I have not the happiness to know if Mr. George Bernard Shaw has ever
written as good a play as “As You Like It.” He says he has, and
certainly he ought to be able to remember what plays he has written. I
don’t know that blank verse is, as Mr. Shaw declares, “a thing that you
could teach a cat if it had an ear.” My notion is that blank verse—good
blank verse—is the most difficult of all metrical forms, and that
among English poets Milton alone has mastered it. I don’t know that
Mr. Shaw is right in his sweeping condemnation of the blank verse of
that indubitable “master of tremendous prose,” Shakspeare. As a critic,
Mr. Shaw ought to know that Shakspeare wrote very little blank verse,
technically and properly so called, his plays being, naturally, mostly
in what the prosodian knows, and what as a playwright Mr. Shaw might be
expected to know, as dramatic blank, a very different thing.