Excerpt from The Man Shakespeare: And His Tragic Life-Story His book has grown out of a series of articles contributed to The Saturday Review some ten or twelve years ago. As they appeared they were talked of and criticized in the usual way; a minority Of readers thought the stuff interest ing; many held that my View Of Shakespeare was purely arbitrary; others said I had used a concord ance to such purpose that out of the mass Of words I had managed, by virtue of some unknown formula, to re-create the character Of the man. The truth is much simpler: I read Shakespeare's plays in boyhood, chiefly for the stories; every few years later I was fain to re-read them; for as I grew I always found new beauties in them which I had formerly missed, and again and again I was lured back by tantalizing hints and suggestions Of a certain unity underlying the diversity of char acters. These suggestions gradually became more definite till at length, out Of the myriad voices in the plays, I began to hear more and more insistent the accents Of one voice, and out of the crowd Of faces, began to distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer; for all the world like some lovelorn girl, who, gazing with her soul in her eyes, finds in the witch's cauldron the face Of the beloved. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.