gedies, and
comedies alike, which distinguishes them, and it is exactly the
characteristic noted above, and well put by Dryden in his famous
definition of Shakespere. Perhaps the first branch or phase of this
distinction is that Shakespere is never, in the vulgar sense of the word,
unnatural. He has not the slightest objection to horrors; the alarmed
foreign critics who described his theatre as a "shambles" need not have
gone farther than his greatest plays to justify themselves literally. But
with barely even the exception which has so often to be made of _Titus
Andronicus_, his horrors are never sought beyond a certain usual and
probable round of circumstance, and are almost always tempered and
humanised by touches of humour or pathos, or both. The cool sarcastic
villany of Aaron (a mood hit off nowhere out of Shakespere, except in
Middleton's De Flores, and not fully there) is the point on which I should
chiefly put the finger to justify at least a partial Shakesperian
authorship. Contrast the character with the nightmare ghastlinesses and
extravagances not merely of Tourneur and Webster, but even of Marlowe in
Barabas, and the difference of Shakespere's handling will be felt at once.
Another point which has been often, yet perhaps not quite fully, noticed is
the distinct and peculiar attitude of Shakespere towards what is in the
common sense called morality. Nobody can possibly call him squeamish: I do
not know that even any French naturalist of the latest school has charged
the author of _Pericles_, and _Love's Labour Lost_, and _Henry IV._, with
that _pruderie bete_ of which they accuse Scott. But he never makes those
forms of vice which most trouble and corrupt society triumphant; he never
diverges into the morbid pathology of the amatory passion, and above all,
and most remarkably of all, though I think least remarked, he never makes
his personages show the singular toleration of the most despicable
immorality which almost all his dramatic contemporaries exhibit. One is
constantly astonished at the end of an Elizabethan play, when, after vice
has been duly baffled or punished, and virtue rewarded (for they all more
or less follow that rule), reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries
follow, to observe the complacency with which husbands who have sold their
wives' favours, wives who have been at the command of the first comer or
the highest bidder, mix cheek by jowl, and apparently unrebuked, with the
modest ma