INTRODUCTION TO _THE DISTRACTED EMPEROR_.


In the Appendix to Vol. II. I have given some account of this anonymous
play, which is here printed for the first time from Egerton MS. 1994.
As the play bears no title in the MS., I have named it at a venture
"The Distracted Emperor."

An ill-shaped and repulsive piece of work it certainly is; crude and
cheerless, but marked with signs of unmistakable power. At the time when
I made the extracts for the Appendix, I thought that Cyril Tourneur
might possibly be the author. On further reflection, it seemed to me
that the stronger passages are much in Marston's manner. The horrid
scene where Charlimayne is represented hugging the dead queen recalls
the anonymous "Second Maiden's Tragedy." Marston, who shrank from
nothing, would not have hesitated to show us the Archbishop, in his
search for the magic ring, parting the dead queen's lips, with the
ironical observation, "You cannot byte me, Madam." The trenchant satire
that abounds throughout the play reminds us frequently of Marston,
though there is an absence of that monstrous phraseology which
distinguished his "Scourge of Villanie" and early plays. But, looking at
the play as a whole, I should have very great hesitation in allowing it
to be Marston's. My impression is that Chapman had the chief hand in it.
The author's trick of moralising at every possible opportunity, his
abundant use of similes more proper to epic than dramatic language, the
absence of all womanly grace in the female characters,--these are points
in which the present play may be compared with Chapman's published
tragedies. Orlando's speech at the beginning of Act ii., "O that my
curse had power to wound the starres," &c., in which he compares