This, however, is beside the question.
It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the _Comedy of Errors--Love's
Labour's Lost--Romeo and Juliet_. It is so like that had we fallen upon
it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word
in all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and
instinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of
Shakespeare than any passage in _King Edward III_. And no Sham
Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless
object of his howling homage the authorship of _Green's Tu Quoque_.
Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which
the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in
it of Shakespeare's early notes--the catch at words rather than play on
words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist:
Countess, albeit my business urgeth me,
It shall attend while I attend on thee.
And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we
pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.
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