For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid little play beats A Warning for Fair Women fairly out of the field.  It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as with fire.  But such power as this, though a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it is not the fit property of a poet.  Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this.  Passion is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones.  I cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. “’Tis a very excellent piece of work”; may we never exactly look upon its like again!

I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly probable, that the author of Arden of Feversham might be one with the author of the famous additional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy, and that either both of these “pieces of work” or neither must be Shakespeare’s.  I still adhere to Coleridge’s verdict, which indeed must be that of all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are

   Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
   For girls of nine: 

to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged at every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic truth, are no less like Shakespeare’s work than unlike Jonson’s:  though hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured style than is the general tone of The Case is Altered, his one surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager’s dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter.  But this unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a descent from the “fine madness” of “old Jeronymo” to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety of Catiline and Sejanus.—­I cannot but think, too, that Lamb’s first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of all Shakespeare’s liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to “the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus.”