Nothing" its nearer source was a drama of the conventional kind; crude, weak, and badly constructed, upon which Shakespeare wrought with the magic that turns dross into gold. These are matters of curiosity; the real thing is the play as the great dramatist left it. We may well take a hint from his indifference to the sources of his plots and his supreme concern to shape the materials which came to his hand to the highest dramatic and poetic uses. The wrong done to Hero and the deception practised on Claudio evidently belonged to the common stock of incident upon which the dramatists and story-tellers of the time drew at will; that which belongs to Shakespeare is the very soul of the play: its firm coherence, its striking contrasts of character, its immortal clowns, and the flash of wit between Beatrice and Benedict. These brilliant personifications of the alertness, the finesse, the artificial wit of the close of the sixteenth century are the real actors in a comedy which is skilfully unfolded against a tragic background that the play of their minds, the clash of their wills, may gain distinctness against the darkness of a great wrong. The malicious villainy of Don John, the weak credulity of Claudio, and the impenetrable stupidity of Dogberry and Verges are essential elements in the staging of this sparkling comedy. Don John is, as Coleridge pointed out, the mainspring of the plot, although he appears only at the moments when his intervention is necessary to keep the plot moving, and then promptly withdraws from the scene. Claudio is so faintly drawn and of such feeble purpose that he is a lay figure in a drama which he does not influence, but in which some one is needed as credulous and ineffective as he; while the irresistible dulness of Dogberry and Verges makes the working out of the plot possible by failure to detect the villainy when its details were fully set forth in their hearing, and serves as a foil to the quick-witted brilliancy of Beatrice and Benedict. The two clowns are, in a way, the satirists of the verbal dexterity of Beatrice and Benedict; they are as skilful in the misuse of language as the chief figures in the play are adroit in forcing the note of far-fetched and often purely artificial association or contrast. The fooling of the clowns, by its delightful unconsciousness no less than by its humour, relieves the strain of the tragic element in the play and offsets the occasional forcing of language in which Beatrice and Benedict indulge themselves, after the manner of a time which took far greater liberties with language than any later period has dared to take. While it is true that "Much Ado About Nothing" is essentially a comedy of wit and, therefore, less highly moralised and less definitely related to character than such a comedy as "Measure for Measure," it shows Shakespeare's hand in the clearness and delicacy of its portraiture. Hero is really a secondary figure and is as definitely subordinate to Beatrice as Claudio is to Benedict; but the few strokes with which she is drawn reveal, with beautiful art, her purity, her simplicity, her womanly power to find refuge in silence and patience. Beatrice, on the other hand, stands out with the distinctness of the most brilliant portraits in the gallery of Shakespeare's women; quick in thought, audacious in speech, mistress of the art of repartee: the heart of the passionate woman reveals itself in her vehement advocacy of Hero, and her imperious command, "Kill Claudio," and in her sudden tenderness when she is persuaded that Benedict's raillery covers an ardent devotion. The connections of the characters in "Much Ado About Nothing" have often been pointed out, and are significant as disclosing the advance of Shakespeare's art in insight and graphic power. The comedy marks the culmination of his creative skill in this kind of drama, and Hazlitt happily put its perfection into words when he said that "the middle point of comedy was never more nicely hit, in which the ludicrous blends with the tender, and our follies, turning round against themselves, in support of our affections, retain nothing but their humanity." If "Love's Labour's Lost" is a preliminary sketch of "Much Ado About Nothing," and Rosaline and Dull, the constable, are studies of Beatrice and Dogberry, the sense of Shakespeare's power of growth — one of the most marvellous of his many gifts-is deepened by the perception of his grasp of the vital connection between action and character and heightened by the realisation of his gain in command of the delicate and subtle resources of speech in which he worked. If Beatrice and Benedict recall Katharine and Petruchio, and a common tragedy of illegitimacy involves Don John and Edmund in " King Lear," these connections serve to bring out Shakespeare's wealth of resource rather than to suggest |