hearts. It is by thus diffusing over all things the tone and temper of his persons, that the Poet often so completely transports us into their whereabout, and makes us see with their eyes. Here as elsewhere, however, the means whereby he does this are so cunningly hidden as to suggest that art with him was instinct. The two sets of persons, moreover, are wrought in together with great skill; while with the higher ones are interwoven several passages of superb poetry, as if on purpose to make up in some measure for the comparatively unvital and inorganic structure of the characters. One need not be very deeply skilled in Shakespeare, to be able to distinguish with great probability the main passages that appeared first in the augmented copy. At the head of these, of course, stands Biron's speech near the close of the fourth act, to "prove our loving lawful and our faith not torn;" which Coleridge thus describes: "It is logic clothed in rhetoric;— but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images, the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a further development of that character." Scarcely inferior to this, except as being shorter, are two speeches of Rosaline, one near the opening of Act II describing Biron, the other at the close of the play laying down the terms upon which he may gain her hand. Of the strange song at the end, made up as it is of the most homely and familiar words and images, Mr. Knight has remarked, what is indeed sufficiently obvious, how fitly it serves "to mark, by an emphatic close, the triumph of simplicity over false refinement." COMMENTS By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS BIRON It is well to be practical; but to be practical, and also to have a capacity for ideas is better. Berowne [Biron], the exponent of Shakspere's own thought, who entered into the youthful, idealistic project of his friends with a satisfactory assurance that the time would come when the entire dream-structure would tumble ridiculously about the ears of them all,-Berowne [Biron] is yet a larger nature than the Princess or Rosaline. His good sense is the good sense of a thinker and of a man of action. When he is most flouted and bemocked, we yet acknowledge him victorious and the master; and Rosaline will confess the fact by and by.-DowDEN, Shakspere-His Mind and Art. Berowne [Biron] is keenly intellectual; no trickery is needed to lure him into love; he falls in love with Rosaline at first sight; when he discovers it, his thoughts are first centred in himself, and, in revolt against it, he even vilifies Rosaline beyond propriety,-beyond what he, in his heart, knows to be the truth. We discern no development of character in him. What he is when we first meet him, he is, when he goes that way, we this way,-ever plausible, brilliant, poetic. Although in his heart of hearts he knows that love gives to every power a double power, and that its voice makes heaven drowsy with the harmony, yet when we part from him we doubt much that his voice will echo in his soul throughout his year of penance. His fertile wit will devise many a mean to stifle it should his task to move wild laughter in the throat of death prove too irk some. His present love's labor will be lost, and Jack will never have his Jill.-FURNESS, Love's Labour's Lost in the Variorum Shakespeare. YOUTHFUL PECULIARITIES The peculiarities of Shakespeare's youthful pieces are perhaps most accumulated in this play. The reiterated mention of mythological and historical personages; the air of learning, the Italian and Latin expressions, which here, it must be admitted, serve a comic end; the older England versification, the numerous doggerel verses, and the rhymes more frequent than anywhere else and extending over almost the half of the play; all this places this work among the earlier efforts of the poet. Alliteration, a silent legacy from Anglo-Saxon literature, and much more in use in the popular and more refined poems of England than in any other language, is to be met with here still more than in the narrative poems, the sonnets, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona; it is expressly employed by the pedant Holofernes, who calls the art "to affect the letter." The style is frequently like that of the Shakespeare sonnets; indeed the 127th and 137th of Shakespeare's sonnets bear express similarities to those inserted here as well as to other passages of the play (Act IV, sc. iii). The tone of the Italian school prevails more than in any other play. The redundancy of wit is only to be compared with the similar redundancy of conceit in Shakespeare's narrative poems, and with the Italian style in general which he at first adopted. GERVINUS, Shakespeare Commentaries. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. In the drama alone, as Shakspere soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labor's Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after life—as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.-COLERIDGE, Lectures on Shakspere. A PLAY OF CONTRASTS We are dealing with a play of antitheta, a "Venus" and a "Lucrece," a "L'Allegro and an Il Penseroso," a plea for mirth and for seriousness, for action and for contemplation, a display of almost all topics set in almost all lights, of opinions, therefore, that are no more final than are the considerations of mere vocabulary and language. We are aware, however, that in his first essay this great genius condemns the falsehood of extremes, recognizes the essentials among the accidents, the follies of our existence, puts philosophy above dogma, and common sense in its due season above both; and plucks from the tree of knowledge the fruit which hangs so high that few may reach it— the fruit of perfect charity. Hereby at the very outset you may know Shakespeare-perhaps from all his contemporaries except Spenser, Hooker, and Bacon.-LUCE, Handbook to Shakespeare's Works. A CARICATURE OF THE PERIOD Armado's bombast may probably be accepted as a not too extravagant caricature of the bombast of the period. Certain it is that the schoolmaster Rombus, in Sir Philip Sidney's Lady of the May, addresses the Queen in a strain no whit less ridiculous than that of Holofernes. But what avails the justice of a parody if, in spite of the art and care lavished upon it, it remains as tedious as the mannerism it ridicules! And this is unfortunately the case in the present instance. Shakespeare had not yet attained the maturity and detachment of mind which could enable him to rise above the follies he attacks, and to sweep them aside with full authority. He buries himself in them, circumstantially demonstrates their absurdities, and is still too in experienced to realize how he thereby inflicts upon the spectator and the reader the full burden of their tediousness. It is very characteristic of Elizabeth's taste that, even in 1598, she could still take pleasure in the play. All this fencing with words appealed to her quick intelligence; while, with the unabashed sensuousness characteristic of the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, she found entertainment in the playwright's freedom of speech, even, no doubt, in the equivocal badinage between Boyet and Maria (IV, i).—BRANDES, William Shakespeare. Of all the plays of Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost is perhaps that which bears most appearance of being a definite satire on his contemporaries. Some traces of individual satire (Florio has been thought to be satirized as Holofernes) have been challenged, but not more than have seemed traceable in other plays; it is in the agreement in general color, and in detailed manners of the follies exhibited, with those which were rife under Elizabeth, that we trace "the form and pressure" of her time. In truth, there seems, to a reader at the present day, to be the essential weakness in the execution of the play, that it contains too much of the very faults it would expose; he becomes weary of the quaint verbalism, the strained affectation of phraseological acuteness, the slowness of the action, either retarded by distinctions and divisions of refinement entirely, or when it should become most lively and excited, losing itself in the crosspaths and byeways of indirect and sophisticated contrivance the sacrifice of plainness and simplicity, not unfrequently involving loss of true sensitive consideration for the claims and feelings of others. The mirror, I suspect, reflects the age too truthfully,—at least a certain class of its faults; and the social exaggerations in language and demeanor, true as they are to general human nature, are still not at present so abundant in these forms, as to prepare us to relish a still more concentrated version on the stage. It seems supererogatory for the dramatist to set such whims and motives in action, and to |