[In this essay, Schelling focuses on the chronicle plays of the later 1590s and the new elements these works introduced to the genre.]

As we have seen above, it was during the last decade of the [sixteenth] century that the Chronicle Play flourished in its greatest luxuriance. We have already investigated the part which Shakespeare's earlier contemporaries, Marlowe, Greene and Peele, played in the development of this species of drama. Let us now consider the authors of chronicle plays in the later years of this decade and then proceed to the treatment of those species of this drama which fell away in one particular or another from the earlier epic type and from the historical tragedy and later comedy form which we have seen developing in the hands of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Robert Greene died in September, 1592, leaving behind him in his Groats-worth of Wit the notorious address “To those Gentlemen his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plaies,” which contains the earliest allusion to the great sovereign of the Elizabethan drama. In this much-quoted passage it will be remembered that Shakespeare is called “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” and it is a line from 3 Henry VI.: “O Tygres Heart wrapt in a Womans Hide,” which in its parody: “His Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide,” declares Greene's enmity to Shakespeare to have been caused largely by the success with which the new dramatist was working over the old historical dramas to fit them for reproduction on the stage. But now Greene was in his grave. Marlowe was killed in the following June, and Peele wrote no chronicle history after Edward I., which was printed in 1593 and must have been first acted three or four years earlier. The chief playwrights, other than Shakespeare to take up the Chronicle Play when Greene, Peele and Marlowe left it, were Anthony Munday and Thomas Heywood. Munday was more than ten years older than Shakespeare and appears to have begun life as a Protestant spy on the English Jesuit college at Rome. He was known as an actor as early as 1575 and continued a busy pamphleteer, small poet and dramatic writer throughout a long life which extended into the reign of King Charles. Munday enjoyed some contemporary repute and was commended by Meres in his Palladis Tamia as “our best plotter,” praise which his extant dramatic work by no means warrants.¹ On the other hand Munday was lampooned as Antonio Balladino by Jonson in The Case is Altered.² Munday's career as a playwright began with a translation entitled Fidele and Fortunio in 1584. His first work in the general class of chronicle plays was John a Kent and John a Cumber, a departure, as we shall presently see, from the contemporary type of the historical drama. Six other plays, supposedly chronicle histories, have been attributed to Munday in joint authorship with Henry Chettle and others. Of this number 1 Oldcastle, and the two parts of Robert Earl of Huntington, are still extant; the non-extant plays were 2 Oldcastle, Owen Tudor and The Rising of Cardinal Wolsey. Our knowledge of all of these plays is derived from Henslowe.

Thomas Heywood is in many respects the most typical of Elizabethan playwrights. He was an actor also and a defender of the “qualitie” he professed as appears from his Apology for Actors, a pamphlet of great interest. Heywood's career as a dramatic writer and general pamphleteer is traceable back certainly to 1596 and his earliest chronicle history is that of Edward IV., in two parts, printed in 1600 though doubtless several years older. Between this play and If You Know Not Me, Heywood's dramatic chronicle of the chief events in the earlier life of Queen Elizabeth, acted in 1604, we have record of two non-extant plays of this class, The Bold Beauchamps, 1599, and 1 Lady Jane Grey, 1602, the work of Heywood and others. Passing The Valiant Welshman which may possibly be capable of identification with The Welshman, performed by the Admiral's and Chamberlain's companies at Newington in 1595, we reach several new names in Henslowe. Henry Chettle has been associated with eighteen plays, nearly all of this class; Thomas Dekker and Michael Drayton were part authors of fifteen and thirteen dramas of the chronicle type respectively; Robert Wilson the Younger and John Day were employed on nine and seven chronicles each. The habit of collaboration was general with the playwrights of this group and no one of them save Dekker has left a chronicle play of undivided authorship. Hence the number of these productions seems greater than it really is. Among the slender remains of these plays which are still extant are the two parts of Munday's Robert Earl of Huntington, mentioned above, in both of which Chettle had a share; The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green, in which Day was Chettle's collaborator; the two plays on Sir Thomas Wyatt in which Webster served an apprenticeship with the older dramatist Dekker; and Oldcastle which, as we have seen above, was the joint effort of no less than four writers. Dekker's one independent play of this general class is The Whore of Babylon, and it is a departure from the type. His Satiromastix, the plot of which is laid in the court of William Rufus, and his Old Fortunatus, the later scenes of which are laid in the England of Athelstan, may be accounted on the border of this class.

