If we do not care for tragedy we shall have passed from Romeo and Juliet or the Merchant of Venice to As You Like It, one of the best of Shakspere’s lighter comedies. It is less deep, but not less charming than the heavier plays. The delightful Rosalind, disguised as a young man in the woods, the melancholy Jaques, and the amusing clown Touchstone, create an atmosphere of refinement which we will find nowhere else. I myself like Much Ado About Nothing as well as any of the comedies. It tells the story of Benedick and Beatrice, who were never going to marry, they were such wits both of them! Yet they were tricked into it, and apparently enjoyed it after all. Where else will you find a woman joker? The Taming of the Shrew is an interesting play if you admire a wilful, stubborn, pretty woman such as Kate was, and would like to know how her husband brought her into charming subjection. It is a very pretty play, and not less interesting for being somewhat out of date among our modern ideas of women. But of all Shakspere’s comic characters, none is more original or famous than Falstaff. We meet him first in Henry V, perhaps the best of Shakspere’s historical plays. He is a wit, a coward, and a blow-hard, but Shakspere never makes him overdo any of these traits, and so we cannot but find him intensely amusing. He reappears in the Merry Wives of Windsor, which Shakspere is said to have written in order to please Queen Elizabeth. The most intensely dramatic of the histories, and the first to read is Richard III. Richard is a scheming, daring fellow; and our love for the little princes put to death in the tower gives us a point of affection. Besides, this is the drama all the great tragic actors have been especially fond of playing. Next to Richard III is Henry VIII, which is said to be only partly Shakspere’s. In it is Henry’s great minister Wolsey, whose fall from power we witness as an event more tragic than death. Last of all let us read the Tempest, that romantic play which Shakspere probably wrote at the end of his career, as a sort of calm retrospect; for we may think of Prospero as Shakspere himself. There are other good plays of Shakspere’s; but if we have not time to read all, these are the best to begin with.