esting because it shows the
justice of Shakespeare's vision. Valentine, the constant friend and
lover, is exposed in an act of treachery to his benefactor. The scenes
in which the disguised Julia witnesses her lover's falseness, and the
scene in which the play is brought to an end, are deeply and nobly
affecting. Theatre managers play Shakespeare as though he were an old
fashion of the mind instead of the seer of the eternal in life. They
should play this play as a vision of something that is eternally
treacherous, bringing misery to the faithful, the noble, and the
feeling. One of the noblest things in the play is the forgiveness at the
end. Passion has taken Proteus into strange byways of treachery. He has
been false to Julia, to Valentine, to the Duke, to Thurio, one falseness
leading to another, till he is in a wood of the soul, tangled in sin. It
only wants that he be false to Silvia, too. Passion makes his eyes a
little blinder for an instant. He adds that treachery to the others.
Power to see clearly is the only cure for passion. Discovery gives that
power. Valentine's words--

"Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest...."

followed so soon by Julia's words--

"Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,
And entertained them deeply in her heart:
How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root....
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes, than men their minds"--

rouse Proteus to the confounding instant of self-recognition. His answer
is like a voice from one of the later plays. It is in Shakespeare's
grand manner. It does not read like a piece of revision done in the
poet's maturity; but as though Shakespeare suddenly found his utterance
in a moment of vision--

"Than men their minds! 'tis true. O heaven! Were man
But constant, he were perfect: that one error
Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins:
Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins."

A word of excuse would brand him as base. He is ashamed and guilty; but
not base. He cannot say more than that he is sorry, and this only to
Valentine. Valentine accepts sorrow with the utterance of one of the
religious ideas which seem to have been constantly in Shakespeare's
mind.

"By penitence the