No Game for Children

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HERBERT MESTMAN WAS FORTY-ONE years old. He was six feet two inches tall and had suffered from one of the innumerable children’s diseases at the age of seven, that had left him with a build decidedly pigeon-chested and slim to the point of emaciation. He had steel-gray hair and wore bifocals. It was his avocation, however, that most distinguished him from all other men: Herbert Mestman knew more about Elizabethan drama than anyone else in the country. Perhaps even in the world.

He knew the prototypes and finest examples of the genre of drama known as the “chronicle history.” He knew Marlowe and Shakespeare (and believed firmly the original spelling had been Shexpeer), he was on recitation terms with Dekker and Massinger. His familiarity with “Philaster” and Johnson’s “Alchemist” bordered on mania. He was, in essence, the perfect scholar of the drama of Elizabeth’s period. No slightest scrap of vague biographical or bibliographical data escaped him; he had written the most complete biography — of what little was known — on the life of John Webster, with a lucid and fantastically brilliant erratum handling all early versions of “The Duchess of Malfi.”

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