Oriana disguised as an Italian lady, and two persons disguised as Merchants discovered above. Enter, below, the Young Man disguised as a Factor, and Mirabel.

Y. Man. Look ye, sir, there she is; you see how busy.

Methinks you are infinitely bound to her for her journey.

Mir. How gloriously she shows! She is a tall woman.

Y. Man. Of a fair size, sir. My master not being at home,

I have been so out of my wits to get her

26 fail.

27 fastidious.

Pin.

(Music.)

Enter Mirabel, Pinac, and Belleur.

What a state she keeps! How far off they sit from her!

How rich she is! Aye, marry, this shows bravely! Bel. She is a lusty wench, and may allure a good man;

But, if she have a tongue, I'll not give twopence for her.

There sits my Fury; how I shake to see her! Y. Man. Madam, this is the gentleman. Mir. How sweet she kisses!

She has a spring dwells on her lips, a paradise!

We'll along with ye: We see you are grown so witty by your journey,

We cannot chicose but step out too. This lady

We mean to wait upon as far as Italy. Bel. I'll travel into Wales, amongst the mountains,

In hope they cannot find me.

Ros.
If you go further,
So good and free society we hold ye,
We'll jog along too.

Pin.
Are you so valiant, lady?
Lil. And we'll be merry, sir, and laugh.

Pin.

We'll go by sea.

Lil.

It may be Why, 't is the only voyage! I love a sea-voyage, and a blust'ring tempest;

And let all split!

Ros. We'll learn to drink, and swagger too.

She'll beat me!Lady, I'll live at home.

Bel.

Ros.

And I'll live with thee; And we'll keep house together.

Bel.
I'll keep hounds first:
And those I hate right heartily.
Pin.
I go for Turkey;
And so, it may be, up into Persia.
Lil. We cannot know too much; I'll travel
with ye.

Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), with a Cambridge and Gray's Inn education behind him, was by 1612 writing for Henslowe, and about 1604 began the series of realistic comedies of London life which established his reputation. He also wrote a considerable number of masques and Lord Mayor's pageants, and held the post of City Chronologer from 1620 till his death. The most striking incident of his career was connected with his play The Game at Chess, satirizing the proposed marriage of Prince Charles with a Spanish princess, which roused the anger of the Spanish ambassador and led to a warrant for the arrest of the players and author. William Rowley (1585?-post 1637), actor and playwright of whose life we know nothing, did most of his work in collaboration, with Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, and others. The year 1614, when the Prince's Company, for whom Rowley was writing, and the Lady Elizabeth's men, who had been acting Middleton's plays, were united, is the date assigned for the beginning of the collaboration which, next to that of Beaumont and Fletcher, was most fruitful of good work.

an

Whatever the circumstances that brought Middleton and Rowley together, the partnership was a fortunate one, for it produced two plays of the first water, A Fair Quarrel (1616) and The Changeling (1623). By 1614 Middleton had written most of the comedies which stamp him as the chief realist of his time. A Mad World, My Masters, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A Trick to Catch the Old One, No Wit, No Help like a Woman's, racy, bustling plays of intrigue, the plot centering in the pursuit of a rich widow by a young scapegrace, or the fooling of a miserly father or greedy usurer, introducing just the sort of figures that would come under the observation of a young lawyer with a keen eye for the comédie humaine, prodigal sons beset by creditors, country gentlemen swindled by sharpers, widows with more money than prudence, old men overreaching themselves in craft, knaves and swaggerers of every sort, constables and police magistrates, once an Amazon in doublet and hose, courtesans masquerading as fine ladies -all the seething underworld of London set forth with the veracity of first-hand

ac

quaintance-plays of this kind are Middleton's contribution to the comedy of manners. Not a pleasant world, my masters, and depicted without a touch of romance, without moral ideality, without a breath of the fresh air that blows through The Shoemakers' Holiday. The plotting is deft, the action is brisk, the characters are firmly drawn, the dialogue, shifting easily from verse to prose and back, is clear and fluent. Rowley, on the other hand, both in style and structure offers a striking contrast. His plotting is slovenly; the conception may be good, for the man had dramatic instinct, but the execution is frequently marred by a huddling of incident and violent straining for theatrical effect. The verse exhibits the same faults; it is often rugged to uncouthness, shambling in meter, exaggerated in its effort for distinction of phrase. Rowley's humor is characteristic: genuine, but tending to buffoonery, rough and ready, and all too commonly depending on mere horseplay and on violent attempts at verbal cleverness, for Rowley was an inveterate bad punster. Yet with all his faults Rowley displays an honesty and human sympathy, a capacity for imagination of the higher, idealizing sort, not felt in Middleton's more artistic product.

An ill-assorted pair this, we should be tempted to say, with no promise of the sympathy of taste and poetic gift which made the union of Beaumont and Fletcher so happy. Yet something in each man seemed to call forth the best in the other, and in their first united work there comes an indescribable lift, a nobility of conception and a power to interpret life and express it in terms of poetry, utterly unheralded by the previous work of either man. A Fair Quarrel, with its problem of the attitude of a finely grained youth toward a mother whose dishonor herself has admitted (though untruthfully, in order to prevent the boy from fighting a duel), and toward her accuser, strikes the reader as surprisingly modern in idea, and in execution the plot is not unworthy of the theme. But it is in the romantic tragedy, The Changeling, of the same class as Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, that Middleton and Rowley reach their highest achievement and produce one of the greatest plays of the period.