N considering with any kind of closeness a play of Shakespeare's, the student is thrown very much upon the probabilities of what he might or might not have got as a base for the work he was about; and when it comes to a question of theory, it is idle and perfectly unnecessary to push the probabilities too far. The enquiry, for instance, rises to the mind after a first reading of "Twelfth Night," Had Shakespeare any theory of a difference, an essential difference, between a comedy and a tragedy? and many subsequent perusals do but urge it more persistently. Personally, I greatly doubt whether the poet troubled himself with definitions, whether, in fact, he had not something better to do; but if he did, the probabilities surely are that he went no deeper into that particular affair than Dante did once, in his famous

letter to Can Grande of Verona. In order, wrote he there, to understand the title of his epic, "one must know that Comoedia is named from kúμn, villa, and edn, which means cantus; so that comoedia is a sort of villanus cantus. It differs from tragedy in this, that tragedy in the commencement is full of admiration and calm, but in the end is stinking and harsh; whence it is named from Tpayos, which is hircus, and edn, as it were cantus hircinus, that is, stinking like a goat - as appears in Seneca's tragedies; whereas comedy begins with something harsh, but has a prosperous ending, as is seen in the Comedies of Terence. In like manner the style of tragedy and comedy are different; that of tragedy is heightened and sublime, that of comedy more lax and unpretending, whence," he concludes, "we see why my work is called Comoedia." This is very well. "Twelfth Night" does begin -or almost begins - with something harsh: indeed a shipwreck; it ends prosperously with three weddings; in style and texture it is lax and unpretending. The play is assuredly a comedy within the meaning of these requisitions; whether it be so in those qualities which we have now come to think essential to such a piece of art is another matter, and a matter in which, as I began by saying, Shakespeare probably took no interest. But the question is whether we, when we read or behold such a play, do or do not take that interest. Is our laughter, if we have any, over the misfortunes of Malvolio "nothing else but a sudden glory, arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison of the infirmity of others"?

That was what a learned man, the Philosopher of Malmesbury, living not so long after Shakespeare, thought we ought to find in comedy. If we laugh at Malvolio in his cellar, is that a sudden glory? Can we say that here "the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain?" No doubt but a Jacobean audience could. Can an Edwardian ?

More of this presently, and of the curious fate of the play: let me consider for a moment, first, the structure of "Twelfth Night, or What you Will." Will." A twin brother and sister, exactly alike, are in shipwreck; the brother supposed lost, the sister palpably alive. (She, for sufficient reasons, disguises herself as a young man and takes service as page with the Duke of Illyria. She falls in love with her master; but he dotes upon a Lady Olivia, who scorns him. The Duke employs his supposed page as ambassador to Donna Olivia, with the result that lady now falls in love with lady; so here we have three persons at the sort of deadlock contrived by Mr. Puff in "The Spanish Armada," and the time seems ripe for the recovery of the lost brother. He duly appears, and contents Olivia; the passionate Duke pairs off with his pretended page; she—and this is important, for everybody is the slave of Viola is actually the only person on the scene who wins her original desire. So much for the main plot of a comedy, whose scheme, lax and unpretending enough, is rendered still more so by the underplot, relating the buffooneries played upon Olivia's steward, Malvolio, by a set of immortal clowns, as irresponsible, capering, madcap wags as ever delighted this easy world

— an underplot, be it added, which its author was at no pains to connect with his main theme; an underplotand this is extraordinary—which, by the force and bent of Shakespeare's genius for character, has so taken hold of the play that it has usurped the interest, outshone the fantasy, forced the title to abdicate, and (for the last hundred and fifty years at least) turned a comedy into something uncommonly like a tragedy. These are perverse reflections, but they all appear to be true.

It would be curious, and it would be long, to enquire into the sources of those conventions of literature — widely departing from the facts of life-which are dear to us, to which we cling, not because they deceive us, for they do not attempt to deceive us, but partly for the sake of old acquaintance, and partly, no doubt, because we love make-believe and find that the more we have of it to make the better we do it. One of these, which we now call Sir Walter Scott's convention, the habit of expressing violent emotion in terms of stately and deliberate rhetoric,- is at least as old as Homer. "My post," says Norna of the Fitful Head, "must be high on yon lofty headland, where never stood human foot save mine -or I must sleep at the bottom of the unfathomable ocean, its white billows booming over my senseless corpse. The parricide shall never also be denounced as the impostor." This is what Sir Walter called his "big bow-wow" style, and is certainly very unlike life. But if that is in itself an objection, the answer to it is, Why should we suppose life to be so fine a thing that the poet

should never aim at a finer? Is rhetoric inadmissible? Is Turner's palette ruled out? Never in the world, we say, so long as they persuade. Socrates had the root of this matter, and so had Gorgias the rhapsodist, though he did not know it until the sage made it clear. So much for a convention of manner: here in "Twelfth Night" is a convention of matter, in Shakespeare's favourite notion of having a young woman dress like a young man, and of letting her go far into the logical consequences of the adventure. There is no doubt at all but that the Elizabethans considered that highly romantic; and as perversion is strange, and strangeness pleasureable, very likely it is romantic. There is this to be said of it, at any rate, that if we don't like it we shall never like "Twelfth Night," or a great part of Shakespeare's comedy. Once more - Pope Joan apart-we are nowhere near life, and it may then once more become a question whether we are near something better or something a good deal worse. It is very much a matter of taste. If the notion of maid wooing maid please us, stir us pleasurably, all is said; but I may add that the opposite notion, unless treated with an almost impossible tact, would not please us at all. Shakespeare never touched upon that in a play, but Bandello did in a novel, as we shall see; and it seems to have been from Bandello that our poet got his main plot for "Twelfth Night."1 I

1 This is my personal belief, though it ought to be said that the experts are not so sure. The Academy of the Intronati of Siena produced a play in 1531, first printed in 1537, called Gl'Ingannati, which has precisely the same plot as Bandello's tale (published at Lucca in 1554), and is equally like "Twelfth Night." Mr. Lee's supposition that the Sienese play was derived from the novel, is beaten