ome readers have perhaps not unreasonably
found a similar objection to the final good fortune of such a pitiful
fellow as Count Claudio. It will be observed that in each case the
sacrifice is made to comedy. The actual or hypothetical necessity of
pairing off all the couples after such a fashion as to secure a nominally
happy and undeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical idol whose
tyranny exacts this holocaust of higher and better feelings than the mere
liquorish desire to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel of
cheap sugar on the tongue.

If it is proverbially impossible to determine by selection the greatest
work of Shakespeare, it is easy enough to decide on the date and the name
of his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute power of
composition, for faultless balance and blameless rectitude of design,
there is unquestionably no creation of his hand that will bear comparison
with _Much Ado About Nothing_. The ultimate marriage of Hero and
Claudio, on which I have already remarked as in itself a doubtfully
desirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dramatic perfection of a
piece which could not otherwise have been wound up at all. This was its
one inevitable conclusion, if the action were not to come to a tragic
end; and a tragic end would here have been as painfully and as grossly
out of place as is any but a tragic end to the action of _Measure for
Measure_. As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of a far
different age and breeding, as Celimene or Millamant; and a decidedly
more perfect woman than could properly or permissibly have trod the stage
of Congreve or Moliere. She would have disarranged all the dramatic
proprieties and harmonies of the one great school of pure comedy. The
good fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift words--"Kill
Claudio" {154}--would have fluttered the dovecotes of fashionable drama
to some purpose. But Alceste would have taken her to his own.

No quainter and apter example was ever given of many men's absolute
inability to see the plainest aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, to
appreciate the most practical requisites of art, whether applied to
theatrical action or to any other as evident as exalted aim, than the
instance afforded by that criticism of time past which sagaciously
remarked that "any less amusingly absurd" constables than Dogberry and
Verges would have filled their parts in the action of the play equally
well. O