--which, if this is a fair sample, is very likely true. Below the prologue the writer has added the couplet:
Th' old wits are gone: looke for noe new thing by us,
For nullum est jam Dictum quod non sit dictum prius.
The other play is preserved in a Bodleian manuscript,[[300]] and is entitled 'The Arcadian Lovers, or the Metamorphosis of Princes.' 'The name of the author,' writes Mr. Hazlitt following Halliwell, 'was probably Moore, for in the volume, written by the same hand as the play, is a dedication to Madam Honoria Lee from the "meanest of her kinsmen," Thomas Moore. A person of this name wrote A Brief Discourse about Baptism, 1649.' Mr. Falconer Madan, however, in his catalogue ascribes the manuscript to the early eighteenth century, a date certainly more in accordance with the character of the handwriting. If, therefore, the conjecture concerning the author's name is correct, he may be plausibly identified with the Sir Thomas Moore whose tragedy Mangora was acted in 1717. The manuscript, which contains various poetical essays, includes not only the complete play, which is in prose, but also a verse paraphrase of a large portion of the same. Neither prose nor verse possesses the least merit.[[301]]
The earliest of the plays founded upon episodes in the Arcadia is Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, which was acted by the children of the Queen's Revels, and published in 1615.[[302]] A revision, possibly by another hand, has introduced considerable confusion into the titles of the personae, but need not otherwise concern us.[[303]] The plot of the play is based on two episodes in the romance, one relating to the vengeance exacted by Cupid on the princess Erona of Lycia for an insult offered to his worship, the other to the intrigue of prince Plangus of Iberia with the wife of a citizen, and the tragic complications arising therefrom. These two stories are combined by the dramatists, with no very conspicuous skill, into one plot. Plangus and Erona, under the names of Leucippus and Hidaspes, are represented as brother and sister, children of the old widowed duke of Lysia. They make common cause in seeking to abolish the worship of Cupid, and their tragedies are represented as alike due to his offended deity. No sooner has the old duke, yielding to his daughter's prayers, prohibited the worship of the god, than Hidaspes falls desperately in love with the deformed dwarf Zoilus, and begs him in marriage of her father. The duke, infuriated at such an exhibition of unnatural and disordered affection in his daughter, causes the dwarf to be beheaded, whereupon the princess languishes and dies.[[304]] In the meanwhile Leucippus has fallen in love with Bacha, the widow of a citizen, and frequents her house secretly, where being surprised by his father, he protests so strongly of her chastity--hoping thereby to save her credit and his own--that the old duke falls in love with her himself, and shortly afterwards marries her. Having now become duchess she seeks to renew her intercourse with the prince, and being repulsed resolves upon revenge. She makes the duke believe that his son is plotting against him, and so secures his arrest and condemnation, hoping thereby to obtain the crown for Urania, her daughter by a previous marriage. The citizens, however, rise in revolt and rescue Leucippus, who thereupon goes into voluntary exile. He is followed by Urania, a simple and innocent girl, who, knowing her mother's designs upon his life, hopes to counteract her malice by attending on the prince in the disguise of a page. The duchess in fact sends a man to murder the prince, the attempt being frustrated by Urania, who herself receives the blow and dies, the murderer being then slain by Leucippus. In the meanwhile the duke dies, and the friends of the prince hasten to him, bringing with them the duchess as a prisoner. She however, seeing her schemes doomed to failure, nurses revenge, and succeeds in stabbing Leucippus, then turning the dagger into her own heart.[[305]]
More ink than was necessary has been spilt over the motive of this wildly melodramatic play. Seward expressed an opinion that there was nothing in the action of the brother and sister deserving such severe retribution. To him Mason retorted, with somewhat childish seriousness, that, the characters being supposed pagan, the speech of the princess must be held a sacrilegious blasphemy. So Sidney no doubt intended it, and so Beaumont, who was evidently the author of the scene in question, intended it too, and he would possibly, if left to himself, have executed the rest in a manner consonant with this intention. But his collaborator took the opportunity of adding a scene between certain of the lords of the court, in which, with characteristic coarseness, he represented the condemned worship in the light of mere vulgar licence. The fact is that not only the playwrights, but, no doubt, the majority of the audience as well, were interested chiefly in the extravagance of the plot, and cared little or nothing for the adequacy of the motive. As a drama the piece is decidedly poor, and the construction which ends the sister's part of the tragedy in the second act leaves much to be desired. There is, moreover, something particularly and unnecessarily revolting in Hidaspes' passion for the deformed dwarf, and something forced in the contrast between Leucippus' licentious relations with Bacha at the beginning of the play and the self-righteousness of his later attitude. Both faults are unfortunately rather typical, one of the extravagant colouring affected by the dramatists, the other of the coarse and hasty characterization to which Fletcher in particular is apt to condescend. There are, however, some good passages in the play, though it is not always easy to assign them to their author. The scenes in which Urania appears are pretty, though inferior to the very similar ones in the nearly contemporary Philaster. The song of the maidens as they watch by their dying mistress, palinode and dirge in one, is striking in the blending of diverse modes:
Cupid, pardon what is past,
And forgive our sins at last!
Then we will be coy no more,
But thy deity adore;
Troths at fifteen we will plight,
And will tread a dance each night,
In the fields or by the fire,
With the youths that have desire.
Thus I shut thy faded light,
And put it in eternal night.
Where is she can boldly say,
Though she be as fresh as May,
She shall not by this corpse be laid,
Ere to-morrow's light do fade? (II. v.)
There is a suggestion of better things, too, in the lines:
he is like
Nothing that we have seen, yet doth resemble
Apollo, as I oft have fancied him,
When rising from his bed he stirs himself,
And shakes day from his hair. (I. iii.)
The authors, or one of them, had also learned something of Shakespeare's quaint humour, as appears in the remark:
What should he be beheaded? we shall have it grow so base shortly, gentlemen will be out of love with it. (II. iii.)