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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. "Enough, good friend; no more.
With this inconsequent and unmotived tragedy is interwoven a slight and incongruous underplot of rustic buffoonery. As a whole Glapthorne's play is of inconsiderable merit. Here and there, however, we come upon a passage which might make us hope better things of the author. Of Argalus it is said that
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.
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. Ive to much griefe already." The "glowewormes uneffectuall fire" is of course pilfered from Hamlet, but it is happily introduced. On the whole I am confident that The Lady Mother will be found less tedious than any other of Glapthorne's pieces.
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.
One of these is the opening of the first scene between Plangus and Andromana: The last in this somewhat dreary catalogue is Glapthorne's Argalus and Parthenia, published in 1639 and acted probably the previous year. The story is briefly as follows.
For the wider and more essential beauties of conception, character, and construction we look in vain in Glapthorne's play. Sidney's Arcadia, however, though the most important, was not the only so-called pastoral romance which left dramatic progeny.
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