Hazlitt has praised the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the
effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the
humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary
infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps
him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production
of evidence against himself; and the scene is no doubt theatrically
effective: but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to
this comparatively unworthy consideration: the pure, high-minded,
noble-hearted lady, whose loyal and passionate affection was so simply
and so attractively displayed in the first part of her story, is so
lamentably humiliated by the cunning and daring immodesty of such a
device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should
have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and
her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade
in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and
vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.
But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us
understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of
"Twelfth Night" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the demerits of the
two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross,
so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist
with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness
and smoothness of workmanship as, even at his very hastiest and crudest,
was Thomas Heywood.
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