vision, probably in collaboration, of an older farce
comedy; _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ bears on its face corroboration of
the tradition that it was written to order in a fortnight. The power in
high comedy first fully shown in _The Merchant of Venice_ reaches its
supreme pitch in the three plays composed at the turn of the century,
_Much Ado about Nothing_, _As You Like It_, and _Twelfth Night_. In each
of these a romantic love-tale, laid in some remote holiday world, is
taken up, given a specific atmosphere, acted out by a group of
delightful creations who are endowed with intellect, wit, and natural
affection, bathed in poetic imagination, and yet handled with sufficient
naturalism to awaken and hold our human sympathies. No more purely
delightful form of dramatic art has ever been contrived; none has ever
been treated so as to yield more fully its appropriate charm; so that in
view of the completeness of the artist's success we are bound to call
the period which closed with the first year of the seventeenth century
the triumph of comedy.

[Page Heading: Third Period]

_Julius Caesar_, the first of the plays dealing with Roman history, may
have been written before 1600, but, whether it preceded _Hamlet_ by one
year or three, it forms a gradual introduction to the group of the great
tragedies. Masterly as it is in its delineation of types, rich in
political wisdom and the knowledge of human nature, splendid in
rhetoric, it still fails to rise to the intensity of passion that marks
the succeeding dramas. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and
_Macbeth_, Shakespeare at length faced the great fundamental forces that
operate in individual, family, and social life, realized especially
those that make for moral and physical disaster, took account alike of
the deepest tendencies in character and of the mystery of external fate
or accident, exhibited these in action and reaction, in their simplicity
and their complexity, and wrought out a series of spectacles of the pity
and terror of human suffering and human sin without parallel in the
modern world. In these stupendous tragedies he availed himself of all
the powers with which he was endowed and all the skill which he had
acquired. His verse has liberated itself from the formalism and monotony
that had marked it in the earlier plays, and is now free, varied,
responsive to every mood and every type of passion; the language is
laden almost to the breaking point with the w