Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/130

110 rape and murder; and in The Old Law (1656) and A Fair Quarrel (1617), scenes and speeches of touching pathos and eloquent morality are surrounded by others of gay but coarse buffoonery.

The scenes in Middleton's tragedy The Changeling (1623, published 1653)—in which he collaborated with William Rowley—that lead up to and include the crisis, are some of the most powerful in the tragedy of criminal passion which the Elizabethan drama produced. Beatrice, the heroine, instigated by a sudden passion for Alsemero, bribes De Flores—a poor knight whose love she has hitherto treated with scorn—to murder her betrothed, and discovers too late that she is "the deed's creature," and in the power of a passion more ruthless and masterful than her own. The scene in which this discovery is slowly forced upon her is in its own terrible and brutal way one of the greatest in dramatic literature. Less poetic than Webster's work, it is more intense, every word more entirely relevant. The scenes which follow and the catastrophe are full of the grotesque and ugly details of Massinger's and Ford's tragedy, but the character of De Flores is preserved in sombre consistency throughout.

Women Beware Women (1657) is of the same type, a tragedy of lawless passion and ruthless crime followed by overwhelming vengeance. The catastrophe—attained through the common device of a play within a play—is the most complete holocaust recorded since and including The Spanish Tragedy. It has not the same strong central interest as The