all probability, Sir John Falstafe in the first entry and the Hotspurr in the second both refer to King Henry IV., Part I. If one play may, in official documents, be called by two names, why not another? Secondly, Shakespeare's fellow actors (now His Majesty's servants, formerly the Lord Chamberlain's men) would know better than to present before their royal audience two plays based on the same theme, the later version written by the most popular playwright in their company. The earlier play would inevitably suffer in the contrast and fail to please. Lastly, Halliwell-Phillipps notes that King Charles I., in his copy of the Second Folio, entered " Benedick and Beatrice" as an alternative title to Much Ado About Nothing. It is, therefore, fairly certain that the two titles both refer to Shakespeare's comedy and that the Lord Treasurer's accounts offer a cold scent in the hunt. The chief indications of this possible early dramatic work are found in the name of Hero's mother in the opening stagedirections to I. i. and II. i.; in the reference to Antonio's son, I. ii. I; and in the unexplained allusions Beatrice makes to events of which the audience knows nothing in I. i. 35 (“He set up his bills here in Messina," etc.) and II. i. 260 (“Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile," etc.).

Upon these slender foundations the latest editors1 have built up an elaborate and an extremely interesting structure. To the few and doubtful signs of an old play already noticed they add indications gleaned from: (i) irregular stage-directions, such as appears after line 194 in II. i.: "Enter the Prince, Hero, Leonato, John and Borachio, and Conrade," where the last three names are superfluous; (ii) inadequate or careless speech-headings, such as the substitution of the names of Kempe and Cowley for Dogberry and Verges in IV. ii., and of Const. and Con. 2 for the same pair in v. i.; (iii) imperfectly deleted passages, appearing at IV. i. 153 and V. i. 108; and (iv) scanty punctuation. Only a full exposition, which is impossible here, could do justice to the learning and ingenuity with which these points in the discussion are presented. To give merely the headings, as I have done, and not the full chain of reasoning, is to give no true idea of the value or suggestiveness of the argument; but it is too long to be

1 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, Cambridge University Press.

2 According to the interpretation of these editors.

stated in its entirety. Taken together these accumulated signs of an early play go far to prove the case. Not, I think, quite far enough; too much has to be assumed.

Further reasoning to the same end is based (i) on the distinction between prose and verse: "we infer that the 1598-9 revision was a prose one and that the verse belongs to the old play"; (ii) on the discrepancies of the plot: according to the editors of The New Shakespeare most of the obscurities in the Margaret-Borachio story may be explained as "loose ends caused by revision." Does not this carry the argument too far into debatable territory? Neither position can be very securely maintained, the first with less confidence than the second. It is true that in the verse of Much Ado About Nothing we hear neither the thrilling, sweet notes of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, nor the deeper music of the tragedies, music that leaves echoes in the mind like the beat of strong pinions, having at last an existence of its own independent of the words by which it is created. All the same, the poetry of Much Ado About Nothing is good poetry and not, except for a few lines, immature. In V. iii. the rhyme, though it suggests an early date, cannot be taken as conclusive evidence. The blank verse of III. i., IV. i. and V. i. is worthy to stand by the best rhetoric of Henry V. and clearly belongs to the same period; it could not well be assigned to a date much earlier than 1599. Moreover, the transitions from prose to verse, and from verse to prose, are so deftly managed that we notice them only as indications of some change in the dramatic atmosphere, not as the deliberate substitution of one form of expression for another. Each change rises naturally out of the situation as it develops, and there is perfect fusion throughout; all the different elements of style and language, as of emotional interest, are reconciled. A glance at v. i. will illustrate this point. The impassioned blank verse of Leonato gives way to the rather thin crackling of Claudio's banter with his friends; this is interrupted by Dogberry's botcheries and the blunt speech of Borachio; verse is heard again upon the reentry of Leonato, and the scene closes with a delightful mixture of poetry and diversified prose. The scene is typical of the play, and the result here, as everywhere, is so harmonious as to render almost untenable the hypothesis of two distinct periods of workmanship.

The last point raised in favour of this theory, namely, the

b

discrepancies in the plot of the play, cannot be easily settled. Margaret's part certainly presents difficulties to the careful reader. She is represented as a lively, thoughtless girl, on good terms with her mistress and the other members of Leonato's household, trusted by them all and apparently worthy of their confidence. And yet she is involved in an affair which, though we must believe it innocent, savours of intrigue, both because of its secrecy and because of the baseness of Borachio's character. It is, further, impossible to explain Margaret's silence at the church (or later, supposing her absent from the ceremony), when a word would have explained everything and saved Hero from dishonour. We may also ask, as the majority of editors have asked, how Margaret could have been persuaded to wear Hero's garments and to be called by Hero's name, and still have no inkling of any intended evil against her mistress.

