at I may keep this white and virgin hand
From any violent outrage, or red murder,
And with that prayer I enter."

[55] First ed. "Play," which I am half inclined to prefer.

A subsequent speech of his--

"O God, O God that it were possible
To undo things done,"

hardly comes short of the touch which would have given us instead of a
prose Shakespere a Shakespere indeed; and all the rest of the play, as far
as the main plot is concerned, is full of pathos.

In the great number of other pieces attributed to him, written in all the
popular styles, except the two above referred to, merits and defects are
mixed up in a very curious fashion. Never sinking to the lowest depth of
the Elizabethan playwright, including some great ones, Heywood never rises
to anything like the highest height. His chronicle plays are very weak,
showing no grasp of heroic character, and a most lamentable slovenliness of
rhythm. Few things are more curious than to contrast with _Henry VI._ (to
which some critics will allow little of Shakespere's work) and _Richard
III._ the two parts of _Edward IV._, in which Heywood, after a manner,
fills the gap. There are good lines here and there, and touching traits;
but the whole, as a whole, is quite ludicrously bad, and "written to the
gallery," the City gallery, in the most innocent fashion. _If You Know Not
Me You Know Nobody_, or _The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth_, also in two
parts, has the same curious innocence, the same prosaic character, but
hardly as many redeeming flashes. Its first part deals with Elizabeth's
real "troubles," in her sister's days; its second with the Armada period
and the founding of the Royal Exchange. For Heywood, unlike most of the
dramatists, was always true to the City, even to the eccentric extent of
making, in _The Four Prentices of London_, Godfrey of Bouillon and his
brethren members of the prentice-brotherhood. His classical and allegorical
pieces, such as _The Golden Age_ and its fellows, are most tedious and not
at all brief. The four of them (_The Iron Age_ has two parts) occupy a
whole volume of the reprint, or more than four hundred closely printed
pages; and their clumsy dramatisation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, with any
other classical learning that Heywood could think of thrust in, presents
(together with various minor pieces of a somewhat similar kind) as striking
a contrast with _Troilus and Cressida_, as _Edward IV._ does with _Henr