he
found himself in prison, and under threat of worse than imprisonment,
together with his unoffending associates in an admirable and inoffensive
comedy. It is impossible to suppose that he would not have come forward
to assume the responsibility of his own words--as it is impossible to
imagine that Jonson or Chapman would have given up his accomplice to
save himself. But the law of the day would probably have held them all
responsible alike.

In the same year as "Eastward Ho!" appeared the best and completest
piece of work which we owe to the single hand of Marston. A more
brilliant and amusing play than "The Dutch Courtesan," better composed,
better constructed, and better written, it would be difficult to
discover among the best comic and romantic works of its incomparable
period. The slippery and sanguinary strumpet who gives its name to the
play is sketched with such admirable force and freedom of hand as to
suggest the existence of an actual model who may unconsciously have sat
for the part under the scrutiny of eyes as keen and merciless as ever
took notes for a savagely veracious caricature--or for an unscrupulously
moral exposure. The jargon in which her emotions are expressed is as
Shakespearean in its breadth and persistency as that of Dr. Caius or
Captain Fluellen; but the reality of those emotions is worthy of a
less farcical vehicle for the expression of such natural craft and
passion. The sisters, Beatrice and Crispinella, seem at first too
evidently imitated from the characters of Aurelia and Phoenixella in the
earliest surviving comedy of Ben Jonson; but the "comedy daughter," as
Dickens (or Skimpole) would have expressed it, is even more coarsely and
roughly drawn than in the early sketch of the more famous dramatist. On
the other hand, it must be allowed--though it may not be recognized
without a certain sense of surprise--that the nobler and purer type of
womanhood or girlhood which we owe to the hand of Marston is far above
comparison with any which has been accomplished or achieved by the
studious and vehement elaboration of Ben Jonson's. The servility of
subservience which that great dramatist exacts from his typically
virtuous women--from the abject and anaemic wife of a Corvino or a
Fitzdottrel--is a quality which could not coexist with the noble and
loving humility of Marston's Beatrice. The admirable scene in which she
is brought face to face with the impudent pretentions of the woman who
ass