Ant. Echo, I will not talk with thee, For thou art a dead thing. Echo. Thou art a dead thing. Ant. My Duchess is asleep now, And her little ones, I hope sweetly: O heaven, Shall I never see her more? Echo. Never see her more. Ant. I mark'd not one repetition of the echo But that; and on the sudden a clear light Presented me a face folded in sorrow. Delio. Your fancy merely. Ant. Come, I'll be out of this ague, I will not henceforth save myself by halves; Delio. Your own virtue save you! I'll fetch your eldest son, and second you: SCENE IV. Enter Cardinal, PESCARA, MALATESTI, RODERIGO, and GRISOLAN. Card. You shall not watch to-night by the sick prince; His grace is very well recover'd. Mal. Good my lord, suffer us. Card. Oh, by no means; The noise, and change of object in his eye, Do not rise, I entreat you. Pes. So, sir; we shall not. Card. Nay, I must have you promise Mal. Neither. Card. It may be, to make trial of your promise, Mal. If your throat were cutting, I'd not come at you, now I have protested against it. Gris. 'Twas a foul storm to-night. Rod. The Lord Ferdinand's chamber shook like an osier. Mal. 'Twas nothing but pure kindness in the devil, Serv. Where are you, sir? Ant. Very near my home.-Bosola! Serv. Oh, misfortune! Bos. Smother thy pity, thou art dead else.-Antonio! The man I would have saved 'bove mine own life! We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded Which way please them.-Oh, good Antonio, I'll whisper one thing in thy dying ear Shall make thy heart break quickly! thy fair Duchess And two sweet children Ant. Their very names Kindle a little life in me. Bos. Are murdered. Ant. Some men have wished to die At the hearing of sad tidings; I am glad To endure vexation. I do not ask The process of my death; only commend me Bos. Break, heart! Ant. And let my son fly from the courts of princes. [Dies. Bos. Thou seem'st to have lov'd Antonio? Serv. I brought him hither, To have reconciled him to the Cardinal. Bos. I do not ask thee that. Take him up, if thou tender thine own life, And bear him where the lady Julia Was wont to lodge.-Oh, my fate moves swift! I have this Cardinal in the forge already; Now I'll bring him to the hammer. O direful misprision! I will not imitate things glorious, No more than base; I'll be mine own example. On, on, and look thou represent, for silence, The thing thou bear'st. [Exeunt. Mixed with some fear. Bos. Thus it lightens into action: I am come to kill thee. Card. Ha!-Help! our guard! Bos. Thou art deceived; They are out of thy howling. Card. Hold; and I will faithfully divide Revenues with thee. Bos. Thy prayers and proffers Are both unseasonable. Card. Raise the watch! we are betray'd! Bos. I have confined your flight: I'll suffer your retreat to Julia's chamber, But no further. Card. Help! we are betrayed! Enter, above, PESCARA, MALATESTI, RODERIGO, and GRISOLAN. Mal. Listen. Card. My dukedom for rescue! Rod. Fie upon his counterfeiting! Mal. Why, 'tis not the Cardinal. Rod. Yes, yes, 'tis he: But I'll see him hanged ere I'll go down to him. Card. Here's a plot upon me; I am assaulted! I am lost, Unless some rescue! Gris. He doth this pretty well; But it will not serve to laugh me out of mine honour. Card. The sword's at my throat! Rod. You would not bawl so loud then. To bed: he told us thus much aforehand. Pes. He wished you should not come at him; but, There flies your ransom. Card. Oh, justice! I suffer now for what hath former bin: Ferd. Now you're brave fellows. Cæsar's fortune was harder than Pompey's; Cæsar died in the arms of prosperity, Pompey at the feet of disgrace. You both die in the field. The pain 's nothing: pain many times is taken away with the apprehension of greater, as the toothache with the sight of the barber that comes to pull it out: there's philosophy for you. Bos. Now my revenge is perfect.-Sink, thou main cause [Kills FERDINAND. Of my undoing!-The last part of my life Ferd. Give me some wet hay; I am broken-winded. I do account this world but a dog-kennel: I will vault credit and affect high pleasures Pes. How fatally, it seems, he did withstand His own rescue! Mal. Thou wretched thing of blood, How came Antonio by his death? Bos. In a mist; I know not how: Such a mistake as I have often seen We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, Mine is another voyage. Pes. The noble Delio, as I came to the palace, Told me of Antonio's being here, and showed me A pretty gentleman, his son and heir. Enter DELIO, and ANTONIO's Son. Mal. Oh, sir, you come too late! Delio. I heard so, and Was armed for 't, ere I came. Let us make noble use Of this great ruin; and join all our force To establish this young hopeful gentleman In's mother's right. These wretched eminent things Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow; As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts, Both form and matter. I have ever thought As when she's pleas'd to make them lords of truth: Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end. [Dies. [Dies. [Exeunt. In August, 1624, the Spanish Ambassador, Count Gondomar, protested against an English play by Thomas Middleton, which had been acted in June that summer, and expressed England's delight at the failure of the Spanish marriage. The play was called "A Game of Chess." White and Black in the play 1 Rushes formerly strewn on the floor of halls and rooms. FUNERAL HEARSE OF JAMES I. (Designed by Inigo Jones) CHAPTER