tered notices regarding the make-up of the company, notices particularly interesting, and particularly incomplete, on some points in which Shakespeare differs from all his contemporaries. For example, the introduction and treatment of the Fool.

Shakespeare's fools are for the most part an adjunct to Shakespeare's comedy; but into the uncharted province of comedy we do not enter here. We know it as the abode of intrigue, of lighter and lesser plot rather than of character contending with circumstance; a world in which, according to Shakespeare, the father may set his daughter's happiness upon a hazard, the lover may change his love at a word, the traitor may repent at the last moment and receive the prize; a world in which speed and variety of incident, sparkle and vivacity of dialogue, not unity of impression or consistency of motive, are the ideal of the workman. In this maze the guiding thread is love, and the principles of the comedy are the lovers divided for a time by some cross fortune, to be united joyously in the last act. Behind the lovers there usually appear, or are felt, the wouldbe arbiters of their fate, the older figures who thwart or fix events. The dead hand of Portia's father, and the living grasp of Shylock, twist the strands of the Merchant of Venice; the two dukes form a stable centre about which revolves the frolic of As You Like It; the dignified figures of Theseus and Hippolyta preside over the tangle of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And, dependent upon the fortunes of the lovers, runs an attendant train of waitingmaids, pedants, shepherds, fairies, and clownish servants, who furnish the blunders, the pompous pretense, the teasing, the mirth, and the music, whose humors and whose stupidity are used by the Elizabethan dramatist partly as brief front-stage scenes to give time for

changes in the main action, partly to meet the demand of the London public for word-play and buffoonery.

This is the simplest form of Shakespearean romantic comedy; it is an enlargement of the still simpler scheme of the Latin comedy; that is, the arbitrary father, the son in love, the knavish or clownish servant of the younger man. How Shakespeare progressed beyond this rudimentary outline; how he swung from farce to romance and back again, from romance to the verge of tragedy and back again; how he wove dissimilar actions, arranged his scenes to obtain variety in pace and tone, and transformed his wit-combat from the wooden sword-clatter of clowns to the swift rapier-play of Beatrice and of Rosalind, it is the duty of the historian of comedy to trace. We who contemplate but the one Elizabethan can follow, in even a single reappearing feature, such as his Clown or Fool, the progress of the dramatist's experience.

Nor is it merely the progress of his experience in the sense of his own personal creative desire freely unfolding year after year. It is the progress of that growing intellectual desire as acted upon by the many compulsions which beset Shakespeare, -the compulsion of his material, the compulsion of his stage equipment, the compulsion of his audience, the compulsion of his band of actors. We are still far from being able to estimate the influence of this last upon him. It is from little more than occasional lists of the cast in early editions, from slips in the quartos of Shakespeare by which the actor's name is printed instead of the character's, from diary and verse-allusions to the impersonators of special parts, that we piece together our fragmentary information as to the King's Men, the group of players who ranged themselves first under the protection of Lord Leicester's name, and, after bearing various titles,

became King James's Servants in 1603. Such a list, prefixed to the first edition of Ben Jonson's Every Man In His Humour, includes Wil. Shakespeare, Ric. Burbadge, Aug. Phillipps, John Hemings, Hen. Condell, Tho. Pope, Wil. Sly, Chr. Beeston, Wil. Kempe, John Duke.' One of these men had perhaps an influence upon Shakespeare's comedy, the actor William Kemp.

Kemp was a clown and buffoon of the most pronounced type. His popularity with the cheaper and noisier element of an Elizabethan audience was very great; frequently he appeared alone at the end of a play in what was called a jig, a long song and dance of improvised character, full of allusions to people and events, local gags,' and direct address to the audience; and the success of this sort of impromptu with the groundlings was so great that the vain and ignorant Kemp extended his improvisations to the text of the part which he sustained within the play. Mantzius has suggested that this habit of Kemp's must have been particularly obnoxious to Shakespeare, and may have led to Kemp's leaving the company, which he did about 1598. A passage in the later play of Hamlet lends color to this suggestion; it occurs in Hamlet's instructions to the players: And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered; that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.'

The last part in a Shakespearean play which Kemp is known to have taken was that of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing; the associated part of Verges was taken by Richard Cowley, who remained of the company

until his death in 1618. We know also, from the accidental insertion of Kemp's name in the early prints, that he played Peter in Romeo and Juliet; and it is supposed, with strong probability, that he enacted the Shallow of the Merry Wives of Windsor and second Henry IV. For Kemp's other parts we have but surmise; yet from the fact that so popular an actor must receive his opportunity in most of the company's plays, and from the character of the Peter and the Dogberry rôles, we deduce the probability that the Costard of Love's Labour's Lost, one of the Dromios in the Comedy of Errors, Launce in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps Launcelot Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice, were done by Kemp.

