n_ is the worst play ever
attributed (even falsely) to authors of genius. The subject is perfectly
uninteresting, the characters are all fools or knaves, and the means
adopted to gull the hero through successive promotions to rank, and
successive deprivations of them (the genuineness of neither of which he
takes the least trouble to ascertain), are preposterous. _The Coronation_
is much better, and _The Sea Voyage_, with a kind of Amazon story grafted
upon a hint of _The Tempest_, is a capital play of its kind. Better still,
despite a certain looseness both of plot and moral, is _The Coxcomb_, where
the heroine Viola is a very touching figure. The extravagant absurdity of
the traveller Antonio is made more probable than is sometimes the case with
our authors, and the situations of the whole join neatly, and pass
trippingly. _Wit at Several Weapons_ deserves a somewhat similar
description, and so does _The Fair Maid of the Inn_; while _Cupid's
Revenge_, though it shocked the editors of 1750 as a pagan kind of play,
has a fine tragical zest, and is quite true to classical belief in its
delineation of the ruthlessness of the offended Deity. Undoubtedly,
however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interesting
material of any except the first. Here is _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a play
founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I think
irrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I am
unable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character.
Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_, in
which the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are neither
squeamish nor feeble. The beautiful part of Ordella in this play, though
somewhat sentimental and improbable (as is always the case with Fletcher's
very virtuous characters) ranks at the head of its kind, and is much
superior to that of Aspatia in _The Maid's Tragedy_. _The Woman Hater_,
said to be Fletcher's earliest play, has a character of rare comic, or at
least farcical virtue in the smell-feast Lazarillo with his Odyssey in
chase of the Umbrana's head (a delicacy which is perpetually escaping him);
and _The Nice Valour_ contains, in Chamont and his brother, the most
successful attempts of the English stage at the delineation of the point of
honour gone mad. Not so much, perhaps, can be said for _An Honest Man's
Fortune_, which, with a mask and a clumsy, though in par