_Othello_ he saw twice, and he tells us more of the acting than of the play itself. On his first visit he notes that the lady next him shrieked on seeing Desdemona smothered: a proof of the strength of the histrionic illusion. Up to the year 1666 Pepys adhered to the praiseworthy opinion that _Othello_ was a "mighty good" play. But in that year his judgment took a turn for the worse, and that for a reason which finally convicts him of incapacity to pass just sentence on the poetic or literary drama. On August 20, 1666, he writes: "Read _Othello, Moor of Venice_, which I have ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it seems a mean thing." Most lovers of Shakespeare will agree that the great dramatist rarely showed his mature powers to more magnificent advantage than in his treatment of plot and character in _Othello_. What, then, is this _Adventures of Five Hours_, compared with which _Othello_ became in Pepys's eyes "a mean thing"? It is a trivial comedy of intrigue, adapted from the Spanish by one Sir Samuel Tuke. A choleric guardian arranges for his ward, who also happens to be his sister, to marry against her will a man whom she has never seen. Without her guardian's knowledge she, before the design goes further, escapes with a lover of her own choosing. In her place she leaves a close friend, who is wooed in mistake for herself by the suitor destined for her own hand. This is the main dramatic point; the thread is very slender, and is drawn out to its utmost limits through five acts of blank verse. The language and metre are scrupulously correct. But one cannot credit the play with any touch of poetry or imagination. It presents a trite theme tamely and prosaically. Congenital inability of the most inveterate toughness to appreciate dramatic poetry could alone account for a mention of the _Adventures of Five Hours_ in the same breath with _Othello_. Pepys did not again fall so low as this. The only other tragedy of Shakespeare which he saw in its authentic purity moved him, contradictorily, to transports of unqualified delight. One is glad to recall that _Hamlet_, one of the greatest of Shakespeare's plays, received from Pepys ungrudging commendation. Pepys's favourable opinion of _Hamlet_ is to be assigned to two causes. One is the literary and psychological attractions of the piece; the other, and perhaps the more important, is the manner in which the play was interpreted on the stage of Pepys's time.