as they appear in the historical plays, we shall fail. The comedy has a certain independence of the histories, and cannot be pieced on to them in any way: the persons are the same and not the same. Mrs. Quickly, servant of Dr. Caius, has a different history from the Mrs. Quickly of the Boar's Head Tavern. At what period in Falstaff's career he pursued the Windsor wives we cannot make out for certain. Nor is he conceived in quite the same manner as the Falstaff of Henry IV. Here the knight is fatuous, his genius deserts him; the never-defeated hangs his head before two country dames; the buckbasket, the drench of Thames water, the blows of Ford's cudgel, are reprisals too coarse upon the most inimitable of jesters. Yet the play is indeed a merry one, with well-contrived incidents and abundance of plain broad mirth. A country air breathes over the whole-for which the Gloucestershire scenes of 2 Henry IV. had prepared us. "The outdoor character that pervades The Merry Wives and As You Like It gives to them their tone of buoyancy and enjoyment, their true holiday feeling." Nowhere else has Shakspere represented English middle-class life in the country, and he has here done it with a vigorous, healthy pleasure. It is not, however, a poetical play, unless comely English maidenhood, in the person of pretty Anne Page, lend it something of poetry. There is a propriety in the fact that this comedy is written almost altogether in prose. The blunders of the French doctor and of the Welsh parson in speaking English are rather an elementary form of fun, such as may suit a somewhat rustic subject; but Sir Hugh Evans, apart from his blunders, is good company. The merry wives themselves are a delightful pair, with "their sly laughing looks, their apple-red cheeks, their brows the lines whereon look more like the work of mirth than years." And Slender, most brainless of youths, most incapable of lovers, is dear for sake of the laugh at him which pretty Anne Page must have

when alone. Altogether, if we can accept Falstaff's discomfitures, it is a sunny play to laugh at if not to love.

The following sources have been pointed out as exhibiting some points of resemblance to the incidents of The Merry Wives, and as possibly supplying hints to Shakspere: Two tales from Le tredici piacevoli notte, by Straparola, and the altered version of one of these to be found in Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatorie (1590); the tale of Bucciolo and Pietro Paulo from the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino; finally, The Fishwife's Tale of Brainford, from Westward for Smelts.

19. Much Ado about Nothing was entered on the Stationers' register, August 23, 1600, and a wellprinted quarto edition appeared in the same year. The play is not mentioned by Meres, 1598, and we may assume that it was written at some time in the interval between 1598 and 1600. For the graver portion of the play--the Claudio and Hero storyShakspere had an original, perhaps Belleforest's translation in his Histoires Tragiques of Bandello's 22nd Novella. The story of Ariodante and Genevra in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (canto v.) is substantially the same. This episode had been translated twice into English before Harington's complete translation of the Orlando Furioso appeared in 1591; and it had formed the subject of a play acted before the Queen 1582-83; the story was also told, in a somewhat altered form, by Spenser, Faerie Queene, ii. 4. No original has been found for the merrier portion of the play, and Benedick and Beatrice were probably creations of Shakspere. It has indeed been pointed out that at about the same date the German dramatist Jacob Ayrer, in his comedy of The Beautiful Phoenicia, connected the story from Bandello with a comic underplot; but the resemblances between Ayrer's comic underplot and Shakspere's loves of Beatrice and Benedick are probably accidental,

