Shakespeare, a very learned man and exhaustless in observation and invention; very careful, too, in construction and endeavoring a reform of comedy along truly classical lines—Ben Jonson, I say, chose for his province the comedy of humors; i.e., the exhibition of all varieties of oddity, eccentricity, whim, affectation. Read his “Every Man in His Humour” or his “Bartholomew Fair” and you will find a satirical picture of all the queer fashions and follies of his contemporary London. His characters are sharply distinguished but they are _too_ queer, too overloaded with traits, so that we seem to be in an asylum for cranks and monomaniacs, rather than in the broad, natural, open daylight of Shakespeare’s creations. So the tyrants and villains of Elizabethan melodrama are too often incredible creatures beyond the limits of humanity. It is perhaps due to their habit of mixing tragedy and comedy that the Elizabethan dramatists made so much use of the double plot; for the main plot was often tragical and the underplot comical or farcical. Shakespeare, who at all points was superior to his fellows, knew how to knit his duplicate plots together and make them interdependent. But in pieces like Middleton’s “Changeling” or “The Mayor of Queensboro,” the main plot and the subplot have nothing to do with each other and simply run along in alternate scenes, side by side. This is true of countless plays of the time and is ridiculed by Sheridan in his burlesque play “The Critic.” Let it also be remembered that an Elizabethan tragedy was always a poem—always in verse. Prose was reserved for comedy, or for the comedy scenes in a tragedy. The only prose tragedy that has come down to us from those times is the singular little realistic piece entitled “The Yorkshire Tragedy,” the story of a murder. A very constant feature of the old drama was the professional fool, jester, or kept clown, with his motley coat, truncheon, and cap and bells. In most plays he was simply a stock fun maker, though Shakespeare made a profound and subtle use of him in “As You Like It” and in “Lear.” The last court jester or king’s fool was Archie Armstrong, fool of Charles I. After the Restoration he was considered as old-fashioned and disappeared from the stage along with puns and other obsolete forms of wit. Opera and pantomime were not introduced into England until late in the seventeenth century: but the Elizabethans had certain forms of quasi-dramatic entertainment such as the court masque, the pageant, and the pastoral, which have since gone out. They were responsible for some fine poetry like Fletcher’s “Faithful Shepherdess,” Jonson’s fragment “The Sad Shepherd” and Milton’s “Comus.” Of late years the pageant has been locally revived in England, at Oxford, at Coventry, and elsewhere.