The gold had a tendency to separate itself from the alloy, and Pepys
only found poetry and romance endurable when they were pretty thickly
veiled behind the commonplaces of rhetoric or broad fun or the
realistic ingenuity of the stage carpenter and upholsterer.

There is, consequently, no cause for surprise that Pepys should write
thus of Shakespeare's ethereal comedy of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_:
"Then to the King's Theatre, where we saw _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the
most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I
confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my
pleasure." This is Pepys's ordinary attitude of mind to undiluted
poetry on the stage.

Pepys only saw _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ once. _Twelfth Night_, of
which he wrote in very similar strains, he saw thrice. On the first
occasion his impatience of this romantic play was due to external
causes. He went to the theatre "against his own mind and resolution."
He was over-persuaded to go in by a friend, with whom he was casually
walking past the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Moreover, he had just
sworn to his wife that he would never go to a play without her: all
which considerations "made the piece seem a burden" to him. He
witnessed _Twelfth Night_ twice again in a less perturbed spirit, and
then he called it a "silly" play, or "one of the weakest plays that
ever I saw on the stage."

Again, of _Romeo and Juliet_, Pepys wrote: "It is a play of itself the
worst I ever heard in my life." This verdict, it is right to add, was
attributable, in part at least, to Pepys's irritation at the badness
of the acting, and at the actors' ignorance of their words. It was a
first night.

The literary critic knows well enough that the merit of these three
pieces--_A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Twelfth Night_, and _Romeo and
Juliet_--mainly lies in their varied wealth of poetic imagery and
passion. One thing alone could render the words, in which poetic
genius finds voice, tolerable in the playhouse to a spectator of
Pepys's prosaic temperament. The one thing needful is inspired acting,
and in the case of these three plays, when Pepys saw them performed,
inspired acting was wanting.

It is at first sight disconcerting to find Pepys no less impatient of
_The Merry Wives of Windsor_. He expresses a mild interest in the
humours of "the country gentleman and the French d