I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of
this play I have never come across in all the range of that
excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer
was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller
relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general
workmanship.[1]
[Footnote 1: As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I
give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy
play:
Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find
A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined
To any bendings: lest his youthful brows
Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs
With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste
Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste,
The body feels consumption: good or bad kings
Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear springs.
Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil
Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.
The vigorous melody of these "masculine numbers" is not more remarkable
for its virile force and honied fluency than is the lighter dialogue of
the play for such brilliant wit or lambent humor as flashes out in
pleasantries like this:
_King_.
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