lovers of Shakespeare will agree that the great dramatist rarely
showed his mature powers to more magnificent advantage than in his
treatment of plot and character in _Othello_. What, then, is this
_Adventures of Five Hours_, compared with which _Othello_ became in
Pepys's eyes "a mean thing"? It is a trivial comedy of intrigue,
adapted from the Spanish by one Sir Samuel Tuke. A choleric guardian
arranges for his ward, who also happens to be his sister, to marry
against her will a man whom she has never seen. Without her guardian's
knowledge she, before the design goes further, escapes with a lover of
her own choosing. In her place she leaves a close friend, who is wooed
in mistake for herself by the suitor destined for her own hand. This
is the main dramatic point; the thread is very slender, and is drawn
out to its utmost limits through five acts of blank verse. The
language and metre are scrupulously correct. But one cannot credit the
play with any touch of poetry or imagination. It presents a trite
theme tamely and prosaically. Congenital inability of the most
inveterate toughness to appreciate dramatic poetry could alone account
for a mention of the _Adventures of Five Hours_ in the same breath
with _Othello_.

Pepys did not again fall so low as this. The only other tragedy of
Shakespeare which he saw in its authentic purity moved him,
contradictorily, to transports of unqualified delight. One is glad to
recall that _Hamlet_, one of the greatest of Shakespeare's plays,
received from Pepys ungrudging commendation. Pepys's favourable
opinion of _Hamlet_ is to be assigned to two causes. One is the
literary and psychological attractions of the piece; the other, and
perhaps the more important, is the manner in which the play was
interpreted on the stage of Pepys's time.

Pepys is not the only owner of a prosaic mind who has found
satisfaction in Shakespeare's portrait of the Prince of Denmark. Over
minds of almost every calibre, that hero of the stage has always
exerted a pathetic fascination, which natural antipathy to poetry
seems unable to extinguish. Pepys's testimony to his respect for the
piece is abundant. The whole of one Sunday afternoon (November 13,
1664), he spent at home with his wife, "getting a speech out of
_Hamlet_, 'To be or not to be,' without book." He proved, indeed, his
singular admiration for those familiar lines in a manner which I
believe to be unique. He set them to music, and the notes are