Such phrases as So I not heard them ([l. 352]) and Like George a-horseback ([l. 433]) in the loose structure of the one and the slangy scurrility of the other, exhibit no kinship to his manner; [l. 373], They are fools that judge me by my outward seeming recalls a Field passage in The Queen of Corinth (D. V, 444) They are fools that hold them dignified by blood. There is here and there, moreover, a certain violence of expression, a compressed over-trenchancy of phrase, that brings to mind the rant of the early Elizabethans, and is found among the Jacobeans only in the work of Rowley, Beaumont, and Field. For the last named, this is notably exemplified in the opening soliloquy of The Knight of Malta; we cannot but recognize the same touch here in [ll. 386–8]:
Thou dost strike
A deathful coldness to my heart’s high heat,
And shrink’st my liver like the calenture.
The Something I must do, which concludes the Act, is repeatedly paralleled in Massinger’s plays, but a similar indefinite resolve is expressed in Woman is a Weathercock (M. 363), and it consequently cannot be adduced as evidence of his hand. Immediately above, however ([ll. 494–6]), we encounter, in the allusion to the Italian and Dutch temperaments, a thought twice echoed by the “stage-poet” in plays of not greatly later date, The Duke of Milan and The Little French Lawyer (C-G. 90 a; D. III, 505). It may represent an interpolation by Massinger; it may be merely that this rather striking conclusion to the climatic speech of his collaborator’s scene so fixed itself on his mind as to crop out afterwards in his own productions.
In the short disputed passage ([ll. 317–343]) which separates what is undoubtedly Massinger’s from what is undoubtedly Field’s, it would appear that both playwrights had a hand. The ’Sdeath and Gads me!, the play upon the word currier, and the phrase, I shall be with you suddenly (cf. Q. of Cor. D. V, 467) speak for Field; while Massinger, on the other hand, parallels
His back
Appears to me as it would tire a beadle;
with
A man of resolution, whose shoulders