the same - and the guilty one, after exposure, usually goes off and in one way or another commits suicide.

I instance one only among Dickens's pet devices. But he had a number of them and 80 had Shakespeare.

Take the trick of the woman disguised in man's apparel. It starts with Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It runs (and good reason why it should when we consider that all women's parts were acted by boys) right through the Comedies and into Cymbeline. Portia, Nerissa, Jessica (these three in one play), Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, each in turn masquerades thus, and in circumstances that, unless we take stage convention on its own terms, beggar credulity.

"The bridegroom may forget the bride Was made his wedded wife yestreen," but not in the sense that Bassanio and Gratiano forget. Is it credible that Bassanio shall catch no accent, no vibration, to touch, awaken, thrill his memory during all that long scene in the Doge's court, or afterwards when challenged to part with his ring? Translated into actual life, is it even conceivable?

Let us take another device: that of working the plot upon a shipwreck, shown or reported. (There is perhaps no better way of starting romantic adventures, misadventures, meetings, recognitions, as none to strip men more dramatically of all trappings that cover their native nobility or baseness.) The Comedy of Errors and Pericles are pivoted on shipwreck; by shipwreck Perdita in The Winter's Tale is abandoned on the magical seacoast of Bohemia. Twelfth Night takes its intrigue from shipwreck and, for acting purposes, opens with Viola's casting ashore:

VIOLA. What country, friends, is this?
CAPTAIN. This is Illyria, lady.
VIOLA. And what should I do in
Illyria?

My brother he is in Elysium. Perchance he is not drown'd -what think you, sailors? CAPTAIN. It is perchance that you yourself were saved.

The Tempest opens in the midst of shipwreck. In The Comedy of Errors, and in Twelfth Night, shipwreck leads on to another trick-that of mistaken identity, as it is called; in The Comedy of Errors (again) and Pericles to the trick of a long-lost mother, supposed to have perished in shipwreck, revealed as living yet and loving. From shipwreck the fairy Prince lands to learn toil and through it to find his love, the delicate Princess to wear homespun and find her lover.

One might make a long list of these favorite themes; from Shakespeare's favorite one of the jealous husband or lover and the woman foully misjudged (Hero, Desdemona, Hermione) to the trick of the potion which arrests life without slaying it (Juliet, Imogen), or the trick of the commanded murderer whose heart softens (Hubert, Leonine, Pisanio). But perhaps enough has been said to suggest an enquiry by which any reader may assure himself that Shakespeare, having once employed a stage device with some degree of success, had never the smallest scruple about using it again. Rather, I suppose, that there was never a great author who repeated himself at once so lavishly and so economically, still husbanding his favorite themes, while ever attempting new variations upon them. In the very wealth of this variation we find "God's plenty," of course. But so far as I dare to understand Shakespeare, I see him as a magnificently indolent man, not agonizing to invent new plots, taking old ones as clay to his hands, breathing life into that clay, anon unmaking, remoulding. reinspiring it. We know for a fact that he worked upon old plays, old chronicles, other men's romances. We

know, too, that men of his time made small account of what we call plagiarism and even now define as a misdemeanor quite loosely and almost capriciously. Shakespeare, who borrowed other men's inventions SO royally, delighted in repeating and improving his own.

Now it has been pretty well established by scholars that the earlier comedies of Shakespeare run in the following chronological order :-Love's Labor's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. A Midsummer Night's Dream. It may, indeed, be argued that The Comedy of Errors came before Love's Labor's Lost; but whether it did or did not matters very little to us; so let us take the four in the order generally assigned by conjecture.

In the 1598 Quarto of Love's Labor's Lost we are informed that it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas, and is now "newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare." It was a Court play, then, and indeed it bears every mark of one. It is an imitative performance, after the fashionable model of John Lyly; but it imitates with a high sense of humor and burlesques its model audaciously.

All young artists in drama are preoccupied with plot, or "construction": character comes later. The plot of Love's Labor's Lost turns on "confusion of identity," the Princess and her ladies masking themselves to the perplexity of their masked lovers. For the rest, in its whole conception as in its diction, the thing is consciously artificial and extravagant from first to last.

