LATE in Measure for Measure, needing a handy explanation, Shake-
speare has Duke Vincentio thus justify his lie to Isabella about
Claudio's survival:

. . . I will make her ignorant of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts of despair,
When it is least expected.

(IV. iii. 113-15.)

This possibly marks the origin in the dramatist's mind--and cer-
tainly it is his first expression--of a psychological principle under-
lying the management of awarenesses in the romances of the lasting
storm: the idea of first making it seem that participants have suffered
or will suffer irreparable losses in a hostile or indifferent universe,
and then, in the end, of restoring all losses and putting a sudden
face of benignity on the universe. 'O you gods,' cries Pericles when
Thaisa dies in childbirth, 'Why do you make us love your goodly
gifts / And snatch them straight away?' Afterwards, the buffeted
Prince gains the first of his 'heavenly comforts' on finding Marina,
whom he had thought dead:

O Helicanus, strike me, honourd sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness.

(Per., v. i. 192-6.)

And he gains the rest with the recovery of 'dead' Thaisa:

No more, you gods! Your present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports.

( Ibid. v. iii. 40-41.)

In Cymbeline, in similar perplexity about universal purposes, Post-
humus's ghostly father berates the gods:

Sici. Why did you suffer Iachimo,
Slight thing of Italy,

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