nate conclusion; but in the sequel, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, the pity and terror of the spectators are aroused by the successful villainy of the Prior of York and one Doncaster, who, after murdering the repentant steward Warman, administer poison to Robin Hood. The death of the outlaw is, however, by no means the conclusion of the new play (in which Munday seems to have been helped by Chettle), for one of the other actors immediately proceeds to address to Skelton (Friar Tuck) the following appeal :

Nay, Friar, at the request of thy kind friend,
Let not thy play so soon be at an end,

Though Robin Hood be dead, his yeoman gone,
And that thou thinkest there now remains not one
To act another scene or two for thee,

Yet know full well to please this company

We mean to end Matilda's tragedy.

In Munday's dramatic style may be recognised some of the features of Greene and Peele's school, together with some remarkable differences. He exchanges the lofty bombastic diction of the earlier playwrights for a simple, natural, and almost conversational manner, suited to the taste of his audience. But, as in The Battle of Alcazar and The Comic History of Alphonsus, the structure of the play is epic rather than dramatic. In The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, the dramatist simply aims at making the ballad more real and distinct, by placing its persons and incidents immediately before the eyes of the spectators. The stage necessities of time and place force him to condense the sequence of events; and it is these necessities alone, and not the idea of a single action organically conceived, which bring the play to any kind of conclusion. Hence the clumsy contrivance of the Presenter is found, both by dramatists and audience, quite good enough to make the action probable to the imagination.

A considerably higher level is reached in the romantic plays of Thomas Heywood, which show the tendency inherent in the romantic movement to become at once more abstract and less poetical. Heywood stands to Shake

speare much in the same relation as the author of Amadis of Gaul and his followers stand to the trouvères, who wrote the romances of the Round Table, or made the collection of fabliaux which furnished models for the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer. While the histories of Lancelot and Tristram were in their way faithful ideal reflections of feudal manners, the late Spanish romances embodied mere extravagant dreams of heroic perfection, without relation to the realities of society. Heywood, in his plays, follows far in the track of Spanish romance, but he adapts the spirit of the Spanish novelist to the taste of an English audience.

Of the history of this playwright little is known. He seems not to have been related to John and Jasper Heywood, of whose works I have already spoken. According to his own account he was a native of Lincolnshire, and lived for some time at Cambridge, and William Cartwright, the actor, who edited his works in 1687, asserts that he was a Fellow of Peterhouse in that university—a statement which is not confirmed by any entry in the books of the College. In 1598 he was an actor in the Lord Admiral's Company, and he was also connected with the players belonging to Lord Southampton. His industry as an actor and dramatist was prodigious. He himself says that he was the sole or principal author of 220 plays, and his biographer, Kirkman, declares that he not only acted, but wrote something every day of his life. Like Munday, Dekker, and Middleton, he was employed in the production of the City Pageants, specimens of which are preserved among his works; and it is plain enough that the civic portion of the audience was that which he mainly sought to please. There seems to be no record of the date of his birth or death, but he began to write for the stage before 1600.

His plays fall into five distinct groups: (1) chronicle histories, like Edward IV. and The Early Days of Elizabeth; (2) mythologies, like The Golden, Iron and Copper Ages, etc.; (3) quasi-historical romances, like The Four Prentises of London; (4) romantic representations of real life, like The Fair Maid of the West, The Fair Maid of the Ex

change, The English Traveller; (5) dramas of abstract romantic situations, like The Royal King and the Loyal Subject and The Woman Killed with Kindness. In these groups I need not take any account of the second, as it has little bearing on the romantic movement as a whole. Of the first it will be sufficient to say that the motive in the poet's mind is not really historical, but romantic; instead of following Holinshed faithfully as Shakespeare did, Heywood selects such episodes from the historical period represented as will, he thinks, appeal to the sentiment of his audience. Edward IV., for example,

is mainly occupied with the adventures of the king in disguise, either as the wooer of Jane Shore, or as the boon companion of the tanner of Tamworth. The sympathies of the spectators are enlisted on behalf of Jane Shore, as being the wife of a citizen, and a good and benevolent woman, who only surrenders her virtue to the king because she does not know how to help herself: dramatic interest is also roused by the position of Shore, divided between his loyalty to his sovereign and his affection for his wife. In If You know not Me You know Nobody, the episodes of the building of the Royal Exchange and of the Spanish Armada are selected for treatment, not because they have any connection with each other, but because they are the incidents in Elizabeth's reign most interesting to the citizens of London.

