“ The fun cannot be too fast or furious; the unexpected always happens; the discovery is staved off to the fifth act with infinite skill; the nearer each brother approaches his fellow, the more impossible it becomes for them to meet. Nowhere has Shakespeare ravelled and unravelled the threads of an intrigue with such incomparable dexterity as in this early play. But Shakespeare's imagination could not rest satisfied with a farce, however laughable or however skilfully conducted. His vein of lyrical poetry breaks forth in the love-episode, for the sake of which he created Luciana. ”

“ The other persons of the comedy are of the high-bred class, in the midst of which the dramatist's imagination moved with most pleasure, but here they are transported into a delightful open-air environment, which breathes a freshness and sweetness into their spirits. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," and especially of such adversity as that of Rosalind, which enables her, in her disguise as Ganymede, to assist in her own wooing and to play the part of a benevolent goddess of destiny for several pairs of lovers including Orlando and herself. ”

“ Perhaps I should not have stayed to make these remarks, but they will, I hope, direct attention to a phenomenon unique in the history of English drama. The St. George play is an example of how a legendary miracle, sacred in its origin, may pass into a folk drama of a national hero, and that again degenerate into a mumming or dance; and how this, oblivious of the original plot and finally of all fable, may first transform the saintly hero into a performer in a sword dance, as in the Shetland play, and then, as in the Revesby, eliminate even him and substitute a fool. ”

“ From the outset Shakespeare thought of comedy as a mirror of human life, which should reflect things sad and serious as well as mirthful, and which by its magic power should convert pain into pleasure; but the two elements of Shakespearian comedy exist side by side in the earliest plays; they are not yet fused into one. In the main, Shakespeare at first relied upon his nimble brain, and aimed at exciting laughter by comic surprises, contrasts, and incongruities which lie upon the surface of things and are the offspring of accident rather than of character. ”

“ In the cardinal point of his delineation of female character, for which he is highly praised because of the purity and grace of the womanhood he presented, he follows the Renaissance convention, as it seems to me, but with refining and often true English touches—that ideal of Italian origin which is, on the whole, one of outline, of pale graciousness, of immobile or expressive beauty, pictorial; these women seem like lovely portraits which have stepped down out of a frame, and have only so much of life as an environment of light and air and silence can give them. ”

“ The peculiar quality and charm of our comedy is that, deriving from sources not only distinct, but remote in literary habitat,—scriptural, allegorical, farcical, pastoral, romantic, classical, historical, or purely native and social,—it has not dissipated itself in a thousand streamlets, but has carried down deposits from each tributary at its best. In Love's Labor's Lost, Two Angry Women, As You Like It, Old Wives' Tale, Every Man in His Humour, we find, as in a miner's pan, 'colours' from vastly different soils. ”

“ Even while representing the superfluity of naughtiness with an eye to its reprobation, he is the life of the 'moral,'—its apology for artistic existence, its appeal to human interest. But when he steals a further march and rounds up for ridicule the very components of the allegorical drama that are most removed from laughter, and most liable thereto,—the long-faced abstractions that regard the comic spirit as sinful and are impervious to a joke,—he fulfils his destiny. He is the dramatic salt and solvent of the moral play. ”

“ That Shakespeare should throw himself with spirit into his task was a crime for which he earns our forgiveness by its successful issue. The merry wives are honest buxom dames, without a grain of real malice in them. The French physician and the Welsh parson murder the Queen's English with as happy a valiance as that of Fluellen and the Princess Katharine in King Henry V. Slender is the most delightfully incompetent of wooers—a Romeo manqué of Windsor, whose amorous passion waits upon his cousin Shallow's promptings and whose wit is mislaid with his Book of Riddles. ”

“ Do we draw the inference from a majority of all plays that might fall within the purview, or from the plays of one cycle, or from a majority of the plays in that cycle, or from a single striking example here or there in one or another cycle or fragmentary collection? Do we draw the inference from, or apply the conclusion indiscriminately to, later as well as earlier cycles and plays? A generalization from the Chester does not prima facie fit the Towneley, nor does a dramatic estimate of the Coventry characterize the isolated miracle morals of the Digby. ”

“ The heroines of comedy are like women of the world, not necessarily heartless for being clear-witted: they seem so to the sentimentally reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and of men with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely, life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. ”

“ Youth still must have its rapture; Florizel must win his royal shepherdess, queen of curds and cream; the nuptials of Ferdinand and Miranda, "these, our dear-beloved," must be duly solemnized at Naples; but Shakespeare's temper is no longer the temper of youth; he is of the company of Hermione and Prospero, and the music of the close is a grave and spiritual harmony.
Between the first scene and the last the path in comedy is beset with obstacles and dangers, past which love must find a way—"the course of true love never did run smooth." ”