VII. UNDER CHARLES I. AND THE COMMONWEALTH. A.D. 1625 TO A.D. 1660. PHILIP MASSINGER was about nineteen years old at the time of the death of Queen Elizabeth, and had not long passed forty when King James I. died. The number of plays that can be given in this volume bears of course, a very small proportion to the whole wealth of the English drama. There are dramatists of second rank, like William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, who produced four "Monarchic Tragedies" in 163, Massinger was about ten years older than James Shirley, the last of the good dramatists born under Elizabeth. He was about ten years younger than Ben Jonson, who still lived, with broken health, and ranked as master poet, during the first twelve years of the reign of Charles I. Ben Jonson died in 1637, the year in which Milton wrote "Lycidas;" Francis Beaumont had died in the same year as Shakespeare (1616); John Fletcher died in the same year as King James (1625); John Ford was only about two years younger than Massinger. We look next, therefore, to Massinger and Ford. No other plays by "The Duke of Milan," in 1623. Massinger were printed in the reign of James I., and the earliest work of his printed under Charles I. was "The Roman Actor," in 1629. Massinger shows in "The Roman Actor" respect for his art as a dramatist, and hatred of tyranny in its most absolute form, personified by Domitian. But his plays contain frequent traces of political opinions, and it is evident that Massinger was much less distinctly than his fellow-dramatists upon the king's side when Charles I. came into contest with his Parliament. In 1638, when ship-money was in question, Massinger produced a play-now lost-called "King and Subject," on the story of Don Pedro the Cruel. From this piece one allusion has been quoted with the record that King Charles at Newmarket, with his own hand, wrote upon it, "This is too insolent, and to be changed." Said the king in the play, PHILIP MASSINGER. From the Portrait in Coxeter's Edition of his Plays (1761). Philip Massinger, son of Arthur Massinger, a gentleman of the household of the Earl of Pembroke, at Wilton, near Salisbury, was well educated, and entered as a commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, in May, 1602. Antony Wood says that his exhibition was from the Earl of Pembroke, and that he gave his mind more to poetry and romance, for about four years or more, than to logic and philosophy, which he ought to have studied, as he was patronised to that end. He left Oxford without a degree about the year 1606, when, perhaps by the death of his father, he seems to have been thrown upon his own resources. An undated document, perhaps of 1614, shows Massinger to have been poor and a playwright when it was written. His first printed play was "The Virgin Martyr," in 1622. Then followed 1601, and 1605; occasional plays written by true poets, like Samuel Daniel's "Philotas," printed in 1605; and single plays of considerable literary interest, like "The Return from Parnassus," acted at Christmas by the students of St. John's College, Cambridge, and printed in 1605, which the limits of this book oblige me to pass over. The book is not a history, but a series of specimens, with no more narrative than is necessary to explain coherently when and by whom each There was written. Readers who desire fuller details may receive mach help from Professor A. W. Ward's two volumes of "A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne" (Macmillan, 1875), an interesting and very serviceable book, based evidently upon honest independent reading of the works described. REMAINS OF A ROMAN THEATRE AT ORANGE IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE. (Copied by permission from Fergusson's "History of Architecture," 18.5.) Esop. What do we act to-day? With Pentheus' bloody end. Par. It skills not what; The times are dull, and all that we receive 1 Pompey's Theatre in the Campus Martius was the first stone theatre built in Rome. There had been wooden theatres, and one built B.C. 59, a few years before Pompey's, would hold 80,000 persons, and had 3,000 statues between its pillars. Pompey overcame the objection to stone theatres by making the benches of his lead up as steps to a temple of Venus Victorious. The opening of Pompey's Theatre, which would hold 40,000 persons, was celebrated by combats of beasts in which 500 lions and twenty elephants were killed. When in this theatre the play of "Clytemnestra" was acted, six hundred mules were introduced to give pomp to the show. The Flavian Amphitheatre, called afterwards the Coliseum, was begun by Vespasian and completed in Domitian's reign. * The salary of six sestertii. Sestertius meant two and a-half, and was the name of a small silver coin, equivalent to two and a-half of the copper coins called asses, and to about twopence in English money. Six sestertii would, therefore, mean about a shilling. 3 Aventine, one of the seven hills of Rome. "My strong Aventine," the strong rock I build on, So dangerous the age is, and such bad acts Is now a crime; and to deserve too well, Is to be guilty. They are only safe That know to soothe the prince's appetite, Sura. Tis true, and 'tis my wonder, That two sons of so different a nature Should spring from good Vespasian. We had a Titus, Styled, justly," the Delight of all Mankind," Who did esteem that day lost in his life, In which some one or other tasted not |