The various stories are usually juxtaposited, not fused, and are allowed to stay crudely unconnected, the work ofttimes of different authors. In dramatic workshops, such or such a craftsman had for his part to provide farcical underplots, to be inserted anyhow into the main one, the subject of which he did not even need to know. It was enough to suppose, afterwards, that a character in plot A had a relation in plot B, and all was said and done. Rowley, for example, shone in that kind of work, and provisioned, to their hearts' content, authors of plots A with lewd iests, coarse or gruesome incidents for piots B. Scenes thus succeeded one another, differing in tone and subject, and disposed as on a checker board, white squares and black squares. The public was delighted; it wanted to have, and, until well within the eighteenth century, did have, its plots and underplots.

No need to say that adventures, surprises, errors, 2 recognitions, sorcerers and magic, 3 apparitions, death torments, scenes in madhouses or worse places are employed more than ever before. Thus, too, in order to amuse, recourse is had to buffoons, to foolish constables, to the use of foreign languages, provincial

William Rowley, author and player, born ab. 1585, wrote mainly in collaboration. See, as an example of the kind of underplots he was renowned for, the madhouse scenes in Middleton's "Changeling." By him also, a prose description of low-life in London: “A Search for Money, or the lamentable complaint for the losse of . . . Mounsier l'Argent," 1609, Percy Soc. 1840; curious, but of much less merit than Dekker's and Middleton's similar works. W. Rowley must not be confounded with Ralph Rowley, also an actor, nor with Samuel Rowley, also a dramatist, all three of the same period.

* For instance, in "What You Will," by Marston, pr. 1607.

3 See, for example, "The Devil's Charter; a tragoedie conteining the Life and Death of Pope Alexander the Sixt," by Barnabe Barnes (above, H. pp. 397, 403, 416), acted in 1606 before the king, printed in 1607, mod. ed. by McKerrow, in Bang's "Materialen," 1905. Like Dr. Faustus, the pope sells himself to the devil; a hideous picture of revolting vices fills the play.

4

• Hence such comical scenes as the one in Middleton's “A Mad World,”

dialects and gibberish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Cornish, Gipsy,' already in favour with Shakespeare. The search for incidents adaptable to the stage is extended to new countries; to France and Italy is now added Spain; from the early years of the seventeenth century, her novel-writers are constantly resorted to for plots and characters; and the illustrious Lazarillo de Tormes has the honour of appearing on the boards at the call of Middleton.2 The wealth of events is, in these authors' eyes, of supreme importance. Even when their subject would seem to make a study of characters imperative, they give the first place to the intrigue. Although very close to the comedy of manners and, at times, of characters, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, even Middleton, and below them, Heywood, Dekker, and their peers, persist in depending on the curiosity excited by incidents to draw an audience to their plays.

Poetry becomes rarer. This supreme resource of Shakespeare, always at his disposal to veil a defect of

where Sir Bounteous, seeing a real constable come in to arrest his nephew, mistakes him for a player, and observes: "They put all their fools to the constable's part still" (v. 2).

Italian in "Antonio and Mellida," by Marston; Dutch in the "Dutch Courtezan" of the same, and in the "Shoemakers Holiday" of Dekker; Gipsy in "More Dissemblers besides Women," by Middleton; Cornish in “A Fair Quarrel," also by Middleton; Dutch, Italian and French in “English-men for my Money," by Haughton (1598, pr. 1616), and in the use of these three languages consists all the fun of the play; German in "Alphonsus Emperor of Germany," attributed (wrongly, it seems) to Chapman ; English mangled and mispronounced by a Welshman, described as a nephew of Rice ap Davy ap Morgan ap Evan ap Jones ap Geoffrey, in a 'Royal King," by Thomas Heywood. This easy means of amusing the crowd had been early practised by the authors of miracle plays (above, I. p. 480) and of moralities. In the newly recovered "Enterlude of Welth and Helth," entered 1557, most of the fun comes from drunken Hance, entering "with a Dutch song" and speaking Anglo-Dutch throughout the play.

In "Blurt, Master Constable," printed 1602. The "Lazarillo" had been translated into English with great success by D. Rowland, 1576, 6th ed. 1653; above, vol. II. p. 539.

composition, is but seldom accessible to his contemporaries and successors. With the master, even at his least happy moments, poetry is felt to be very near; the river at times flows under ground, but not far from the surface; it can be heard. With his successors, the enchanting rumour has been hushed, we are no longer under the continuous spell of the divine murmur. Here and there only, poetical patches are more or less cleverly set in, producing, they too, a chequered assemblage of black and white squares, in strong contrast, black ones predominating.