“ Johan Johan himself, with his boasting and cowardice, his eagerness to be deceived, and futile attempts to put a good face on the matter, his burning desire to partake of the pie, his one moment of self-assertion, to which disappointed hunger spurs him, and then his fresh collapse to ludicrous uneasiness,—who can deny that he is a triumph of dramatic art, just human enough and natural enough to seem very human and natural on the stage, but with the ludicrous side of him so sedulously presented to the spectator that there is never any risk of compassion for him becoming uncomfortably acute? ”

“ In Claudio the passions of youth, snatching too eagerly at unlicensed satisfaction, are brought into the presence of death; and to life, tender and florid, the vast regions of the grave are full of obscurity and uncertain horror. It is hardly a scene for the joy of love, though to two strong hearts love may come in the end as the sequel of a common struggle for justice and moral reformation. ”

“ In his person Shakespeare not only lays bare the nerve and muscle of a wrestler in the game of life, but studies the darker and sadder features of a race. He is no incredible monster like the Barabas of Marlowe, but a man, whose origins and environment have made him what he is; whom, therefore, we understand and whom in his very pitilessness we are constrained to pity. Nor had the English stage hitherto seen any woman so complex in her various powers of intellect, emotions, will, so single in their harmonious coöperance, as the noble lady of Belmont. ”

“ This is the fresh and sympathetic handling of a well-worn theme. But the Wakefield poet is no sentimentalist: his anger burns as sudden as his pity. Otherwhere genially ironical, it is in his revision of the Judicium that he displays his full power as a satirist. Here his hatred of oppression, his scorn of vice and self-love, his contempt of sharp and shady practice in kirk or court, upon the bench, behind the counter, or by the hearth are welded into one and brought to edge and point. He strikes hard when he will, but he has the comic sense and spares to slay. ”

“ So in Shakespearian comedy we may, with almost equal certainty, reckon upon a marriage, or more marriages than one, in act, or in immediate prospect, before the curtain closes. Or, if not a marriage, for the lovers may be wedded lovers at the opening, then, after division, or separation of husband and wife, what we may call a remarriage, with misunderstandings cleared up and faults forgiven. When Shakespeare wrote his earlier plays he was himself young, and his gaze was fixed upon the future; exultant lovers begin their new life, and the song of joy is an epithalamium. ”

“ The novelty, if any, was in the distinctively comic nature of the plot-movement most suitable to the purpose of this kind of drama. In tragedy, the movement must be economic of its ups and downs: once headed downward, it must plunge, with but one or two vain recovers, to the abyss. In comedy, on the other hand, though the movement is ultimately upward, the crises are more numerous; the oftener the individual stumbles without breaking his neck, and the more varied his discomfitures, so long as they are temporary, the better does he enjoy his ease in the cool of the day. ”

“ When we consider that the Four Elements was written by a friend of Sir Thomas More, and that, like the plays of John Heywood, another of More's friends, it depends for much of its effect upon its gibes at womankind, we are, perhaps, assisted in realizing the extent to which the literary taste of the day still indulged in this primitive form of amusement, and the distance which was yet to be covered before comedy could safely avail itself of the feminine element as it is,—witty and practical, as well as tender,—and so prepare to fulfil its peculiar function as the conserver of society. ”

“ As I have already said, the romantic in life appears to spring from a desire to assert one's independence and realize the possibilities of the resulting freedom. "Our pent wills fret And would the world subdue." But since the conditions of life are largely opposed to the complete fulfilment of our desires, it is the privilege and function of romance, and of romantic comedy according to its kind, to idealize the stubborn facts—the "limits we did not set" in favour of our ecstatic but still human urgency. ”

“ It is, indeed, as satirist sometimes virulent, but usually jocose, that the Vice is most to be esteemed. In so far as the genial character of the domestic fool of Green, Lodge, or Shakespeare reflected his irony and shrewd wit, some memory of him survived; and the clown-Vice of Friar Bacon renews a passage or two of his later career, but not every usurper of his comic appanage, his mimicry, puns, irrelevance, and horse-play can lay claim to be descended from the Vice. ”

“ We can only say that the spirit of this comedy of disillusion is alien to that of genuine comedy as conceived by Shakespeare in his happier days. The young love of Troilus is betrayed by the courtesan born. Achilles is a dull-brained fellow, barren of wit, who sulks or wantons in his tent; Ajax is a clumsy elephant; Thersites lives on garbage, and spews his filth ”

“ Here it is no pompous formalist who is humiliated; no common pretender who is detected and delivered over to laughter; the deadliest ambushes of evil are attacked; the heart, "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," is laid bare. Angelo, the self-deceiver, is exposed not merely to others, but to himself; he gazes down appalled into the abyss discovered in his own soul. We have travelled far from the fresh wild-wood paths of Arden and from the glowing gardens of Illyria. ”