It was many a year before Dick Pike had earned the honor of
commemoration by his hand or by any other poet's that Heywood had won
his spurs as the champion presenter--if I may be allowed to revive the
word--of his humbler and homelier countrymen under the light of a no
less noble than simple realism. "The Fair Maid of the Exchange" is a
notable example of what I believe is professionally or theatrically
called a one-part piece. Adapting Dr. Johnson's curiously unjust and
inept remark on Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII."--the play in which,
according to the principles or tenets of the new criticism which walks
or staggers by the new light of a new scholarship, "the new Shakspere"
may or must have been assisted by Flitcher (why not also by Meddletun,
Messenger, and a few other _novi homines?_), we may say, and it may be
said this time with some show of reason, that the genius of the author
limps in and limps out with the Cripple. Most of the other characters
and various episodical incidents of the incomposite story are alike, if
I may revive a good and expressive phrase of the period, hastily and
unskilfully slubbered up: Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate
example of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer of Moll's regard from
him to his friend is both childishly conceived and childishly contrived.
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