In "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon" the dramatic ability of Heywood, as
distinct from his more poetic and pathetic faculty, shows itself at its
best and brightest. There are not many much better examples of the sort
of play usually defined as a comedy of intrigue, but more properly
definable as a comedy of action. The special risk to which a purveyor of
this kind of ware must naturally be exposed is the tempting danger of
sacrificing propriety and consistency of character to effective and
impressive suggestions or developments of situation or event; the
inclination to think more of what is to happen than of the persons it
must happen to--the characters to be actively or passively affected by
the concurrence or the evolution of circumstances. Only to the very
greatest of narrative or dramatic artists in creation and composition
can this perilous possibility be all but utterly unknown. Poets of the
city no less than poets of the court, the homely Heywood as well as the
fashionable Fletcher, tripped and fell now and then over this awkward
stone of stumbling--a very rock of offence to readers of a more exacting
temper or a more fastidious generation than the respective audiences of
patrician and plebeian London in the age of Shakespeare.
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