I

rather than of incident, and in the persons of Don Adriano de Armado, a fantastical Spaniard, of Sir Nathaniel the curate, and of Holofernes the schoolmaster, are caricatured various Elizabethan absurdities of speech, pseudo-refinement, and pseudo-learning. The braggart soldier and the pedant are characters well known in Italian comedy, and perhaps it was from that quarter that the hint came to Shakspere, which stirred his imagination to create these ridiculous figures. Holofernes, some persons have supposed to be a satirical sketch of an individual-John Florio, author of an Italian dictionary; but Shakspere did not in any ascertained instances satirise individual persons, and there is little evidence in this case to warrant the supposition. The fifth act winds up with a pair of songs in the most genuine country style, rustic yet graceful, such songs as the milkmaids of Isaac Walton might sing. After the daintinesses, and pomposities, and affectations, come these fresh rural ditties. The play contains nothing which serves to ascertain its precise date, but it certainly belongs to Shakspere's earliest dramatic period. The first quarto was printed in 1598 (probably in the spring of the year 1598-99) "as it was presented before her Highness [Queen Elizabeth] this last Christmas [probably the Christmas of 1598], Newly corrected and augmented.' Two traces of the alterations from the original play may still be observed. In Act V. Sc. ii., the lines 827-832 ought not to appear, being almost certainly the fragment of the play in its first form, which was afterwards worked out in the lines 833-879. Similarly in Berowne's great speech, Act IV. Sc. iii., the lines 296-317 contain passages which are repeated or altered in the lines which follow, 318-354, and obviously some of the lines of the original version have here been retained through a mistake.

4. The Comedy of Errors is Shakspere's one farcical play. Its sources of laughter lie almost wholly in the situations and incidents, hardly at all in the charac

ters. The spectator of the play is called on to accept much that is improbable and all but impossible, not as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the sake of freer play of imagination, and because the world pictured by the poet is a fairy-world of romantic beauty and grotesqueness, but for the sake of mere fun and laughter-stirring surprises. So cleverly, however, are the incidents and persons entangled and disentangled, so rapidly does surprise follow surprise, that we are given no time to raise difficulties and offer objections. The subject of the comedy is the same as that of the Menæchmi of Plautus-mistakes of identity arising from the likeness of twin-born children. How Shakspere made acquaintance with Plautus we are not certain ; possibly through William Warner's translation of the Menæchmi, seen in manuscript before its publication in 1595; more probably through an earlier play, not now extant, perhaps that one which was acted in 1576 at Hampton Court, under the name of The Historie of Error. The hint for Act III. Sc. i., where Antipholus of Ephesus is shut out from his own house while his brother and wife are at dinner within, seems to have been taken from the Amphitruo of Plautus, where Jupiter, the supposed Amphitruo, takes possession of the house of the real Amphitruo, and beguiles. its mistress. To the twins of the Menæchmi are added, by Shakspere, their servants, a second pair of brothers, the twins Dromio. This does not make the improbability of the whole seem greater, but rather the reverse; for the fun is doubled, and where so much is incredible we are carried away and have no wish but to yield ourselves up to belief in the incredible for the time being, so as to enter thoroughly into the jest. Shakspere added other characters-the Duke Solinus (when he can he always introduces a duke), Ægeon, Balthazar, Angelo, the Abbess, and Luciana, and he alters the character of the married brother, Antipholus, from the repulsive Menæchmus of Plautus, with whom we can have little sympathy, into a person who at least

is not base and vicious. Epidamnum to Ephesus, that city which had an evil repute for its roguery, licentiousness, and magical practices, a city in which such errors might be supposed to be the result of sorcery and witchcraft. (See Act I. Sc. ii. L. 97-102.) To Shakspere belongs wholly the serious background, from which the farcical incidents stand out in relief--the story of the Syracusan merchant who almost forfeits his life in the search for his lost children, and finally recovers both the lost ones and his own liberty. There is a fine passage, full of pathos, and almost in Shakspere's later dramatic manner, where the old man, a prisoner before the duke, finds that his son does not recognise his face, nor remember his voice (Act V. Sc. i. L. 295-322); but such passages, in which character or human passion rather than incident chiefly interests us, are rare. As the twins Antipholus are indistinguishable in person and costume, so there is little or no attempt made to discriminate their characters; the Dromios are only a pair of jesters, alike and equally serviceable for receiving hard knocks and returning witty answers. But Adriana, the jealous wife, has some individuality; she is more than an excuse for ridiculous accidents; Shakspere takes some interest in doing her dramatic justice; her shrewish temper is that of a woman who loves her husband, and who would persecute him into loving only her. The date of the play cannot be exactly determined, but it is certainly one of the very earliest plays. "In what part of her body stands.

