INTRODUCTION TO THE LADY MOTHER.

The authorship of this anonymous play, now printed for the first time (from Eg. MS. 1994), is not difficult to discover. Any one who has had the patience to read the Plays of Henry Glapthorne cannot fail to be amused by the bland persistence with which certain passages are reproduced in one play after another. Glapthorne's stock of fancies was not very extensive, but he puts himself to considerable pains to make the most of them. In The Lady Mother we find the same ornaments spread out before us, many of them very tawdry at their best. Glapthorne's editor has striven to show that the weak-kneed playwright was a fellow-pupil of John Milton's at St. Paul's. One cannot think of the two names together without calling to mind the "lean and flashy songs" and "scrannel pipes of wretched straw" in Lycidas.

Yet Glapthorne was a man of some parts. He had little enough dramatic power, but he writes occasionally with tenderness and feeling. In his poetical garden rank weeds choke up the flower-beds; but still, if we have patience to pursue the quest, we may pick here and there a musk-rose or a violet that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the Grateful Servant, a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry faded graces of the Lady's Privilege.

A note at the end of The Lady Mother in the hand-writing of William Blagrave, acting for the Master of the Revels, shows that the play was licensed in October, 1635. From a passage in II., 1, it would seem to have been produced at the Salisbury Court Theatre in Whitefriars. In the same year Glapthorne's comedy of the Hollander, according to the title-page, was being acted at the Cockpit, Drury Lane. His other pieces were produced rather later. I am inclined to think that The Lady Mother, in spite of the wild improbability of the plot and the poorness of much of the comic parts, is our author's best work. In such lines as the following (IV., 1) there is a little flickering of pathos:—

"Enough, good friend; no more. Had a rude Scythian, ignorant of tears, Unless the wind enforced them from his eyes, Heard this relation, sure he would have wept; And yet I cannot. I have lost all sense Of pitty with my womanhood, and now That once essentiall Mistress of my soule, Warme charity, no more inflames my brest Then does the glowewormes uneffectuall fire The ha[n]d that touches it. Good sir, desist The agravation of your sad report; [Weepe. Ive to much griefe already."

The "glowewormes uneffectuall fire" is of course pilfered from Hamlet, but it is happily introduced. There is some humour in the scene (I., 2) where the old buck, Sir Geoffrey, who is studying a compliment to his mistress while his hair is being trimmed by his servant before the glass, puts by the importunity of his scatter-brain'd nephew and the blustering captain, who vainly endeavour to bring him to the point and make him disburse. On the whole I am confident that The Lady Mother will be found less tedious than any other of Glapthorne's pieces.