From all this, one would naturally expect Love's Labour's Lost to be far from amusing on the modern stage. Within a few years, however, it has been acted with considerable success. The secret of vital

ity like this is not to be found in such matters as we have glanced at; it must be sought in something not merely contemporary, but of more permanent dramatic value. Several things of this kind are soon perceptible. In the first place, the play has an openair atmosphere of its own, a bit conventional, to be sure, but romantic and sustained; you feel throughout that what is going on takes place in just the sort of world where it belongs. In the second place, there are various perennially effective situations, such as the elaborate concealment and eavesdropping by which the King and his lords discover that they have all fallen from their high resolves in common;1 and more notably still such as the elaborate confusion of identity, when the Princess and her ladies mask themselves to bewilder their disguised lovers.2 In the third place, the elaborate repartee of the dialogue, particularly in the passages which make Biron and Rosaline so suggestive of Benedick and Beatrice, though very verbal, is very sparkling. In the fourth

place, the elaborate introduction of a play within a play, broadly burlesquing a kind of literature which was passing out of fashion, must always have been

1 IV. iii. 1-210.

2 V. ii. 158-265.

8 See II. i. 114-128; and cf. Much Ado, I. i. 117-146.

4 V. ii. 523-735.

diverting, if only by way of contrast. Finally, to go no further, the contrast of clowns and courtiers in this very scene emphasizes what pervades the play,— constant caricature of contemporary absurdity along with frequent serious perpetration of the like.

To specify these details has been worth while, because, as we shall see later, they constantly reappear in the later work of Shakspere, who is remarkable among dramatists for persistent repetition of whatever has once proved dramatically effective. We might have specified more such detail; we might have studied Love's Labour's Lost far more profoundly, defining the various affectations it commits or satirizes, discussing whether this part of it or that was meant for a personal attack on a rival company, and so on. For our purposes, however, we have touched on the play sufficiently. Contemporary, in a general way, with Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, and -perhaps because so palpably corrected and augmented

vastly better than either of them, it groups itself with them in our view of Shakspere as an artist. When he began to write, comedy was more highly developed than tragedy or history. His first comedy, then, was more ripe than his first work of other kinds; but like them it may be regarded, in the end, as a successful experiment in the best manner of his time,

not as a new contribution to dramatic literature.

IV. THE COMEDY OF ERRORS.

[At Christmas time, 1594, a "Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus)" was played at Gray's Inn. Meres, in 1598, mentioned Errors among the comedies of Shakspere. The play was first entered in 1623, and published in the folio.

Its source is clearly the Menechmi of Plautus, probably in some translation, and one or two scenes from his Amphitryon. Modern critics generally agree in placing it, on internal evidence, before 1591, with a slight preference for 15891 or 1590.]

In the three plays we have considered, assuming them to be at least partly Shakspere's, we found him, in his earliest dramatic work, by no means original. Instead of trying to do something new, he devoted himself to writing a tragedy of blood much in the manner of Kyd or Marlowe, to collaborating in a conventional chronicle-history in which various contemporary manners appear, and to making a comedy in the manner of Lyly. If we try to characterize this work by a single word, we can hardly find a better term than experimental.

As apparently an experiment, the Comedy of Errors, like the play we shall consider next, groups itself with what precede. Like the next play, however, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, it differs from the others in not imitating any one else. The first three experiments seem unpretentiously imitative; the two following seem independent.

1 1589 is the latest year in which the allusion to France "making war against her heir-" III. ii. 127- would have been literally

true.

Clearly enough, the Comedy of Errors attempts to adapt for the Elizabethan stage to translate into contemporary theatrical terms - a classic comedy. In a way, the effort is akin to that of the poems, which, as we saw, exemplified the phase of Renascent feeling which delighted not so much in the formal graces of foreign culture as in the humane spirit of ancient literature. While in the poems, however, Shakspere altered and adapted Ovid or whom else, with excessive verbal care, to the taste of the literary public, he altered Plautus, in the Comedy of Errors, for purely theatrical purposes. The resulting contrast is curious. The poems, in their own day far more reputable literature than any contemporary plays, became, from the very concreteness of their detail, rather more corrupt in effect than the originals from which they were drawn. At all events, they carry that sort of thing as far as it can tolerably go; for throughout, while dealing with matters which demand pagan unconsciousness, they are studiously conscious. The Comedy of Errors, on the other hand, in its own day a purely theatrical affair, Shakspere altered in a way which the most prim modern principles would unhesitatingly pronounce for the better. In Plautus, for example, the episode of the courtesan and the chain is frankly licentious; in Shakspere, it is so different1 that without a reference to Plautus one can hardly make out why the lady in question is called a courtesan at all. This trait we shall find to be gen

1 III. ii. 169 seq.; IV. i., iii.

erally characteristic of Shakspere. Always a man of his time, to be sure, he never lets the notion of propriety stand between him and an effective point; when there is nothing to prevent, however, he is decent; among his contemporaries, he is remarkable for refinement of taste.

This incidental refinement of plot is by no means his only addition to the material of Plautus. The second Dromio is Shakspere's, so is the conventional pathos of Ægeon, so the effort to contrast the shrewish Adriana with her gentler sister. The very mention of these characters, however, calls our attention to the most obvious weakness of the Comedy of Errors. Except for conventional dramatic purposes, the characters throughout are little more than names; they are not seriously individualized. A convenient rhetorical scheme of criticism sometimes states the principle that any story or play must have a plot, the actions or events it deals with; and that as actions or events must be performed by somebody, or happen to somebody, somewhere, any play or novel must also include characters and descriptions. A theoretically excellent play, then, consists of an interesting plot, which involves individual characters, in a distinct local atmosphere. Applying this test to the Comedy of Errors, we find a remarkably ingenious and wellconstructed plot, and little else. Characters and background might be anybody and anywhere.

As a piece of untrammelled construction, as a plot put together with what seems almost wilful disregard