Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/243

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THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

so genuine, his modest ambition so high-spirited and high-minded, that it would be juster and more critical to compare him with Don Quixote masquerading in the accoutrements of his esquire. Dick Bowyer, whose life and death are mendaciously announced on the catch-penny title-page, and who (like Tiny Tim in 'A Christmas Carol') 'does not die,' is a rather rough, thin, and faint sketch of the bluff British soldier of fortune who appears and reappears to better advantage in other plays of Heywood and his fellows. That this must be classed among the earlier if not the earliest of his works we may infer from the primitive simplicity of a stage direction which recalls another in a play printed five years before. In the second scene of the third act of 'The Trial of Chivalry' we read as follows:—'Enter Forester, missing the other taken away, speaks anything, and exit.' In the penultimate scene of the second part of 'King Edward IV.' we find this even quainter direction, which has been quoted before now as an instance of the stage conditions or habits of the time:—'Jockie is led to whipping over the stage, speaking some words, but of no importance.'

A further and deeper debt of thanks is due to Mr. Bullen for the recovery of 'The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered,' after the lapse of nearly three centuries. The singularly prophetic sub-