In all these parts there is a strong family resemblance: as we call up mental pictures of Costard, Dromio, Bottom, and Dogberry, we imagine them of one common physical type, halfrustic, half-aldermanic figures, with small dull eyes, big heads, clumsy bodies, and gait of Sir Oracle. Such personages often bear but the loosest relation to the story; and in many of the comedies mentioned there is a noticeable distinction between the clownscenes and the bulk of the play. Bottom and his fellows constitute a plot by themselves; Launcelot Gobbo and his peasant-father in the Merchant of Venice, Launce and Speed or Launce and his dog in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, are very palpably given the stage at times by the playwright-manager Shakespeare; Costard and Dull and the two Dromios have their separate scenes of laborious punning and slap-stick dialogue. Whatever the clown may nominally be in these earlier comedies, servant, messenger, or artisan, he gets his chance alone with the audience. His function, whenever he does impinge upon the plot, is to

blunder or be the victim of a blunder.

About the year 1598, however, the Shakespearean comedy undergoes a change, a change which had been more than foreshadowed in The Merchant of Venice two years earlier. The plot of this latter play, with its complex interweaving of strains, its heightened story interest, its brilliant womanly figure as centre, is in striking contrast to all preceding comedy. We can readily imagine that here for the first time the audience laughed somewhat perfunctorily at the Clown, in their impatience to resume the tale of Shylock and Antonio; and here for the first time the central personages carry a generous share of the wit of the play. The clown-note is still there; but we may suggest with plausibility that it was there because Kemp was still of the Shakespearean company and must receive his portion of front-stage scene.

Of these new features several reappear still more markedly in Much Ado About Nothing. Who the youth was who had played Portia we do not know, but he was again made conspicuous as Beatrice, and in the following year given a yet more admirable rôle as Rosalind. The wit of the play is transformed and transferred from the punning, tumbling, blundering Clown to the brilliant badinage of highborn, gallant-hearted, swift-tongued women. Kemp has his part in Much Ado About Nothing, but it is not likely that in the face of such strong story interest, of such play of teasing wit in the main action, the audience would welcome interpolation by the Clown as they welcomed it in plays more loosely and thinly built.

At the close of 1598 or in early 1599 Kemp left the Shakespearean company; and the two comedies which follow, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, show certain features which can be due neither to coincidence nor to a supposedly joyous mood just then in Shakespeare's

thought. Not only is some clever lad advanced by the dramatist-manager to the centre of the stage in the supreme women's parts of Rosalind and Viola; not only is the heavy-headed, heavypaunched champion of his own quality displaced by the slender, quick-eyed, close-hooded court jester, agile as a monkey, domestic as a cat, faithful as a dog, intrusive as a parrot; but there is marked at this point the change in Shakespearean music from the partsong or casual comic snatch to the lovelyric brought in perforce to display the solo voice. The Merchant of Venice possessed a strong musical element; the opening of the last act is pervaded with it; but the actors do not produce it, they listen and comment. In Much Ado About Nothing, however, the servant Balthasar is called upon to sing; in As You Like It, the lord Amiens, one of the banished Duke's followers, is twice bid sing; in Twelfth Night the fool Feste sings twice at command, and has also the song-epilogue, with frequent bits of music in other scenes. Did this same actor, another figure now brought forward by Shakespeare, carry the part of the Fool in Lear, with its constant snatches of song?

Weaving together these suggestions, we find ourselves with a view of Shakespearean comedy something on this wise: that up to The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare allowed Kemp much his own way in the comic parts; that with that comedy and Much Ado About Nothing he modified and fitted more closely to his plan the conventional clown-part, centring the interest upon the woman's figure, for which he had found an impersonator; that, after the withdrawal of Kemp, the dramatist, anxious no doubt to overcome the regret of the audience for the departed favorite, retained in As You Like It a conspicuous fool-figure, which he altered in Twelfth Night to suit the youth

ful singer whom he had been training in minor rôles in the comedies just preceding.

Is it a mercenary, box-office view which suggests that the greatest of Shakespeare's comedies were produced in part to supply the loss of one actor, to meet the talents of others? But when we consider if he who played Touchstone could have played Malvolio, have played Edgar in the Tom o' Bedlam scenes of Lear, have played Stephano in the Tempest, are we not following the only line of Shakespeare's daily thought which we are capable of following? We know that Falstaff, as created by Shakespeare's friend and fellow-actor John Heming, became instantly one of the most popular of characters, and it is a credible tradition which asserts that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the Queen's command, that she might see Falstaff in love. The figure of Falstaff in this play is escorted by that of the immortal Slender, sighing for sweet Anne Page; the jovial bulk of the one, the lackadaisical length of the other of the ill-assorted comrades delighted the Elizabethans as they do us.

