If we seek a simple explanation of the fact, we shall say, well knowing that we trespass against Signor Croce's canons of criticism, that the sonnets of tormented love belong to the moment when the golden thread in the plays is suddenly and unexpectedly snapped. We shall hold that the Sonnets represent an episode in Shakespeare's experience which caused a momentary but a complete overclouding of the reflection in the mirror of the plays. The episode passes and the reflection becomes calm and serene once more. The Sonnets give us, as it were, a year of Shakespeare's attitude to love; the plays give us a lifetime. In other words, even in this single matter of love, it is a mistaken effort to measure the plays by the Sonnets; what we have to do is to measure the sonnets by the plays. If we do this the sonnets of disastrous love seem to fall naturally into place in that period of profound disturbance which is expressed in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, in Troilus and Cressida, and in All's Well that Ends Well. No doubt this disturbance had its manifest reactions in realms of Shakespeare's faith other than his faith in love; it may have been the proximate cause of his greatest tragedies. But for these we need not assume an origin in personal catastrophe. Moreover, in the great tragic period Shakespeare's faith in love has manifestly begun to reassert itself. We have only to imagine Antony and Cleopatra written in the mood of Troilus and Cressida to understand what Shakespeare actually chose to do with a theme that would have lent itself

magnificently to all the bitterness of an outraged heart.

If we put aside the plays of this period of disturbance, which ordinary readers and literary critics alike have felt to be discordant with Shakespeare's work as a whole, we discover pervading the rest an attitude to love which all cynics and most critics have conspired to describe as romantic. It is true that it appears to flower most divinely in what we call the romantic comedies; but that does not mean that the love portrayed in them is romantic in essence. Classification of this kind is superficial and confusing. A poet uses the most convenient plot as the foundation on which to build up the expression of his emotional attitude. The mere accident that the plot contains improbable coincidences and enchanted islands cannot affect the substance of the attitude expressed by its means. The romantic comedy of one poet may be a trivial indulgence of the fancy, while that of another is the flashing of a warm light into the verity of the human soul. We have only to compare Shakespeare's comedy, on the one hand with Beaumont and Fletcher's, and on the other with Ben Jonson's, to discover how far asunder they are in their poetic truth. The segregation of Shakespeare's comedies is misleading unless it is considered merely as the distinction of an aspect within the whole work of Shakespeare. The most immature of his comedies is nearer in spirit to the most perfect of his tragedies than it is to the comedies of Jonson or

Fletcher, whatever merits of their own these may possess.

To call the love of Shakespeare's romantic comedies itself romantic is meaningless, or it is the expression of a private and personal conviction concerning the nature of love. It may mean that in the opinion of the judge love is not in fact so happy, nor so secure, nor so deeply irradiated with the heart's delight as Shakespeare represented it; but it can mean nothing more. And we cannot tell whether Shakespeare himself believed that love actually was as he chose to represent it. But we can say that he did believe either that it was so, or that it ought to be so; and that he found it natural to create men and women who are alive with a reality no other created characters possess, who love in the way he chose to make them love, with a tenderness and a gaiety, an open-eyed confidence in themselves and the future, a shyness and a humour, a marvellous equality in affection, which have made them for a whole world of mankind the embodiment of their experience if they were happy in love, or of their dreams if they were disappointed. And this love, which is as solid and as ethereal, as earthly and as magical as a rose in full bloom, is in all his early comedies; it is essentially the same in A Midsummer Night's Dream as in Much Ado about Nothing. We can hardly say more than that the light changes from moonlight to full sunshine as we pass from Lysander and Hermia, through Orsino and Viola, to Benedick and Beatrice, and that when we reach As You

Like It the midday brightness is faintly mellowed with afternoon. Nor is it possible to say that the love of the Merchant of Venice or of Romeo and Juliet is of another kind, though the one is calm and the other tempestuous. It is only the tempest of circumstance which wrecks the love of Romeo and Juliet. There is a peculiar ecstasy in their surrender to the enchantment, which bursts out like a flame at the clash of contact between the enemy houses; but in their love no seed of disruption or decay is visible, much less of disaster. Theirs is a love of which all human foresight could prophesy its

'Outliving beauty's outward with a mind That doth renew swifter than blood decays.'

They are the victims not of their passion but of crass casualty; they are fortune's fools, not their own. "Romeo and Juliet,' as Professor Herford truly says, 'appears not to be the tragedy of love, but love's triumphal hymn.'

The love which shines so gloriously through this period of Shakespeare's work is as mysterious and natural as birth. It is a thing that happens; to ask why it happens is to wait till doomsday for an answer; and if these lovers ask each other, they can only make up jesting replies. When Phebe applies Marlowe's line to her own love of Rosalind-Ganymede, she speaks for them all, men and women alike.

'Dead Shepherd, now I prove thy saw aright: Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?'

For the most part they know themselves what has happened; and even where, as with Benedick and Beatrice, we seem to know it before they do, it is only because of their shyness of themselves and each other, which will not suffer their heads to confess the truth of their hearts. The moment that Benedick and Beatrice open fire on one another we know that they are caught. It is only love that makes a man and a woman single out each other for such teasing.

'Beatrice. I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick; nobody marks you. Benedick. What! My dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?'

Benedick might have called her the dear lady of his heart and had done with it, for he gave himself as completely away in that address as he could ever have done in the sonnet they found in his pocket at church, in which no doubt he rhymed, as he feared to rhyme, ladies' and 'babies.' Yet, though Much Ado About Nothing has precisely the same radiant substance as the rest of the lovecomedies-love at first sight-it stands apart from them because the drama itself consists in the delicate working out of the psychology of this heavenly condition. It is not entangled with alien accidents, and owes nothing to the enchantment of disguise; it deals with an absolute perfecttion of art, with the process by which the message of unhesitating love steals from the heart to the