The leading
young man of this comedy now under notice is represented as "a
wild-headed gentleman," and revealed as an abject ruffian of unredeemed
and irredeemable rascality. As much and even more may be said of the
execrable wretch who fills a similar part in an admirably written play
published thirty-six years earlier and verified for the first time as
Heywood's by the keen research and indefatigable intuition of Mr. Fleay.
The parallel passages cited by him from the broadly farcical underplots
are more than suggestive, even if they be not proof positive, of
identity in authorship: but the identity in atrocity of the two hideous
figures who play the two leading parts must reluctantly be admitted as
more serious evidence. The abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables
by comparison or confusion with indecent native ones is a simple and
school-boy-like sort of jest for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as
even more deserving of the birch than any boy on his stage, might have
pleaded the example of the captain of the school, and protested that his
humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were funnier and less forced
than Master Shakespeare's.
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