“Is this a fit habit for a handsome young gentlewoman’s
mother? as I hope to be a lady, you look like one
o’ the Scottish wayward sisters.”
The still more broadly comic interlude of the bewitched
rustic bridegroom and his loudly reclamatory bride
is no less humorously sustained and carried through.
Altogether, for an avowedly hasty and occasional piece
of work, this tragicomedy is very creditably characteristic
of both its associated authors.
How small a fraction of Heywood’s actual work
is comprised in these twenty-six plays we cannot even
conjecturally compute; we only know that they amount
to less than an eighth part of the plays written wholly
or mainly by his indefatigable hand, and that they
are altogether outweighed in volume, though decidedly
not in value, by the existing mass of his undramatic
work. We know also, if we have eyes to see, that
the very hastiest and slightest of them does credit
to the author, and that the best of them are to be
counted among the genuine and imperishable treasures
of English literature. Such amazing fecundity
and such astonishing industry would be memorable even
in a far inferior writer; but, though I certainly
cannot pretend to anything like an exhaustive or even
an adequate acquaintance with all or any of his folios,
I can at least affirm that they contain enough delightfully
readable matter to establish a more than creditable
reputation. His prose, if never to be called
masterly, may generally be called good and pure:
its occasional pedantries and pretentions are rather
signs of the century than faults of the author; and
he can tell a story, especially a short story, as
well as if not better than many a better-known writer.
I fear, however, that it is not the poetical quality
of his undramatic verse which can ever be said to
make it worth reading: it is, as far as I know,
of the very homeliest homespun ever turned out by the
very humblest of workmen. His poetry, it would
be pretty safe to wager, must be looked for exclusively
in his plays: but there, if not remarkable for
depth or height of imagination or of passion, it will
be found memorable for unsurpassed excellence of unpretentious
elevation in treatment of character. The unity
(or, to borrow from Coleridge a barbaric word, the
triunity) of noble and gentle and simple in the finest
quality of the English character at its best—of
the English character as revealed in our Sidneys and
Nelsons and Collingwoods and Franklins—is
almost as apparent in the best scenes of his best
plays as in the lives of our chosen and best-beloved
heroes: and this, I venture to believe, would
have been rightly regarded by Thomas Heywood as a more
desirable and valuable success than the achievement
of a noisier triumph or the attainment of a more conspicuous
place among the poets of his country.
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