Shakespeare meant this story to be tragic. It is either all good sport, or outrageous both dramatically and otherwise. Again we must divide the blame between Time, as responsible for some increase of humane sensitiveness on the part of the English-speaking world, and the modern actor who makes Malvolio a leading and an over-serious part. Lamb gives a brilliant account of Robert Bensley playing it with "richness and dignity," looking, speaking, and moving "like an old Castilian," and concludes, "I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest." The maturer portion of a modern audience may sometimes be observed to endure actual suffering, during the scenes where the steward suffers most, while the younger-or otherwise less developed-spectators are enjoying themselves hugely, as Shakespeare wished them to. The affair is a delicate matter to judge, and has been complicated by the fact that some readers view Malvolio as an arrant hypocrite, others as a disagreable but wholly virtuous soul, still others as a deliberate type of the race of Puritans whom Shakespeare desired to bring to judgment. Two remarks must here suffice. The first is, that if Shakespeare desired to caricature Puritanism in Malvolio, he ignored many tempting opportunities to make his purpose clear; the second, that if the buoyant cheerfulness of Twelfth Night is to be preserved for us, it is imperative that the steward shall not be interpreted as a person of too great moral dignity or importance.

To return for a moment to the principal portion of the play, it is worth noting that it forms a kind of summit or acme, not merely of Shakespeare's art in romantic comedy,

but of his presentation of the theme of love on its happier side. The Elizabethans had a common word, fancy, which properly and more commonly meant an illusion or a passing caprice, but was often applied to youthful love, because it came-and sometimes went-in so illusory and capricious ways. It was engendered in the eyes: so said the singer in The Merchant of Venice, and this was good doctrine, since fancy came through the captivating perception of beauty. It distorted all things else in the interest of its object; even Duke Orsino, when under its power, admitted this:

So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

(I, i, 14—15.)

But as the experience grew into something deeper, maturer, and more lasting, it was likely to drop this term for the nobler one, love. Now it is the aspect of love as fancy with which the comic spirit is most concerned,-its tricks, caprices, illusions, and humors, and this we have seen Shakespeare reveling in, throughout even the relatively sympathetic comedies. Love's Labor's Lost treated it with an ironic touch, as a wanton wrecker of men's resolves; the Midsummer Night's Dream made it the sport of fairies and the creature of their magic juices; in Much Ado irony was again emphasized, as two young persons who had scorned love's power were suddenly swept into its control; and we have seen how Rosalind agreed with Theseus in counting it a kind of hopeless universal lunacy. In The Merchant of Venice, to be sure, love is treated more seriously; indeed Portia's great speech of self-dedication ("You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand") in itself

III, ii, 150-67.

is quite unexcelled, from this point of view, in any of the plays; yet after all love plays but a small part in The Merchant, compared with friendship. Twelfth Night fills the stage with the streaming forces of love and beauty, and the poetic mood seems to make them matters of dignity and inner worth. Not that the tricks of "fancy" are gone, it still shows us its familiar swift, irrationally transforming ways, but we are made to laugh less lightly, and to sympathize more intimately. It is also true that the possibilities of love's sadness are sincerely hinted in this comedy, as in none of the others. One may doubt whether Portia, Beatrice, or Rosalind would suffer long or deeply, even if love proved transient; their emotional equilibrium and intellectual resources would go far to keep them carefree. But with Viola (as we might know merely from her lovely lines on the maid that never told her love) it would be a more serious matter. remembers with some sadness that she is the last of Shakespeare's heroines of love who is not made to suffer bitterly -until we come to Miranda at the very end of the list.

With this in view, one

The first editors of Shakespeare included four other plays, besides these that we have been considering, among his comedies; but they are marked by such distinctive elements that it seems preferable to reserve them for another type and another chapter. As for "Love's Labor's Won," mentioned by Meres in his list of the comedies, who knows whether we have considered it or not? It may have been revised or renamed as The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, or All's Well that Ends Well, or through some ill fortune may have perished irretrievably.

I

CHAPTER VI

THE TRAGEDIES

T IS an ancient and never-settled question why mankind finds pleasure in a form of art concerned, like tragedy, with such matters as crime and suffering, which give little pleasure, or pleasure of an ignoble kind, to those who have to do with them in actual experience. The problem cannot be discussed here, but one is reminded that it is pertinent in a special way to the age of Shakespeare. That age, despite its vivid sense of the color and joy of life, its willingness to revel in all pleasures that the earth could give, and its eager realization of a newly enlarged and fascinating world, was as devoted to the literature of suffering as to that of pleasure, and its tragedy became its greatest dramatic form.

Two or three aspects of this interest, if not explanations of it, may be briefly noticed. One was the childlike love of vivid sensation, so characteristic of every form of Elizabethan art; from this standpoint we may say that the men of that age went to see a tragedy as a boy would gladly go to see a collision between two motor-cars or locomotives, if the accident could be foreseen. A somewhat deeper aspect is the interest of personality. The Renaissance developed this in many ways, and, as we have seen, by no

means failed to take account of the evil in human nature: this, while a distressing, was also a fascinating feature of mankind. From this standpoint, then, we may say that the Elizabethans went to see a tragedy as any of us would go out of our way to see a vial which we were told contained a distillation of the most deadly poison known to chemistry, or a serpent whose fangs produced the most dangerous venom of the tropics. A third aspect of tragedy, rather more attractive and more creditable to its amateurs, is its relationship to poetry. For the conditions of the Elizabethan drama this, it is clear, would be highly important. Poetry sometimes becomes a vehicle of comedy, but it is a kind of triumph over natural incompatibility when it does. Of tragedy, however, it has been the normal vehicle, and the passions with which tragedy is concerned have in almost every age stimulated poetry to its highest reaches of beauty and power. Of this the age of Sophocles and that of Shakespeare are, of course, the supreme examples. The Elizabethans, then, found in tragedy a means of satisfying at once their interest in vivid sensation, their curiosity respecting the darkest corners of the human mind and heart, and their love of surging eloquent verse.

Before taking up Shakespeare's tragedies by themselves, let us pause, as we did in approaching his comedies, to notice one or two distinctions that concern tragic types. The fundamental distinction is the same as in comedy,that between mere outer action and action which takes its meaning from within. In other words, we find types of tragedy corresponding, on the whole, to farce on the one hand and high comedy on the other, to the thoughtless and the thoughtful kinds of laughter. If two locomotives