As for the other member of Webster's famous
triad, I fear that the most indulgent sentence passed on Master Dekker,
if sent up for punishment on the charge of bad language and impudence,
could hardly in justice be less than Orbilian or Draconic. But he was
apparently if not assuredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare of
presenting the most infamous of murderers as an erring but pardonable
transgressor, not unfit to be received back with open arms by the wife
he has attempted, after a series of the most hideous and dastardly
outrages, to despatch by poison. The excuse for Heywood is simply that
in his day as in Chaucer's the orthodox ideal of a married heroine was
still none other than Patient Grizel: Shakespeare alone had got beyond
it.
The earlier of these two plays, "a pleasant" if somewhat sensational
"comedy entitled 'How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,'" is written for
the most part in Heywood's most graceful and poetical vein of verse,
with beautiful simplicity, purity, and fluency of natural and musical
style. In none of his plays is the mixture or rather the fusion of
realism with romance more simply happy and harmonious: the rescue of the
injured wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, like Juliet,
she has been laid while under the soporific influence of a supposed
poison could hardly have been better or more beautifully treated by any
but the very greatest among Heywood's fellow-poets.
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