elman's _Glossary_ and
Scapula's _Lexicon_. To these soporific works of reference he
apparently regarded the dramatist's volume as a fitting pendant. He
seemed subsequently to have exchanged the Third Folio for a Fourth, by
which volume alone is Shakespeare represented in the extant library
that Pepys bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge.

As a regular playgoer at a time when the stage mainly depended on the
drama of Elizabethan days, Pepys was bound to witness numerous
performances of Shakespeare's plays. On the occasion of forty-one of
his three hundred and fifty-one visits to the theatre, Pepys listened
to plays by Shakespeare, or to pieces based upon them. Once in every
eight performances Shakespeare was presented to his view. Fourteen
was the number of different plays by Shakespeare which Pepys saw
during these forty-one visits. Very few caused him genuine pleasure.
At least three he condemns, without any qualification, as "tedious,"
or "silly." In the case of others, while he ignored the literary
merit, he enjoyed the scenery and music with which, in accordance with
current fashion, the dramatic poetry was overlaid. In only two cases,
in the case of two tragedies--_Othello_ and _Hamlet_--does he show at
any time a true appreciation of the dramatic quality, and in the case
of _Othello_ he came in course of years to abandon his good opinion.

Pepys's moderate praise and immoderate blame of Shakespeare are only
superficially puzzling. The ultimate solution is not difficult.
Despite his love of music and his zeal as a collector, Pepys was the
most matter-of-fact of men; he was essentially a man of business. Not
that he had any distaste for timely recreation; he was, indeed,
readily susceptible to every manner of commonplace pleasures--to all
the delights of both mind and sense which appeal to the practical and
hard-headed type of Englishman. Things of the imagination, on the
other hand, stood with him on a different footing. They were out of
his range or sphere. Poetry and romance, unless liberally compounded
with prosaic ingredients, bored him on the stage and elsewhere.

In the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Massinger and Ben Jonson,
poetry and romance were for the most part kept in the background. Such
elements lay there behind a substantial barrier of conventional stage
machinery and elocutionary scaffolding. In Shakespeare, poetry and
romance usually eluded the mechanical restrictions of the theatre.