I'm back to reading Middleton on the job again. Last night I read The Patient Man and the Honest Whore, which is a collaboration with Thomas Dekker. This is another one of those Jacobean plays that is really two plays in one, and both plays serve as foils for the other. It is really a complicated symbiosis that works on a literary level, but sometimes does not as entertainment. The two stories are diverse enough, with one having all the laughs and the other all the melodrama.
The melodrama involves a Romeo and Juliet type scenario, except no one dies and they live happily ever after. This story would occasionally mingle with the other story, but one could theoretically produce this play and cut the other one without much missing. This story is the main story of the two as it has the 'Honest Wore' as one of the characters and portrays her change from being a prostitute to wanting to be a redeemed woman. The funniest moment is when Hippolito berates her and her profession for over 150 lines. He holds nothing back and she sits there and listens to his puritanical rant. Though probably not meant to be funny, it struck me as funny.
The second story was the funny one for me. A shrew has the most patient man in Milan as her husband and she desperately wants to see him get angry. So this story involves a string of characters approaching Candido the patient man and trying to rouse his anger. There are some very funny moments here, such as one character wanting only a pennyworth of cloth, and for it to be cut from the middle of the cloth. Or the wife not letting Candido get his court robes so he goes upstairs and cuts a hole in the bedroom rug for his head and some others for his arms and then puts a fools cap on and goes to court. I would love to see this comedic story on stage.
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