Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/369

 m. APRIL 22, 1905.1 NOTES AND QUERIES.

301

LONDON, SATL'UUAY, APRIL Si, 1905.

C N T E N T S. -No. 69.

NOTES :-'Capt. Thomas Stukeley,' 301 Bacon as "Glen- dower," 302 Barah Outran, Robert Kmmet, and Major Sirr's Papers Kaster Eggs, 303 Master Sepulchre Palm Sunday and Easter Customs A Military Execution Rogestvensky, 304 To-day: To-morrow "Yuloh ": 'Laodah": " Circum-Baikal" Wotton's Letters Polo- nius and Lord Burleigh : Cecil and Montano, 305 Sir Timothy Baldwin Alexander Luders, 306 Brian Boru : Concobar Foot-warmers in Church, 307.

QUERIBS : Tenses in Fiction Mr. Moxhay, Leicester Square Showman, 307 Lawrance Family of Bath Paint- ing of Loom Jennings Arms Prince Albert as Poet and Musical Composer Hallet Family, 303 Wordsworth's Highland Girl Toastmaster Hooper : Elderton D. B. Warden Bookbinding " Legenvre "Epigram on a Hose Lynde : Delalyude St. Julian's Pater Noster Buse Surname Amberskins : Chocolate Recipe, 309.

RB PLIES -. Palindrome Windsor Castle Sentry, 310 John Butler, M.P. for Sussex Queen of Duncan II. De Morgan : Turville, 311 Great Seal of Scotland Penny Wares Wanted King's Cock-Crower, 312 Irish Folk-lore Martello Towers Francis Douce Spratt Family Dr. James Barry Haswell Family, 313 Horseshoes for Luck" February (ill dyke "Battle-axe Guard, 315 Sir James Cotter St. Aylo'tt Heraldic Vadstena Church- War Medals Jacobean Houses in Fleet Street, 315 Wooden Fonts Bacon or Usher? Bibliographies Turing : Bamierman, 316' Directions to Churchwardens' Small Parishes Raleigh's ' Historic of the World' Shorter: Walpole House of An.jou Russian Names, 317 Twins Tigernacus Cureton's Militants, 318.

NOTES ON BOOKS :' Augustiui Dacti Libell us ''Piers Plowman' modernized by Skeat Tennyson's Poems 'The English Catalogue of Booki'' Illuminated Manu- scripts '" Cameo Classics" "York Library " loter- mediaire' ' Folk-Lore ' ' The Publishers' Weekly' ' The Library Journal.'

'CAPT. THOMAS STUKELEY.' AMONGST the best of the less-known plays of the so-called Elizabethan era is ' The Famous History of the Life and Death of Capt. Thomas Stukeley,' included in Simp- son's 'School of Shakspere.' Of the plays of that great era accessible to me this was one of the few with which I was totally un- acquainted ; and it was not until February of this year that I embarked upon its perusal. Expecting little literary merit in the play, which has been favoured with none of the praise so generously bestowed upon the work of even the lesser dramatists of the period, I was afforded a most agreeable surprise. In the first three acts the character of Stukeley is magnificently conceived and excellently sustained ; and the play contains some scenes that would do no discredit to any play of the period notably the humorous third scene of the first act (in Stukeley's lodgings), and, in quite a different vein, the scene of farewell between Stukeley and his wife. It is to the former of these scenes that I wish to draw particular attention, not on account of its merits, but because it seems to me that the authorship of it can scarcely be a matter of doubt to any one acquainted with

the characteristics of our leading dramatic writers.

Of all the dramatists of that golden era of English literature there is one whose handi- work can ordinarily be picked out without hesitation by those who have studied his methods and his mannerisms. The writer in question is John Fletcher, who created a unique medium for the expression of his dramatic ideas a blank verse as different from that of Shakspere as it, in its turn, differed from the monotonous sing-song of the overrated Peele. The chief character- istics of the very flexible indeed, too flex- ible verse of Fletcher are its abundance of feminine endings, the frequency with which the over-syllable is accented, the tendency to anapaestic verse, and the reversion to the system of end-stopt lines from which English blank verse had been emancipated by a greater than he. There were other drama- tists who employed feminine endings, but none who employed them with anything ap- proaching the frequency of Fletcher, and none who ventured on triple and quadruple endings to the extent that he did. He stands out even more by virtue of his use of the accented over-syllable ; for, though it was adopted by both Middleton and Massinger, neither used it so extensively as its originator. He is almost as distinguishable by the body of his verse as by its endings, by reason of its con- taining not only frequent anapaests, but not unseldom three or four unaccented syllables standing together. In no one of these respects does his verse stand quite alone ; but it is absolutely unique in the combi- nation of them. His plays are also cha- racterized by absence of rime and, except in his early work, by absence of prose.

That this verse of Fletcher's was not a matter of gradual evolution, but a deliberate invention, is shown not only by the adoption of a novelty in the emphatic over-syllable, but also by the reversion to the old-fashioned end-stopt line. It therefore came upon me as a very great surprise to discover in the third scene of the first act of ' Stukeley ' an anticipation of every one of the prime cha- racteristics of Fletcher. I was the more astounded because I was under the impres- sion that the play had been published in the middle nineties ; but when I saw not only that the mechanism of the verse was Flet- cher's, but also that the modes of expression and the tone of the dialogue were distinctly his, I came to the conclusion that this was no anticipation of Fletcher's style and manner, but his actual work. Looking up for the first time the date of the play, I