Mr. Copeland's Lecture.

In beginning a discussion last evening of Certain Relations of Shakespeare to Our Own Time, Mr. Copeland spoke of the overwhelming predominance in almost every form of art of what we have agreed to call realism. In fiction for one art, notwithstanding the romantic revival under the leadership of Stevenson, by far the larger number of prose master pieces have been of realistic tone and temper. Prose has long since crowded verse out of the drama and all the resources of scenery, stage carpentry, costumes, and the actor's art have been used to realize-if one may so speak-even the romantic drama. Even these devices, however, do not remove the bar that separates Shakespeare and the average man of today. The fact that his plays are written in verse, that declamation is often suffered to interrupt action, and that Shakespeare not infrequently uses what seems to many persons a single and arbitrary psychology-vide for example the marriage of Celia and Oliver and that of Isabella and the Duke-makes Shakespeare-land seem a foreign country to the ordinary play goer and to not a few readers, who are by no means ordinary. But the realistic and materialistic trend of our own time is one of the strongest reasons for going back to Shakespeare's country and dwelling in it until we have learned to take familiar delight there. One of the best introductions to Shakespeare is his own play of Hamlet, for in spite of the romantic method he has there presented a type of man and a scheme of thought and feeling with which many of the young men of our own time are in intimate sympathy. The lecture, which was the last but one of the series, was followed with the reading of several scenes from Hamlet.