All you, the sad Spectators of this Act,
Whose hearts do taste a feeling pensiveness
Of this unheard-of savage massacre:
Oh be far off to harbour such a thought,
As this audacious murderer put in act!
I see your sorrows flow up to the brim,
And overflow your cheeks with brinish tears:
But though this sight bring surfeit to the eye,
Delight your ears with pleasing harmony,
That ears may countercheck your eyes, and say,
“Why shed you tears? this deed is but a Play.”[120]
Murderer to his Sister, about to stow away the trunk of the body, having severed it from the limbs.
Hark, Rachel! I will cross the water strait,
And fling this middle mention of a Man
Into some ditch.
It is curious, that this old Play comprises the distinct action of two Atrocities; the one a vulgar murder, committed in our own Thames Street, with the names and incidents truly and historically set down; the other a Murder in high life, supposed to be acting at the same time in Italy, the scenes alternating between that country and England: the Story of the latter is mutatis mutandis no other than that of our own “Babes in the Wood,” transferred to Italy, from delicacy no doubt to some of the family of the rich Wicked Uncle, who might yet be living. The treatment of the two differs as the romance-like narratives in “God’s Revenge against Murder,” in which the Actors of the Murders (with the trifling exception that they were Murderers) are represented as most accomplished and every way amiable young Gentlefolks of either sex—as much as that differs from the honest unglossing pages of the homely Newgate Ordinary.
C. L.
[117] This address, for its barbaric splendor of conception, extravagant vein of promise, not to mention some idiomatic peculiarities, and the very structure of the verse, savours strongly of Marlowe; but the real author, I believe, is unknown.
[118] A sort of young Caliban, her son, who presently enters, complaining of a “bloody coxcomb” which the Young Saint George had given him.
[119] Calib had killed the parents of the Young Saint George.