poetic beauty than in Love's Labor's Lost, there is a closer approach to realism of dialogue, and an abandonment of the many youthful artifices of lyric form that impair the dramatic effect of the text of the earlier comedy. Despite these advances, the Comedy of Errors often impresses a reader as the most primitive of the plays, an effect due to its almost wholly farcical nature. A comedy dependent upon the assumption that twin brothers look so much alike that their very wives can make no distinction between them, and upon the further incredible assumption that these brothers have happened to come into possession respectively of twin slaves equally impossible to tell apart, asks nothing in the way of either characterization or ideas to make it all that it should be. No doubt it would be possible and Shakespeare made the experiment later, in Twelfth Night-to study the fortunes of a pair of twins whose characters were so different that the contrast of their personalities, taken together with the likeness of their persons, developed into high comedy instead of farce. But this would be to ask more than the occasion required; and those who seek for fine distinctions between Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse are engaged in a gratuitous search for what Shakespeare was not concerned with. On the other hand, it is true, even here, that he was not content with wholly characterless farce. The servants, like most of the humbler characters in the early plays, have somewhat more of individuality than their masters; and Adriana, wife to one of the masters, is endowed with much more reality and personal dignity than her prototype in the Latin source. Furthermore, the presentation of the aged parents of the principal charac

ters does something to raise the piece above the level of farce, the pathos of their story being sketched in, as framework to the main comic action, in a mood of humaneness which is distinctively Shakespeare's. Aside from touches like these the play is unique among his works in its almost entire dependence on the interest of plot; we remember it neither for realism, characterization, satire, poetry, nor romance.

Both these initial comedies, then, stand somewhat apart from the main lines of Shakespeare's dramatic evolution: they represent the two chief comic joys of youth, critical burlesque and astonishing farce. But in the third, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, we are at the real beginning of his career in comedy. Here he tested the possibilities of treating in comic form the materials of continental romance, in which the theme of love was entwined with adventure, and thereby developed a dramatic type which was to prove of the greatest importance in his later career. Love and adventure: these are not in themselves the normal materials of comedy, since it is supposed to concern itself primarily with matter more familiar, more rational, more subject to moral judgments,-just as poetry is not the normal medium of comedy, because of its want of harmony with the realistic and the rational. It was in the two great forms of metrical and prose romance, beloved both in the Middle Age and the Renaissance, that these themes of love and adventure found their chief expression, as they do in prose romance to this day. But the Italians first, and later some English playwrights, had made the experiment of translating the matter of the romances into popular drama. Greene, for example, was doing it with

Ariosto's Orlando, apparently just as Shakespeare was beginning his work for the stage. And in some of his original comedy, referred to at the opening of this chapter, Greene had experimented effectively with the problem of combining dramatic humor with the gentler passions of romance. In particular, his fancy for heroines who engage in rather bold adventures but retain their Arcadian simplicity of spirit and purity of feeling may have given suggestions to Shakespeare of which the Two Gentlemen shows us the first fruition. If so, Greene was certainly not made happier by the obvious fact that in his imitator's work the possibilities of romantic comedy-the vital union of narrative technique with poetic seriousness-were newly and brilliantly revealed.

Shakespeare evidently found the story of this play in a Spanish source, Montemayor's romance of Diana, though whether directly or through a lost intervening play we do not know. As with Plautus' story of the twins, he seems to have deliberately complicated the action, increasing its difficulties for plausible representation, as if to satisfy both the eagerness of his audience for abundance of narrative material and his own eagerness for experimentation in dramatic technique. Thus he added to the adventures of two rival ladies and a changeful lover the story of a faithless friend, and made that friend's faithlessness as downright and unreasonable as it well could be. The result is an aggregation of fascinating improbabilities which come upon us, one after another, with the casual charm of the world of romance. In the Comedy of Errors the improbabilities had largely depended upon an initial hypothesis to which we became accustomed as the

play proceeded, but here they accumulate their daring demands upon credulity from one act to another. Modern readers are most likely to balk at the concluding scene, in which Valentine not only forgives the unfaithful Proteus but even offers to resign his lady to his suddenly penitent friend. To an Elizabethan audience this was not so extraordinary a proceeding as it appears to us, since as we saw in a former chapter-the doctrine of the superiority of man's love for man to his love for woman was familiar in the Renaissance; a certain Italian play, called The Duel of Love and Friendship, had this for its principal theme. At the same time one cannot overlook the fact that Shakespeare made little effort to work out either the repentance of Proteus or the renunciation of Valentine by means of plausible characterization or any other device for the concealment of the bald miracles of romance. The fact that he made his changeable hero to bear the symbolic name of Proteus is in itself an incidental evidence of the "stock" nature of the character; indeed no character in the play can be said to attract our interest for himself as distinguished from what happens to him.

If there be an exception to this last statement, it is found in Launce the clown-servant,-one should perhaps rather say, in Launce and his dog. In a sense this character also had already become a convention of the stage, but Launce is somewhat more than a type; as he describes to the dog his parting from his family, and seeks to dramatize the scene with the aid of his shoes and other convenient objects, we are conscious of his interest as a person, and -if we happen to have read Shakespeare's later plays

1

1II, iii, 1-35.

of his significance as precursor of still more individual clowns to come. Indeed that is likely to be characteristic of our feeling regarding a great part of the Two Gentlemen, even more than in the case of Love's Labor's Lost,-how full it is of experimental elements which Shakespeare repeated so much more effectively a little later that the world has largely forgotten the preliminary sketches.

The next comedy, the Midsummer Night's Dream, might be said to interrupt the direct evolution of the comic type in Shakespeare's hands, though from one point of view it forms a happy link between the Two Gentlemen and The Merchant of Venice. It is like the preceding comedies in its regal indifference to probability and detailed characterization,-in being a kind of glorious romantic farce; but since it is a "midsummer night's dream," with a setting and associations which withdraw it from the normal tests of plausibility, there is an effect of consistency and causation quite wanting in the others. Romance is now working in a region of perfect freedom. But this cannot help in the development of real human comedy, which lacks such freedom by being bound to the common human world; hence the play, while a masterpiece, is felt to be what Armado would call a "delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic," rather than a normal drama. There can be little doubt that the Dream was made for festal purposes instead of for the regular stage, and every reader will believe, even in the absence of proof positive, that it was first presented in connection with some great wedding, -such, for example, as that of the Earl of Derby, which was celebrated at Greenwich Palace at a time (1594) when the play may plausibly be dated. The patent reference