ction is more arbitrary and loose, and the more so, the
more marvelous the invention of the whole and the more entirely it has
become a light reveling of the fancy. The comic intervals everywhere
serve to prevent the pastime from being converted into a business, to
preserve the mind in the possession of its serenity, and to keep off
that gloomy and inert seriousness which so easily steals upon the
sentimental, but not tragical, drama. Most assuredly Shakespeare did
not intend thereby, in defiance to his own better judgment, to humor
the taste of the multitude: for in various pieces, and throughout
considerable portions of others, and especially when the catastrophe
is approaching, and the mind consequently is more on the stretch and
no longer likely to give heed to any amusement which would distract
their attention, he has abstained from all such comic intermixtures.
It was also an object with him, that the clowns or buffoons should not
occupy a more important place than that which he had assigned them: he
expressly condemns the extemporizing with which they loved to enlarge
their parts.[26] Johnson founds the justification of the species of
drama in which seriousness and mirth are mixed, on this, that in real
life the vulgar is found close to the sublime, that the merry and the
sad usually accompany and succeed each other. But it does not follow
that, because both are found together, therefore they must not be
separable in the compositions of art. The observation is in other
respects just, and this circumstance invests the poet with a power to
adopt this procedure, because everything in the drama must be
regulated by the conditions of theatrical probability; but the mixture
of such dissimilar, and apparently contradictory, ingredients, in the
same works, can be justifiable only on principles reconcilable with
the views of art which I have already described. In the dramas of
Shakespeare the comic scenes are the antechamber of the poetry, where
the servants remain; these prosaic attendants must not raise their
voices so high as to deafen the speakers in the presence-chamber;
however, in those intervals when the ideal society has retired they
deserve to be listened to; their bold raillery, their presumption of
mockery, may afford many an insight into the situation and
circumstances of their masters.

Shakespeare's comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has
shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an eq