agencies. And while he thus studied unreality in his situations, he threw all the strength of his invention into his dialogue, which he endeavoured to enliven by a constant display of the peculiar form of "wit" that he had brought into fashion at Court. I have already described the general characteristics of Lyly's euphuistic dialogue;' the following specimen, taken from his Mydas, will at once sufficiently illustrate that description, and what will be said hereafter of the influence of this style on the early comedies of Shakespeare :—

LICIO. But, soft! here comes Pipenetta, what news?

PIPENETTA. I would not be in your coats for anything.

LICIO. Indeed if thou shouldest rig up and down in our jackets, thou wouldest be thought a very tom-boy.

PIP. I mean I would not be in your cases.

PETULUS. Neither shalt thou, Pipenetta, for first they are too little for thy body, and then too fair to pull over so foul a skin. PIP. These boys be drunk, I would not be in your takings. LICIO. I think so, for we take nothing in our hands but weapons; it is for thee to use needles and pins, a sampler not a buckler.

PIP. Nay, then, we shall never have done! I mean I would not be so curst 2 as you shall be.

PET. Worse and worse! We are no chase (pretty mops); for deer we are not, neither red nor fallow, because we are bachelors, and have not cornucopia, we want heads; hares we cannot be, because they are male one year, and the next female, we change not our sex; badgers we are not for our legs are one as long as another; and who will take us to be foxes that stand as near a goose and bite

not.

PIP. Fools you are, and therefore good game for wise men to hunt; but knaves I leave you for honest wenches to talk of.

LICIO. Nay, stay, sweet Pipenetta, we are but disposed to be

merry.

PIP. I marvel how old you will be before you will be disposed to be honest. But this is the matter, my master has gone abroad, and wants his page to wait on him; my mistress would rise, and lacks your worship to fetch her hair.

PET. Why is it not on her head?

1 See vol. ii. p. 362.

2 It would appear from the following speech of Petulus that the true reading should be "chased."

3 This must necessarily, both for the sense and rhythm of the sentence, be the true punctuation. Fairholt (Lyly's editor) reads: "We are no chase (pretty mops) for deer; we are not, etc."--which is nonsense, besides destroying the antithesis.

PIP. Methinks it should be, but I mean the hair that she must wear to-day.

it.

LICIO. Why doth she wear any hair but her own?

PIP. In faith, sir, no, I am sure it's her own when she pays for But do you hear the strange news at the Court?

PET. No, except this be it to have one's hair lie all fight out of the house from one's head.

PIP. Tush! everything that Mydas toucheth is gold.

PET. The devil it is.

PIP. Indeed, gold is the devil.

LICIO. Thou art deceived, wench, angels are gold. But is it true ? PIP. True? Why, the meat that he toucheth turneth to gold, so doth the drink, so doth his raiment.

PET. I would he would give me a good box on the ear that I might have a golden cheek.

LICIO. How happy shall we be if he would but stroke our heads that we might have golden hairs. But let us all in lest we lose the virtue of the gift before we have the benefit.

PIP. If he take a cudgel, and that turn to gold, yet beating you with it, you shall only feel the weight of gold.

PET. What difference to be beaten with gold and to be beaten gold? PIP. As much as to say, drink before you go, and go before you drink. LICIO. Come let us go lest we drink of a dry cup for our long tarrying.1

Another feature in Lyly's comedies, afterwards most artistically developed by Shakespeare, was the underplot. In the New Comedy this portion of the dramatic structure was not of great importance, because the principle of the play consisted in the regular evolution of the main plot by means of déos (complication) and Xúois (dénouement). But the action in Lyly's plays being completely subordinated to the wit of the dialogue, it was the more necessary for him to keep alive the interest of the audience by contrasts of character. Accordingly the speeches of the personages who conduct the thread of the principal action are, in the majority of his court comedies, followed by conversational scenes, in which the combats of wit are maintained with peculiar smartness between speakers whose presence is not needed to advance the movement of the play. In Endimion, for example, there is an underplot exhibiting the ridiculous character of Sir Tophas, a braggart knight, who is mocked by his pages; in Mydas 1 Lilly's Dramatic Works (Fairholt), vol. ii. pp. 13-15.

(as is seen from the extract just given) the smart pages chop comic logic with waiting-women and huntsmen; in Gallathea the action is relieved by interludes, representing the adventures of a cheating alchemist and his apprentices; in Campaspe the loves of the heroine and Apelles are diversified by the invectives of the railing philosopher, Diogenes.

