If his most ambitious efforts at portraiture of character
are often faulty at once in color and in outline, some of his slighter
sketches have a freshness and tenderness of beauty which may well atone
for the gravest of his certainly not infrequent offences. The sweet
constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the
memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the
reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy and passionate
instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina
and Isabella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's plays are
better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of
the baser sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who
paints virtue better than vice, and has a happier hand at a hero's
likeness than at a villain's, must unquestionably be assigned to the
author of "Antonio and Mellida." Piero, the tyrant and traitor, is
little more than a mere stage property: like Mendoza in "The Malcontent"
and Syphax in "Sophonisba," he would be a portentous ruffian if he had a
little more life in him; he has to do the deeds and express the emotions
of a most bloody and crafty miscreant; but it is only now and then that
we catch the accent of a real man in his tones of cajolery or menace,
dissimulation or triumph.
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