the practice was injurious to their rights. The
effort was only partially successful. 'Much Ado,' like 'Henry V,' was
published before the close of the year. Neither 'As You Like It' nor
'Twelfth Night,' however, was printed till it appeared in the Folio.

'Much Ado.'

In 'Much Ado,' which appears to have been written in 1599, the brilliant
and spirited comedy of Benedick and Beatrice, and of the blundering
watchmen Dogberry and Verges, is wholly original; but the sombre story of
Hero and Claudio, about which the comic incident revolves, is drawn from
an Italian source, either from Bandello (novel. xxii.) through
Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques,' or from Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso'
through Sir John Harington's translation (canto v.) Ariosto's version,
in which the injured heroine is called Ginevra, and her lover Ariodante,
had been dramatised before. According to the accounts of the Court
revels, 'A Historie of Ariodante and Ginevra was showed before her
Majestie on Shrovetuesdaie at night' in 1583. {208} Throughout
Shakespeare's play the ludicrous and serious aspects of humanity are
blended with a convincing naturalness. The popular comic actor William
Kemp filled the role of Dogberry, and Cowley appeared as Verges. In both
the Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 these actors' names are prefixed
by a copyist's error to some of the speeches allotted to the two
characters (act iv. scene ii.)

'As You Like It.'

'As You Like It,' which quickly followed, is a dramatic adaptation of
Lodge's romance, 'Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie' (1590), but
Shakespeare added three new characters of first-rate interest--Jaques,
the meditative cynic; Touchstone, the most carefully elaborated of all
Shakespeare's fools; and the hoyden Audrey. Hints for the scene of
Orlando's encounter with Charles the Wrestler, and for Touchstone's
description of the diverse shapes of a lie, were clearly drawn from a
book called 'Saviolo's Practise,' a manual of the art of self-defence,
which appeared in 1595 from the pen of Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian
fencing-master in the service of the Earl of Essex. None of
Shakespeare's comedies breathes a more placid temper or approaches more
nearly to a pastoral drama. Yet there is no lack of intellectual or
poetic energy in the enunciation of the contemplative philosophy which is
cultivated in the Forest of Arden. In Rosalind, Celia, Phoebe, and
Audrey, four types of youthful wo