"O, doe not set the organ of thy voice
On such a grunting tone of discontent!
Doe not deforme the beautie of thy tongue
With such mishapen answeres."
It is appropriate that upon him who has given rise to the brief unpleasantness by inviting guests without his wife's consent, should rest the onus of devising the effective "pollicie" of reconciliation.
From him Goursey is well differenced. Possessed of a finer wife and a quicker temper, when the former, contrary to expectation, crosses the latter he well-nigh falls into an apoplexy. Oaths he abhors, but in the access of his rage swears horribly and apologizes to the Almighty between breaths.
That the morals of the sons reproduce those of the sires in their salad days, I reluctantly suspect. It is the recital of young Frank's licentiousness that convinces young Philip that here is just the husband for Sister Mall. And—considering that Mall is frankly and squarely what her mother calls her, a "lustie guts" and "vile girl," in fact her mother's daughter, fit to "floute the devill and make blush the boldest face of man that ere man saw" a swearing wench whose only claim to morals is unmorality—Philip's judgment is correct. There is, in my opinion, no coarser-minded girl in Elizabethan comedy; and at the same time there obtains no dramatic portrayal of the animal more observantly conceived or more faithfully executed. That she is, as Mr. Ellis says, less sophisticated than Congreve's Prue, is not exactly to her credit. Nor need I make her out "a wholesome, robust English girl ... with a brave openness, loving and sincere," in order to justify my appreciation of Porter's skill in creating her. She is, indeed, robust and Elizabethan, seventeen and upward; but within she is a mate for Caliban; no relation to Prue,—rather a link between Wapull's Wilful Wanton and Vanbrugh's Hoyden. It is hardly necessary to point out the literary and dramatic affinities of Sir Raph and his wife: the buck-hunting squire and the lady tender-hearted and "pitous."
The foregoing are characters of broad outline; but each has, as well, his quirk of conduct, manners, or of style. The jealous wife with her "stopt compares"; "Mistresse Would-Have," who has "let restrainèd fancy lose," and sworn to lead no apes in hell; her brother, a poet at second-hand, and "sick discourser" of his sister's wit; Nan Lawson's lover of "quick invention" and "pleasure-aiming mind,"—these and others of the major movement are as palpably in their "humours" as Mrs. Otter, Doll Common, Master Stephen, or Kitely, or Truewit. And when we turn to the secondary group we find the "humours" not only advertised upon the title-page but specified in the text. Dick Coomes is "humord bluntly" to brag and swear and drink and quarrel and talk bawdy. "I see, by this dearth of good swords, that dearth of sword-and-buckler fight begins to grow out; I am sorry for it," complains this swashbuckler serving-man. With "Sbloud!" he comes upon the stage, and there's little left of God unhallowed when Coomes subsides beneath his buckler in the dark. "Why, what a swearing keeps this drunken asse," exclaims Francis. "Peace, do not marre his humour," Phil replies. "Away, bawdie man," cries Hodge, and even the Boy must say, "Here him no more, maister; he doth bedawbe ye with his durty speche." He has a "merrie humour," too, this Coomes, of punning, and has brought "the apparell of his wit ... into fashion of an honor." A Thraso of the servants' hall, he'll outswear any 'Pharaoh's foot' of a tailor's shop. He can dispute precedence with Ancient Pistol as "the foul-mouthedst rogue in England"; and when he's in his "quarreling humour," not Pistol, nor Bobadil, nor the 'humorous' Nim could swagger to Dawson's close or out of a horse-pond with a more humorous grace. It is to be noted that, in his first lines, Coomes animadverts upon "the humour of those young springals," his masters, who "will spend all their fathers' good at gaming"; also that Philip's servingman has his humour both of manners and of style: "a spruce slave," cross-gartered like Malvolio, "a nosegay bound with laces in his hat," "all proverbes in his speech ... because he would speak truth," a dramatic Camden or Ray, who quotes Latin withal, and is as marked in his "humour" as Coomes and Franke's Boy, and Mall and Mrs. Barnes in theirs.
Place in the History of Comedy.—It would, therefore, be of no small importance to determine whether this Pleasant History is Henslowe's Comodey of Umers of May 11, 1597; for if it be, this play of characteristics precedes Every Man in his Humour, and disputes the "place peculiar to itself in our dramatic literature" which most critics have assigned to that masterpiece of Ben Jonson. But even if it be not the play of May 11, 1597, our drama was certainly written before December 22, 1598, probably by May 30 of that year; and consequently to Porter, as an influential associate of Chapman and Jonson, must be given something of the credit of blazing the path toward the comedy of characteristic. The fun of the play has at once a Chaucerian shrewdness and a something of the careless guffaw of W. Wager. Its realism throws back to Mak, and Johan, Tom Tyler and Gammer Gurton. As a comedy of unadulterated native flavour, breathing rural life and manners and the modern spirit, constructed with knowledge of the stage, and without affectation or constraint, it has no foregoing analogue except perhaps The Pinner of Wakefield. No play preceding or contemporary yields an easier conversational prose, not even the Merry Wives.
We must not close this study without remarking certain resemblances to Shakespeare. In the matter of situations and language traces of the Romeo and Juliet of 1592, and the Midsummer-Night's Dream of 1594-1595, appear. The fanciful reader might, indeed, suspect something like a good-natured burlesque of the balcony scene in the conversation between Frank and Mall "at her window"; perhaps even of the motif of Shakespeare's tragedy, in the loves of the children of the inimical wives of Abington: "How, sir? your wife!" says Mrs. Barnes to Francis:—