Summary
Act II
Scene 1
Kitely, his man Cash, and Downright enter. Kitely asks Cash to take care of a bit of his merchant business, and Cash accedes. After he leaves, Kitely tells Downright he took Cash in when he was a child and gave him his own first name, Thomas, and trusts him with his own life.
Downright listens politely but asks his brother-in-law what he said he had to tell him. Kitely is reluctant, trying Downright’s patience. Kitely begins by saying Downright’s brother, Wellbred, has declined of late. When he came to stay with Kitely, he was marked by sweetness and elegance, but now his “course is so irregular” (26). He is “loose, affected, and depriv’d of grace” (26). He seems a stranger, and makes Kitely’s house common and tawdry, a place where “He and his wild associates spend their hours, / In repetition of lascivious jests, / Swear, leap, drink, dance, and revel night by night” (26).
Downright asks why Kitely thinks he would be any help. He has talked to Wellbred before, and “counsel to him is as good as a shoulder of mutton to a sick horse” (27). He suggests just letting the man do what he wants to do, and reap the consequences. He then asks why Kitely does not say something if he is so bothered. Kitely explains that Downright is Wellbred’s elder brother and the title gives authority. Wellbred would feel a sense of duty if Downright spoke to him, but if Kitely did, then “He would be ready from his heat of humour” (27). He would be mocking and scornful and claim Kitely was jealous of him.
Before the men can continue, Bobadil and Matthew burst in. Bobadil tells Matthew he will not speak to Downright at the moment, and asks after Wellbred. Kitely replies that he did not come in. Bobadil and Mathew leave.
Downright is vexed at the appearance of Matthew, but Kitely implores him not to follow him. Downright cannot believe these men are his brother’s friends; he wishes he could just get rid of them all. Kitely encourages him to calm down and not let himself be controlled by choler; instead, “rather use the soft persuading way, / Whose powers work more gently” (29).
A bell rings, and Kitely says it is breakfast. He says for Downright to go in and sit with his wife for now, and Downright exits.
Kitely reflects on his situation, wishing Wellbred had not lodged in his house. He thinks women cannot resist such “wanton gallants, and young revelers” (30), and is certain that he is being cuckolded. He plans to be like “an iron bar” between the “conspiring motions of desire” (30).
Dame Kitely and Bridget enter, and Dame Kitely tells her husband they’ve been waiting for him to begin their meal. He says his head aches and his wife is immediately solicitous. After the women leave, he grumbles to himself that he does have a disease—the “poor mortals’ plague” which infects “the houses of the brain” (31). It begins in the mind, fills it with phantasy, and touches every thought and motion in the mind with “the black poison of suspect” (31).
Scene 2
Brainworm enters, disguised. He is pleased with his appearance and his plan, which is to intercept his young master before the old master arrives. He espies Edward and Stephen coming his way.
Stephen is telling Edward he seems to have lost his purse, but then discovers he still has it. it would be bad, he says, for he has a jet ring his mistress Mary sent him. He sent her poems in return.
Brainworm reveals himself to the men, and asks if they’d like to exchange a few crowns for a good blade he is selling. He introduces himself as a poor gentleman and soldier who is reduced to a state of poverty. Edward asks where he served, and Brainworm mentions a number of places and a number of times he was shot.
Stephen asks what he would sell the rapier for. Both Stephen and Edward are interested in it, and Brainworm assures them it is a real Toledo. Edward tells his cousin it will not be his, and hands Brainworm a shilling. Stephen is angry that he was outbid, and the men argue. Stephen says he will pay more than it is worth, and gestures for Brainworm to follow him.
Scene 3
Knowell bitterly reflects on what the letter’s tone and content suggests about youth today. He recalls how there was a time when age was authority, when an older man received reverence. Yet now, all are fallen—youth from their fear, and age from good example. He believes all have a role to play in this state of affairs, though, for parents make their children’s “palates cunning” because “the first words / We form their tongues with are licentious jests!” (35). Children repeat words like “whore” and “bastard” and parents laugh and praise them.
Furthermore, Knowell bemoans, the way fathers live should be censured. The mistresses, the “lascivious courtships” (35), the bringing their sons into such things—this is problematic. There are so many ways that parents “spoil our own” (35), and it seems all children are taught is to get money. Knowell hopes he has done better by his son, but he is not sure.
