ew are of the latter kind. _The
Miseries of Enforced Marriage_, a domestic tragi-comedy, connects itself
with the wholly tragical _Yorkshire Tragedy_, and is a kind of introduction
to it. These domestic tragedies (of which another is _A Warning to Fair
Women_) were very popular at the time, and large numbers now lost seem to
have been produced by the dramatisation of notable crimes, past and
present. Their class is very curiously mixed up with the remarkable and, in
one sense or another, very interesting class of the dramas attributed, and
in general estimation falsely attributed, to Shakespere. According to the
fullest list these pseudo-Shakesperian plays number seventeen. They are
_Fair Em_, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Edward III._, _The Birth of
Merlin_, _The Troublesome Reign of King John_, _A Warning to Fair Women_,
_The Arraignment of Paris_, _Arden of Feversham_, _Mucedorus_, _George a
Green the Pinner of Wakefield_, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, _The London
Prodigal_, _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, _Sir John Oldcastle_, _The Puritan or
the Widow of Watling Street_, _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _Locrine_. Four
of these, _Edward III._, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Arden of
Feversham_, and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, are in whole or parts very far
superior to the rest. Of that rest _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, a violent and
bloodthirsty little piece showing the frantic cruelty of the ruined
gambler, Calverley, to his wife and children, is perhaps the most powerful,
though it is not in the least Shakesperian. But the four have claims, not
indeed of a strong, but of a puzzling kind. In _Edward III._ and _The Two
Noble Kinsmen_ there are no signs of Shakespere either in plot,
character-drawing, or general tone. But, on the contrary, there are in both
certain scenes where the versification and dialogue are so astonishingly
Shakesperian that it is almost impossible to account for the writing of
them by any one else than Shakespere. By far the larger majority of critics
declare for the part authorship of Shakespere in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_; I
avow myself simply puzzled. On the other hand, I am nearly sure that he did
not write any part of _Edward III._, and I should take it to be a case of a
kind not unknown in literature, where some writer of great but not very
original faculty was strongly affected by the Shakesperian influence, and
wrote this play while under it, but afterwards, either by death or
diversion to non-literary employm