Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/41

Rh events and fabulous tranactions, and that incredibility, by which maturer knowledge is offended, was the chief recommendation of writings, to unkilul curioity.

Our author’s plots are generally borrowed from novels; and it is reaonable to uppoe, that he choe the mot popular, uch as were read by many, and related by more; for his audience could not have followed him through the intricacies of the drama, had they not held the thread of the tory in their hands.

The tories, which we now find only in remoter authors, were in his time acceible and familiar. The fable of As you like it, which is uppoed to be copied from Chaucer’s Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of thoe times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain Englih proe which the criticks have now to eek in Saxo Grammaticus.

His Englih hitories he took from Englih chronicles and Englih ballads; and as the ancient writers were made known to his countrymen by verions, they upplied him with new ubjects; he dilated ome of Plucarch’s lives into plays, when they had been tranlated by North.

His plots, whether hitorical or fabulous, are always crouded with incidents, by which the attention of a rude people was more eaily caught than by entiment or argumentation; and uch is the power of the marvellous, even over thoe who depie it, that every