use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare
against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness,
through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In
Shakspeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of
its place;--he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,--does not
make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek,
humane, and temperate; he has no benevolent butchers, nor any
sentimental rat-catchers.

4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot. The interest in
the plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not 'vice
versa', as in almost all other writers; the plot is a mere canvass and
no more. Hence arises the true justification of the same stratagem being
used in regard to Benedict and Beatrice,--the vanity in each being
alike. Take away from the Much Ado About Nothing all that which is not
indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at
best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any
other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have
answered the mere necessities of the action;--take away Benedict,
Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the character of
Hero,--and what will remain? In other writers the main agent of the plot
is always the prominent character; in Shakspeare it is so, or is not so,
as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the
plot. Don John is the main-spring of the plot of this play; but he is
merely shown and then withdrawn.

5. Independence of the interest on the story as the ground-work of the
plot. Hence Shakspeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It
was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented
or recorded such as had one or other, or both, of two recommendations,