y
Shakespeare in jest as popular or ambitious of popularity on the stage
for which they wrote. Aristophanic license of libel or caricature, more
or less ineffectually trammelled by the chance or the likelihood of
prosecution and repression, is common under various forms to various
ages and countries; but the serious introduction and presentation of
contemporary figures and events give to such plays as these as mixed and
peculiar a quality as though the playwright's aim or ambition had been
to unite in his humble and homespun fashion the two parts of an epic or
patriotic historian and a political or social caricaturist; a poet and a
pamphleteer on the same page, a chronicler and a jester in the same
breath. Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more
literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and
registered fact: the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from
William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else
omnivorous appetite of censure so humble an example of such obsequious
and unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next
to none. In Thomas Drue's play of "The Duchess of Suffolk," formerly and
plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part of the same ground is gone over
in much the same fashion and to much the same effect; but the subject, a
single interlude of the Marian persecution, has more unity of interest
than can be attained by any play running on the same line as Heywood's,
from the opening to the close of the most hideous episode in our
history. That the miserable life and reign of Mary Tudor should have
been "staged to the show" for the edification and confirmation of her
half-sister's subjects in Protestant and patriotic fidelity of animosity
toward Rome and Spain is less remarkable than that the same hopelessly
improper topic for historical drama should in later days have been
selected for dramatic treatment by English writers and on one occasion
by a great English poet. As there are within the range of any country's
history, authentic or traditional, periods and characters in themselves
so naturally fit and proper for transfiguration by poetry that the
dramatist who should attempt to improve on the truth--the actual or
imaginary truth accepted as fact with regard to them--would probably if
not certainly derogate from it, so are there others which cannot be
transfigured without transformation. Such a character is the last and
wretch