For the plot and matter of the Comedy, Shakespeare was apparently little indebted to any thing but his own invention. The Two Lovers of Pisa, a tale borrowed from the novels of Straparola, and published in Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory, 1590, is thought to have suggested some of the incidents; and the notion seems probable.  In that tale a young gallant falls in love with a jealous old doctor’s wife, who is also young, and really encourages the illicit passion.  The gallant, not knowing the doctor, takes him for confidant and adviser in the prosecution of his suit, and is thus thwarted in all his plans.  The naughty wife conceals her lover, first in a basket of feathers, then between some partitions of the house, and again in a box of deeds and valuable papers.  If the Poet had any other obligations, they have not been traced clearly enough to be worth noting.

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As a specimen of pure comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor by general concession stands unrivalled.  I say pure comedy, for it has no such interminglings of high poetry and serious passion as mark the Poet’s best comedies, and give them a semi-tragic cast.  This play is not only full of ludicrous situations and predicaments, but is also rich and varied in comic characterization.  Even Falstaff apart, who is an inexhaustible storehouse of laughter-moving preparations, there is comic matter enough in the characters and doings of the other persons to make the play a perpetual diversion.  Though historically connected with the reign of Henry the Fourth, the manners and humours of the scene are those of the Poet’s own time; and in this respect we need but compare it with Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, to see “how much easier it was to vanquish the rest of Europe than to contend with Shakespeare.”

The action of the piece proceeds throughout by intrigue; that is, a complication of cross-purposes wherein the several persons strive to outwit and circumvent one another.  And the stratagems all have the appropriate merit of causing a pleasant surprise, and a perplexity that is grateful, because it stops short of confusion; while the awkward and grotesque predicaments, into which the persons are thrown by their mutual crossing and tripping, hold attention on the alert, and keep the spirits in a frolic.  Yet the laughable proceedings of the scene are all easy and free; that is, the comic situations are ingenious without being at all forced; the ingenuity being hidden in the naturalness with which every thing comes to pass.  The play well illustrates, too, though in its own peculiar sort, the general order and method of Shakespeare’s art; the surrounding parts falling in with the central one, and the subordinate plots drawing, as by a secret impulse, into harmony with the leading plot.  For instance, while Falstaff undergoes repeated collapses from a hero into a butt, that others may laugh at