second Hermione championing a slandered Perdita,1 -another glimpse of that relationship of mother and daughter, so rarely touched by Shakespeare. But the theory of a 'revision' (the cheap panacea in some hands for the slightest discrepancy) is wholly unsupported by criteria of style. The dramatic manner of Much Ado is flexible in the highest degree, but it is not at all composite. The subsequent fortunes of the play were not, for one of the masterpieces of English comedy, eventful. It was one of the six plays of Shakespeare chosen for performance at the wedding festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, and, except the unmatched 'Sir John Falstaff' (as Henry IV. was called) and the new, or recent, Tempest and Winter's Tale, the only comedy. Up to the closing of the theatres it continued to fascinate high and low. Let but Beatrice The cockpit, galleries, boxes all are full. So wrote Leonard Digges in 1640. But after the Restoration its brilliance was already a little out of date, and the play might have gone off the boards had it not occurred to Sir W. Davenant to eke out its deficiencies by fusing it with Measure for Measure, the two being 'believ'd' (as Langbaine puts it) 'to have Wit enough in them to make one good play.' The result was his The Law against Lovers, witnessed by Pepys in 1661 and published in 1673. The serious plot of Much Ado is founded on the story of Timbreo and Fenicia, the twenty-second of Bandello's novels, which Shakespeare perhaps read as paraphrased by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques. Timbreo is the victim of a plot similar to that laid 1 In ii. 1. the stage direction also mentions, but without naming, Leonato's wife among the persons who enter. Eng ed Perdita, mother and e. But the ea in some wholly un tic manner gree, but it fortunes of erpieces of of the six nce at the h in 1613, alstaff' (as or recent, y. Up to o fascinate 11. t after the tle out of boards had ke out its Measure, -uts it) 'to ood play.' witnessed ed on the second of ps read as Tragiques. that laid wife among er. against Claudio. But its author is a jealous rival, Girondo, and its agent not a counterfeit presenter of the lady but a servant 'perfumed' like a lover, whom he causes to ascend by night to Fenicia's chamber window before Timbreo's eyes. Timbreo sends a message to her parents, breaking off the match. Fenicia, overcome with the humiliation, pines away, but, when apparently at the point of death, suddenly revives. Her parents thereupon send her secretly to a distant retreat, giving out that she is in fact dead, and burying an empty coffin with solemn ceremony. Girondo repents, confesses, and begs Timbreo to take his life. Fenicia is restored, and Timbreo recovers his old fiancée under the semblance of a new. A much superior form of the plot-incident in this fantastic tale was to be found in Ariosto's story of Ariodante and Genevra (Orl. Fur. c. v.). Here the Duke of Albany, Polynesso, a rejected lover of Genevra, similarly beguiles Ariodante, his successful rival. But instead of the perfumed serving-man, he resorts to an abandoned mistress of his own, Genevra's maid, inducing her innocently to appear at her lady's window in her lady's dress. The sequel differs; Genevra's imagined guilt is less lightly pardoned, and she is only rescued from death by the timely intervention of the champion Rinaldo. The story in both forms had long been familiar in England. Even before the appearance of Harington's translation of the Orlando in 1591, it had been translated in verse by Turbervile and Beverley; and a nameless playwright had produced a (lost) ' Historie of Ariodante and Genevora,' which was 'showed before her Majestie on Shrove Tuesdaie at night, in 1583.' Spenser also introduced it into the tale of Sir Guyon (F. Q. ii. 4), qualifying it for its place in the allegory of Temperance by a new conclusion in which the deceived lover, an example of headstrong fury, actually slays the innocent Claribella and vainly endeavours to slay her handmaid. No Such a story involved a nearer approach to a tragic action and to tragic pathos than anything in As You Like It or Twelfth Night. Rosalind's banishment on pain of death is but a shadowy threshold across which she steps blithely into the magic woodlands of Arden. Even the 'concealment' which preys on the damask cheek of Viola cannot compare in poignancy with the slanderous outrage which crushes Hero. Yet we are never in danger of anticipating a tragic issue. where is the art more delicate with which Shakespeare communicates to the hearer an indefinable assurance that all will go well. In the earlier Comedies he achieved this by making the controller of the harms essentially amiable and humane. The duke who condemns Egeus in The Comedy of Errors, Theseus, who threatens the lovers in the Midsummer-Night's Dream, satisfy us in spite of themselves that the cruelties these charming persons promise will not come off. In the later Comedies his plan is a subtler and more difficult one. He admits as contrivers of harm persons purely malign and criminal, like Stephano and Antonio in The Tempest, and Don John in our play, or fatuously cruel, like Leontes, in The Winter's Tale, and Frederick in As You Like It. Far from being more amiable than his prototype in Bandello, Don John is a more unmitigated scoundrel-the purest embodiment, perhaps, in all Shakespeare of cynical egoism. He has neither Girondo's excuse of rivalry in love nor his after-virtue of penitence; he hails the announcement of an intended marriage before he knows whose it is, with the eager question, 'Will it serve as a model to build mischief on?' But egoism so unalloyed as his is self-destructive; and the |