Brainworm enters, disguised still as the soldier-beggar. He sycophantically asks for a bit of money and begins weeping dramatically, saying he had to part with his rapier. Knowell is disgusted by him and excoriates him for living this sort of life. He tells the disguised Brainworm that there are so many forms of honest labor he could be undertaking.
Brainworm replies that he would love to find another course, and Knowell replies sharply that he would love to find it, but not seek it. Knowell asks his name and Brainworm says he is “Fitz-Sword.” Knowell asks Brainworm to work for him, and to follow him to see if Brainworm’s deeds “will carry a proportion to thy words” (38).
After Knowell leaves, Brainworm starts laughing. He cannot believe this “fox” betrayed himself thusly. He knows that being Knowell’s confidante will help him become “possess’d of all his counsels: and, by that conduit, my / young master” (38). He plans to “bring him clean out of love with the soldier for ever” and “abuse him intolerably” (38).
Analysis
The second major household in the play is that of Kitely. He and his wife reside with his sister, Bridget, and their visitor Wellbred (Dame Kitely’s brother). Wellbred’s presence means the presence of diverse young men, here to smoke and carouse with their friends. Kitely is frustrated with this, and asks Wellbred’s older brother, Squire Downright, to intervene. Kitely’s main reasons, as he tells Downright, are that Wellbred is no longer who he used to be—now he is “loose, affected, and depriv’d of grace” (26)—and that he has ruined Kitely’s house—“He makes my house common, as a mart, / A theatre, a public receptacle / For giddy humour, and diseased riot” (26). A staid, rather dour man himself, Kitely cannot countenance how Wellbred and “his wild associates spend their hours, / In repetition of lascivious jests, / Swear, leap, drink, dance, and revel night by night” (26).
Perhaps more importantly, though, is that Kitely is desperately jealous of these men and assume his wife will fall prey to their advances. He doesn’t tell this to Downright explicitly, preferring to say that he assumes he will be called jealous, but after Downright leaves, Kitely admits to himself that he does indeed feel the intense stirrings of jealousy permeating his mind—“like a pestilence, it doth infect / The houses of the brain . . . Till not a thought, or motion, in the mind, / Be free from the black poison of suspect” (31). Kitely’s preponderant humor seems to be melancholy, as he convinces himself that his lovely wife cannot be faithful to him.
In this second act Brainworm begins to don his disguises. He intends to do so to show his loyalty to his young master, but he also knows there is more at stake. He says, “now must / I create an intolerable sort of lies, or my present profession / loses the grace” (32). He also must wear disguises to make his way in the world, and the money he gets from these encounters helps sustain him. His first disguise is that of a soldier-beggar, and he tricks Stephen into buying his sword, an otherwise unimportant blade that he claims is a Toledo.
Brainworm’s stated desire to protect Edward from his father derives from Knowell’s consternation over his son’s perceived dissolute behavior. In a moving passage, Knowell wonders if he went wrong somewhere as a parent. He is perspicacious in his condemnation of the way fathers can corrupt their sons almost from the cradle with their curses, jests, flaunting of mistresses, advice to make money above all else, etc. He thinks he did a decent job, but worries nonetheless.
Knowell is like many parents and those of the older generation who think that the youth are corrupted, perhaps forgetting their own dalliances and adventures now that they are gray-haired. Knowell’s words are a little pitiful and very universal in their suggestion of how the old in most places and most times view the young: “[I cannot] leave t’admire the change / Of manners, and the breeding of our youth, / Within the kingdom, since myself was one. / When I was young, he liv’d not in the stews / Durst have conceiv’d a scorn, and utter’d it, / On a grey head; age was authority / Against a buffoon: and a man had, then, / A certain reverence paid unto his years, / That had none due unto his life . . . But, now, we all are fall’n; youth, from their fear, / And age, from that which bred it, good example” (34). Scholar A. Richard Dutton suggests that there’s even more in Knowell’s characterization, writing, “Old Kno’well is not simply an abstract ‘humour’—he is a manifestation of the London in the play, where suspicious, rather cynical old age is out of tune with regenerative nature and society, represented here by the playful vitality of the young men.”
