title, War without Blows could hardly be applied to a play in which the whole of the last act is occupied with fierce fighting between three different nations.  So with the second title, Love without Suit.  Serena indeed grants her love in the end without any reason whatever, but only after her lover has ‘suited’ himself clean out of his five wits.  Moreover, it is not certain that this second title should not be Love without Strife.  Heywood’s play, I have little doubt, was a mere love-comedy (cf. such titles as The Amorous War, and similar expressions in the dramatists passim).  The identification, moreover, would necessitate the date 1598, though this does not prevent Fleay from stating that the piece is founded on William Webster’s poem published in 1617.  So early a date seems to me rather improbable.  Since William Webster’s poem has nothing to do with the present piece, the suggestion that Kirkman’s attribution of the play to John Webster was due to a confusion of course falls to the ground.

[313] According to S. L. Lee in the Dic.  Nat.  Biog., who follows the Biographia Dramatica.

[314] It will be found in Mr. Bullen’s admirable collection, Lyrics from the Dramatists, 1889, p. 231.

[315] Reprinted in 1882 by A. H. Bullen in the first volume of his Old English Plays, and more recently by R. W. Bond in his edition of Lyly.  In quoting, I have generally followed the latter, though I have preferred my own arrangement of certain passages.  None of the suggestions that have been put forward as to the authorship of the play appear to me to carry much weight.  The ascription of the whole to Lyly, first made by Archer in 1656, and repeated by Halliwell as late as 1860, is now utterly discredited.  The view, first advanced by Edmund Gosse, that the author was John Day, has been tentatively endorsed by both editors of the piece; but I agree with Professer Gollancz in thinking it unlikely on the ground of style.  Fleay assigns the serious (verse) portion of the play to Daniel, and the comic (prose) scenes to Lyly.  It seems to me unlikely, however, that Daniel, who was shortly to appear as the chief exponent of the orthodox Italian tradition, should at this date have been concerned in the production of a typical example of the hybrid pastoral of the English stage.  Nor do I believe that Lyly was in any way concerned in the piece, though some scenes are evident imitations of his work.  This, however, involves the question of the authorship of the lyrics found in Lyly’s plays, and I must refer for a detailed discussion to my article upon the subject already cited (p. 227).

[316] Metamorphoses, ix. 667, &c.  Ward is moved to characterize the plot as a theme of ‘Ovidian lubricity.’  I question whether any such censure is merited.  That the theme is one which would have become intolerably suggestive in the hands of the Sienese Intronati, for instance, may be admitted, but the author has treated the story with complete naivete.  The obscene passages referred to later on (p. 345) occur in the comic action, and are in no way connected with the point in question.  Ward further informs us that the play is ‘throughout in rime,’ notwithstanding the fact that something approaching a quarter of the whole is in prose.