Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or
reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after
the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a
double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other
in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk
a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either
side. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign
evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a
beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to
the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possible
occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the
work of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent
abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already
superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot,
in his transmutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless deliverer
into the disgusting burlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no need
as I should certainly have no patience to speak.
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