THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE
_William Shakespeare, the greatest of English writers, was born in 1564, and was pretty well educated for those days. The free school of the town was open to all boys, and his father could afford to send him to it. He early became an actor, and from correcting plays by other people he came to writing plays himself.
Shakespeare possessed a very unusual combination of two rare gifts. On the one side he had to a great degree the ability to understand men and women and read the thoughts that were passing through their minds.
But his second gift, which was more wonderful still, was his ability to write down on paper words that, as soon as we read them, make us feel just as he did, make us see just the pictures he saw.
Four of his plays are here represented by short stories, in which the plot of each play is briefly told. To play Shakespeare's plays is the height of an actor's ambition. To read and enjoy them has been for over three hundred years one of the greatest pleasures known to English-speaking people._