There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by no man be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires some knowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean age—­so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake of literary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man will expect to find in any such quarter.  Even in the broad coarse comedy of the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of the very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama:  so like Shakespeare, they might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare’s fellows, that we cannot choose but recognise his hand.  Here as always first in the field—­the genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb has cited a passage from Green’s Tu Quoque—­a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley’s Old Plays—­on which he observes that “this is so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it,” being as it is a girl’s gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a woman’s love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity—­“we seem to remember it,” says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello.  This lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority of Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be—­to eyes ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of the Shakespeare who wrote Othello.  This, however, is beside the question.  It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the Comedy of Errors—­Love’s Labour’s Lost—­Romeo and Juliet.  It is so like that had we fallen upon it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word in all men’s mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and instinctive accuracy of touch.  It is very much liker the first manner of Shakespeare than any passage in King Edward III.  And no Sham Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless object of his howling homage the authorship of Green’s Tu Quoque.

Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in it of Shakespeare’s early notes—­the catch at words rather than play on words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist: 

   Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,
   It shall attend while I attend on thee.

And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.