Humor there is of a genuine plain-spun kind in the scenes
which introduce the King as the guest of the tanner; Hobs and his
surroundings, Grudgen and Goodfellow, are presented with a comic and
cordial fidelity which the painter of Falstaff's "villeggiatura," the
creator of Shallow, Silence, and Davy, might justly and conceivably have
approved. It is rather in the more serious or ambitious parts that we
find now and then a pre-Shakespearean immaturity of manner. The
recurrent burden of a jingling couplet in the cajoleries of the
procuress Mrs. Blague is a survival from the most primitive and
conventional form of dramatic writing not yet thoroughly superseded and
suppressed by the successive influences of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and
of Jonson; while the treatment of character in such scenes as that
between Clarence, Richard, and Dr. Shaw is crude and childish enough for
a rival contemporary of Peele. The beautiful and simple part of Ayre, a
character worthy to have been glorified by the mention and commendation
of Heywood's most devoted and most illustrious admirer, is typical of
the qualities which Lamb seems to have found most lovable in the
representative characters of his favorite playwright.
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