Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/20

 some individuality. Suckling's failures are more conspicuous, in that he is always pointing us to his models. The influence of the character of Hamlet is perceptible in the discontent of Brennoralt. Hamlet, probably seen through the medium of Vendice in Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, is again responsible for the hero of The Sad One. Aglaura, the most ambitious and complicated of the tragedies, is reminiscent of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, not merely in the hero's reverence for royalty, but in the position of the heroine with regard to her lover and the King. The dramatic strength of the Maid's Tragedy resides in the guilt of Evadne, and her vengeance on the seducer who has ruined her life. Aglaura, on the contrary, is innocent; her would-be seducer is murdered by others, while she murders her lover by mistake—a confusion in slaughter by which the tragic horror of Beaumont and Fletcher's play is totally missed. When, after the Restoration, the last act of the Maid's Tragedy was altered to avoid the reflections raised by the murder of the guilty King, the effect of the play was spoiled. In Suckling's alternative last act of Aglaura, written at an earlier date, with a similar purpose, the change leaves every reader tranquil, unless here and there one may be found who delights in mechanical carnage on the stage. It is impossible to feel much lively interest in the conduct of a plot whose characters go through their evolutions so tamely.

In the present edition the text of the early editions of the Fragmenta Aurea has been carefully collated. Its contents, with one or two additions, such as that of the Cantilena Politica-Jocunda, are those of the 1646 edition with the additions introduced in 1658. These have been reprinted in as close accordance with the original editions as is permitted by the use of modern spelling. In the plays, the prose-scenes, printed in the early and modern editions alike as though written in blank verse, have been arranged as prose for the first time. The verse-scenes in the early editions are printed very irregularly, and in modern editions have been subjected to much alteration, in which it is often difficult to recognize the likeness to blank verse that presumably dictated such radical departures from the text. The present editor has