and manners combining, or rather uniting (for
there is little combination of them), four themes--first, the love of
Hippolito for the Princess Infelice, and his virtuous motions followed by
relapse; secondly, the conversion by him of the courtesan Bellafront, a
damsel of good family, from her evil ways, and her marriage to her first
gallant, a hairbrained courtier named Matheo; thirdly, Matheo's
ill-treatment of Bellafront, her constancy and her rejection of the
temptations of Hippolito, who from apostle has turned seducer, with the
humours of Orlando Friscobaldo, Bellafront's father, who, feigning never to
forgive her, watches over her in disguise, and acts as guardian angel to
her reckless and sometimes brutal husband; and lastly, the other humours of
a certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him,
his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and
unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb,
while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather
oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it,
admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reason
for preferring it to almost all the non-tragical work of the time out of
Shakespere, is the wonderful character of Bellafront, both in her
unreclaimed and her reclaimed condition. In both she is a very woman--not
as conventional satirists and conventional encomiasts praise or rail at
women, but as women are. If her language in her unregenerate days is
sometimes coarser than is altogether pleasant, it does not disguise her
nature,--the very nature of such a woman misled by giddiness, by
curiosity, by love of pleasure, by love of admiration, but in no thorough
sense depraved. Her selection of Matheo not as the instrument of her being
"made an honest woman," not apparently because she had any love for him
left, or had ever had much, but because he was her first seducer, is
exactly what, after a sudden convincing of sin, such a woman would have
done; and if her patience under the long trial of her husband's
thoughtlessness and occasional brutality seem excessive, it will only seem
so to one who has been unlucky in his experience. Matheo indeed is a
thorough good-for-nothing, and the natural man longs that Bellafront might
have been better parted; but Dekker was a very moral person in his own way,
and apparently he would not entirely let her--Imo