"Wouldst thou my daughter have?
Ile rather have her married to her grave."
Even so had spoken Lady Capulet. And Romeo seems to be muttering in his sleep through Philip's soliloquy:—
Is in three houres become an Ethiope ...
She will not have one of those pearlèd starres
To blab her sable metamorphosis."
If anything further were needed to illustrate Philip's taste in plays, it would be furnished by the hazy reminiscence of "the imperial votaress" and "the nun, for aye ... in shady cloister mewed." Indeed, if Porter did not have in mind the quadrilateral wanderings of the Midsummer-Night's Dream when Frank and Mall missed the way to Carfax, I am much surprised. That Dick Coomes, when he stood between his mistress and the angel to be tempted, was not thinking of Gobbo, is, of course, possible, but it is not possible that Dick Coomes's creator was not familiar with the Merchant of Venice. There is also, as I have already implied, a quality in Dick's sword-and-buckler voice that rings contemporaneous with the Henry IV., Pts. I. and II. To trace a connection between the well-known lines of Hamlet in 1602 and Porter's
"How loathsome is this beast man's shape to me
This mould of reason so unreasonable"