Audrey, in _As You Like It_; sometimes closely, as in the case of Dogberry and Verges, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action. The _Merry Wives of Windsor_ is an exception to this plan of construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-class English life, and, is written almost throughout in prose. It is his only pure comedy, except the _Taming of the Shrew_. Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus _Cymbeline_ is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as _Winter's Tale_--to which its plot bears a resemblance--and is only technically a tragedy because it contains a violent death. In some of the tragedies, as in _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, the comedy element is reduced to a minimum. But in others, as _Romeo and Juliet_, and _Hamlet_, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast. Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the moralities. The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in _As You Like It_, and Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_, are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man's nature. The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless _Titus Andronicus_ be his, was, doubtless, _Romeo and Juliet_, which is full of the passion and poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work. He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet. _Romeo and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama. It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic conclusions from within, through character, rather than through external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life, _Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth_, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero. This is so, in a special sense, in _Hamlet_, the subtlest of all Shakspere's plays, and, if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure, but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the attention upon a single character. This difference is seen even in the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from their heroes, the comedies never.