ents, left no other monument of himself
that can be traced or compared with it. The difficulty with _Arden of
Feversham_ and _The Merry Devil_ is different. We shall presently speak of
the latter, which, good as it is, has nothing specially Shakesperian about
it, except a great superiority in sanity, compactness, pleasant human
sentiment, and graceful verse, to the ordinary anonymous or named work of
the time. But _Arden of Feversham_ is a very different piece of work. It is
a domestic tragedy of a peculiarly atrocious kind, Alice Arden, the wife,
being led by her passion for a base paramour, Mosbie, to plot, and at last
carry out, the murder of her husband. Here it is not that the versification
has much resemblance to Shakespere's, or that single speeches smack of him,
but that the dramatic grasp of character both in principals and in
secondary characters has a distinct touch of his almost unmistakable hand.
Yet both in the selection and in the treatment of the subject the play
definitely transgresses those principles which have been said to exhibit
themselves so uniformly and so strongly in the whole great body of his
undoubted plays. There is a perversity and a dash of sordidness which are
both wholly un-Shakesperian. The only possible hypothesis on which it could
be admitted as Shakespere's would be that of an early experiment thrown off
while he was seeking his way in a direction where he found no thoroughfare.
But the play is a remarkable one, and deserves the handsome and exact
reproduction which Mr. Bullen has given it. _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_,
licensed 1611, but earlier in type, is one of the gloomy pity-and-terror
pieces which were so much affected in the earlier part of the period, but
which seem to have given way later in the public taste to comedy. It is
black enough to have been attributed to Tourneur. _The Queen of Aragon_, by
Habington, though in a different key, has something of the starchness
rather than strength which characterises _Castara_. A much higher level is
reached in the fine anonymous tragedy of _Nero_, where at least one
character, that of Petronius, is of great excellence, and where the verse,
if a little declamatory, is of a very high order of declamation. The
strange piece, first published by Mr. Bullen, and called by him _The
Distracted Emperor_, a tragedy based partly on the legend of Charlemagne
and Fastrada, again gives us a specimen of horror-mongering. _The Return
from Parnassus