ch all goes well
provided one follows the rules, and where one of the key rules is that
Hymen's rites must precede love's consummation. One of Licia's chief
responsibilities, in addition to summing up all feminine perfections,
is to enforce this rule. Philos, though severely tempted to violate
it, soon yields to Licia's virtuous admonitions, for he is, let it be
known, a pliant youth, almost as devoted to Licia's will as the knight
in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale to the Loathly Lady's. The poem ends
happily, with the gods attending the lovers' nuptials. The result of
this too easily ordered union of souls and bodies, unhappily for this
otherwise charming poem, is an insufficiency of conflict. Aside from
the poem's un-Marlovian insistence on matrimony, its most notable
feature is its skillful and sustained use of light and dark imagery,
recalling Chapman's much less extensive treatment of such imagery in
his conclusion of Marlowe's poem and in Ovid's =Banquet of Sense=.

Gale's =Pyramus and Thisbe= begins with a moderately engaging portrayal
of the youngsters' innocent friendship; it soon falls into absurdity,
from which it never subsequently gets entirely clear. Gale seems to
have had no inkling of the ridiculous possibilities of "serious"
verse. Consequently, he is able to write of Pyramus and Thisbe
"sit[ting] on bryers,/Till they enjoyd the height of their desires,"
(Stanza 13), with no sense of the incongruity of the image employed.
With similar ill effect in its pathetic context, Thisbe's nose bleed
is introduced as an omen of disaster (Stanza 33), and Pyramus' "angry"
blood, by a ridiculously far-fetched conceit, is said to gush out "to
finde the author of the deed,/But when it none but =Pyramus= had found,/
Key cold with feare it stood upon the ground" (Stanza 30).

=Dom Diego=, though a pleasant, occasionally charming imitation of
Lodge's =Scillaes Metamorphosis=, employs fewer of the epyllionic
conventions than =Philos and Licia=, and uses them less imaginatively.
Though it never achieves a style of its own, it is quite successful in
recapturing the lachrymose artificiality that marks Lodge's poem.

Despite its oblique opening and occasionally awkward style, Barksted's
=Mirrha= is a poem of more power than =Dom Diego=. Among its more
affecting passages are a vivid portrayal of a "gloomy gallerie" lined
with portraits of Mirrha's suitors (p. 128) and an inventive account
of Hebe's spilling the nectar that rai