ABSTRACT
THE MIDDLE COMEDIES : The Merry Wives of Windsor; The Merchant of Venice; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night
A MONG the most happily conceived and popular of Shake-speare's plays, these comedies, with the exception of The Merchant of Venice, show very little development in his verse, though there is much new in the prose of the comic episodes. Two of them, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, have many evidences of hasty composition. Twelfth Night is brilliantly executed and is one of his outstanding achievements in comedy, yet linguistically there is little to mark a development from what had been achieved in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. This conclusion must not be identified with any assumption that much in these comedies is not new, for indeed all is most fresh and attractive. In Much Ado About Nothing the plot has a dexterity worthy of a better theme, and Benedick and Beatrice are more mature than any previous characters in the comedies: As You Like It has a careless audacity in technique and a measureless charm. The whole however is constructed without the genius of the writer being fully stretched, with a gracious and seemingly unlabouring ease. At last, almost as if he realised that the end had come of this particular way of writing he gathered up the dominant motives into Twelfth Night and gave them their final and most perfect expression. Achievement, then, there is in plenty though it is not in the main a linguistic development.
