Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/268

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. iv. OCT., ms.

' Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany.' If Webster is always to be regarded as the " terrible " Webster, we cannot contem- plate him as a possible claimant to the comic underplot of ' The Fair Maid of the Inn.' Similarly, if all Hey wood's work is pitched in a minor key, if he is a " prose Shake- speare " who never penned a vivid phrase nor aimed at violent effects, then ' The Fair Maid of the Exchange ' cannot be his. J. A. Symonds affirms that " Heywood's lan- guage is never high-flown or bombastic."* As a description of all but a small fraction of his work, this is true. But " never " is a dangerous word. The fact is that Heywood could, when he chose, bombast out a blank verse with the best : Help me to tear off this infernal shirt Which raws me where it cleaves, unskin my

brawns,

And like one nak't, rolled in a tun of spikes, Of thousands make one universal wound.

. . . .pluck, tear, rend

Though you my bones leave naked, and iny flesh, Frying with poison, you cast hence to dogs. Dread Neptune, let me plunge me hi thy seas, To cool my body that is all in flame.

. . . .unhand me, Lords,

I^et me spurn mountains down, and tear up rocks, Rend by the roots huge oaks, till I have digg'd A way to hell, or found a scale to heaven.

These lines are not Peele's, nor Greene's, nor Marlowe's ; they are by the author of ' The English Traveller ' and ' A Woman kill'd with Kindness.' f If Heywood can write in a fashion so foreign to his ordinary method as he does here, is there anything in the style of ' The Fair Maid of the Ex- change ' that need raise a doubt of his authorship ?

There is another point to be noted bear- ing on the presence in this play of words and modes of expression reminiscent of Heywood's forerunners in the drama. Though few writers of the time are freer from the guilt of literary petty larceny, there can be no dotibt that he was an attentive student of the earlier drama, and there are more than a few traces of its influence upon his vocabulary. Thus we find him using such phrases as " kill my heart" (' 1 Edward IV.,' 83, '2 Ed. IV.,' 151) ; " short tale to make " (' Challenge for Beauty,' 36) ; " buy with our blood " (' Golden Age,' 9) ; " marching hitherward " (' 2 Ed. IV.,' 107); " long home " = the grave

in trod., p. xxi.
 * ' Thomas Heywood,' " Mermaid Series,"

t See ' The Brazen Age ' (Hercules and the shirt of Nessus), Heywood's ' Dramatic Works,' ed. Pearson, vol. iii. p. 250. All subsequent references are by the pages of the volumes of Pearson's "edit ions.

(' Woman Kill'd,' 100) ; " effuse of blood " (' Fair Maid of the West,' 369, 401) ; " vital blood" (' Brazen Age,' 174, 107 : ' Lucrece,' 173) ; and '.' true succession " (' 2 Ed. IV.,' 184). If these phrases, or the majority of them, occurred in any one play, and that play could with any plausibility be assigned to the earlier years of the last decade o'f the sixteenth century, they would justly raise a very strong presumption of Peele's authorsliip. But Heywood shows little ten- dency to make use of stereotyped phrases, and these occasional resuscitations, most of which appear only once in an exceptionally large bulk of dramatic writing, merely prove that Heywood was well acquainted with Peele's work, and that some of Peele's phrases lingered in his mind. When, there- fore, in ' The Fair Maid of the Exchange,' we find (p. 32)

Sweet fair, I pity, yet no relief Harbours within the closet of my soul,

we need neither suspect the presence of Greene's hand because "sweet fair" sug- gests him, nor seek to implicate Peele because in his ' David and Bethsabe ' we find the lines,

Then let my presence with my sighs perfume The pleasant closet of my sovereign's eoul.

The question we have to ask ourselves here is : What kind of a play might Hey- wood be expected to produce if for once he determined to frame a play that might satisfy the demand of the public for " strong lines " and lofty flights of poetry ?

To show that ' The Fair Maid of the Exchange ' might have been written by Heywood is not to prove that it is his, but it seemed to be advisable to lay some emphasis on the point that its unlikeness to the general run of his plays is no sufficient reason for rejecting his authorship. When we come to examine this comedy closely we shall find that there is no reason at all, for the marks of Heywood's vocabulary are apparent throughout the piece from beginning to end ; while, so far as its prose scenes are concerned, they are so un- mistakably in the same vein as the prose of Heywood's other plays that had they not been found in association with verse not easily recognizable as his, it is safe to say that it would never have occurred to anybody to question their origin.

Before we deal with the text of ' The

Fair Maid of the Exchange ' its prologue

j deserves attention. First it should be

i noted that this is in the Shakespearean

1 sonnet form adopted by Heywood for