Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/129

Rh comedies of city manners and humours, A New Wonder and A Match at Midnight. In 1624 his Game of Chess, a skit on the proposed Spanish marriage, brought the author and actors into considerable danger.

A Trick to catch the Old One (1608), The Phœnix (1607), Michaelmas Term (1607), Your Five Gallants (lic. 1608), A Mad World, my Masters! (1608), and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1630) are the best of Middleton's farcical comedies. The type is the popular one. The recurrent characters are gay gallants, greedy usurers, citizens and their wives, roarers, bawds, and punks. Every one gulls every one else, and the situations are often highly ludicrous, or must have been so to a not too squeamish taste. Middleton is on the side of youth. Young men induce usurers to compete with one another for the hand of a disguised courtesan, or by ingenious devices rob their old uncles when these refuse to provide for them. Middleton's indelicacy is almost always relieved by real humour. Even A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is as amusing as it is outrageous.

In his more romantic plays Middleton betrays the inability which besets all the minor dramatists, to invest a whole play with the poetic charm which illumines portions. What is beautiful and what is repulsive are found side by side. Shakespeare is not exempt from the same fault, but his splendour outshines his spots. In The Spanish Gipsy (1653), based on a couple of Cervantes' novels, the scenes of merriment and romance cannot make us forget those of