Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/132

112 farce. One can imagine what Jonson thought of a play on classical history containing such songs as—

Small coals here! Thus go the cries in Rome's fair town, First they go up street, and then they go down;"

and—

Arise, arise, my Juggy, my Puggy; Arise! get up, my dear!"

Heywood's most individual plays are the two domestic tragedies, A Woman killed with Kindness (1607, mentioned by Henslowe in 1603), and The English Traveller (1633). They are in the same key as Arden of Feversham, but adultery is not in Heywood's play followed by murder. He tells a story of cruel unfaithfulness and bitter repentance with simplicity and pathos, but with no transfiguring breath of poetry. The style and morality are somewhat humdrum, and the characters a little disposed to whine.

Heywood's romantic comedies, The Fair Maid of the West, or a Girl worth Gold (1631), A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634), A Challenge for Beauty (1636), Fortune by Land and Sea (1655), The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), and others, describe themselves—stories constructed in the most careless fashion, full of incident by sea and land, patriotic and kindly sentiment, farcical humour, but of the slightest poetic and dramatic interest. His most successful comic type is the careless, shameless, quick-witted knave such as Reignalt in The English Traveller.