With the mad Prince and Poins we laugh at Falstaff, no doubt; but we are ready also to laugh with him, because he is so humorously human. We like him even if we cannot have any respect for him; in fact, we like him so much that we are a little inclined to resent the way in which his creator has chosen to treat him in more than one episode of the ‘Merry Wives,’ especially his concealment in the buckbasket of foul linen and his subsequent upsetting into foul water. Shakspere, even tho his masterpieces may survive for all time, was himself a man of his own time; and at the end of the sixteenth century people were more callous than they are at the beginning of the twentieth, thicker of skin and stouter of stomach, more tolerant of needless pain and even of purposeless brutality. We cannot doubt that Shakspere must have been a spectator at “the whipping of the blind bear”; and to him as to other Elizabethans madness was comic rather than tragic. To-day we have for Malvolio, and even for Shylock, a sympathy which is born of a better understanding and which assuredly would astonish no one more than it would Shakspere. George Eliot, with her shrewd insight into the recesses of human nature, declared that “a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections”; and there is no doubt that our affection for Shakspere is now and again not a little strained by his eager pursuit of the obvious pun and by his persistent employment of the obvious practical joke. Our taste in jests is more restricted than his; and we labor in vain to excuse him by the plea that he descended to the pun and the practical joke only to gratify the ruder likings of the groundlings who stood restless in the unroofed yard of the Globe Theater. It is simpler, and it is honester, to admit frankly, first of all, that Shakspere was a right Elizabethan Englishman who shared the tastes of his contemporaries and his countrymen; and second, that the false glitter of dialog and the artificial practical joking are simply testimony to the immaturity of his genius at the time when he composed the comic dramas in which we discover these defects. Not only has our taste in jests changed in more than three centuries, but Shakspere’s own taste in jests changed in less than twenty years. In his later masterpieces, in the best plays of his best period, the wit is intellectual rather than verbal and the humor is sympathetically human. II