N analogy with learning a language by speaking it, the direct method of teaching Shakespeare is the way of discovering him by playing him. A play works by the exhibition of details seen and heard; these are the vocabulary of drama, and an audience learns both its grammar and idiom by an act of concentrated perception. All the senses are brought into play through the eyes and ears: Othello forgets his priestly role as he bends over the sleeping rose Desdemona upon I'll smell thee on the tree./ Oh balmy breath ... ., and his audience breathes with him. He persuades us of her death upon Cold, cold, my girl? as we must seem to touch her with him. Cordelia ceases to be a spirit and becomes a daughter again upon Be your tears wet? yes 'faith . . . , and she, Lear, and the spectator must be quite close for him to touch her cheeks. Eyes and ears are the agents of perception in the theater, and to be effective and meaningful the stimuli must be specific. At its peril does a play begin with ideas, abstractions, themes, intellection. The audience in the theater, like students in a classroom, must take from the play impressions, images, and perceptions by which it constructs the conceptions that lie buried beneath, and by this act of apparent discernment they enjoy the excitement of apparent discovery. A play is poetry, something made; it is drama, something done; and theater, something perceived. Schopenhauer argued that a work of art must be perceptual before it could carry allegorical or other value, and to be perceived the work must be particular. God preserve us from generalizations! was Chekhov's watchword. Stanislavsky urged his actors to do nothing in general, since generality is the enemy of art. Peter Brook, no doubt the most visionary director of our time, has concluded that only through the concrete can we recognize the abstract. i Shakespeare, man of the theater, followed the rule. The sonnet prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a formal statement in the metaphysical manner designed to rehearse all the themes of the play. Why, after such a tidy overture, stay for the play itself? Because, however incisively worded, the ideas have no perceptual meaning, and he is quick to follow the prologue with a fiercely attacking scene which traces the theme in blood. Lennox speaks in accents terrible of prophecies of dire combustion, and confus'd events, but only as a prelude to pandemonium in Inverness. Lear prays for poor naked wretches, only to be amazed by the ironic embodiment of all poverty, nakedness, and wretchedness in the pretended person of Poor Tom. This is not the place to pursue modern theories of sensory perception, only to urge that whenever the classroom ceases to insist upon the same means of communication as that intended for the play, it risks its distortion and death.