The former is by no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry.  In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.  In others, like Measure for Measure, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close.  Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play like Winter’s Tale, in which the painful situation is prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy.  Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the title-pages of the time, “tragi-comedies.”  The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic.  It was cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touchstone and Audrey, in As You Like It; sometimes closely, as in the case of Dogberry and Verges, in Much Ado about Nothing, where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action.  The Merry Wives of Windsor is an exception to this plan of construction.  It is Shakspere’s only play of contemporary, middle-class English life, and, is written almost throughout in prose.  It is his only pure comedy, except the Taming of the Shrew.

Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned it to a new account.  The two species graded into one another.  Thus Cymbeline is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as Winter’s Tale—­to which its plot bears a resemblance—­and is only technically a tragedy because it contains a violent death.  In some of the tragedies, as in Macbeth and Julius Caesar, the comedy element is reduced to a minimum.  But in others, as Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast.  Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the moralities.  The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in As You Like It, and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man’s nature.

The earliest of Shakspere’s tragedies, unless Titus Andronicus be his, was, doubtless, Romeo and Juliet, which is full of the passion and poetry of youth and of first love.  It contains a large proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work.  He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet. Romeo and Juliet is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama.  It was Shakspere’s habit to work out his tragic