The Lady objects: I know all this; your words are but delaies : The prentice-knight remains impenetrable; but the Lady, undismayed, follows him to the wars, and, in the final outcome, weds him. It will be seen that the situation is more acute than that between Ralph and Pompiona; but because of its easy susceptibility to burlesque, it is possible that it was in our author's mind, together with the analogous episode in Palmerin de Oliva with which comparison has already been made. At the conclusion of The Four Prentices, Charles says: Since first I bore this shield I quartered it Dyce points out the resemblance of these lines to the Wife's suggestion: 'Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband' (Ind. 46), and also to a ballad entitled The Honour of a London Apprentice, in which the said apprentice kills two lions. It is hazardous to assert that either Heywood's play or the ballad is the direct source of the Wife's proposal. The romances of chivalry are filled with conflicts with lions, and Beaumont may have been merely ridiculing this stock motive, without a specific incident in view. The Honour of a London Apprentice is an absurdly serious tale of a London shop-boy, who finds himself in Turkey, and proceeds to defend the name of 'Elizabeth his princess' by slaying the Sultan's son. Two lions are set to devour the prentice, but he succeeds in killing them both by thrusting his arms down their throats and plucking out their hearts, which he casts before the Sultan. This act so fills the monarch with admiration that he repents all his 'foul offences' against the prentice, and gives him his daughter to wed1. This ballad was very popular at the time, and must have been known to Beaumont. It offers an excellent parallel, in its ridiculous laudation of the prowess of London prentice-boys, to the burlesque use of this general theme in our play; and, though it cannot be demonstrated, it is possible that the ballad influenced Beaumont's conception. There are three comparatively distinct strands in the plot of The Knight of the Burning Pestle: the lovestory of Jasper and Luce, the fortunes of the Merrythought family, and the adventures of Ralph. The literary relationships of the third division have been specified. The first two are realistic reflections of ordinary life merely, and are for the most part either original with the dramatists, or drawn from the common subject-material of the stage. The love-theme, though given here and there some freshness and beauty, is essentially conventional. The avaricious and irascible father, bent upon wedding his daughter to a wealthy dolt whom she despises, the rejected suitor, the poor but favored lover, the elopement, the reconciliation, and the happy ending -here is a time-honored plot which has been the stock in trade of the theatre from the earliest appearance of English comedy down to the latest popular 'hit' upon Broadway. It is superfluous to attempt to find an origin for the central idea of this story. Beaumont and Fletcher drew it from their observation of the life about them, and from the conventions of their profession. One or two of its elements, however, seem to have been suggested by contemporary plays. Emil Koepp 1 The ballad may be found in Ritson's Ancient Songnd Ba other Requord has called attention to a similarity between one of its episodes and Marston's Antonio and Mellida, which appeared in 16021. At the conclusion of the play, there is a device similar to the conveyance of Jasper into the house of Venturewell, and of Luce into the house of Merrythought, in a coffin (4. 268, 349, and 5. 196). Antonio, the hero, causes himself to be carried on a bier into the presence of his beloved Mellida in the palace of her father, Piero Sforza, the Duke of Venice, who has opposed the match because of enmity toward Antonio's family. When the incident occurs, the Duke has just been reconciled with Antonio's father. In the midst of the funeral assemblage, Piero swears that he would bestow Mellida's hand upon Antonio, could the latter's life be restored. At these words, the supposed corpse rises from the bier, and demands the fulfilment of the vow, which is granted. It is true that the situation in our play is conceived chiefly in a comic spirit, and is solved through Venturewell's ludicrous fear of Jasper's fabricated ghost, and grief over the fictitious death of the heroine instead of the hero; but the devices in the two plays are similar enough to make plausible the conjecture that here our authors draw upon Marston. The character of Humphrey has interesting affiliations throughout our early comedy, and is not hard to account for. The cowardly fop and ninny, who is the dupe of a parasite, or the sport of a scornful lady-love, or the victim of humorous wags about n, is a stock figure upon the Elizabethan stage; , indeed, as Ralph Roister Doister him- n su den Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marston's und 42. Simple, to Ben Jonson's Master Stephen, and to numerous gulls and dandies of the old drama whose only merit lies in their curled locks or in their moneybags. A comparative study of these characters would result in the definition of a recurrent type; it would not result in the specification of a concrete source for the conception of Humphrey. Here, again, Beaumont and Fletcher are appropriating the general stock in trade of the theatre, though they must be granted a large degree of originality in a creation of such bizarre, and indeed overdrawn, absurdity as the figure of this unconscionable booby. The family of the Merrythoughts, like the household of the merchant, form merely a homely picture of more or less typical domesticity, and are sketched by the authors from observation rather than under the influence of literary models. Old Merrythought, however, is more of a 'humor' study than an actual invididual, and his portrait has suggested analogues. His name reminds Leonhardt of Merrygreek, the parasite in Ralph Roister Doister, and his fondness for ballads recalls to Leonhardt Justice Silence in 2 Henry IV. It is almost needless to say that the resemblances here are only superficial. Merrygreek, like Merrythought, does, indeed, flee from work, and he announces as a sort of guiding motto: As long lyueth the merry man, they say, As doth the sory man, and longer by a day; but he is a schemer and a sharp, who craftily designs to live at the charges of his patron, while our scapegrace thinks not at all about the means for procuring meat and drink, and carelessly defies the encroachment of poverty. He warbles: 1 Über Beaumont und Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, p. 30. Who can sing a merrier note Than he that cannot change a groat? In another passage he cries: When earth and seas from me are reft, Merrythought's absorbing jollity is not the spirit of Merrygreek Still less is it associated with Shakespeare's Justice Silence. This character has no kinship with Merrythought beyond his singing of snatches from old ballads, and, moreover, he sings only when he is intoxicated; Merrythought sings at all times, whether he be drunk or sober. If it were desirable to push comparisons, one might find relationships between our lover of ballads and the ballad-monger Autolycus in A Winter's Tale, which was first acted near the date of our play's appearance. This latter personage, however, is concerned only with the profit to be gained from his wares, and the clownage which characterizes him is the expression of deep-dyed rascality, while that of Merrythought is merely the result of irrepressible spirits. After all, however far Merrythought may be the reflection of a common type, I think that we must recognize in his blithe and sunny nature, his invincible gaiety, and his comfortable philosophy, an imperfectly outlined, but original and eminently happy creation of our dramatists. The character is not without an ancestry, but in its distinguishing lineaments it is unique. E. OBJECTS OF THE SATIRE. The satire in The Knight of the Burning Pestle points in many directions. It is leveled at the romances of chivalry, together with the tastes of the reading members of the middle classes, and the extravagances of the bourgeois drama, which were the products of this e |