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QUERIES FOR DISCUSSION

Beatrice "is a tarter,--and, if a natural woman, is not a pleasing representative of her sex." She "will provoke her Benedicke to give her much and just conjugal castigation," says Campbell. Is he right, and will Benedicke feel so?--or is Swinburne right, who says she is "a decidedly more perfect woman than could properly or permissibly have trod the stage of Congreve or Molière" and who speaks of her "light true heart"?

Is the superficial Claudio worthy of Hero?

Are the faults in the plot of the Play, such as are necessitated by the design of using the characters themselves and their "noting" of one another as the source of events, and, therefore, in the last analysis not faults, a study of their relation to the design leading us, as Hartley Coleridge puts it, never to censure Shakespeare without finding reason to eat our words?

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