Certain New Elucidations of Shakespeare 43 



prospective lovers, whom the lack of ready money, on the part 

 of the intending wooer, keeps asunder."^ We naturally fall into 

 sympathy with Bassanio and Portia as hero and heroine of the 

 story to be told, and are thus provided with the ' consummation ' 

 necessary to hold us to the plot. We desire and expect that the 

 lovers shall have their will.'^^ Shylock's hesitancy in coming to 



22 Many critics, among whom Quilkr-Couch seems to enroll himself, 

 fall afoul of Bassanio as a fortune hunter. But manifestly, were Shake- 

 speare to make his hero a man ' of independent means,' he could not bring 

 Shylock into the plot. Nor could he use a ' poor but honest ' suitor, from 

 outside Portia's class. So he needs must provide some person whose 

 estate is ' involved,' but not beyond repair. And finally, we must not 

 forget that a bride, in Shakespeare's age, from royalty down was expected 

 to bring to the compact something besides herself, as an earnest of her 

 worth, — namely, a respectable dotj which as a matter of course was to be 

 placed in her husband's hands as his or for his use. 



22 If we have not discerned the fact already, we shall perhaps be inter- 

 ested to find that Shakespeare's dramatic scheme holds good typically of 

 the modern novel. At some point, within the early chapters, correspondent 

 to the second scene or situation in a play of Shakespeare, the reader sights 

 and desires a specific consummation as the outcome of the forces and con- 

 ditions introduced. The vision and desire of this conclusion will spur the 

 reader on through four or five hundred pages of happenings till the end is 

 reached. Generally, in a standard example, as Scott's Quentin Durward 

 or Meredith's Evan Harrington, the whole number of pages divided by 

 five will designate parts roughly answering to acts in a play of Shake- 

 speare. The consummation, in the second of these novels, is sighted and 

 desired in Chapter IV. The minor and subjective obstruction, which is the 

 refusal of the hero to aspire to Rose, is resolved against our wishes when 

 Evan hurries off, at the end of Chapter IX, to learn tailoring in London. 

 This, we remember, should mark the close of a First Act, and comes here 

 almost exactly at the point where the first fifth of the book concludes. 

 The greater obstacle, which is the presumably final separation of the pair, 

 is resolved according to our wishes when Evan is trapped and brought to 

 Beckley Court. The subjective climax, at which we prefigure the issue, is 

 reached at the close of Chapter XXIII. The Fourth Act of this comedy, 

 by the author's explicit notification, ends with Chapter XXXVII. Mere- 

 dith seems to have divined Shakespeare's idea of form. 



In play or novel, some incentive, some allurement, is needed to arouse 

 and sustain interest in audience or reader. Shakespeare's plan is only a 

 fully developed form of Aristotle's postulate of ' a beginning, a middle, 

 and an end.' Shakespeare's fellow dramatists and some moderns follow 

 close upon this trail. But they often delay the consummation, they multi- 



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