d is supposed to be dead, and who has very complacently
forgotten all about him, but on a ridiculous plot to foist a pretender off
as the dead husband itself--is simply absurd. The lack of probability,
which is the curse of the minor Elizabethan drama, hardly anywhere appears
more glaringly. _Parasitaster_, or _The Fawn_, a satirical comedy, is much
better, but the jealous hatred of _The Dutch Courtesan_ is again not made
probable. Then came Marston's completest work in drama, _The Malcontent_,
an anticipation, after Elizabethan fashion, of _Le Misanthrope_ and _The
Plain Dealer_. Though not free from Marston's two chief vices of coarseness
and exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the best
thing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such a
husband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasm
of adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude. It is to be observed
that both in _The Fawn_ and _The Malcontent_ there are disguised dukes--a
fact not testifying any very great originality, even in borrowing. Of
_Eastward Ho!_ we have already spoken, and it is by no means certain that
_The Insatiate Countess_ is Marston's. His reputation would not lose much
were it not. A _fabliau_-like underplot of the machinations of two
light-o'-love citizens' wives against their husbands is not unamusing, but
the main story of the Countess Isabella, a modern Messalina (except that
she adds cruelty to the vices of Messalina) who alternately courts lovers
and induces their successors to assassinate them, is in the worst style of
the whole time--the tragedy of lust that is not dignified by the slightest
passion, and of murder that is not excused by the slightest poetry of
motive or treatment. Though the writing is not of the lowest order, it
might have been composed by any one of some thirty or forty writers. It was
actually attributed at the time to William Barksted, a minor poet of some
power, and I am inclined to think it not Marston's, though my own estimate
of him is, as will have been seen, not so high as some other estimates. It
is because those estimates appear to me unduly high that I have rather
accentuated the expression of my own lower one. For the last century, and
perhaps longer, the language of hyperbole has been but too common about our
dramatists, and I have known more than one case in which the extravagant
praise bestowed upon them has, when students have come to the