distinct plots in the present play. The one relates to the
murder of Robert Beech, a chandler of Thames Street, and his boy, by a
tavern-keeper named Thomas Merry; and the other is founded on a story
which bears some resemblance to the well-known ballad of _The Babes in
the Wood_. I have not been able to discover the source from which the
playwright drew his account of the Thames Street murder. Holinshed and
Stow are silent; and I have consulted without avail Antony Munday's
"View of Sundry Examples," 1580, and "Sundry strange and inhumaine
Murthers lately committed," 1591 (an excessively rare, if not unique,
tract preserved at Lambeth). Yet the murder must have created some stir
and was not lightly forgotten. From Henslowe's Diary[3] (ed. Collier,
pp. 92-3) we learn that in 1599 Haughton and Day wrote a tragedy on the
subject,--"the Tragedy of Thomas Merrye." The second plot was derived, I
suppose, from some Italian story; and it is not improbable that the
ballad of the _Babes in the Wood_ (which was entered in the
Stationers' Books in 1595, tho' the earliest printed copy extant is the
black-letter broadside--circ. 1640?--in the Roxburghe Collection) was
adapted from Yarington's play.

Although not published until 1601, the _Two Tragedies_ would seem from
internal evidence to have been written some years earlier. The language
has a bald, antiquated look, and the stage-directions are amusingly
simple. I once entertained a theory (which I cannot bring myself to
wholly discard) that _Arden of Feversham_, 1592, _Warning for Fair
Women_, 1599, and _Two Tragedies in One_, 1601, are all by the same
hand; that the _Warning_ and _Two Tragedies_, though published later,
were early essays by the author whose genius displayed its full power in
_Arden of Feversham_. A reader who will take the trouble to read the
three plays together will discover many points of similarity between
them. _Arden_ is far more powerful than the two other plays; but I
venture to think that the superiority lies rather in single scenes and
detached passages than in general dramatic treatment. The noble scene of
the quarrel and reconciliation between Alice Arden and Mosbie is
incomparably finer than any scene in the _Warning_ or _Two Tragedies_;
but I am not sure that Arden contains another scene which can be
definitely pronounced to be beyond Yarington's ability, though there are
many scattered passages displaying such poetry as we find nowhere in the
_Tw