Sinon is a spirited and rather amusing
understudy of Thersites: his seduction of Cressida is a grotesquely
diverting variation on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of
the typical traitress; and though time and space are wanting for the
development or indeed the presentation of any more tragic or heroic
character, the rapid action of the last two acts is workmanlike in its
simple fashion: the complicated or rather accumulated chronicle of crime
and retribution may claim at least the credit due to straightforward
lucidity of composition and sprightly humility of style.
In "Love's Mistress; or, The Queen's Masque," the stage chronicler or
historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet:
his work has more of form and maturity, with no whit less of spontaneity
and spirit, simplicity and vivacity. The framework or setting of these
five acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the leading parts, is
sustained with lively and homely humor from induction to epilogue: the
story of Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier skill and more
graceful simplicity by Heywood than afterward by Moliere and Corneille;
though there is here nothing comparable with the famous and exquisite
love scene in which the genius of Corneille renewed its youth and
replumed its wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless and hapless
Theophile's.
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