edest victim of a religious reaction which blasted her kingdom
with the hell-fire of reviving devil-worship, and her name with the
ineffaceable brand of an inseparable and damning epithet. If even the
genius of Tennyson could not make the aspirations and the agonies of
Mary as acceptable or endurable from the dramatic or poetic point of
view as Marlowe and Shakespeare could make the sufferings of such poor
wretches as their Edward II. and Richard II., it is hardly to be
expected that the humbler if more dramatic genius of Heywood should have
triumphed over the desperate obstacle of a subject so drearily
repulsive: but it is curious that both should have attempted to tackle
the same hopeless task in the same fruitless fashion. The "chronicle
history" of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare's self attempted it, could
scarcely have been other--if we may judge by our human and fallible
lights of the divine possibilities open to a superhuman and infallible
intelligence--than a splendid and priceless failure from the dramatic or
poetic point of view. The one chance open even to Shakespeare would have
been to invent, to devise, to create; not to modify, to adapt, to
adjust. Bloody Mary has been transfigured into a tragic and poetic
malefactress: but only by the most audacious and magnificent defiance of
history and possibility. Madonna Lucrezia Estense Borgia (to use the
proper ceremonial style adopted for the exquisitely tender and graceful
dedication of the "Asolani") died peaceably in the odor of incense
offered at her shrine in the choicest Latin verse of such accomplished
poets and acolytes as Pietro Bembo and Ercole Strozzi. Nothing more
tragic or dramatic could have been made of her peaceful and honorable
end than of the reign of Mary Tudor as recorded in history. The greatest
poet and dramatist of the nineteenth century has chosen to immortalize
them by violence--to give them a life, or to give a life to their names,
which history could not give. Neither he nor Shakespeare could have kept
faith with the torpid fact and succeeded in the creation of a living and
eternal truth. One thing may be registered to the credit, not indeed of
the dramatist or the poet, but certainly of the man and the Englishman:
the generous fair play shown to Philip II. in the scene which records
his impartial justice done upon the Spanish assassin of an English
victim. There is a characteristic manliness about Heywood's patriotism
which gives a certain ad