this poor trampled figure to "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To find its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to lesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her—or one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is Robert Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy, labelled to How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, which in its central situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful Legend of Florence; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of Chaucer and Boccaccio.
For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid little play beats A
