Shylock; yet no rendering of Shylock which makes the man look noble enough to be seriously sympathetic could ever have failed to command sympathy. There are few facts in the Elizabethan drama which more strongly emphasize the remoteness from ourselves not only of Elizabethan England, but also of Shakspere, the Elizabethan playwright.

This view of Shakspere we must always keep in mind. As we come to these more lasting of his works, we are prone to forget it. In the Merchant of Venice, for example, we cannot but find, along with what we have already glanced at, a constantly growing beauty, gravity, significance of mere poetry; everywhere, in short, we feel Shakspere's grasp of life growing firmer, his wisdom deeper. We are tempted to guess that all this is not merely temperamental, but profoundly, philosophically conscious. We may generally be preserved from this temptation, however, by such constant consideration of fact as in this chapter we have insisted upon. Among the hypotheses about this play, the simplest is this: A stage playwright of that olden time set himself the regular task of translating into effective dramatic form an archaically trivial old story. In the course of some nine years of practice he had so mastered his technical art, theatrical and literary alike, and had so awakened his own faculty of spontaneously creative imagination, that he made his version of the story permanently plausible. He did more; like any masterly artist, he introduced into his work touch after touch of

the kind which makes works of art endlessly suggestive to ages more and more foreign, in thought and in feeling, to the age which produced them. The Merchant of Venice, then, is full of implicit wisdom, and beauty, and significance. That Shakspere realized all this, however, does not follow. Critics who declare a

great artist fully conscious of whatever his work implies are generally those who least know how works of art are made.

VIII. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

[The Taming of the Shrew, in its present form, appeared first in the folio of 1623. There is no certain allusion to it at any earlier date.

On May 2nd, 1594, however, "A pleasant conceited history called the Tayming of a Shrowe" was entered in the Stationers' Register. This, which was published in quarto during the same year, is evidently the source, if not the original version, of the comedy finally ascribed to Shakspere. Who wrote the earlier play, how much of the final play may be pronounced Shakspere's, and to what period we may assign his work on it, have been much discussed with no certain result. It seems probable that the play as we have it is the work of several hands, revised by Shakspere somewhere about 1597.]

If the Taming of a Shrew be Shakspere's, and such, at least to a considerable degree, we may assume it until further adverse evidence appears, it is in various ways different from any of his work which we have as yet considered. In the plays discussed in the last chapter, Shakspere seemed plainly to be trying his hand, with marked versatility, at various experiments. In the plays hitherto discussed in this chapter, he has

seemed the master of his vehicle, which with more or less artistic seriousness he has used to express the various moods into which his various subjects have thrown him. In this play one finds far less definite artistic motive than in those which we have lately read; yet at the same time one finds such easy mastery of dramatic technique that the Taming of the Shrew remains among the most popular light comedies on the English stage. The play is a rollicking farce, so full of fun that, whether we read or see it, we accept its assumptions. When we stop to consider, we are surprised to find these involving that archaic view of conjugal relations which permits the husband, provided his stick be not too big, to enforce domestic discipline by whipping. All of which is at once less serious than the artistic plays we have dealt with, and more skilful than the experimental.

One reason for this peculiar effect may lie in the fact that while most of the plays we have lately considered are almost certainly Shakspere's throughout, a large part of the Taming of the Shrew is thought to be by others. The old Taming of a Shrew was in all probability by somebody else, though by whom we cannot be sure. The passages about Bianca and most of the other minor characters are very likely by some intervening hand. This leaves to Shakspere himself little more than the characters of Sly, Katharine, and Petruchio, with occasional touches throughout,a state of things quite in accordance with the habitual collaboration of the Elizabethan theatre.

Collaborative or not, however, the play has a distinct effect of its own, which is by no means one of palpable patchwork. Its plot, to begin with, is swift and constant in action, and quite firm enough still to hold the attention of any audience. Even if the play were not by Shakspere at all, too, it contains one feature, unique in the work ascribed to Shakspere, but common in the drama of his time, which would be well worth our attention. This is the Induction, which makes the main action a play within a play. Probably intended to be followed by improvised remarks between scenes, it was almost certainly intended to be balanced by a formal epilogue, or conclusion, in which Sly should fall asleep as lord, and wake up as tinker. Eccentric as such a device seems nowadays, it is very suggestive of the conditions of the Elizabethan theatre; it clearly exemplifies, too, the old convention which Shakspere developed into the artistic removal from real life of whatever in the Midsummer Night's Dream or in the Merchant of Venice was at first blush incredible.

Inductions, interpolated comments by the personages thereof, and final conclusions, were common on the Elizabethan stage. A glance at the works of Greene or of Peele, or at Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, will show how general this sort of thing was. Impracticable on our own stage, it was exactly fitted to the conditions of the stage by which all of Shakspere's plays were produced. On either side of that stage, we remember, in the place now

occupied by proscenium boxes, were seats where the more fashionable part of the audience sat, themselves a brilliant feature of the spectacle afforded to the more vulgar company in the pit or the gallery. Among these people of quality, the actors in the Induction could seat themselves while the main play went on, forming a natural system of intermediates between audience and play — actually part of both. When the audience was banished from the stage, such a proceeding became impracticable. Finally the whole system merged into the rhymed prologue, which has disappeared in turn. It is interesting to us chiefly as a fresh reminder that the stage for which Shakspere made his plays was a totally different thing from the stage to which we are accustomed.

In itself, to be sure, the Induction of the Taming of the Shrew is comical. So is the real play. Neither, however, possesses very individual traits; both deal, after the manner of their day, with such incidents as compose the stock plots of Italian novels, at that time generally popular.

To pass to the characters of the Taming of the Shrew, we find them, with three exceptions, merely conventional stage figures, of the sort which figured in Shakspere's earlier experimental work. These exceptions are those on which we have already touched, -Sly in the Induction, and in the play Katharine and Petruchio. At least contrasted with the other characters, these seem almost Shaksperean in vitality. Certainly the queerly matched pair, for all their extrav