“The interest in the plot is on account of the characters, not vice versa, as in almost all other writers:  the plot is a mere canvas, and no more.  Take away from Much Ado about Nothing all that is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously-absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action; take away Benedick, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the character of Hero,—­and what will remain?  In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character:  John is the main-spring of the plot in this play; but he is merely shown, and then withdrawn.”

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The style and diction of this play has little that calls for special remark.  In this respect the workmanship, as before noted, is of about the same cast and grain with that of As You Like It; sustained and equal; easy, natural, and modest in dress and bearing; everywhere alive indeed with the exhilarations of wit or humour or poetry, but without the laboured smoothness of the Poet’s earlier plays, or the penetrating energy and quick, sinewy movement of his later ones.  Compared with some of its predecessors, the play shows a decided growth in what may be termed virility of mind:  a wider scope, a higher reach, a firmer grasp, have been attained:  the Poet has come to read Nature less through “the spectacles of books,” and does not hesitate to meet her face to face, and to trust and try himself alone with her.  The result of all which appears in a greater freshness and reality of delineation.  Here the persons have nothing of a dim, equivocal hearsay air about them, such as marks in some measure his earlier efforts in comedy.  The characters indeed are not pitched in so high a key, nor conceived in so much breadth and vigour, as in several of the plays written at earlier dates:  the plan of the work did not require this, or even admit of it; nevertheless the workmanship on the whole discovers more ripeness of art and faculty than even in The Merchant of Venice.

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One of the Poet’s methods was, apparently, first to mark out or else to adopt a given course of action, and then to conceive and work out his characters accordingly, making them such as would naturally cohere with and sustain the action, so that we feel an inward, vital, and essential relation between what they are and what they do.  Thus there is nothing arbitrary or mechanical in the sorting together of persons and actions:  the two stand together under a living law of human transpiration, instead of being gathered into a mere formal and outward juxtaposition.  That is, in short, the persons act so because they are so, and not because the author willed to put them through such a course of action:  what comes