Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild and
wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of "young satyrs,
tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned"; during certain scenes we seem almost to
stand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the first lisping
and laughing accents run over from her baby lips in bubbling rhyme; but
when the note changes we recognise the speech of gods. For the first
time in our literature the higher key of poetic or romantic comedy is
finely touched to a fine issue. The divine instrument fashioned by
Marlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at once its new sweet use in
the hands of Shakespeare. The way is prepared for _As You Like It_ and
the _Tempest_; the language is discovered which will befit the lips of
Rosalind and Miranda.
What was highest as poetry in the _Comedy of Errors_ was mainly in rhyme;
all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by AEgeon and the
appearance in the last scene of his wife: in _Love's Labour's Lost_ what
was highest was couched wholly in blank verse; in the _Two Gentlemen of
Verona_ rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance, and there are no
passages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exalted
eloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a
simple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the whole
poem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony.
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