Much of Shakespeare’s humor is delicately suffused through his plays.  Many of them either ripple with the laughter of his characters or are lighted with their smiles.  We may pass pleasant hours in the company of his joyous creations, such as Rosalind in As You Like It, or Portia in The Merchant of Venice, or Puck as the spokesman for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who good naturedly exclaims:—­

  “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

or Viola and her companions in Twelfth Night, or Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, or Ariel in The Tempest playing pranks on the bewildered mariners and singing of the joys of life which come as a reward for service:—­

  “Merrily, merrily shall I live now
  Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”

Shakespeare is also the one English author who is equally successful in depicting the highest type of both comedy and tragedy.  He has the power to describe even a deathbed scene so as to invest it with both humor and pathos.  Dame Quickly’s lines in Henry V., on the death of Falstaff, show this capacity.

The next greatest English writer is lacking in this sense of humor.  John Milton could write the tragedies of a Paradise Lost and a Samson Agonistes, but he could not give us the humor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, or As You Like It.  We have seen that the next greatest dramatic genius, Marlowe, has little sense of humor.  Mrs. Browning correctly describes the plays of Shakespeare as filled—­

  “With tears and laughters for all time.”

Moral Ideals.—­To show the moral consequences of acts was the work which most appealed to him.  Banquo voiced the comprehensiveness of moral law when he said, “In the great hand of God I stand.”  There is here great divergence between the views of Shakespeare and of Bacon.  Dowden says:—­

“While Bacon’s sense of the presence of physical law in the universe was for his time extraordinarily developed, he seems practically to have acted upon the theory that the moral laws of the world are not inexorable, but rather by tactics and dexterity may be cleverly evaded.  Their supremacy was acknowledged by Shakespeare in the minutest as well as in the greatest concerns of human life.”

By employing “tactics” in sending Hamlet on a voyage to England, the king hoped to avoid the consequences of his crime.  Macbeth in vain tried every stratagem to “trammel up the consequence.”  Goneril and Regan drive their white-haired father out into the storm; but even in King Lear, where the forces of evil seem to run riot, let us note the result:—­