" It happily was not, however, in the printer's power to aver
that such impudently immetrical verse as Rowley at once breaks ground
with was ever in fashion with any of his famous fellows. Nothing can be
worse than the headlong and slipshod stumble of Dekker's at its worst;
but his were the faults of hurry and impatience and shamefully scamped
work: Rowley's, if I mistake not, is the far graver error of a
preposterous theory that broken verse, rough and untunable as the shock
of short chopping waves, is more dramatic and liker the natural speech
of men and women than the rolling and flowing verse of Marlowe and of
Shakespeare: which is as much liker life as it is nobler and more
satisfying in workmanship. In reading bad verse the reader is constantly
reminded that he is not reading good prose; and this is not the effect
produced by true realism--the impression left by actual intercourse or
faithful presentation of it.
The hagiology of this eccentric play is more like Shirley's in "St.
Patrick for Ireland" than Dekker's and Massinger's in "The Virgin
Martyr." Assuredly there is here nothing like the one incomparably
lovely dialogue of Dorothea with her attendant angel.
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