A lesser poet might have been
powerless to resist the temptation or suggestion of sentiment that he
should give to the little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch of
pathetic or emotional interest; but "opulent as Shakespeare was, and of
his opulence prodigal" (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knew
better than to patch with purple or embroider with seed-pearl the hem of
this homespun little piece of comic drugget. The match between cloth of
gold and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any good issue in this
instance. Instead therefore of following the lead of Terence's or the
hint of Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his comedy to the
full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty
and odd lines of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers,
proctors, lousy fox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, to
make room for the bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which
might not unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmed
circle of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. Even in that all heavenly poem
there are hardly to be found lines of more sweet and radiant simplicity
than here.

The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and consummate taste of
Shakespeare were perhaps never so wonderfully shown as in his recast of
another man's work--a man of real if rough genius for comedy--which we
get in the _Taming of the Shrew_. Only the collation of scene with
scene, then of speech with speech, then of line with line, will show how
much may be borrowed from a stranger's material and how much may be added
to it by the same stroke of a single hand. All the force and humour
alike of character and situation belong to Shakespeare's eclipsed and
forlorn precursor; he has added nothing; he has tempered and enriched
everything. That the luckless author of the first sketch is like to
remain a man as nameless as the deed of the witches in _Macbeth_, unless
some chance or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favouring light
on his now impersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clear
enough when we take into account the double and final disproof of his
imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with such
unanswerable certitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist
from that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly out
of place in the homely setting of his usual style that they seem
transmuted from r