Now for this representation, for
this mirror-reflection on the stage, blank verse is just the suitable
glass to receive the silvering of the genius-mind behind it.
But if Shakspere had had to sit down and make his tools first, and then
quarry his stone and fell his timber for the building of his house,
instead of finding everything ready to his hand for dressing his stone
already hewn, for sawing and carving the timber already in logs and
planks beside him, no doubt his house would have been built; but can we
with any reason suppose that it would have proved such "a lordly
pleasure-house"? Not even Shakspere could do without his poor little
brothers who preceded him, and, like the goblins and gnomes of the
drama, got everything out of the bowels of the dark earth, ready for the
master, whom it would have been a shame to see working in the gloom and
the dust instead of in the open eye of the day. Nor is anything so
helpful to the true development of power as the possibility of free
action for as much of the power as is already operative. This room for
free action was provided by blank verse.
Yet when Shakspere came first upon the scene of dramatic labour, he had
to serve his private apprenticeship, to which the apprenticeship of the
age in the drama, had led up.
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