The scene he transfers from

France?" asks Antipholus of Syracuse, questioning Dromio about the kitchen-wench, who is so large and round that she has been compared to a globe; and Dromio answers: "In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir." (Act III. Sc. ii. L. 125-27.) France was in a state of civil war, fighting for and against her heir, Henri IV., from August, 1589, until shortly before his coronation, in February, 1594. In 1591 Henri received the

assistance of troops from England, commanded by the Earl of Essex.

5. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, though in parts slightly worked out, exhibits an advance on the preceding comedies. The Errors was a clever tangle of diverting incidents, with a few passages of lyric beauty, and one of almost tragic pathos; Love's Labour's Lost was a play of glittering and elaborate dialogue. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakspere struck into a new path, which he was to pursue with admirable results; it is his earliest comedy in which a romantic love-story is told in dramatic form. Here first Shakspere records the tender and passionate history of a woman's heart, and the adventures to which love may prompt her. Julia (who is like a crayon sketch of Juliet, conceived in a way suitable to comedy instead of tragedy) is the first of that charming group of children of Shakspere's imagination which includes Viola, Portia, Rosalind, and Imogen-women who assume, under some constraint of fortune, the disguise of male attire, and who, while submitting to their transformation, forfeit none of the grace, the modesty, the sensitive delicacy, or the pretty wilfulness of their sex. Launce, accompanied by his immortal dog, leads the train of Shakspere's humorous clowns: his rich, grotesque humanity is "worth all the bright, fantastic interludes of Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes," worth all the dancing doggerel or broad-witted prose of either Dromio." The play contains a number of sketches, from which Shakspere afterwards worked out finished pictures. (See p. 91, Merchant of Venice.) The characters are clearly conceived, and contrasted with almost too obvious a design: the faithful Valentine is set over against the faithless Proteus; the bright and clever Silvia is set over against the tender and ardent Julia; the clown Speed, notable as a verbal wit and quibbler, is set over against the humorous Launce.

The general theme of the play we may define as love and friendship, with their mutual relations. The dénouement in Act V., if written by Shakspere in the form we now have it, is a very crude piece of work. Proteus' sudden repentance, Valentine's sudden abandonment to him of Silvia, under an impulse of extravagant friendship ("all that was mine in Silvia I give thee;" Act V. Sc. iv. L. 83), and Silvia's silence and passiveness whilst disposed of from lover to lover, are, even for the fifth act of a comedy, strangely unreal and ill-contrived. Can it be that this fifth act has reached us in an imperfect form, and that some speeches between Silvia and Valentine have dropped out? The date of the play cannot be definitely fixed; but its place among the comedies is probably after Love's Labour's Lost, and before A Midsummer Night's Dream. The language and verse are characterised by an even sweetness; rhymed lines and doggerel verses are lessening in number; the blank verse is written with careful regularity. It is as if Shakspere were giving up his early licences of versification, were aiming at a more refined style (which occasionally became a little tame), but being still a novice in the art of writing blank verse, were timid, and failed to write it with the freedom and

happy valiancy" which distinguish his later manner. The story of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is identical in many particulars with The Story of the Shepherdess. Flismena in the Portuguese pastoral romance, Diana, by George of Montemayor; but though manuscript translations of the Diana existed at an earlier date, no translation was published before that of Yonge, in 1598. The story had probably been dramatised before Shakspere's play, for we read in the accounts of the revels of The History of Felix and Philomena, acted before her Highness in 1584. Valentine's consenting to become captain of the robbers has been compared with a somewhat similar incident in Sidney's