Is it accident that in the later Twelfth Night, along with the highly sentimental plot of Viola and the Duke, there is interwoven a rollicking plot of Shakespeare's own creation, in which the jovial bulk and the lackadaisical slenderness again walk the stage together as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew? Is it accident that Sir Andrew sighs unavailingly, as Slender had sighed? In these products of high and joyous imagination, even as in the world of commerce, there is a relation between demand and supply. The situation of confident masculine superiority tricked into love had proved popular in Much Ado About Nothing; the figures of Falstaff and Slender had proved popular in the Merry Wives; the motives and figures of these earlier comedies were

unhesitatingly reëmployed by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night.

There is but a step from the study of Shakespeare's practical reworking of stock situations—such as the maiden disguised as a page wooing another woman for her secretly beloved lord, or the tricking a man into believing a woman in love with him to a study of the practical daily duty of the dramatist to employ his company in the kind of rôles best fitted for them. It is a mark of the poet's artistic development that the device when repeated is raised to a higher power; it is a mark of his professional tact and his professional necessities that the device and the character-type, when successful, should reappear.

Such, then, may be in part the reason for Touchstone, the first of Shakespeare's true fools: a concession, on the one hand, to the demand of the public for scenes of interlude and display of verbal agility; an effort, on the other hand, to differentiate the new buffoon in look, costume, and function, from the type represented by Kemp. Touchstone, as befits his calling, appears usually at the elbow of his patron; his unsolicited comment is intruded just as his later colleague Sam Weller intruded his anecdotes upon Mr. Pickwick, and has no more to do with shaping the romantic plot. Despite Professor Barrett Wendell's stricture, however, that Touchstone and his fellows are not essential parts of the plays in which they appear, that without them everything might fall out as it does, I think we feel between this Fool and his world a living and necessary bond, a bond other than that which links Dogberry or Bottom to the play in which, not of which, he is a part.

A romance is nothing if not discursive, gregarious; it flies from court to camp, and finds each populous; its personages stroll about, innocent of dra

matic purpose, desiring only to fleet the time as they did in the golden world. Doubtless the plot of As You Like It would work out were Touchstone absent; but the less said the better about a plot to which Touchstone is unnecessary, and to which the impossible repentances of Oliver and of the usurping Duke are necessary. As You Like It has no plot, it has situation, situation carefully created, but carelessly dissolved; and to the situation Touchstone is necessary. He is the bond between the real world outside the forest and its temporary substitute; the Fool's is the only steady head in the epidemic of romantic exile and romantic love. The atmosphere of Arden would be but the ordinary mingling of ozone and sentiment, were not that loyal devotee of court life twirling his bauble under the antique oaks; the key of romantic extravaganza would lack of its full chord did we not hear the voice of the Fool's common sense parodying Orlando's love-verses and capping Rosalind's Well, this is the forest of Arden!' with 'Ay, now I am in Arden: the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place!'

Touchstone is on the stage in seven scenes, and conspicuous in most of them; he talks constantly, but it is no Dogberry braggadocio and mispronunciation; his reproof to the shepherd Corin for his mode of life and his dissertation on the Lie seven times removed are the stuff that high comedy, not farce, is made of. There is, however, one slender bond between him and the earlier clowns of Shakespeare: he seems, like them, a man of mature years. And if the rôle of Touchstone was played, as seems probable, by the actor who succeeded to Kemp's place in the Shakespearean company, this feeling is justified by the age of the new comedian, Robert Armin, for whom Shakespeare in such case intended the part.

Armin, a poverty-stricken scribbler of about thirty, had recently been the clown of the company known as Lord Chandos's Men. We know that he took up the rôle of Dogberry played by Kemp; what more likely than that he should in the following year be cast as Touchstone? He was still with the King's Men in 1605, when the will of one of them made bequests to several fellow actors; but for some subsequent years he seems to have been in other fields, returning to his allegiance in 1610, not long before his death. While with the Shakespearean company, he achieved high repute as a comic actor; and it is noteworthy that the part of Malvolio, which is recorded as immensely popular with Elizabethan audiences, follows close after Touchstone chronologically, and is, in the stock companies of our own generation and the last, usually impersonated by the same actor.

Neither Touchstone, nor the whole group of victim and victimizers in Twelfth Night, Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Feste the Fool, is in the original used by Shakespeare. Perhaps it was the Elizabethan joy in a complex and variegated comedy-pattern which impelled Shakespeare to weave other threads into the Italian love-story of mistaken identity and tangled wooing, to transform the colorless Italian household of Olivia's servants into the damask and the yellow, the sable and the motley, the laughter, mischief, and music which delighted an English audience. Perhaps it was the dramatist-manager's desire to give each of his company a characteristic opportunity in a comedy written for court presentation which urged Shakespeare in Twelfth Night; for there is no other play by him, in which so many sharply differentiated parts are on a nearly uniform level of interest. The dreamy sentiment of the Duke, the manly vehemence of Antonio, the devotion of