The Comedy of Errors is an experi

1 For instance any poet or dramatist may take the story of Tristram and Iseult and make what he can of it; whereas if I use (which God forbid) a plot of Mr. Hall Caine's or of Mrs. Humphry Ward's, I am a branded thief. The reader will find an amusing attemt to delimit the offence of plagiarism in an appendix to Charles Reade's novel, "The Wandering Heir,"

ment on a different model; not Lyly now, but Plautus, and Plautus to be out-Plautussed. Again we have confusion of identity for the motive; but here confusion of identity does not merely turn the plot, as in Love's Labor's Lost: it means all the play, and the play means nothing else. Where Plautus had one pair of twinbrothers so featured that they cannot be told apart, Shakespeare adds another pair, and the fun is drawn out with amazing dexterity. Let three things, however, be observed. (1) The feat is achieved at a total sacrifice of character-and indeed he who starts out to confuse identity must, consciously or not, set himself the task of obliterating character. (2) Unless a convention of pasteboard be accepted as substitute for flesh and blood, the events are incredible. (3) On the stage of Plautus the convention of two men being like enough in feature to deceive even their wives might pass. It was actually a convention of pasteboard, since the players wore masks. Paint two masks alike, and (since masks muffle voices) the trick is done. But (4) Shakespeare, dispensing with the masks, doubled the confusion by tacking a pair of Dromios on to a pair of Antipholuses; and to double one situation so improbable is to multiply its improbability by the

hundred.

It is all done, to be sure, with such amazing resource that, were ingenuity of stage-craft the test of great drama, we might say, "Here is a man who has little or nothing to learn." But ingenuity of stage-craft is not the test of great drama: and, in fact, Shakespeare had much more than a vast deal to learn. He had a vast deal to unlearn.

A dramatic author must start by mastering certain stage-mechanics. Having mastered them, he must-to be great-unlearn reliance on them, learn

to cut them away as he grows to perIceive that the secret of his art resides in playing human being against human being, man against woman, character against character, will against willnot in devising "situations" or "curtains," and operating on puppets to produce these. His art touches climax when his "situations" and "curtains" astound, yet are visibly, rationally, necessarily brought about by the men and women he has conjured on to his stage; so that we tell ourselves: "It is wonderful-yet what else could have happened?" Othello is one of the cleverest stage-plays ever written. What does it leave to us to say but in an awe of pity-"It is most terrible, but it must have happened so"? In great art, as in life, character makes the bed it lies on, or dies on.

So in the next play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we find Shakespeare learning and, perhaps even more deliberately, unlearning. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not a great play; but it is a curious one, and a very wardrobe of "effects," in which Shakespeare afterwards dressed himself to better advantage.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare is feeling for character, for real men and women. Tricks no longer satisfy him, but the old tricks haunt him. He must have again, as in The Comedy of Errors, two gentlemen with a servant apiece-though the opposition is discriminated and more cunningly weighted. For stage effect, Proteus (supposed a friend and a gentleman) must suddenly behave with incredible baseness. For stage effect, Valentine must surrender his true love to his false friend with a mawkish generosity that deserves nothing so much as kicking

"All that was mine in Silvia I give thee."

And what about Silvia? Where does

Silvia come in? That devastating sentence may help the curtain, but it blows all character to the winds. There are now no gentlemen in Verona.

We come now to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, with the three earlier comedies to guide us, will attempt to conjecture how the young playwright would face this new piece of work.

First we will ask. What had he to

do?

Nobody knows precisely when, or precisely where, or precisely how A Midsummer Night's Dream was first produced. But it is evident to me that, like Love's Labor's Lost and The Tempest, it was written for performance at Court, and that its par ticular occasion, like the occasion of The Tempest, was a Court wedding. It has all the stigmata of a Court play. Like Love's Labor's Lost and The Tempest, it contains an interlude, and that interlude - Bully Bottom's Pyramus and Thisbe-is designed, rehearsed, enacted for a wedding. Can anyone read the opening scene or the closing speech of Theseus and doubt that the occasion was a wedding? Be it remembered, moreover, how the fairies dominate this play, how constantly and intimately fairies are associated with weddings in Elizabethan poetry, their genial favors invoked, the malign caprices prayed against. I take a stanza from Spenser's great Epithalamion

"Let no deluding dreams, nor dreadful sights

Make sudden sad affrights; Ne let house-fyres, nor lightnings helplesse harmes, Ne let the Pooke nor sprights,

other evil

Ne let mischievous witches, with theyr charmes,

Ne let hob-Goblins, names whose sense we see not,

Fray us with things that be not.

Let not the shrieck Oule nor the Stork be heard,

Nor the night Raven that still deadly yels,

Nor damned ghosts cald up with mighty spels,

Nor griesly Vultures, make us once afeard,

Ne let the unpleasant Queen of Frogs still croaking

Make us to wish their choking.

