Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/125

Rh What you Will (1607) and The Dutch Courtezan (1605) are Marston's most tolerable comedies, because the least pretentious. The former, a slight farce largely indebted for its plot to Plautus's Amphitruo, was probably written shortly after Cynthia's Revels. There are allusions to the quarrel of the players. Jonson's arrogant style is parodied; and a couple of characters loosely connected with the plot represent Jonson and Marston. These excrescences do not improve the play, which in itself is a jovial little farce concerned with second marriages and mistaken identities. The Dutch Courtezan (1605) is still better. It relates the attempted vengeance of a forsaken mistress. Mr Bullen has, I venture to think, overrated the character of Francheschina, who is drawn crudely and perfunctorily. A finer treatment would have changed the whole tone of the play. But on a quite low level the comedy is good—the story well managed, the characters fairly human and attractive, the style vigorous, and the humour of the by-plot, in which a rascally vintner is befooled, lively and genial though coarse. The best play with which Marston's name is connected, however, is undoubtedly the delightful comedy Eastward Ho (1605), in which he collaborated with Jonson and Chapman, and for which they were all three imprisoned. How much he contributed to that amusing picture of citizen types, astute rogues, absurd adventures, and comical repentance, we cannot tell; but the geniality of its humour is, I believe, that of the real Marston, whom Nature never intended for tragedian or satirist. He was a journeyman writer