Terror is transformed into horror, freedom into obscenity; this sign of decay is most apparent. Under the two first Stuarts, a group of dramatists was formedMarston, Ford, Webster, Tourneur-who made horror their speciality, while others, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, used as their main condiment scenes of shameless ribaldry; neither group, moreover, refraining from using at need the other's recipe.

Marston gives, about 1600, "The History of Antonio and Mellida," and "Antonio's Revenge," written in that bombastic style ridiculed by Jonson in his “Poetaster": sombre pictures in which dark personages stand dimly discernible on a yet darker background. Antonio, disguised as an Amazon, while Mellida is disguised as a page, ends by disguising himself as a corpse (a frequent device); seeing the body, Piero, Duke of Venice, and the monster of the play, declares that if the dead

"The History of Antonio and Mellida. The first part. As it hath been sundry times acted by the children of Paules," 1602, 4to; "Antonio's Revenge. The second part," same date. John Marston, born ab. 1575, an Oxford student, B.A. 1594, composed plays from 1600 to 1607, then ceased to write for the stage and became a priest; d. 1634; "Works," ed. Bullen, 1887, 3 vols. 8vo. On Marston, lyrical and satirical poet, see above, vol. II. pp. 411 and 431. On his sources, see Koeppel, “Quellen-Studien,” Leipzig, 1895. On Montaigne's influence on him (and on Webster) see Ch. Crawford's articles in Notes and Queries, July 15, 1905, ff.

man were alive, he would give him his daughter. Antonio rises and takes him at his word. All this is but a kind of introduction. In the second part, Marston surpasses himself; the stage looks like a butcher's stall with human flesh retailed to customers. Piero and Antonio answer one another, crime for crime, in a prolonged duo; we have gone back to the days of Titus Andronicus and Barabas, we are retracing our steps and going down hill, decadence is truly beginning. Piero opens the second play, "unbraced, his arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand bloody and a torch in the other; Strotzo following him with a cord." Thus accoutred and accompanied, at that darkest hour of night when

no one moves,

Save meagre ghosts, Piero, and black thoughts,

he proceeds to hang up at his daughter's window the body of a man just butchered ("stab'd thick with blood"). In the next act the body is still there, and swings bleeding before the spectators. "Rot there," says Piero, who reveals to us what murders are coming next, and remarks:

I have been nursed in blood, and still have suck'd
The steam of reeking gore.

Antonio appears, "his arms bloody, bearing a torch and a poniard," just as Piero had, for now it is his turn. He has murdered in a church Julio, the son of his enemy, and he besprinkles with "these fresh reeking drops" the tomb of his own father, killed by the duke:

Antonio has read "Hamlet," the old play that Shakespeare was to transform, and he knows that, in a good drama of the sombre kind, the victim's widow marries the murderer. Every device, in this category of play, was employed time and time again; if it was of an extraordinary sort, it pleased best, but was used most and soon became that horrible thing, a stale wonder.1 Antonio is not mistaken: Maria really intends to marry her husband's murderer. The dead man's ghost, however, also knows the story of Hamlet, and as the unfortunate woman is drawing the curtain of her bed, she sees the ghost, sitting on the sheets. The apparition curses, then pardons her: "I pardon thee, poor soul." All hatred and revenge should be reserved for "that black incarnate fiend"-Claudius in "Hamlet,"Piero here. Antonio, no less well read, feigns folly to discover the secret of the tyrant.

Marston's "Sophonisba " and his " Insatiate Countesse" 2 belong to the same category: lust and murders! The revolting indecency of the last acts of "Sophonisba " passes all imagination. As for the countess of the second play, she has a husband and five principal paramours :

Three earls, one viscount, and this valiant Spaniard,
Are known to ha' been the fuel to her lust;

Besides her secret lovers.

I Widows marrying the murderer of their husband, in Shakespeare's "Richard III." and "Hamlet"; in the first "Hamlet," in Marston's "Antonio and Mellida"; murderer trying to marry his victim's mother, in Chettle's "Hoffman," acted in 1602, one of the blackest of these dramas: at the opening of the play a cave is shown, before which swings the skeleton of a man who was hanged there; the play continues "qualis ab incepto"; tortures, murders, and revenges; at the end we find ourselves once more before the same cave, but with three corpses dangling instead of one.

2 "The Wonder of Women, Or the Tragedie of Sophonisba, as it hath beene sundry times Acted at the Blacke Friers," first printed 1606; "The Insatiate Countesse. A Tragedie: Acted at White- Fryers,” pr. 1613.