Or of Imogen, blind to all but the path of light and air that divides her from Milford Haven: I see before me, man; nor here, nor here, Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them, That I cannot look through. Even Adriana, in the _Comedy of Errors_, expresses the unity of married love with an intensity which we expect neither from this bustling _bourgeoise_ nor in this early play: For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf And take unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself and not me too; (II, ii. 127.) an utterance which in its simple pathos anticipates the agonized cry of Othello--the most thrilling expression in Shakespeare of the meaning of wedded unity: But there, where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up: to be discarded thence! The husband in these cases, it is true, neither forgives nor condones, and Shakespeare (unlike Heywood) gives no hint that he would have dissented from the traditional ethics on which Othello and Posthumus and Leontes acted, had their wives in fact been guilty. The wives, on the other hand, encounter the husband’s unjust suspicions, or brutal slanders, without a thought of revenge or reprisal. Desdemona, Imogen, Hermione, alike beautifully fulfil the ideal of love presented in the great sonnet: Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. In one drama only did he represent ideal love brought to a tragic doom without a hint of inner severance. The wedded unity of Romeo and Juliet is absolute from their first meeting to their last embrace; it encounters only the blind onset of outer and irrelevant events; nothing touches their rapturous faith in one another. This earliest of the authentic tragedies thus represents, in comparison with its successors, only an elementary order of tragic experience; set beside _Othello_, it appears to be not a tragedy of love, but love’s triumphal hymn. Yet it is only in this sense immature. If Shakespeare had not yet fathomed the depths of human misery, he understood completely the exaltation of passion, and _Romeo and Juliet_, though it gives few glimpses beyond the horizons of his early world, remains the consummate flower of his poetry of ideal love. III The beauty and insight of Shakespeare’s finest portrayals of the comedy and the tragedy of love were not reached at once. His conception of love itself was still, at the opening of his career, relatively slight and superficial; his mastery of technique was equally incomplete. The early plays accordingly abound with scenes and situations where from either cause or both the dramatic treatment of love is not yet in the full sense Shakesperean. It will suffice in this sketch to specify two types of each.