He has sometimes been accused of obscurity in expression, which renders some of his passages difficult to be understood by commentators; but this, in most cases, is the fault of his editors.  The cases are exceptional and unimportant.  His anachronisms and historical inaccuracies have already been referred to.  His greatest admirers will allow that his wit and humor are very often forced and frequently out of place; but here, too, he should be leniently judged.  These sallies of wit were meant rather to “tickle the ears of the groundlings” than as just subjects for criticism by later scholars.  We know that old jokes, bad puns, and innuendoes are needed on the stage at the present day.  Shakspeare used them for the same ephemeral purpose then; and had he sent down corrected versions to posterity, they would have been purged of these.

INFLUENCE OF ELIZABETH.—­Enough has been said to show in what manner Shakspeare represents his age, and indeed many former periods of English history.  There are numerous passages which display the influence of Elizabeth.  It was at her request that he wrote the Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff is depicted as a lover:  the play of Henry VIII., criticizing the queen’s father, was not produced until after her death.  His pure women, like those of Spenser, are drawn after a queenly model.  It is known that Elizabeth was very susceptible to admiration, but did not wish to be considered so; and Shakspeare paid the most delicate and courtly tribute to her vanity, in those exquisite lines from the Midsummer Night’s Dream, showing how powerless Cupid was to touch her heart: 

            A certain aim he took
    At a fair vestal, throned by the west;
    And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
    As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: 
    But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
    Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon;
    And the imperial votaress passed on,
    In maiden meditation, fancy free.

SHAKSPEARE’S SONNETS.—­Before his time, the sonnet had been but little used in England, the principal writers being Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton.  Shakspeare left one hundred and fifty-four, which exhibit rare poetical power, and which are most of them addressed to a person unknown, perhaps an ideal personage, whose initials are W. H. Although chiefly addressed to a man, they are of an amatory nature, and dwell strongly upon human frailty, infidelity, and treachery, from which he seems to have suffered:  the mystery of these poems has never been penetrated.  They were printed in 1609.  “Our language,” says one of his editors, “can boast no sonnets altogether worthy of being placed by the side of Shakspeare’s, except the few which Milton poured forth—­so severe and so majestic.”

It need hardly be said that Shakspeare has been translated into all modern languages, in whole or in part.  In French, by Victor Hugo and Guizot, Leon de Wailly and Alfred de Vigny; in German, by Wieland, A. W. Schlegel, and Buerger; in Italian, by Leoni and Carcano, and in Portuguese by La Silva.  Goethe’s Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister is a long and profound critique of Hamlet; and to the Germans he is quite as familiar and intelligible as to the English.