Shakespeare's Comedies Author:William Shakespeare General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1909 Original Publisher: Dent Subjects: Drama / General Drama / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Drama / Shakespeare Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing t... more »ext. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PREFACE This is a spring day, and I am writing in a flood of sunlight in front of a brown French inn. Above my head there is the dusty branch of a tree stuck out of a window, the ancient sign that gave point to the proverb,' Good wine needs no bush.' Good books, I suppose, need no prefaces. But honest authors realise that their books are never as good as they had planned them. A preface, put on last and worn in front, to show what they would have liked their books to be, is the pleasant- est of their privileges. And I am not inclined to do without it. A book that calls itself a history of a subject with as many byeways and blind alleys as exist in the history of story-telling, is precisely the kind of book that one would wish one's enemy to have written. Everybody who reads it grumbles because something or other is left out that, if they had had the writing of it, would have been put in. And yet in the case of this particular book (how many authors have thought the same!) criticismof omissions is like quarrelling with a guinea-pig because it has not got a tail. It is not the guinea- pig's business to have a tail, and it is not the business of this book to be a chronicle, full of facts, and admirable for reference. That place is already filled by Dunlop's History of Fiction, and, in a very delightful manner, by Professor Raleigh's English Novel. The word history can be used in a different sense. The French say that such an one makes a history of a thing whe...« less