In the second period this
gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a
boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it
would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced
and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh
photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and
brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great
and perfect tragedy: for the porter in _Macbeth_ makes hardly an
exception worth naming. It is when we come upon the singular little
group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly
describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as
tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due
catastrophe--it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings
of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless
disappearance from the stage of _King Lear_ seems for once a sure sign of
inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so
nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry
of Pandarus and Thersites.
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