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      Who loves to lie with me," —

      might be the very leit-motiv of As You Like It.

      – here you have the treachery of Don John, and the vacillating mistrust of Claudio, succinctly summed up.

      thus the Clown in Twelfth Night becomes mouthpiece of the dénouement which was never long in doubt.

      To every man his métier: and that of William Shakespeare was not to be the mouthpiece of those "spacious times," tingling with sensation, with excitement, with huge enterprise. Exhibiting, throughout, the curious patient persistence of the essential Midlander, he had worked his way right up from the bottom rung of the ladder. The ill-mated young man of twenty-three, who had left Stratford with a travelling company of players in 1587, – who had (whether conscious or unconscious of his genius) plodded industriously onward as a literary hack of drama – tinkering, adapting, re-shaping and re-writing the stale old stock plays, until they suffered a change "into something rich and strange," – whose colossal greatness his contemporaries were not great enough to appreciate; – that same man was now arriving – like so many other Midlanders – at a point where criticism could not touch him. He had gained no giddy pinnacle of sudden success, but a safe and solid summit of assured position. That he should attain it in his own way, and after his own methods, – that, after all, was his business. There were plenty of other poets to utter Arma virumque cano. William Shakespeare preferred to link himself with thoughts of Italy, and fairy-folk, and "the sea-coast of Bohemia," – with youth and palaces and forests, and fortunate or frustrate love. His range and scope were enormous, if he cared: his output astonishing, if he chose… Meanwhile, it was mid-summer and there were roses…