that any body but himself could have been the author of, is to be found there. The main features of this part, however, were by no means original in that play: is one of the old stories that seem > be always on the go, being told of divers persons and at sundry times. If it have not travelled all round the globe, it has been to Arabia, and perhaps was born there; as the earliest known traces of it are met with in The Sleeper Awakened, of the Thousand and One Nights, but suspected by Mr. Laue not to be a genuine tale. But the most available version of it is in Goulart's Admirable and Memorable Histories, translated by E. Grimestone in 1607, though it had appeared in English as early as 1570, in a collection of stories by Richard Edwards.

Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, being at Bruxelles, and taking a walk one night after supper with some of his favourites, found a certain artisan lying drunk and sound asleep upon the stones. It pleased him in this artisan to make trial of the vanity of our life, whereof he had before discoursed with his familiar friends. He therefore caused the sleeper to be taken up and carried into his palace; to be laid in one of the richest beds; a rich night-cap to be given him; his foul shirt to be taken off, and one of fine holland to be put on him. He having digested his wine and beginning to awake, there came about his bed pages and grooms of the Duke's chamber, who draw the curtains, make many courtesies, and ask him if it please him to rise, and what apparel he will put on that day. This new Monsieur, amazed at such courtesy, and doubting whether he dream or wake, lets himself be dressed, and led out of the chamber. Then come noblemen who salute him with all honour, and conduct him to the mass, where with great ceremony they give him the book of the Gospel, and Pixe to kiss, as they usually did to the Duke. Brought back thence to the palace, he washes his hands, and sits down at the table well furnished. After dinner, cards are brought in, with a great sum of money, and he, a duke in his own fancy, plays with the chief of the court. This done, he is taken to walk in the garden, and to hunt the hare, and to hawk; then back to the palace, where he sups in state. Candles being lighted, the music strikes up, the tables are removed, and the gentlemen and ladies have a dance. Then they play a pleasant comedy, which is followed by a banquet with store of Ipocras and precious wine, so that he is soon drunk again, and falls fast asleep.

The critics have been very warm and unanimous in praise of Shakespeare's Induction, some, however, wondering and regretting that he did not keep it up to the end of the play, others suspecting that he did so keep it up, but that the continuation has been lost. We are otherwise minded, being convinced that in this as in other things the Poet was wiser than his critics. For the purpose of the Induction was but to start an interest in the play; and he probably knew that such interest, once started, would be rather

hindered than set forward by any comings-in of other matter, that there would be no time to think of Sly amidst such a whirlwind of oddities and whimsicalities as he was going to raise. Nevertheless, the regret in question well approves the goodness of the thing; for the better the thing, the more apt men are to think they have not enough until they have too much of it.

As to the Induction itself, we confess with Hazlitt, that if forced to give up this or the play we should be not a little puzzled to choose. But then this, no doubt, is partly because the play, though abounding in well-aimed theatrical hits, is one of comparatively little merit. The Induction is wonderfully stuffed with meat, and that, too, of the most savoury quality: the free, varied transpiration of character crowded into it is literally prodigious for so small a space. And yet how the whole thing swims in a stream of the most racy and delicate humour! and therewithal has a light aerial grace, touched occasionally with the richest colours of poetry, hovering over it; all, together, making it one of the most expressive and delectable things we shall any where find.

.

The two plots of the play, as Johnson observes, are skilfully interwoven, so as to give a wide variety of comic incident, without running into perplexity. And such variety was the more needful here, forasmuch as the interest turns in a very unusual degree upon the incidents; though the thought and speech are every where sprightly and brisk enough. For if the dialogue seldom rise to poetry, it never becomes vapid and flat, these being qualities of which Shakespeare was hardly capable. As to Bianca and the proceedings of her suitors, they seem of little consequence any way save as helping to make up an agreeable variety of matter. Bianca apparently has not force of character enough to do any thing wrong, else she had probably been as naughty as her sister. The play indeed has little depth and vigour of characterization save what is contained in Grumio, Katharine, and Petruchio: these, especially the last, have character enough, are thoroughly compacted of individual life, and are forcibly drawn.

