The satirical references to Jonson are more
pointed and effective in this comedy than in either of the two plays
last mentioned; but its best claim to remembrance is to be sought in the
admirable soliloquy which relates the seven years' experience of the
student and his spaniel. Marston is too often heaviest when he would
and should be lightest--owing apparently to a certain infusion of
contempt for light comedy as something rather beneath him, not wholly
worthy of his austere and ambitious capacity. The parliament of pages in
this play is a diverting interlude of farce, though a mere irrelevance
and impediment to the action; but the boys are less amusing than their
compeers in the anonymous comedy of "Sir Giles Goosecap," first
published in the year preceding: a work of genuine humor and invention,
excellent in style if somewhat infirm in construction, for a reprint of
which we are indebted to the previous care of Marston's present editor.
Far be it from me to intrude on the barren and boggy province of
hypothetical interpretation and controversial commentary; but I may
observe in passing that the original of Simplicius Faber in "What you
Will" must surely have been the same hanger-on or sycophant of Ben
Jonson's who was caricatured by Dekker in his "Satiromastix" under the
name of Asinius Bubo.
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