Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/160

 and nobler types of womanhood and manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in 'Parasitaster' and 'The Dutch Courtesan,' a general defect in his unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the work of a professional and practised hand. 'What you Will' is modestly described as 'a slight-writ play': but slight and slovenly are not the same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence. I have already observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and punctilious excess of conscience