But

The first experiment of Shakespeare in comedy was called The Taming of A Shrew. This play was published in quarto in 1594, and had at that date been probably several times witnessed in the theatre. Written while the poet was still under the influence of Marlowe, it cannot compare as a work of art with the revised version, as it stands under the title of The Taming of THE Shrew. considered historically, it is a monument of very great interest, because we see in it the first rude sketch of the philosophical idea of life which characterises all Shakespeare's mature creations, and also the earliest tentative efforts of an art unequalled in its power, both of vitalising the crude subject-matter with which it deals, and of fusing conflicting principles of thought in a single organic structure.

The main action, the taming of the wilful heroine, seems to have been borrowed from some Italian story now lost, though the floating Fabliau, of which it is a variation, survives in the metrical tale of "The Wife Lapped in Morel's Skin."1 For the idea of the disguises in the play Shakespeare was indebted to Gascoigne's translation of the Suppositi of Ariosto. In that comedy (the scene of which is laid in Ferrara) the hero Erostrato has, before the play begins, changed clothes with his servant Dulipo, in order to be in the same house with Polynesta, with whom he is in love. Philogano, his father, is about to arrive from Milan; and the servant, who is transformed into Erostrato, persuades a Siennese gentleman, by a cunning device, to personate Philogano. The appearance of the real Philogano brings on the dénouement. In imitation of this plot, Aurelio, the principal lover in The Taming of A Shrew, changes characters

1 Collier, Shakespeare's Library, Part i. vol. iv. p. 415.

with his servant Valeria, thereby obtaining admission to the house of Alfonsus, with whose daughter Phylema he is in love; the Duke of Cestus, father of Aurelio, is substituted for Philogano; and Philotus, a merchant, takes the place of the personating Siennese in the Suppositi. As to what is original in the conception of the play, Shakespeare's inimitable vein of comic characterisation displays itself in the slight but firm sketches of Ferando, the prototype of Petruchio, and of Sandar, who, in The Taming of THE Shrew, is developed into Grumio. All the scenes of the taming in that comedy-the "beef and mustard episode," with those of the tailor, the question as to the time of day, as to the moon and sun, and as to the sex of the Duke of Cestus (or Vincentio)—appear in the early play; so, too, does the final wager as to the obedience of the wives; moreover, a good deal of the dialogue of the older play is transplanted without alteration into The Taming of THE Shrew.

Turning from the play to the Induction, we feel the first stirring of the serene and beautiful imagination which at a later date created the atmosphere of A MidsummerNight's Dream. The idea of this part of the work was suggested by a story called The Waking Man's Dream, the incidents of which are related as having happened to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, though they are only an adaptation of the tale of Abou Hassan in the Arabian Nights. That profound sense of earthly vanity which pervades all Shakespeare's dramatic writings is graphically expressed in the opening of the story, and as it may have been this moral tradition, inherited from the Gesta Romanorum, that first touched the poet's philosophical imagination, I here transcribe the passage:

What hath our pride and pomp availed us? say those poor miserable souls shut up in the infernal prisons; where is our bravery become, and the glorious show of our magnificence? all these things are passed like a flying shadow, or as a post who hastens to his journey's end. This is it which caused the ancient comic poet to say that the world was nothing but an universal comedy, because all the passages thereof serve to make the

wisest laugh; and according to the opinion of Democritus, all that is acted on this great theatre of the whole world differs in nothing from that which has been acted on a player's stage: the mirror which I will here set before your eyes will so lively express all these inventions, and so truly show the vanities of all the greatness and opulencies of the earth, that although in these events I gather not either examples not far distant from our times, or that have been published by any other writer, yet I believe that the serious pleasantness of this one will supply its want of novelty, and that its repetition will neither be unfruitful nor unpleasing.1

It is to be noted that the idea of vanity runs all through The Taming of A Shrew, in which play Christopher Sly continues to comment on the action almost up to the close, when, having again fallen asleep, he is conveyed back to the spot from which he was taken, to marvel on awakening at the distinctness of his dream in the revised Taming of THE Shrew, on the other hand, Sly is represented as on the point of falling asleep at the end of the first scene of the first act, after which we see no more of him.

In the dramatic representation of the unreality of things, Shakespeare, as I have said, had been anticipated by Lyly. But both in this and in the other points that have been mentioned his genius is still seen in embryo. The episode of Sly in The Taming of A Shrew wants altogether the rich colouring and admirable chiaroscuro which give such an air of truth and poetry to the later Induction. Still more unsatisfactory is the management of the plot of the play. No explanation is given of the necessity of the exchange of identities between the master Aurelio and the servant Valeria; the latter, after agreeing to personate the Duke of Cestus's son, is introduced, without any adequate reason, as a teacher of music into the house of Alfonsus; there is nothing to account for the personation of Aurelio's supposed father by the merchant Philotus; there is no inducement in the way of dowry to attract Ferando, the original of Petruchio, to marry Kate. When Shakespeare came to judge his play with mature experience, he saw in how many points 1 Shakespeare's Library, Part i. vol. iv. p. 408.