The obvious answer to these questions, that Shakespeare was writing for an Elizabethan audience and not for the careful reader, is satisfactory up to a point. In stage representation the inconsistencies are not noticeable; they do not, at any rate, obtrude themselves. They may, however, be further explained by reference to the original sources, without our having to take refuge in the theory of survivals from an old play. The difficulty of Margaret's share in the plot is, in fact, inherent in the original story. In the versions of both Ariosto and Spenser the maid's actions are slightly incredible. Dalinda and Pryene are shown as loyal to their mistresses and as acting in entire good faith towards them, even while enamoured of their knavish lovers. Neither realizes that any conspiracy is afoot. In each case, by an appeal to her vanity, the villain persuades the waiting-maid to dress in the garments of her mistress and to participate in a love scene that must surely have seemed something in the nature of a masquerade to the girl herself. It is significant that Bandello avoids this difficulty, and the loyal but besotted maid disappears from his pages. It may be urged that in both Ariosto's and Spenser's versions the waiting-maids realize the truth of the situation as soon as the lying accusations are noised abroad. Margaret is not behind Dalinda and Pryene in intelligence; she is their superior in virtue. But were her quick brain to work with its usual promptness, were she to detect the conspiracy and acknowledge her part in it, what would then become of the "shallow fools"? The low

comedians of the company must have some part in the play, and, since Shakespeare's conscience is not to be satisfied with mere scenes of clowning, it must be an integral part in the development of the plot. To them is entrusted the revelation of the truth. Margaret, whom the audience has learned to like and will not readily suspect, must therefore, for a short time, lie under suspicion, to be dismissed in the end without a stain on her character. Her exoneration is, no doubt, largely due to Borachio's emphatic statement in her favour (v. i. 293296), which serves not only to clear her name but to raise him in our regard. In this comparatively small matter of Margaret's complicity Shakespeare shows the same delicacy in the manipulation of his sources that he extends to the still less important question of her relations with Borachio. In the interests of the plot it is necessary that the two should be entangled in a love affair; in the interests of the tone or atmosphere of the play it is desirable that the affair should be an innocent one. Borachio is much "in the favour of Margaret, the waiting gentlewoman to Hero"; it is not implied that she is his mistress. Thus, in slight, as in more obvious ways, Shakespeare contrives to relieve the essential ugliness of the original theme.

In connection with the Margaret-Borachio plot we would only add that Shakespeare knew well what he was about when he trusted to report the incident of the midnight assignation and chose for his great central scene the rejection of Hero at the altar. In this scene all the characters are faced with a crisis, not unexpected by some, horrible to others in its sudden and shattering cruelty. As would happen in real life, so on Shakespeare's stage; the men and women in this great revealing hour show themselves for what they are; the masks are off. Herein lies the justification of the darkening of the hero's character entailed by this public repudiation, a far more shameful method of refusal than is found in Ariosto or Bandello. At the same time character is not sacrificed to situation; even here incident is made dependent on character. For the Claudio of Much Ado About Nothing is a vain young sentimentalist, a far subtler delineation of a court gallant than either Ariodante or Timbreo. He washes with tears his vile accusations against Hero; with heartless levity he jokes about the "two old men without teeth" who have just given him news of her death; he weeps again when embracing Leonato's offer of another bride. Throughout the play we see how

much he enjoys his own emotions, how shallow they are, and yet how transiently sincere. To begin with (and apparently to end with, though our queasy modern stomachs reject the notion), he is much liked by all the men, except, of course, the villain. Leonato is glad to welcome him as a son-in-law, Benedick is sincerely attached to him, and he is the Prince's loved favourite, far closer to his heart than Benedick, whose character more nearly resembles his own. This is not surprising. Claudio's May of youth is blowing fragrantly, disarming censure, delightful to the Prince as, no doubt, to Shakespeare himself. It is his strongest, but not his only, recommendation to mercy. The vein of poetry in him, the quick feeling for beauty, his courage, and his slightly selfconscious virtue must all appeal to older men, especially to Don Pedro of Arragon-a gay, kindly, practical man of affairs, and a bachelor. But Claudio, like every sentimentalist, has two soul sides. One we have seen. The other is less attractive; it shows the cruelty of wounded self-love that hastens to wound in return, the coarseness lurking beneath a too delicate moral sense that is not finely enough tempered to withstand a sudden shock, the mean spirit that would defile an overthrown image. Such a man is Claudio, and to such a man the prospect of the public humiliation of his bride would not be unpleasurable. Did it not offer the chance both of an exquisite revenge and of a melodramatic, moving spectacle, with himself in the rôle of tragic hero?

The church scene is thus made to serve the ends of both situation and character. The window episode, convincing enough in a long poem or novel, would fail in dramatic effect if represented on the stage. It would lack plausibility to an audience already in the secret, and it would give too great prominence to the evil motive of the play; Borachio would appear more vile, Margaret more guilty, Claudio more gullible. The author of The Partiall Law,' a playwright not easily daunted by discommodious situations, chose to show to his audience the full working out of the conspiracy; not with

1" The Partiall Law a Tragi-comedy by an unknown author (circa 161530)." This play, printed by Mr. Bertram Dobell from the original manuscript in 1908, is of the first interest in the study of Much Ado About Nothing as it offers an independent Elizabethan dramatic version of the Ginevra story from Ariosto. It proves, by contrast, more clearly than could be done in any discussion, Shakespeare's supreme powers of construction, especially in his methods of alleviation,