*  Coleridge  was  evidently  inclined  to  regard  Dogberry  and  his  com-
panions as  instances  of  over- characterisation — '*  any  other  less  ingeniously
absurd  watchmen  and  night-constables  would,"  he  declares,  "  have
answered  the  mere  necessities  of  the  action "  {Lectures  and  Notes  on
Shakespeare^  p.  139).  But  Coleridge,  who  had  such  a  marvellous  power
of  discovering  things  which  Shakespeare  did  not  put  into  his  plays,  often
failed  to  see  what  he  did  put  there.  Dogberry  and  his  fellows  provide,
in  fact,  an  admirable  example  of  the  vital  dependence  of  action  upon
character.  Their  interview  with  Leonato  in  Act  III.,  scene  v.,  suffices
to  prove  this.
THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  251

most  obviously,  the  advantage  is  on  the  side  of  the
novelist,  especially  where  complexities  of  character
and  the  subtler  shadings  of  motive  and  passion  are
concerned.  When,  remembering  this,  we  join  with
such  advantage  his  practically  unrestricted  freedom
in  respect  alike  of  movement  and  of  space,  we  can
see  that  the  peculiarities  which  critics  sometimes
regard  as  the  artistic  imperfections  of  the  novel — its
wide  range,  its  looseness  of  structure,  its  eminently
personal  quality — really  give  it  an  enormous  superiority
to  the  drama  in  the  field  of  characterisation.  Here  we
have  one  among  several  reasons  which  go  far  to  explain
the  displacement  of  the  drama  by  prose  fiction  in  an
age  greatly  occupied  with  the  problems  of  the  inner
life.
