every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth. Nor is he diffused through the play like a gas. If there were an idiot who thought plays existed on their own, without an author (not to mention actors, producer, manager, stagehands and what not), our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them. The rest of us, in varying degrees according to our perceptiveness, ‘found