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And of the master Shakespeare, what shall I say, when the min-utes allotted me would scarcely suffice to enumerate his works and the names of those who have written about him?

A poet, actor, author, and English playwright who has occupied mankind for nearly four centuries, and their interest in him goes on increasing day by day; and I fear that dozens of generations will pass before a single man succeeds in understanding him as well as he, in but part of one generation, managed to understand all men.

As a creator he comes second in rank only to the Creator; as a builder, before all. And if in creation there is giving, and in giving there is love, then Shakespeare is he who gave the most, and loved the most!

The nineteenth century went so far in deifying him that some counted him above mankind, while others went to the opposite extreme in reaction and made of him, as they made of Homer, a name rather than a man: now he is Sheikh Isbir, now he is Bacon!

Historical fact, however, recon-ciles the two theories, and shows us that William Shakespeare, like other geniuses among men, stands on the frontier between men and gods!

The date of his birth is not known exactly, but what is certain is that he was baptized on the twenty-sixth of April 1564 and died fifty-two years later on the twenty-third of the month of April as well — which, in the opinion of the story-tellers among his historians, was his birthday!

His father was one of the notable figures of the village; he engaged in trade and farming and held certain municipal posts. His mother was the youngest sister among the eight daughters of the great farmer Robert Arden. In surroundings of this kind William should, by rights, have obtained a deep and comprehensive educa-tion, had not his father's financial circumstances declined, cutting him off from study and making

The Radio Orient station had organized a series of lectures under the title "The Inspired," in which a number of men of letters took part. It was intended to publish those lectures in a book, and for that reason only a few of them appeared in the press. Here is one of those lectures, never published before today:

of him, for a while, a herder of cattle... But he was not, it appears, a good herdsman, for when he was angry he would kill the calves, and when he was pleased he would deliver speeches and odes to them.

Yet that material crisis did not prevent him from marrying, at eighteen years of age, a girl eight years his senior. As for his haste in that adventure, it goes back to what may not be proclaimed before the public... a phenomenon in the history of genius worthy of study!...

After this marriage eight years passed over William during which he blackened the face of his respectable father: a drunkard, a gambler, a troublemaker of the first order. But God alone knows what our friend stored up of experience in that stretch of the turbulent Elizabethan age!

In the end he was forced to flee from the face of his creditors to London, where he was entrusted with guarding and tending horses at the door of one of the theaters. From there he rose step by step until he became a minor actor, then a great actor, then a playwright who baptized the theater with his name, then a poet for whom heaven envies us!

As for his theater, it would be a mistake, and a squandering of time, to expatiate on studying it and setting forth its merits and defects, saying with Jonson: it

lacks art; and with Milton: it is a wild art... I say it is a mistake to begin with a play otherwise than by seeing it on the stage, for then we should be like one who eats the rose instead of smelling it...

Yet if we analyze him now as literature rather than as theater, we find in him, for all his short-comings, a relative perfection, if the expression is sound. There is in him a richness which, if it does not all come from culture, comes from that obscure period Shakespeare passed after his mar-riage, storing up from life what yielded its first positive fruit: a comprehensiveness without limit and a power of deduction, an understanding of the corners of the human soul and its corridors, together with an instinctive genius for presenting ideas, emotions, characters, and events with a lavishness that grants art the freedom of life itself. Yet he rises and falls like every genius whose gift exceeds the craft of his art and his culture, and he runs to extremes in everything, with an astonishing power of balancing between opposites. He breaks away with novelty as far as the soul can break away, without ever cutting himself off from truth; and he penetrates into the heart of truth without touching it with the vulgarity of the commonplace. Every word of his is steeped in the feeling of love, beauty, and goodness, and in a thousand sweet feelings that men have not yet baptized with a name.

In his first plays he falls under the influence of the various schools, but in the play Richard III he begins to be himself, master of the great school of Shakespearean design and of the free verse of which he later became lord. There then passed over him a period of experiment among the genres: from a comedy of raillery in the play "Love's Labour's Lost" to a lyrical comedy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; from a lyrical tragedy in Romeo and Juliet to a lyrical history in Richard II, to a romantic blend of tragedy and comedy in the Two Gentlemen of Verona and in the immortal masterpiece of this kind, "The