52 L. A. Sherman 



Having said this in praise of a piece of good workmanship, I must in 

 fairness mention a piece of sheer botchwork. I mean the introduction of 

 Hymen in the last Act. To explain away this botch as an imposition upon 

 Shakespeare by another hand — to conjecture it as some hasty alternative 

 to satisfy the public censor, who objected to Church rites of marrriage on 

 the stage — would be as easy as it were accordant with the nice distinctions 

 of critical hypocrisy, were it not that Shakespeare, almost if not quite to 

 the end of his days, was capable of similar ineptitudes, such as the vision 

 of Posthumus, and the scroll dropped into his lap. You can explain away 

 one such lapse by an accident; but two scarcely, and three or four not at 

 all. That kind of artistic improbability runs almost in harmonical pro- 

 gression. Hymen in As You Like It is worse than Hecate in Macbeth. 



No, no, not worse. Hecate in Macbeth mars sublimity. 

 Hymen in As You Like It does nothing worse than offend good 

 taste. Yet one wonders how far one may revise sixteenth cen- 

 tury values by twentieth century standards. In Renaissance 

 times, Renaissance ideas and accessories were not yet staled. 

 There is reason for belief that Shakespeare's audiences liked to 

 see mythologic figures staged, just as readers of that day and 

 later liked classical quotations. Also, the vogue of personifica- 

 tion, as developed in the Moralities, was not yet denatured in the 

 general mind. Moreover, our mentor seems not to realize that 

 Shakespeare might convict him of inconsistency in his present 

 strictures. In another lecture, he holds The Tempest as the 

 greatest work of the Master, or even of literary genius for all 

 time. Yet in this play of The Tempest, which stands forever 

 without * botch ' or blot, we see Iris and Ceres and Juno ' enter ' 

 upon, the stage, and hear Ceres and Juno si^g^^ antiphonal bless- 

 ings upon Ferdinand and Miranda, and are barely saved from 



2*5 Had Shakespeare perhaps read Virgil's lines, — 



Ast ego qui divom incedo regina Jovisque 

 Et soror et conjunx, — 

 in the Grammar School of Stratford? There were certainly men in the 

 audiences of 1611 and later who remembered them, and were sensible of 

 the humor or enormity of setting these deities at the business of ' favor- 

 ing' Globe Theater patrons with specimens of their celestial skill. Did 

 Juno, we wonder, sing in alto or soprano falsetto? In Ben Jonson's 

 elaborate masque of Chloridia, rendered at Shrovetide, in 1630, Juno and 

 Iris sing being shown, among clouds and ' airy spirits,' in the opened 

 heavens. But all these parts were taken by ladies of the court. 



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