octor." But he
condemns the play as a whole. It is in his favour that his bitterest
reproaches are aimed at the actors and actresses. One can hardly
conceive that Falstaff, fitly interpreted, would have failed to
satisfy Pepys's taste in humour, commonplace though it was. He is not
quite explicit on the point; but there are signs that the histrionic
interpretation of Shakespeare's colossal humorist, rather than the
dramatist's portrayal of the character, caused the diarist's
disappointment.

Just before Pepys saw the first part of _Henry IV._, wherein Falstaff
figures to supreme advantage, he had bought and read the play in
quarto. "But my expectation being too great" (he avers), "it did not
please me as otherwise I believe it would." Here it seems clear that
his hopes of the actor were unfulfilled. However, he saw _Henry IV._
again a few months later, and had the grace to describe it as "a good
play." On a third occasion he wrote that, "contrary to expectation,"
he was pleased by the delivery of Falstaff's ironical speech about
honour. For whatever reason, Pepys's affection for Shakespeare's fat
knight, as he figured on the stage of his day, never touched the note
of exaltation.

Of Shakespeare's great tragedies Pepys saw three--_Othello_, _Hamlet_,
and _Macbeth_. But in considering his several impressions of these
pieces, we have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of
them did he witness in the authentic version. _Macbeth_ underwent in
his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its
primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of _Othello_ and
_Hamlet_ are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently
characteristic of the variable moods of the average playgoer.

_Othello_ he saw twice, and he tells us more of the acting than of the
play itself. On his first visit he notes that the lady next him
shrieked on seeing Desdemona smothered: a proof of the strength of the
histrionic illusion. Up to the year 1666 Pepys adhered to the
praiseworthy opinion that _Othello_ was a "mighty good" play. But in
that year his judgment took a turn for the worse, and that for a
reason which finally convicts him of incapacity to pass just sentence
on the poetic or literary drama. On August 20, 1666, he writes: "Read
_Othello, Moor of Venice_, which I have ever heretofore esteemed a
mighty good play; but having so lately read the _Adventures of Five
Hours_, it seems a mean thing."

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