seems to mark them
out as the characters of his predilection; [169] and it is hard not to
identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in Love's
Labours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In
this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect
level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see,
perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able
to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.

1878.

NOTES

162. *Act V. Scene II. Return.

"MEASURE FOR MEASURE"

[170] IN Measure for Measure, as in some other of his plays,
Shakespeare has remodelled an earlier and somewhat rough composition to
"finer issues," suffering much to remain as it had come from the less
skilful hand, and not raising the whole of his work to an equal degree
of intensity. Hence perhaps some of that depth and weightiness which
make this play so impressive, as with the true seal of experience, like
a fragment of life itself, rough and disjointed indeed, but forced to
yield in places its profounder meaning. In Measure for Measure, in
contrast with the flawless execution of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
has spent his art in just enough modification of the scheme of the
older play to make it exponent of this purpose, adapting its terrible
essential incidents, so that Coleridge found it the only painful work
among Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the reader of to-day more
than the usual number of difficult expressions; but infusing a lavish
colour and a profound significance into it, so that under his [171]
touch certain select portions of it rise far above the level of all but
his own best poetry, and working out of it a morality so characteristic
that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral
judgments. It remains a comedy, as indeed is congruous with the bland,
half-humorous equity which informs the whole composition, sinking from
the heights of sorrow and terror into the rough scheme of the earlier
piece; yet it is hardly less full of what is really tragic in man's
existence than if Claudio had indeed "stooped to death." Even the
humorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining in
less emphatic passages a stray lire or word of power, as it seems, so
that we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand has
glanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully,
in