_ (see note, p. 81), famous for its personal touches and its
contribution to Shakespere literature, is interesting first for the
judgments of contemporary writers, of which the Shakespere passages are
only the chief; secondly, for its evidence of the jealousy between the
universities and the players, who after, in earlier times, coming chiefly
on the university wits for their supplies, had latterly taken to provide
for themselves; and thirdly, for its flashes of light on university and
especially undergraduate life. The comedy of _Wily Beguiled_ has also a
strong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and
_Lingua_, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though a
lively one, to the system of personification and allegory. _The Dumb
Knight_, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic,
half-farcical class; but in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, the authorship
of which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other great
names have been put forward, a really delightful example of romantic
comedy, strictly English in subject, and combining pathos with wit,
appears. _The Merry Devil_ probably stands highest among all the anonymous
plays of the period on the lighter side, as _Arden of Feversham_ does on
the darker. Second to it as a comedy comes Porter's _Two Angry Women of
Abingdon_ (1599), with less grace and fancy but almost equal lightness, and
a singularly exact picture of manners. With _Ram Alley_, attributed to the
Irishman Lodowick Barry, we come back to a much lower level, that of the
bustling comedy, of which something has been said generally in connection
with Middleton. To the same class belong Haughton's pleasant _Englishmen
for my Money_, a good patriot play, where certain foreigners, despite the
father's favour, are ousted from the courtship of three fair sisters;
_Woman is a Weathercock_, and _Amends for Ladies_ (invective and palinode),
by Nathaniel Field (first one of the little eyasses who competed with
regular actors, and then himself an actor and playwright); Green's "_Tu
Quoque_" or _The City Gallant_, attributed to the actor Cook, and deriving
its odd first title from a well-known comedian of the time, and the
catchword which he had to utter in the play itself; _The Hog hath Lost his
Pearl_, a play on the name of a usurer whose daughter is married against
his will, by Taylor; _The Heir_ and _The Old Couple_, by Thomas May, more
famous still for his La