struck root, which distinguishes and denotes the peculiar style of Cyril Tourneur’s tragic poetry, rises to its highest tidemark in this part of the play.  Every other line, one might almost say, is an instance of it; and yet not a single lineis undramatic, or deficient in the strictest and plainest dramatic propriety.  It may be objected that men and women possessed by the excitement of emotions so desparate and so dreadful do not express them with such passionate precision of utterance:  but, to borrow the saying of a later and bearer of the name which Cyril sometimes spelled as Turner, “don’t they wish they could?” or rather, ought they not to wish it?  What is said by the speakers is exactly what they might be expected to think, to feel, and to express with less incisive power and less impressive accuracy of ardent epigram or of strenuous appeal.[1]

[Footnote 1:  It is, to say the least, singular to find in the most famous scene of a play, so often reprinted and re-edited a word which certainly requires explanation passed over without remark from any one of the successive editors.  When Gratiana, threatened by the daggers of her sons, exclaims: 

Are you so barbarous to set iron nipples
Upon the breast that gave you suck?

Vindice retorts, in reply to her appeal: 

                                 That breast
   Is turned to quarled poison.

This last epithet is surely unusual enough to call for some attempt at interpretation.  But none whatever has hitherto been offered.  In the seventh line following from this one there is another textual difficulty.  The edition now before me, Eld’s of 1608, reads literally thus: 

Vind. Ah ist possible, Thou onely, you powers on hie,
That women should dissemble when they die.

Lamb was content to read,

   Ah, is it possible, you powers on high,

and so forth.  Perhaps the two obviously corrupt words in italics may contain a clew to the right reading, and this may be it: 

   Ah! 
   Is’t possible, you heavenly powers on high,
   That women should dissemble when they die?

Or may not this be yet another instance of the Jew-Puritan abhorrence of the word God as an obscene or blasphemous term when uttered outside the synagogue or the conventicle?  If so, we might read—­and believe that the poet wrote—­

   Is’t possible, thou only God on high,

and assume that the licenser struck out the indecent monosyllable and left the mutilated text for actors and printers to patch or pad at their discretion.]