I could not steal their wit, nor plots outrake:
All my plays’ plots, my own poor brain did make.[177]
From Plutarch’s story, I ne’er took a plot,
Nor from romances, nor from Don Quixote.
[175] The Duchess seems usually to have spelt Ben Jonson’s name Johnson.
[176] Author of The History of Great Britain, etc. The second edition was published in 1627. Speed was a tailor and a man of very little education; but his history of England was for a long time the best in existence.
[177] Is this a slap at Shakespeare?
Only three short quotations shall be given from her plays; and first we have a fair specimen of her heavy, wearisome style in a few sentences from her play, “The Presence”.
Act II. Scene I.