seems inextricable, in the effect on Claudio of the slandering of Hero by Don Pedro's hirelings. The story is meant to create suspense early and to keep an audience emotionally tense even to the end. In "Twelfth Night," too, the Duke, whom Viola loves, cares not for her, but for Olivia, who in turn loves Viola, thinking her a youth. This means a conflict of wills productive of moving scenes. Both of these plays, in other words, make a strong and varied appeal to the emotions of the audience. So far as Orlando and Rosalind are concerned, the complications for them are less even than for Beatrice and Benedick. The misrepresentations of Benedick and Beatrice to each other by Leonato and Claudio complicate their wooing badly. Scene ii of Act V in "As You Like It" shows how completely Rosalind controls the dénouement of the play. When Orlando tells her of the speedy marriage of Celia and Oliver she says: "If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out, when your brother marries Aliena, shall you marry her." Indeed, as any careful reader must note, the angry banishment of Rosalind by the Duke in Act I gives promise of complications for Rosalind which never appear. The first act is so stormy that it prepares a hearer for a play of bustling action later; but such action fails to appear. Such a contrast between this act and the mood of the other acts is more suggestive of the contrast between the almost tragic opening of "The Comedy of Errors" and the farce of its main scenes than of any other play of Shakespeare before 1600. There can be no question, then, that the main dependence of "As You

Like It" is not upon a complicated central story. The appeal of " As You Like It" is, frankly, delicate rather than powerful, intellectual rather than emotional, to the educated, the cultivated, rather than to the untrained mind.

A play built directly from Lodge's material must depend not on dramatic situation, but on attractive characterisation of the dramatis personae, on graceful and charming speech, and upon much variety instead of much intensity of interest. That is, its means must be literary rather than essentially dramatic. Now experience long, long ago demonstrated that in the theatre it is situation which can be depended on, above everything else, to win and hold the attention of a large audience. Take away, not story entirely, but the complication in story which keeps an audience in suspense, eager for a solution favourable to the heroine or annihilating to the villain, and what is to hold the public? Character may, but if so it must provide some decidedly attractive or interesting figures. What holds most in characterisation is the clash of wills which produces dramatic situations; but, as we have seen, in the scenes of Orlando and Rosalind such clashes are absent. Though Shakespeare contrasts Celia and Rosalind, though Orlando and the disguised Rosalind may seem to clash in their talk of Orlando's love, there is no real combat of wills. It is in Rosalind's relations to Phebe that the only real complication in the love story comes. Yet Shakespeare does not make even that in any way complicate the relations of Orlando and Rosalind as he makes the slandering of Hero bring Ben

edick and Beatrice to an understanding. It is noteworthy, too, that all the strongly emotional moments come early in the play, in the wrestling scene, the banishment of Rosalind, and the flight of Orlando and Adam. Once in the Forest of Arden, all real anxieties are over; Rosalind and Celia are free to play with their moods and to indulge in badinage with Orlando; Touchstone can quaintly soliloquise; and Jaques may philosophise as the days slip by. Action in the ordinary sense is kept off the stage. We hear of the rescue of the brother Oliver; of the conversion of the usurping Duke; we are told that Celia and Oliver fall head over ears in love at sight; but nothing of all this are we allowed to see in action. I dwell on this absence of complicated plotting, of dramatic action, of emotional appeal in the main figures, for it points to the emphasis intended by the dramatist. When we know that, his underlying purpose in the play must reveal itself.

Evidently Shakespeare's interest in this play went much where it did in "Love's Labour's Lost"-on characterisation and dialogue. As was true in that play, here he depends much on variety of appeal rather than on a story of emotional significance. There we had Don Armado, Jaquenetta, Costard, Holofernes, Moth, and Will, each with his own special interest for the audience, but all slightly and arbitrarily connected with the main story. Here we have Touchstone, Audrey, Jaques, William, the foresters, and the singing pages, all added to the original fable, not to complicate the main story but to give varied interest. The additions in "As You Like

It" are, however, somewhat better connected with their main story. But there are other similarities between the two plays. Just as the performance of "The Nine Worthies" helps in "Love's Labour's Lost" to bring the play to an end, so Hymen here is introduced, by no means inevitably, in order to provide an appeal always gratifying to the Elizabethans, enthusiastic as they were over masques. Yet, though the connection of the new figures with Rosalind and Orlando may be better than the massing of the material in "Love's Labour's Lost," they are not so essential to the development of the main story as are Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in "Twelfth Night" and Dogberry and Verges in "Much Ado about Nothing." Neither of these plays could reach its dénouement without the aid of the characters named. Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey, William, Sir Oliver Martext, are in no way essential to the working out of the love story of Oliver and Rosalind. Are the foresters needed for more than atmosphere and spectacle?

The truth is, phrase, dialogue for its own sake, plays a greater part proportionately here than in either of the other two great comedies. In "Much Ado," phrase for the sake of phrase is largely confined to the Beatrice-Benedick scenes, and in "Twelfth Night" it is marked chiefly in scenes between the Duke and Viola or between Viola and Olivia. In "As You Like It" the interest in phrase pervades the play. Jaques exists for his philosophising. The foresters were created to sing and comment on the woodland life, producing an atmosphere for the whole play. Touchstone

lives by and for his whimsical truths. The chief scenes of Rosalind and Orlando savour of the word-combat. Does not all this sound reminiscent of "Love's Labour's Lost?" Even on their first appearance Rosalind and Celia fall to making epigrams:

CEL. Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally. Ros. I would we could do so; for her benefits are mightily misplaced; and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.

CEL. 'Tis true; for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest; and those that she makes honest she makes very ill-favouredly.

Or they bandy quips and quiddities with Touchstone. He in turn splits hairs as he counters on the slow-witted Corin. When Jaques enters after the finding of the sonnets, Orlando proves a very stage interlocutor to draw out the fancies of the fertile brain of Jaques. Even the interest of the mock marriage of Orlando and Rosalind arises from her wit as it flashes hither and thither, lighting up the whole scene. In all of these scenes, and in many more, it is not doing but saying which counts. One has only to contrast Scene v of Act III, the first meeting of Rosalind and Phebe, to grasp the difference between movement by emotionalised situation and movement by clever dialogue. The grip of this scene on the attention is much swifter and stronger than that of surrounding scenes. Evidently, then, "As You Like It" was written in a mood not unlike that which produced