civilization.  In these dramas the comic element is introduced whenever its character of reality gives it the right of admission and the advantage of opportune appearance.  Falstaff appears in the train of Henry V., and Doll Tear-Sheet in the train of Falstaff; the people surround the kings, and the soldiers crowd around their generals; all conditions of society, all the phases of human destiny appear by turns in juxtaposition, with the nature which properly belongs to them, and in the position which they naturally occupy. . . .

“Thus we find the entire world, the whole of human realities, reproduced by Shakespeare in tragedy, which, in his eyes, was the universal theatre of life and truth.”

It is possible to make a brutal picture of the England of Shakespeare’s day by telling nothing that is not true, and by leaving out much that is true.  M. Taine, who has a theory to sustain, does it by a graphic catalogue of details and traits that cannot be denied; only there is a great deal in English society that he does not include, perhaps does not apprehend.  Nature, he thinks, was never so completely acted out.  These robust men give rein to all their passions, delight in the strength of their limbs like Carmen, indulge in coarse language, undisguised sensuality, enjoy gross jests, brutal buffooneries.  Humanity is as much lacking as decency.  Blood, suffering, does not move them.  The court frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a courtier’s fringed coat, boxes Essex’s ears; great ladies beat their children and their servants.  “The sixteenth century,” he says, “is like a den of lions.  Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking.  Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness.  If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated.  It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him.  He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism.  He is not uncrowned as in the Restoration.”  He has entered like a young man into all the lusty experiences of life, every allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty of things are strong with him.  He plunges into all sensations.  “Such were the men of this time, Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself, excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with premeditation like the roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on principle like the Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the overflowing of nature.  Thus prepared, they could