Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher

" The New Inn. "

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Act i. sc. 1. Host's speech:—

“A heavy purse, and then two turtles, makes.”

“Makes,” frequent in old books, and even now used in some counties for mates, or pairs.

Ib. sc. 3. Host's speech:—

...“And for a leap

Of the vaulting horse, to play the vaulting house.”

Instead of reading with Whalley “ply” for “play,” I would suggest “horse” for “house.” The meaning would then be obvious and pertinent. The punlet, or pun-maggot, or pun intentional, “horse and house,” is below Jonson. The jeu-de-mots just below—

...“Read a lecture

Upon Aquinas at St. Thomas À Waterings”—

had a learned smack in it to season its insipidity.

Ib. sc. 6. Lovel's speech:—

“Then shower'd his bounties on me, like the Hours,

That open-handed sit upon the clouds,

And press the liberality of heaven

Down to the laps of thankful men!”

Like many other similar passages in Jonson, this is e?d?? ?a?ep?? ?de??—a sight which it is difficult to make one's self see,—a picture my fancy cannot copy detached from the words.

Act ii. sc. 5. Though it was hard upon old Ben, yet Felton, it must be confessed, was in the right in considering the Fly, Tipto, Bat Burst, &c., of [pg 284] this play mere dotages. Such a scene as this was enough to damn a new play; and Nick Stuff is worse still,—most abominable stuff indeed!

Act iii. sc. 2. Lovel's speech:—

“So knowledge first begets benevolence,

Benevolence breeds friendship, friendship love.”

Jonson has elsewhere proceeded thus far; but the part most difficult and delicate, yet, perhaps, not the least capable of being both morally and poetically treated, is the union itself, and what, even in this life, it can be.

[pg 285]

Seward's Preface. 1750.—

“The King and No King, too, is extremely spirited in all its characters; Arbaces holds up a mirror to all men of virtuous principles but violent passions. Hence he is, as it were, at once magnanimity and pride, patience and fury, gentleness and rigour, chastity and incest, and is one of the finest mixtures of virtues and vices that any poet has drawn,” &c.

These are among the endless instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III.; and even now it is but just awaking.

Ib. Seward's comparison of Julia's speech in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, act iv. last scene—

“Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning,” &c.

with Aspatia's speech in the Maid's Tragedy—

“I stand upon the sea-beach now,” &c.—Act ii.—

and preference of the latter.

It is strange to take an incidental passage of one writer, intended only for a subordinate part, and compare it with the same thought in another writer, who had chosen it for a prominent and principal figure.

Ib. Seward's preference of Alphonso's poisoning [pg 286] in A Wife for a Month, act i. sc. 1, to the passage in King John, act v. sc. 7:—

“Poison'd, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off!”

Mr. Seward! Mr. Seward! you may be, and I trust you are, an angel; but you were an ass.

Ib.—

“Every reader of taste will see how superior this is to the quotation from Shakespeare.”

Of what taste?

Ib. Seward's classification of the plays.

Surely Monsieur Thomas, the Chances, Beggar's Bush, and the Pilgrim, should have been placed in the very first class! But the whole attempt ends in a woful failure.

[pg 287]

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