“And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn
Of slimy newts”;
and
“ ... past the baser court
Of outward sense”;--
but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here deserted by our
_fida compagna_? Again, (Vol. II. pp. 55, 56,) we read, “This Granuffo
is a right wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never
speakes his signes to me, and men of profound reach instruct
aboundantly; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with signes,”
etc. This Granuffo is qualified among the “Interlocutors” as “a silent
lord,” and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be
confessed, is rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying
nothing. It is plain enough that the passage should read, “a man of
excellent discourse, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of
profound reach instruct abundantly,” etc.
In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader
to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should
certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what
Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer,--“gone before and
swept the way.” An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible
to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the
old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes
to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own tongue should not
be as tough to us as Æschylus to a ten years’ graduate, nor do we wish
to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way
through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to find (as is
generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all.
But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in
that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is
in a speech of _Erichtho_, in the first scene of the fourth act of
“Sophonisba,” (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in
this shape:--
----“hardby the reverent (!) ruines
Of a once glorious temple rear’d to Jove
Whose very rubbish ...
... yet beares
A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac’d, [razed,]
Hurl’d down by wrath and lust of impious kings,
So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing
Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow,
The ill-voyc’d raven, and still chattering pye,
Send out ungratefull sounds and loathsome filth;
Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs,
* * * * *
Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men
Stood in assured rest,” etc.
The last verse and a half are worthy of Chapman; but why did not Mr.
Halliwell, who explains _up-pont_ and _I um_, change “Joves acts were
vively limbs” to “Jove’s acts were lively limned,” which was
unquestionably what Marston wrote?
In the “Scourge of Villanie,” (Vol. III. p. 252,) there is a passage
which till lately had a modern application in America, though happily
archaic in England, which Mr. Halliwell suffers to stand thus:--
“Once Albion lived in such a cruel age
Than man did hold by servile vilenage:
Poore brats were slaves of bondmen that were borne,
And marted, sold: but that rude law is torne
And disannuld, as too too inhumane.”