In the comic parts of Whetstone’s drama there is all the grossness of Measure for Measure, without any thing that the utmost courtesy of language can call wit or humour.  So that, if the Poet here received no help, neither can he have any excuse, from the workmanship of his predecessor.  But he probably saw that some such matter was required by the scheme of the play and the laws of dramatic proportion.  And as in these parts the truth and character are all his own, so he can hardly be blamed for not anticipating the delicacy or squeamishness of later times, there being none such in the most refined audiences of his day; while, again, his choice of a subject so ugly in itself is amply screened from censure by the lessons of virtue and wisdom which he used it as an opportunity for delivering.  To have trained and taught a barbarous tale of cruelty and lust into such a fruitage of poetry and humanity, may well offset whatever of offence there may be in the play to modern taste.

* * * * *

I have already referred to certain characteristics of style and temper which this play shares with several others probably written about the same time, and which, as before observed, have been thought to mark some crisis in the Poet’s life.  It cannot well be denied that the plays in question have something of a peculiar spirit, which might aptly suggest that some passage of bitter experience must have turned the milk of his genius for a time into gall, and put him upon a course of harsh and indignant thought.  The point is well stated by Hallam:  “There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare’s life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience:  the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man’s worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen associates peculiarly teaches,—­these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind."[21] And Verplanck speaks in a similar strain of “that portion of the author’s life which was memorable for the production of the additions to the original Hamlet, with their melancholy wisdom; probably of Timon, with its indignant and hearty scorn, and rebukes of the baseness of civilized society; and above all of Lear, with its dark pictures of unmixed, unmitigated guilt, and its terrible and prophet-like denunciations.”

[21] “This type,” continues the writer, “is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gayety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world.  It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and one rather more severe in the Duke of Measure for Measure.  In all these, however, it is merely a contemplative philosophy.