Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/56

 without order or proportion. There is some promise of humour in the part of a Puritan adulteress, but it comes to little or nothing; and the comedy rather collapses than concludes in a tangle of incongruous imbecilities and incoherent indecencies. The text is seemingly more corrupt than we find in Chapman's other plays, which are generally exempt from such gross and multitudinous misprints as deform the early editions of many Elizabethan dramatists; their chief defect is the confusion and the paucity of stage directions. In the opening speech of An Humorous Day's Mirth, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth verse, we must supply with some such reading as this the evident hiatus of sense and metre in the fifteenth:

But pure religion being but mental stuff, And sense, indeed, [being] all [but] for itself, 'Tis to be doubted," etc.

The text and arrangement of the scenes