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Queen read like fulsome flattery, but women of lesser rank received the same homage of exaggerated and high-flown tribute. This splendor of bearing, often forced and unnatural, marked the endeavor of the age to live on a level with the greatness of life as it was brought home to the imagination by heroic and romantic achievements. When she had become a wrinkled old woman, the Queen was discovered practicing a new dance-step in the solitude of her closet!

The plot of "Love Labor's Lost" is slight and of minor importance; its sources have not been discovered; the play lives in its dialogue and satire. The influence of Lyly is apparent not only in the extravagance and fastidiousness of speech which are satirized with ready skill, but in the give and take of the conversation and the quickness of repartee which first appeared in the English drama in Lyly's court plays.

In this comedy of manners Shakespeare makes admirable sport of the high-flown speech of the time, touching with a light but sure hand its ambitious pedantry in Holofernes, the fantastic excesses of the latest fashion in learning in Armado, and the perils of Euphuism, as he recognized them in his own art, in Biron, who probably speaks the poet's mind when he puts by forever

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical.

The youthfulness of the writer of the play is shown by the great preponderance of lines that rhyme, and by its marked lyrical character, which stamps it as the work of a brilliant poet rather than of an experienced dramatist. Three sonnets and a song are introduced, not because they are necessary parts of the drama, but because they are the natural forms of expression for a young poet; and Mr. Pater has called attention to the fact that the opening speech on the immortality of fame, spoken by the King, and the more striking passages spoken by Biron, have "something of the monumental style of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and are not without their conceits of thought and expression." The stock figures with which the stage was familiar are prominent in the play; the chief actors are sketched with a free hand rather than carefully drawn and

strongly individualized after the poet's later manner; and the play contains several characters which, in the light of later plays, are seen to be first studies of some of the most notable portraits of riper years. The note of youthfulness is distinct also in the extravagance of speech which runs through it, and which was not only satirical but full of attractiveness for the poet. Indeed, the comedy may be regarded as an attempt on the poet's part to free himself from artistic peril by giving his mind, on its dexterous side, full play. The early ripening of artistic instinct into artistic knowledge is evidenced by the discernment of the danger and the welldevised remedy. Biron interprets the young poet's self-consciousness as an artist clearly and decisively; he shows us Shakespeare's insight into the methods. and means of securing the freest expression of his thought, and his deliberate selection of right approaches to his art and his deliberate rejection of the most seductive errors of his time. In this comedy his mind was at play; its natural agility, alertness, keenness, love of paradox, delight in the dexterous handling of words, were allowed full scope, and the disease of his time came fully to the surface and never again seriously attacked him. With his magical quickness of mental action and command of language, he might have succumbed to the temptation to be a marvelously keen and adroit manipulator of words instead of a great creative artist; he might easily have been a fastidious writer for experts in the bizarre, the curious, and the esoteric in style, instead of becoming the full-voiced, large-minded, deep-hearted poet of humanity. This peril he escaped by discerning it and, in the very act of satirizing it, giving his mind opportunity to indulge a passion which all men of artistic feeling shared. The play dealt more freely with contemporaneous events and was more deeply imbedded in contemporary conditions than any other of his dramas; for this reason it became very popular with Elizabethan audiences, but is the least interesting of Shakespeare's works to modern readers. There is in it a preponderance of the local and a minimum of the universal elements.

But Shakespeare could not satirize the extravagances and follies of his time without

a by-play of comedy which reaches perfection in " As You Like It." As a piece of apprentice work "Love's Labor's Lost" is quite invaluable; so clearly does it reveal the early processes of the poet's mind and his first selection of themes, motives, human interests, and artistic methods.

"The Comedy of Errors" belongs to this period of tentative work, and is interesting as showing Shakespeare's familiarity with the traditional form of comedy and as marking the point of his departure from it. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, but it was presented as early as the Christmas season of 1594, in the hall of Gray's Inn, and its production was accompanied by considerable disorder in the audience, which must have been composed chiefly of benchers and their guests. This disturbance is mentioned by a chronicler in the same year in these words: "After much sport, a Comedy of Errors was played by the players; so that night began and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called the 'Night of Errors.'" The main, although not the only, source of the plot was the Menæchmi of Plautus, in which the Latin comedian develops the almost unlimited possibility of blunders which lies in mistakes of identity-then as now a popular device with playwrights and story-tellers. Shakespeare may have read the comedy in the original, or in a translation by William Warner, which was not published until the year following the presentation of the "Comedy of Errors," but which was probably in existence in manuscript much earlier. In this form many pieces of prose and verse which later became famous were passed from hand to hand; writing was practiced chiefly for the pleasure of the writer and his friends, and publication was secondary, and usually an afterthought.

In turning to Plautus, Shakespeare paid tribute to the classical tradition which dominated Italy and was never without witnesses in England; a tradition which cannot be disregarded without serious loss of artistic education, nor accepted without sacrifice of original power. When ever the classical tradition has secured complete possession of the stage, a new and vital drama has been impossible;

whenever it has been entirely discarded, unregulated individualism has degenerated into all manner of eccentricities of plot and form. With characteristic insight. Shakespeare escaped both dangers; he knew the classical manner, and was not unresponsive to its order, balance, and genius for proportion, but he refused to be enslaved or hampered by it. English tragedy had secured complete freedom, and was fast becoming the richest and most adequate cxpression of the English genius; English comedy had been fighting the same battle, and "The Comedy of Errors" marks the decisive triumph of the national genius. In this play Shakespeare conformed to the ancient requirements that the action should take place in a single day and within the limits of a single locality-the time-honored unities; but he changed the classical into the romantic spirit by the introduction of greater complexity of characters and therefore of greater perplexity of plot, and by the infusion of a vein of pathos which is alien to the Latin comedy.

The ease with which the difficult plot is handled shows that Shakespeare had already gone far in his education as a playwright. A comparison with Plautus's play brings out his essential and fundamental cleanness of imagination. He was a man of his time, and his time was incredibly frank and coarse of speech; but whenever he could escape into a purer speech he rarely lost the opportunity. The coarseness and occasional obscenity in his work were the dust of the road along which he traveled; among the men of his age and vocation he was singularly refined in taste and clean in speech. His moral sanity is one of Shakespeare's most characteristic qualities; he is ethically sound throughout the entire body of his work. His insight holds him true at all points to the inexorable play of law. offends the taste of a more fastidious age, but he is far more wholesome than many modern writers of irreproachable vocabulary. On this whole matter Coleridge has spoken the final word:

He

"Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice; he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotze