The Brilliance of DH Lawrence's Essays

It's not Lawrence's novels but his fresh and forceful essays that make him a great modern writer.
I can remember quite clearly how I first encountered DH Lawrence as a writer of something other than fiction. We were studying Hamlet at school, reading the expected lit-crit by AC Bradley, G Wilson Knight and, more fashionably, Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary). But my teacher also nudged me towards a strange piece of writing by Lawrence called “The Theatre”, about going to see a production of Hamlet. Wanting to reduce the piece to exam-directed utility I didn't know what it was or how it was meant to be read. Obviously it was about Hamlet (a “statement of the most significant philosophic position of the Renaissance”) but it was also a kind of story, a recreation of an actual experience and place.