Dr Johnson was the last critic who dared to say that Shakespeare’s most characteristic and most inspired work lay in his comedies. The Romantics, putting an exaggerated value on tragedy as in some way nearer to the heart of the matter, degraded the comedies to the status of pot-boilers; and even to-day we have hardly escaped from the Romantics’ spell. We have one expounder of the comedies for every ten on the tragedies; and for a Granville-Barker to stoop to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or an Edith Evans to Rosalind, is exceptional.

We may not agree with Johnson that the comedies deserve more effort than the tragedies, but clearly they require more if they are to make a comparable impression on a modern audience. Tragedy is large in gesture and effect, and even when its overtones are lost and the subsidiary strokes bungled, its main import can hardly be missed. Comedy depends much more on detail, on delicate adjustments of balance and of contrast; it seeks to reproduce the climate rather than the actual predicaments of real life and its method is rather allusiveness than direct presentation. Comedy has more and finer points of attachment to the world in which it is composed than has tragedy. For this reason, comedy dates the more rapidly and the more thoroughly, and after a lapse of years a tragedy based even on so fantastic a convention as Fletcher's is easier to grasp than a comedy of Jonson or Middleton, for all its firm grounding in human nature. Tragedy can be understood in the original, as it were, even by those unacquainted with the tongue; whereas comedy, to be appreciated by a modern audience, must undergo some degree of translation into modern terms.