The Four Prentises of London is a very characteristic play, and of peculiar historical interest from the account which Heywood himself gives of its transient popularity, and of its method of composition. It represents the adventures of Godfrey, Charles, Guy, and Eustace, the four sons of the Earl of Boulogne, who-a fact previously unknown to history-are living with their exiled father in London as apprentices, respectively, to the Haberdashers', Mercers', Goldsmiths', and Grocers' Companies. The boys enlist for the Crusades, and after being separated from each other on their journey to the Holy Land by numerous adventures, involving both love and danger, are finally reunited and raised to the

sovereignty of different kingdoms. The character of the play is explained in the Prologue by two of three critics, who are merely signified by numbers.

1. But what authority have you for your history? I am one that will believe nothing that is not in the chronicle.

2. Our authority is a manuscript, a book writ in parchment, which not being public or general in the world, we rather thought fit to exemplify unto the public censure things concealed and obscured, such as are not common with every one, than such historical tales as every one can tell by the fire in winter. Had not ye rather for novelty's sake see Jerusalem ye never saw, than London that ye see hourly? 1

On the other hand, Heywood knew very well that in order to reconcile his audiences to romantic extravagance he must indulge their traditional love of realistic imitation. Hence he exhibited, to the great delight of the spectators, heroic virtues in domestic spheres; lovely damsels, rescued (as in The Fair Maid of the Exchange) from robbery and dishonour in the streets of London by valiant cripples; 2 or, in man's attire (as in The Fair Maid of the West), commanding vessels making private war against the Spaniards.3 In the first portion of the latter play the Fair Barmaid-for that is her original occupation-is placed by her lover on his departure from England in charge of an inn, with a view to testing her virtue and fidelity. Tidings of her lover's death being brought to her, she fits out a ship to recover his body, and, after making havoc of the enemies of her country on the high seas, penetrates as far as the Court of Fez, where she has the happiness of finding that her Spencer is still alive. The passion which she excites in the bosom of the monarch of the country-who owns the unusual name of Mullisheg—is the cause of many thrilling adventures with which the second part of the play is entirely occupied. The Royal King and the Loyal Subject and The Woman Killed with Kindness present clear-cut views of those abstract situations for which the spectators had been accustomed to look in the action of the Moralities.

1 Heywood's Dramatic Works (1874), vol. ii. p. 166. 2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 8.

3 Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 363-423.

All this indicates very distinctly the essential difference in the dramatic treatment of romance by Marlowe and Shakespeare, on the one side, and by Heywood on the other. In the plays of Heywood the lyrical spirit is completely wanting. Marlowe, the founder of the romantic drama, had made it the reflection of his own intense and vehement nature; Shakespeare had chosen for dramatic representation such tales and histories as lent themselves most readily to the expression of his deep and comprehensive philosophy. But Heywood thought mainly of translating into a dramatic form ideas of romance that he divined to be in the minds of his audience. He knew that to please them he must deal with incidents of love and adventure: he understood the kind of moral situations which would prove interesting on the stage. His plays abound in fresh, ardent and generous conceptions, and are but little disfigured by the gross indecency which prevails in the work of some of his contemporaries. But he knew of no principle of spiritual unity whereby to reduce to dramatic form his romantic materials; he could not even create, like Marlowe, a single type of character to command the interest of the audience; still less could he conceive, like Shakespeare, an ideal action logically developed through a series of causes and effects: his plots, invariably invented by himself, have no beginning, middle, or end. In The Fair Maid of the West, the action of which is alive with bustle and movement, a chorus is introduced at the end of the fourth Act with the followwing naive apology :

Our stage so lamely can express a sea,
That we are forced by chorus to discourse
What should have been in action.1

The Woman Killed with Kindness has two quite distinct abstract situations, one dealing with the idea of honour, the other with the idea of domestic virtue.

And since Heywood does not know how to organise

1 Heywood's Dramatic Works, vol. ii. p. 319.