Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/110

90 For Henslowe he patched old plays (The Spanish Tragedy in 1610-12), and wrote plays singly and in collaboration, of some of which the names have survived, as the Page of Plymouth and Richard Crookback. The Case is Altered (1609), in whatever year it was composed, represents perhaps a survival of this joint work, perhaps an early experiment of his own in comedy, romantic and fanciful in story and spirit, but regular in structure, careful in character-drawing, and touched with satire. The story is woven from the plots of the Aulularia and the Captivi, and Mr Swinburne has justly regretted "that the influence of Plautus on the style and method of Jonson was not more permanent and more profound."

But no poet except Milton ever knew his own mind better than Jonson. With Every Man in his Humour, which was produced at the Globe in 1597 or 1598 (the characters bearing then Italian names), his style appeared fully formed, and thereafter he could hardly think of the romantic novella comedy but with impatience and contempt. "I travail with another objection, Signor," says Mitis in Every Man out of his Humour, "which I fear will be enforced against the author ere I can be delivered of it." "What's that, sir?" replies Cordatus. Mitis. "That the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady's waiting-maid; some such cross-wooing, with a clown to their serving-man, better than to be thus near and