Much Ado about Nothing was popular on the stage in Shakspere's day, and has sustained its reputation. Its variety, ranging from almost burlesque to almost tragedy, and from the euphuistic speech of courtiers to the blundering verbosity of clowns, has contributed to the success of the play. The chief persons, Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick, are contrasted pairs. Hero's character is kept subdued and quiet in tone, to throw out the force and colour of the character of Beatrice; she is gentle, affectionate, tender, and if playful, playful in a gentle way. If our interest in Hero were made very strong, the pain of her unmerited shame and suffering would be too keen. And Claudio is far from being a lover like Romeo; his wooing is done by proxy, and he does not sink under the anguish of Hero's disgrace and supposed death. Don John, the villain of the piece, is a melancholy egoist, who looks sourly on all the world, and has a special grudge against his brother's young favourite Claudio. The chief force of Shakspere in the play comes out in the characters of Benedick and Beatrice. They have not a touch of misanthropy, nor of sentimentality, but are thoroughly healthy and hearty human creatures; at first a little too much self-pleased, but framed by-and-by to be entirely pleased with one another. The thoughts of each from the first are preoccupied with the other, but neither will put self-esteem to the hazard of a rebuke by making the first advances in love; it only needs, however, that this danger should be removed for the pair to admit the fact that nature has made them over against one another-as their significant names suggest-for man and wife. The flouting of Benedick by Beatrice reminds us of scenes between an earlier pair of lovers, Rosaline and Berowne, in Love's Labour's Lost. The trick which is played upon the lovers to bring them together is one of those frauds practised upon self-love which appear in several of the comedies of this period. But neither is an egoist except in a superficial way. Beatrice is filled

with generous indignation against the wrongers of her cousin, and she inspires Benedick to become (not without a touch of humorous self-consciousness) champion of the cause. Dogberry and Verges, as well as Beatrice and Benedick, are creations of Shakspere. The blundering watchmen of the time are a source of fun with several Elizabethan playwrights; but Dogberry and goodman Verges are the princes of blunder. ing and incapable officials. It is a charming incongruity to find, while Leonato rages and Benedick offers his challenge, that the solemn ass Dogberry is the one to unravel the tangled threads of their fate. Friar Francis is a near spiritual kinsman of Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet.

20. As You Like It was entered on the Stationers' register together with Henry V., Much Ado about Nothing, and Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, "to be staied," i.e. not printed; the date is August 4, but the year is not mentioned. The previous entry is dated May 27, 1600, and as the other plays were printed in 1600 and 1601, we infer that the August was that of the year 1600. The comedy is not mentioned by Meres. A line, "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" is quoted (Act III. Sc. v. L. 82) from Marlowe's Hero and Leander, which was published in 1598. We may set down the following year, 1599, as the probable date of the creation of this charming comedy.

The story is taken from Thomas Lodge's prose tale, Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, first printed in 1590, and a passage in Lodge's dedication probably suggested to Shakspere the name of his play. Lodge, who wrote this tale on his voyage to the Canaries, founded it in part on the Cook's Tale of Gamelyn, wrongly ascribed to Chaucer, and inserted in some editions as one of the Canterbury Tales. In parts of his work the dramatist follows the story-teller closely, but there are some important differences. The heroic names Orlando, Oliver, and Sir Rowland are due to

Shakspere. It was a thought of Shakspere to make the rightful and the usurping dukes, as in The Tempest, brothers. In Lodge's novel the girl-friends pass in the forest for lady and page, in Shakspere, for brother and sister. Shakspere omits the incident of Aliena's rescue from robbers by her future husband; love at first sight was natural in Arden, but a band of robbers would have marred the tranquillity of the scene. Το Shakspere we owe the creation of the characters of Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey.

Written perhaps immediately after Henry V., the play presents a striking contrast with that high-pitched historical drama. It is as if Shakspere's imagination craved repose and refreshment after the life of courts and camps. We are still on French soil, but instead of the sound of the shock of battle at Agincourt, we hear the waving forest boughs, and the forest-streams of Arden, where "they fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the Golden World." There is an open-air feeling about this play, as there is about The Merry Wives of Windsor; but in The Merry Wives all the surroundings are English and real, here they belong to a land of romance. For the Renaissance, that age of vast energy, national enterprise, religious strife, and court intrigue, pastoral or idyllic poetry possessed a peculiar charm; the quiet and innocence of a poetical Arcadia was a solace to a life of highly-wrought ambition and aspiration.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity," moralises the banished Duke, and external, material adversity has come to him, to Rosalind, and to Orlando; but if fortune is harsh, nature-both external nature and human character-is sound and sweet, and of real suffering there is none in the play. All that is evil remains in the society which the denizens of the forest have left behind; and both seriously, in the characters of the usurping Duke and Oliver, and playfully, through Touchstone's mockery of court follies, a criticism on what is evil and artificial in society is suggested in