even without the hint supplied by Antimon in the second scene of Act IV:  ’She cannot choose but love me now; I’m sure old Menaphon ne’er courted in such clothes.’  The dramatist, however, has not followed his source slavishly; the pastoral element is largely suppressed or at least subordinated, and the catastrophe somewhat altered.  Instead of the siege of the castle by the shepherds when the heroine is carried off by her own son, we have the following ending.  The king himself carries off his daughter, and her son and husband, ignorant of course of their mutual relationship, put themselves at the head of the shepherds in pursuit.  At this moment the country is invaded by the king of Sicily, who comes to seek his son, the husband of the heroine, and by the king of Africa, who comes to avenge the banished brother of the king of Thrace.  After much fighting it is resolved to decide the issue by single combat, in the course of which explanations ensue which lead to a general recognition and reconciliation.  The pastoral element is represented by old Antimon an antic shepherd, a clown his son, his daughter a careless shepherdess and her despised lover, and a careless shepherd.

The play was printed in 1661 by Francis Kirkman, who ascribed it on the title-page to John Webster and William Rowley.  All critics are agreed that the former at least had nothing to do with the composition; but beyond that it is difficult to go.  Perhaps the mention of ‘old Menaphon’ might be taken to indicate that the romance was at least not new at the time of the composition of the play, for Menaphon himself was not an old man.  In spite of the small merit of the play from a poetical point of view, and of occasional extraordinary oversights in the plot—­for instance, we are never told how the infant who is shipwrecked on the shore, presumably of Arcadia, comes to be a young man in the service of the king of Africa—­its badness has perhaps been exaggerated, and it is undoubtedly from the pen of an experienced stage-hack.  I do not know, however, that any passage is worth quotation.[312]

Any argument in favour of an early date for the Thracian Wonder, based on its being founded on Greene’s romance, is sufficiently answered by Thomas Forde’s Love’s Labyrinth, which is a much closer dramatization of the same story, retaining the names and characters almost unchanged, but which cannot have been written very long before its publication in 1660.  One episode, the death of Sephistia’s mother, a character unknown to Greene, is apparently borrowed from Gomersall’s Lodovick Sforza.[313] The play, which lies somewhat beyond our limits, represents in its worst form the debacle of the old dramatic tradition, continued past its date by writers who had no technical familiarity with the stage.  It is equally without poetic merit, except in a few incidental songs.  Of these, some are borrowed from Greene, one is a translation from Anacreon also printed in the author’s Poetical Diversions, some are original.  Of the last, one may be worth quoting.[314]