In Kate it was no slight thing to reconcile the demands of truth and of the stage together. For by the design of the piece she was to undergo, at least in appearance, an entire revolution of character in a very short space of time; such a change as could not be supposed to proceed by the methods of growth: so that there was no way but that she must truly be all the while what she at last comes to appear; for it is plain that so great a transformation could not be both natural and real. Accordingly her faults at first are clearly the result of over-indulgence rather than of an ugly and ill-conditioned nature. With a good stock of reason and right feeling, nothing was wanting but a vigorous and resolute hand to discipline them forth into action: by nature proud and wilful, as well-built folks are apt to be, it was for art to bend her will, in which case her pride itself would tend to make her go right; and

antil this is done she is perverse, froward, and cross. and get. somewhat in a habit of showing her freedom by putting on unamiable traits. Thus her shrewishness is for the most part assumed, yet with others it passes for real, and so gets her a bad name, which she knows she does not deserve, and yet is too proud to remove the occasion thereof. Her worst conduct is towards her sister, and that, too, at the very time when she most keenly feels the evils such conduct is drawing upon her. For education has wrought with nature to make her crave the honours and comforts of inarriage, and her vexation at the prospect of missing them urges her into greater transports of petulance, and those transports fall heaviest, of course, upon her who has what she desires. In some such way as this a true womanhood often instinctively challenges a taming and subduing hand; thus it dares a conquering power, because it wants to be conquered there is many a good woman who will not be ruled by her husband, if she can help it, yet will love with all her heart and respect with all her soul the husband that does rule her, provided his government issue from a sterling manhood; that is, if it be because he loves her too well and too wisely to let her have her own way.

Now all this Katharine has in Petruchio, whom Hazlitt aptly describes as "a madman in his senses, a very honest fellow, who hardly speaks a word of truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures; acting his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical extravagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired animal spirits, and without a particle of ill-humour from beginning to end." His plan is, to drive her out of her humour by becoming just like her, only more so. In pursuance of this, the more wild and absurd his statements, the more he insists upon them, and, out of pure love for her, will not let her rest till she assents to them; so that she has no way but to endorse his maddest assertions, and when she does this his end is accomplished, and he ceases to make them. For she must first be taught to set charity before knowledge, love before logic, and that to live at peace with her husband is worth far more than to have the better of him in argument; and with this view he keeps saying things that no woman in her senses would or could admit, but for the sake of such peace. In all which he does but make his will stand for reason, till her will gives place to reason. At first, indeed, she thinks he is what he seems, and accordingly neither loves nor respects him; but when she perceives that he has but put on this character as an offset and antidote to hers; that it proceeds noway from weakness, but from superabundant strength; that he has perfect control over it, and will not be diverted from it, nor beaten out of it, till his work is done; then she begins to rejoice in the match, and to build her heart upon him, willingly yielding herself to the sway of his stout, manly, generous mind

Tailor, Haberdasher, and Servants attending on
Baptista and Petruchio.

SCENE, sometimes in Padua ; sometimes at Petruchio s House in the Country.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

INDUCTION.

SCENE I. Before an Alehouse on a Heath.

Enter Hostess and SLY.

Sly. I'LL pheese' you, in faith.
Host. A pair of stocks, you rogue!

Sly. Y'are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris; let the

world slide. Sessa! 3

1 This word, variously spelt, feize, feaze, fease, fese, feese, vease, and veze, occurs in several old writers. As in Ben Jonson's Alchemist, Act v. sc. 3: "Come, will you quarrel? I will feize you, sirrah ;” in a note upon which Mr. Gifford, a West-of-England man, says that in that part of the country the word means, to beat, chastise, or humble." This accords with what Fuller says in his Worthies of Dorsetshire: "Bishop Turbervil recovered some lost lands, which Bishop Voysey had vezed;" and in a note upon vezed he explains to mean, "driven away, in the dialect of the West." Likewise in Stanyhurst's translation of Virgil: "Feaze away the drone bees;" and again: "We are touz'd, and from Italy fear'd." And Skinner says, that "feuse, or feag, is to lash, to beat with rods." We have the word again in Troilus and Cressida, Act ii. sc. 3: "An a' be proud with me, I'll pheese his pride: let me go to him."

H.

2 Knight says, -"The tinker was right in boasting the antiquity of his family, though he did not precisely recollect the name of the Conqueror." Doubtless the name is from the same original as our words sly and sleight. So that there have been Slys ever since there began to be skilful, cunning men. Among "the names of the principal actors in all these plays," mentioned in Vol. I. page xvi., we have William Slye. The name is said to have been common in the Poet's native town.

H.

3 Sessa is for the Spanish Cessa; meaning, cease, be quiet.—