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Updated: June 3, 2025
The next writer to bring forward a view of this character was the Rev. F.G. Fleay, the well-known Shakspere critic, whose ingenious efforts in iconoclasm cause a curious alternation of feeling between admiration and amazement. His argument is unfortunately mixed up with a question of textual criticism; for he rejects certain scenes in the play as the work of the inferior dramatist Middleton.
Before my mind had been made up, my good friend, Mr. Fleay, pronounced strongly in favour of Massinger. He is, I think, right; in fact, it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Massinger wrote the speech quoted above. In all Massinger's work there is admirable ease and dignity; if his words are seldom bathed in tears or steeped in fire, yet he never writes beneath his subject.
Malone, Dyce, Steevens, Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee, Messrs. Gosse and Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is Will Shakspere. But Mr. Fleay and Mr. For Chettle says that in the Groatsworth of Wit "a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken." The mysterious one is, therefore, one of the playwrights addressed by Greene.
Consequently all the followers of Malone, who wrote before Messrs. Fleay and Castle, are mistaken; and what Mr. Greenwood has to say about Sir Sidney Lee, J. C. Collins, and Dr. Garnett, and Mr.
Fleay avoids the difficulty created by this passage, which alludes to the witches as "the weird sisters," by supposing that these lines were interpolated by Middleton a method of criticism that hardly needs comment.
The Cambridge editors believe that Middleton was permitted to supply certain scenes at the time of the writing of Macbeth: Mr. Fleay, that Middleton cut down and patched up Shakespeare's perfected work, adding much inferior matter of his own, and that he did this being engaged to alter the play for stage purposes. The latter opinion I must reject, notwithstanding Mr.
F. G. Fleay, in his "Shakespearian Manual," starting from this view, have gone so far as to say that "Macbeth," as we have it, is not all Shakespeare's, but in part the work of Thomas Middleton, a second or third-rate playwright contemporary with Shakespeare, who wrote a play, called "The Witch," which is plainly an imitation of the supernatural scenes in this tragedy.
Miss Polly looked at the forlorn little gray bunch of neglected misery in Pollyanna's arms, and shivered: Miss Polly did not care for cats not even pretty, healthy, clean ones. "Ugh! Pollyanna! What a dirty little beast! And it's sick, I'm sure, and all mangy and fleay." "I know it, poor little thing," crooned Pollyanna, tenderly, looking into the little creature's frightened eyes.
I now leave the reader to the enjoyment of this old play, which, whether it be Heywood's or not, certainly deserves the attention of all faithful students of our inexhaustible dramatic literature. To ensure as much accuracy as possible, Mr. Fleay has read the proof-sheets throughout. By the same gentleman's kindness I am able to correct the following misprints in the first volume: Ten.
Edited, with an introduction and notes, by the author of Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea, Consort of George I., &c. Mr. Fleay thinks that Dick of Devonshire was written by R. Davenport. "The conduct of the plot," he observes, "the characterisation, the metre, the language are very like the City Nightcap." The reader must judge between us.
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