e quiet straightforwardness of treatment: it is curious that
the tragic end of Jason and Medea should find no place in the
multifarious chronicle which is nominally and mainly devoted to the
record of the life and death of Hercules, but into which the serio-comic
episode of Mars and Venus and Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly
as it is humorously and dramatically presented. The rivalry of Omphale
and Deianeira for their hero's erratic affection affords a lively and
happy mainspring--not suggested by Caxton--for the tragic action and
passion of the closing scenes.

At the opening of "The Iron Age," nineteen years later in date of
publication, we find ourselves at last arrived in a province of dramatic
poetry where something of consecutive and coherent action is apparently
the aim if not always the achievement of the writer. These ten acts do
really constitute something like a play, and a play of serious, various,
progressive, and sustained interest, beginning with the elopement and
closing with the suicide of Helen. There is little in it to suggest the
influence of either Homer or Shakespeare: whose "Troilus and Cressida"
had appeared in print, for the helplessly bewildered admiration of an
eternally mystified world, just twenty-three years before. The only
figure equally prominent in either play is that of Thersites: but
Heywood, happily and wisely, has made no manner of attempt to rival or
to reproduce the frightful figure of the intelligent Yahoo in which the
sane and benignant genius of Shakespeare has for once anticipated and
eclipsed the mad and malignant genius of Swift. It should be needless to
add that his Ulysses has as little of Shakespeare's as of Homer's: and
that the brutalization or degradation of the god-like figures of Ajax
and Achilles is only less offensive in the lesser than in the greater
poet's work. In the friendly duel between Hector and Ajax the very text
of Shakespeare is followed with exceptional and almost servile fidelity:
but the subsequent exchange of gifts is, of course, introduced in
imitation of earlier and classic models. The contest of Ajax and Ulysses
is neatly and spiritedly cast into dramatic form: Ovid, of course,
remains unequalled, as he who runs may read in Dryden's grand
translation, but Heywood has done better--to my mind at least--than
Shirley was to do in the next generation; though it is to be noted that
Shirley has retained more of the magnificent original than did hi