A more
brilliant and amusing play than "The Dutch Courtesan," better composed,
better constructed, and better written, it would be difficult to
discover among the best comic and romantic works of its incomparable
period. The slippery and sanguinary strumpet who gives its name to the
play is sketched with such admirable force and freedom of hand as to
suggest the existence of an actual model who may unconsciously have sat
for the part under the scrutiny of eyes as keen and merciless as ever
took notes for a savagely veracious caricature--or for an unscrupulously
moral exposure. The jargon in which her emotions are expressed is as
Shakespearean in its breadth and persistency as that of Dr. Caius or
Captain Fluellen; but the reality of those emotions is worthy of a
less farcical vehicle for the expression of such natural craft and
passion. The sisters, Beatrice and Crispinella, seem at first too
evidently imitated from the characters of Aurelia and Phoenixella in the
earliest surviving comedy of Ben Jonson; but the "comedy daughter," as
Dickens (or Skimpole) would have expressed it, is even more coarsely and
roughly drawn than in the early sketch of the more famous dramatist.
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