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The Dutchess of Suffolk, an historical play 1631. For the play see Fox's Martyrology, p. 521. The English Traveller, a tragi-comedy, acted at the Cock-pit in Drury-lane, 1633, dedicated to Sir Henry Appleton, the plot from Plautus Mostellaria. A Maidenhead well lost, a comedy acted in Drury-lane, 1634.
They comprise three variations on the theme which, to modern taste, has become so excessively tedious, of the Fourberies de Scapin the Epidicus, Mostellaria, and Persa; the Poenulus, a dull play, which owes its only interest to the passages in it written in the Carthaginian language, which offer a tempting field for the conjectures of the philologist; two more, the Mercator and Stichus, of confused plot and insipid dialogue; and a mutilated fragment of the Cistellaria, or Travelling-Trunk, which would not have been missed had it shared the fate of the Carpet-Bag.
The apparitions were generally believed to frighten people, just as they are at present, though the well-authenticated stories of such occurrences would seem to show that genuine ghosts, or whatever one likes to call them, have the power of paralyzing fear. In the Mostellaria, Plautus uses a ghost as a recognized piece of supernatural machinery.
With these supernatural phenomena, as they prevailed in Athens and Rome, we are well acquainted, not only from the Mostellaria of Plautus, but from the numerous ghost-stories of Pliny, Plutarch, the Philopseudes of Lucian, and similar sources.
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