Among the learned there has been a great deal of discussion about what Comedy is; and the different theories are far from uninteresting; but, when we are dealing with Gayer Comedies, there can be little difficulty in determining what their object is. It is to excite laughter.

Man is said to be the only animal that can laugh; and it is a precious privilege. As the Scripture says, "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine". It is a kind of piquant and titillating sauce, appointed by Nature to be taken along with the daily bread of work, which would otherwise be too dry and indigestible. It is a kind of sunshine, which imparts buoyancy to the step and prevents the journey of life from becoming too tedious. It is a power imparted to human beings in very varying degrees. As one of these Gayer Comedies says,

now, by two-headed Janus,

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her timeSome that will evermore peep through their eyes And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper;

And others of such vinegar aspect,

That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile, Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.

To laugh well, however, requires a good deal of wisdom. It is possible to laugh too much—it doeth good, says Solomon, "like a medicine "—that is, when

taken now and then, with plenty of work and other kinds of seriousness in between-but to feed on medicine would be a perilous experiment. Another secret of the wisdom of laughter lies in laughing at the right things and not at the wrong ones. And we may take as the guide to the wisdom of Shakspeare in this part of his writings the question-What are the things at which he makes us laugh?

In these plays there are figures introduced which have been expressly created for the purpose of provoking laughter. These are the Fools, of whom Touchstone, in As You Like It, is perhaps the most distinguished. In the Age of Chivalry there was attached to the establishment of lords and ladies a professional fool, who wore motley and cap and bells. He was a privileged character, who was allowed to say anything to anybody. He went about making jokes on the business of life, as a clown does on the business of a circus; but, if he happened to be a man of shrewdness and sense, he might be a true teacher, because he was permitted to utter unpalatable truths. As Shakspeare says, "he uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and, under the presentation of that, he shoots his wit". And elsewhere the poet says:

This fellow's wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well craves a kind of wit;
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,

The quality of persons, and the time;

Not, like the haggard,1 check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man's art.

"Full of labour" he calls the business of the fool; and it must be confessed that to us now at all events it is a laborious task to follow the fooling of these plays. It turns to a large extent on puns and other plays upon words, which no doubt were easily comprehended by the first hearers, but now require as much commenting as obscure passages in the classics. There are pages upon pages on which the light of wit must once have shone as brightly as the morning sunshine on the drops of dew; but time has rendered them as dry as sand and as opaque as clay. You may with great labour master every difficulty; but in nine cases out of ten the game is not worth the candle.

There are other figures on a level with the fools -such, for example, as the Men's Men. When a young gentleman goes forth from home on his travels, he is always accompanied by a confidential servant, who not only fetches and carries for him, and assists him in every kind of adventure, but also plays the fool for his amusement. Of these one or two, like the immortal Launce in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, who is always accompanied by his dog Crab, are still

1 Untrained hawk.

amusing; but the wit of most of them has fallen, through the lapse of time, into a woefully withered condition, consisting as it does almost entirely in verbal quibbles and contemporary allusions. Sometimes, for their blunders, they come in for a beating from their masters; and it is easy to understand how such scenes would make the pittites of Shakspeare's day roar with delight; but it is hard work, at this distance of time, to extract amusement from such horseplay. The Women's Women-that is to say, the handmaidens who attend on the heroines-resemble the men's men in the liberty they are' allowed with their tongues; but in none of them, I suspect, is there any permanent vitality, except it be "the little villain' Maria, as she is called by Sir Toby Belch, in Twelfth Night, who presides over the orgies and practical jokes of that play with such inventive gaiety.

The men's men, as I have called them, are constantly falling into mistakes with their words-they will say "repose" instead of "compose"; "expectoration" instead of "expectation," and the like-and Shakspeare extracts a great deal of wit of this kind out of his humbler characters. Indeed, the mark with him of the lower orders is that language baffles them. Thus Dogberry and Verges, who represent the police, go blundering over the Queen's English at every sentence. It may be remarked, in passing, how old is the practice of making the police the butt of popular

jokes; and Shakspeare's charge against them is exactly the modern one, expressed in the music-hall line, that the bobby's duty is to walk the other way. Says Dogberry to the guard, "This is your charge—you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand in the Prince's name". "But how," asks the Second Watch, "if a' will not stand?" "Why, then," replies Dogberry, "take no note of him, but let him go; and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave."

There are other minor characters out of whose difficulties with the Queen's English mirth is extracted— such as the French Doctor practising in England. The Welshman comes in for very severe handling in this respect; Shakspeare being almost as hard on him as Thackeray is on the Irishman. Sir Hugh Evans, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is the chief example; and the last straw in poor Sir John Falstaff's burden of humiliation in that play is that he has lived to stand at the taunt of one who makes fritters of English and says "sheese" and "putter" instead of "cheese" and "butter".

On the other hand, there are characters whose amusing quality is their command of language. Shakspeare rather makes fun of the Schoolmaster, for example, because he thinks the sky is more to him than other men if he knows the Latin name for it. "Sir," says Sir Nathaniel, of one who knows no Latin,