idens, the virtuous matrons, the faithful lovers of the piece.
Shakespere never does this. Mrs. Quickly is indeed at one time the
confidante of Anne Fenton, and at another the complaisant hostess of Doll
Tear-sheet, but not in the same play. We do not find Marina's master and
mistress rewarded, as they would very likely have been by Fletcher or
Middleton, with comfortable if not prominent posts at the court of
Pericles, or the Government-house of Mytilene. The ugly and artistically
unmanageable situation of the husband who trades in his wife's honour
simply does not occur in all the wide license and variety of Shakespere's
forty plays. He is in his own sense liberal as the most easy going can
demand, but he never mixes vice and virtue. Yet again, while practising
this singular moderation in the main element, in the most fertile motives,
of tragedy and comedy respectively, he is equally alone in his use in both
of the element of humour. And here we are on dangerous ground. To many
excellent persons of all times since his own, as well as in it,
Shakespere's humour and his use of it have been stumbling-blocks. Some of
them have been less able to away with the use, some with the thing.
Shakesperian clowns are believed to be red rags to some experienced
playwrights and accomplished wits of our own days: the porter in _Macbeth_,
the gravediggers in _Hamlet_, the fool in _Lear_, even the humours in
_Love's Labour Lost_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ have offended. I avow
myself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant or
almost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcastic
quintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through the
fantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which not
unfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as I
have hinted already, one of the chief of those spells by which Shakespere
has differentiated his work in the sense of universality from that of all
other dramatists. I have used the word nonsense, and I may be thought to
have partly given up my case by it. But nonsense, as hardly any critic but
Hazlitt has had the courage to avow openly, is no small part of life, and
it is a part the relish of which Englishmen, as the same great but unequal
critic justly maintains, are almost alone in enjoying and recognising. It
is because Shakespere dares, and dares very frequently, simply _desipere_,
simply to be foolish, tha