Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's Lost_ was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together a number of _humors_, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of play, unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story turned on a single "humor," Katharine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's _Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The _Taming of the Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays; a _bourgeois_ domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's _Malade Imaginaire_, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher. The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It was a play purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play. Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll. The fun lies in the situation. This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the _Mennaechmi_ of Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of play, though there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors. In this play, as in the _Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure_, and the _Tempest_, the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_. In others, like _Measure for Measure_, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close. Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play like _Winter's Tale_, in which the painful situation is prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies." The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touchstone and