fect example of the kind of attention, the kind of sympathy, the seriousness, of which "The Taming of the Shrew" ought not to be the subject. Nay, it might be worth while to pretend to take such a commentary seriously for a while, in order to show the kind writer to what she would commit herself. Granting her, then, that the heroine of a tender story, a sentimental shrew honestly in need of love and a respectable master, is appropriately to be tamed by famine, cold, ignominy, insolence, and violence, to what end are these rigours practised in the play? To what end but to make of her a hypocrite - her husband the while happy to have her so? For a woman who feigns, under menace, to see a young maid where an old man stands, or a sun where the moon shines, is no other. Katharine does this for fear of the repetition of outrage— more famine, more cold, more contempt, at the hands of the strong man: the strong man of her girlish dreams, quotha! See to what a pass an earnest view of this play will bring us. But no need to confound the sentimentalist further with the monstrous morality - the merry drama. No, these sweet ways of feeling are out of place in the audience at the playing of "The Taming of the Shrew"; and as the audience, so must the readers be. The comedy is drama, and only by concomitance and only insomuch as all composed language is literary, is it literature. And yet literature stands between it and life

nearer than life. Therefore neither to Katharine's past nor to her future have we to look, neither to her spirit nor to anything that can be called a woman's

womanhood are we led by Shakespeare. She is not a woman of this world, she is a shrew of the inner stage. Let us look on her drama, not into it, and not through it. And in fact Shakespeare may have taken the convention of his comedy all the more easily because the Katharine played before him was not a woman. The squeaking Katharine who "boy'd her greatness surely helped him to his irresponsibility. He had before him a romping youth, not a raging woman. In so far as this Katharine was a woman she was a grotesque and intolerable creature, to be overcome and broken by grotesque and intolerable means. This doubtless was the shrew of that society. She has vanished from ours.? A shrew may scold, in our day, in the alleys of a town, but not in "Petruchio's house in the country"; not in the person of a beautiful, young, and well-taught woman. In Goldoni's comedies, of a century and a half later than Shakespeare's, there are still shrews. For a defect of dress, for a dowry, for a dispute with a mother-in-law, rabbia is the name of the lesser and earlier stages of a woman's anger, and tutte le furie of the greater and later. The men of those Venetian households, occupied with the choice of paste for the soup, and going in and out in the course of a long day on little affairs and bargainings, have for their principal preoccupation this tendency to rabbia and tutte le furie amongst the women - the ladies; let us give them the name that both Shakespeare and Goldoni give. It is to be noted that the Goldoni husband has no hope or expectation of a remedy; like Petruchio, he has no thought of appeal

ing to the reason or the conscience of the woman; unlike Petruchio, he has no mind to quell her by force. Like Petruchio, again, he does her not so much honour as lies in a reproach; to responsible humanity belong reproof, rebuke, remonstrance, or even dislike, even forgiveness, but not to a woman married into a family of Venice. The husband in Goldoni's comedies neither hates nor pardons the furies -- he does no more than evade them. If the noise will but spend itself and the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law return to their own apartments, pacified by promises, all is well for the time. The master-mind was never more tolerant or unmoved than in this master of a tempestuous household. He makes no comment, and generalises not at all. Il ne fait que constater. Sufficient for the day is the storm. After a reading of Goldoni, it might be worth whilefor the love of Shakespeare, but hardly for the love of this play of his-to disentangle what is Italian from what is English. We have plenty of evidence of the currency of a popular play, "Taming of a Shrew," in England in the time of Shakespeare. Other parts of Shakespeare's play are derived remotely from the Italian of Ariosto, and, moreover, the author of the comedy of which Petruchio is hero had a small piece of Italian knowledge of which the author of the tragedy that has Hamlet for hero was ignorant, the gender, that is, of the Italian name Battista, or, as the English plays have it, Baptista. Its final vowel gave it a feminine sound, and it is a woman's name in "Hamlet," but a man's, as it should be, in "The Taming of the Shrew." This dis

parity has of course been remarked by those who have not thought the play last named to be the work of Shakespeare; but the incident is too slight to bear any such significance. Obviously, Shakespeare might forget his scholarship on the point of Italian Christian names, if, as seems to be the case, we must not suppose that he corrected it, because "Hamlet was the later work. Whatever may be the conflict of expert opinion as to the entire authorship, on the external ground, the testimony of the play itself is surely that, although Shakespeare the manager borrowed his plot, the scenes are the writing of Shakespeare the dramatist. "The Taming of the Shrew" is authentically Shakespeare's to the reader. Circumstantial evidence apart, the Shakespearean who is in every man and woman of letters, English and American, will not hesitate to pronounce it veritably Shakespeare's, almost Shakespeare's worst (the "Induction" apart), but as certainly his as "Lear" itself; yet will be willing to accept any well-accredited origin for the dramatic story · Italian lendings, or popular current English horse-play, or any other. The note of the time is no more manifest than the tone of the man of the time. Shakespeare's tone, even when it is hardly significant enough to be called Shakespeare's style, is assuredly to be recognised like a voice. The note is Elizabethan ; and the dramatists, the lyrists, the sonneteers sing it alike; but who would doubt the tone of the driest couplet in one of Shakespeare's sonnets? Hardly more can one doubt whose voice in literature it is that speaks a slight speech for Bianca or for Tranio. Tranio, by the

way, is very Italian. That manner of man, who survived so buoyantly in the comedy of Molière, is evidently the Arlecchino, or Harlequin, of the primitive stage of Italy: the tricksy and shifty spirit, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the Mercurial one. He is many times modified, and is exquisitely altered by the loss of his customary good luck, in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." For when Mercutio falls, there falls with him the gay but inhuman figure falls, for English literature, perhaps finally. It lives, it takes a mortal wound at Tybalt's sword-point, it bleeds and dies. The primitive Italian tradition is, moreover, touched in another place, where Lucentio speaks to the smooth Bianca of her father, behind his back, as "the old Pantaloon." Baptista is very little of a Pantaleone; except insomuch as he suffers deception, he is a person of sufficient dignity. And that he is subject to this deception is a token both of the Italian and of the Shakespearean humour. Of the two-the typical Italian primitive and the single Shakespeare-it may be suspected that it was Shakespeare who best loved a mystification ; the word is not a good one in English, but we may quote it from the French to describe precisely the kind of jest. That Shakespeare took some Puckish pleasure in that jest we know. "The Comedy of Errors" bears witness to this, so does "Twelfth Night," so does "All's Well that Ends Well." Nay, a brief mystification comes to pass in the course of a tragedy; it hampers the urgency of some passage of passionate feeling; the moment, stretched with apprehension and dismay, is made to