Let none of these theyr drery accents sing;

Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring."

and I compare this with the fairies' last pattering ditty in our play"Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,

Puts the wretch that lies on woe

In remembrance of a shroud, Now it is the time of night

That the graves, all gaping wide, Everyone lets forth his sprite

In the churchway paths do glide: And we Fairies, that do run

By the triple Hecate's team,
From the presence of the Sun

Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic: not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallowed house;
I am sent with broom before

To sweep the dust behind the door.

Court. He is naturally anxious to shine, and, moreover, though his fellow-playwrights already pay him the compliment of being a little jealous, he still has his spurs to win.

As I read the play and seek to divine its process of construction, I seem -and the reader must take this for what it is worth-to see Shakespeare's mind working somewhat as follows:

He turns over his repertory of notions, and takes stock. "Lyly's model has had its day, and the bloom is off it; I must not repeat the experiment of Love's Labor's Lost. I have shown that I can do great things with Mistaken Identity; but I cannot possibly express the fun of that further than I did in The Comedy of Errors; and the fun there was clever, but a trifle hard, if not inhuman. . . . But here is a wedding; a wedding should be human; a wedding calls for poetry; and I long to fill a play with poetry. (For I can write poetry. Look at Venus and Adonis!) Still, Mistaken Identity is a trick I know, a trick in which I am known to shine. If I could only make it poetical. A pair of lovers? For Mistaken Identity that means two pairs of lovers.

. . Yet, steady! We must not make it farcical. It was all very well to make wives mistake their husbands. That has been funny ever since the world began; that is as ancient as cuckoldy, or almost. But this is a wedding play, and the sentiment must be fresh. Lovers are not so easily mistaken as wives and husbands-or ought not to be in poetry. "I like too" - we dramatist continuing of the scorned lady sweetheart. . . . I did not quite bring it off in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; but it is none the less a good situation, and I must use it again'

see the young "that situation following her

2 And he did; not only here, but in "All's Well that Ends Well," for instance.

scorner

Lovers mistaking one another

...

scorned lady following the wandering through a wood (that is poetical, anyhow). Yes, and by night: this play has to be written for a bridal eve. A night for lovers-a summer's nighta midsummer's night-dewy thicketsthe moon. . . . The moon? Why, of course, the moon. Pitch darkness is for tragedy, moonlight for softer illusion. Lovers can be pardonably mistaken-under the moon. . . . What besides happens on a summer's night, in a woodland, under the moon?

Then for the man's fancy never started to work but it straightway teemed-we can watch it opening out new alleys of funs, weaving fresh delicacies upon "How, for a tangle, to get one of the fairies caught in the web they spin? Why not even the fairy-queen herself? ... Yes, but the mortal she falls in with? Shall he be one of the lovers? .... Well, to say truth, I haven't yet given any particular character to these lovers. The absolute jest would be to bring opposite extremes into the allusion, to make Queen Mab dote on a gross clown. . . . All very well, but I haven't any clowns. . . The an

this central invention.

swer to that seems simple: if I haven't I ought to have. . . . Stay! I have been forgetting the interlude all this while. We must have an interlude; our interlude in Love's Labor's Lost proved the making of the play. . . . Now suppose we make a set of clowns perform the interlude, as in Love's Labor's Lost, and get them chased by the fairies while they are rehearsing? Gross flesh and gossamerthat's an idea! If I cannot use it now, I certainly will some day. . . But I can use it now! What is that story in Ovid about Midas and the ass's ears? Or am I confusing it with another story-which I read the other day in that book about witches-of a man transformed into an ass?"

Enough! I am not, of course, suggesting that Shakespeare constructed A Midsummer Night's Dream just in this way. (As the provincial Mayor said to the Eminent Statesman, "Aha, sir! that's more than you or me knows. That's Latin!") But I do suggest that we can immensely increase our delight in Shakespeare and strengthen our understanding of him if, as we read him again and again, we keep asking ourselves how the thing was done. I am sure that-hopeless as complete success must be by this method we get far nearer to the τό τί ἦν εἶναι of a given play than by searching among "sources" and "origins," by debating how much Shakespeare took from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, or how much he borrowed from Golding's Ovid, or how much Latin he learned at Stratford Grammar School, or how far he anticipated modern scientific discoveries, or why he gave the names "Pease - blossom," "Cobweb," "Moth," "Mustard-Seed" to his fairies. I admit the idle fascination of some of these studies. A friend of mine-an old squire of Devon-used to demon

3 And he did (see the last Act of "The Merry Wives of Windsor").