Henry Chettle first appears in the history of the drama as the publisher of Greene's Groats-worth of Wit, for the violence of the language in which with regard to Shakespeare he apologized in his Kind-Harts Dreame, printed almost immediately after. Within the decade of his thraldom to Henslowe, 1597-1607, Chettle contributed nearly fifty plays of various kinds to the drama of his time.³ Of Robert Wilson, usually distinguished from the author of The Three Ladies of London and designated “the Younger,” we know little beyond what Henslowe tells us.⁴ This Wilson was active in the writing of chronicle plays but appears to have essayed no unaided effort. Michael Drayton's traffic with the stage rests likewise almost solely on the evidence of Henslowe's old book of accounts in which Drayton's name recurs again and again as the associate of Dekker, Chettle, Wilson and others during a period from December, 1597, to May, 1602.⁵ Drayton's “well written tragedies” are also alluded to in an anonymous book entitled Poems of Diverse Humours, 1598,⁶ although this may have been no more than a reference to his epical histories such as that of Meres who called Drayton, “Tragœdiographus, for his passionate penning of the downfals of valiant Robert of Normandy, chast Matilda, and great Gaueston.”⁷ Henslowe mentions twenty-four plays in connection with Drayton's name, of which number about half concern English historical subjects and but one, William Longsword, was written by Drayton alone. Drayton had been intimate with Lodge and Daniel, with both of whom he vied, at first in carrying on the pastoral mode which Sidney and Spenser had rendered popular and, after the publication of the former's Astrophel and Stella and Daniel's Delia, in his own sonnet-sequence Idea. In the writing of narrative history, too, Drayton imitated Daniel, whose Complaint of Rosamund appeared in 1592 and was succeeded in the next year by Drayton's Legend of Piers Gaveston, the subject of which may have been suggested by the contemporary popularity of Marlowe's Edward II. This coincidence taken with some others, such as the appearance of Daniel's Civile Wars in the same year, 1594, with a revived popularity of the plays dealing with the contention of the houses of York and Lancaster, has been thought by some to point to a rivalry between the stage and the epic in this species of literature.⁸ Be this as it may, The Legend of Robert Duke of Normandy, the Mortimeriados (later remodelled as The Barons Warres), together with Englands Heroicall Epistles and the far later Battle of Agincourt, all attest Drayton's fertility and perseverance in the epic presentation of subject-matter drawn from the old chronicles. Nothing could have been more natural than that Drayton should have transferred his interest in chronicle history epically told to the planning and penning of historical dramas when the temporary failure of patrons and the stress of circumstances drove him to a temporary coöperation with men his inferiors in birth, station and celebrity.

Dekker and Day call for no word here. Other names which Henslowe's Diary has associated with the Chronicle Play are William Haughton, who had a hand in eight such plays, besides some others during the years 1600 and 1601; Henry Porter, the author of the delightful comedy of situation, The Two Angry Women of Abington; Richard Hathway whose name suggests a possible Shakespearean relation; Wentworth Smith whose initials have created some confusion with William Shakespeare and William Smith, the author of the sonnet-sequence, Chloris; and lastly William Rankins, the satirist. The works of these writers of chronicle plays have perished save for the now indistinguishable part which Hathway had in 1 Oldcastle.

John Webster and Thomas Middleton are both mentioned in Henslowe.⁹ William Rowley is not so mentioned but claims a place here. The part of these three dramatists in the Chronicle Play was slight. Middleton in The Mayor of Queenborough and Rowley in The Birth of Merlin meet on common ground in offering legendary chronicles reconstructed from earlier dramatic material. Neither author has written any other play of the chronicle type, if we except Middleton on the basis of Henslowe's association of his name with a play no longer extant called variously Chester Tragedy and Randall Earl of Chester. Webster's share in the Chronicle Play is confined to the assistance rendered Dekker in the extant play on Sir Thomas Wyatt and the two non-extant plays on Lady Jane Grey, if indeed these two titles are not referable to the same production.¹⁰ Samuel Rowley covenanted in 1599 to act for a year for Henslowe,¹¹ but his one unaided play of the chronicle type When You See Me You Know Me or the Famous Chronicle History of Henry VIII., printed in 1605 and performed not long before, was not written while he was in Henslowe's employ. Finally Jonson's name has been attached to three plays of the chronicle class. Henslowe mentions Robert II. of Scotland, written by Jonson in conjunction with Chettle and Dekker in 1599, and Richard Crookback, 1602, the work of Jonson alone.¹² Neither of these is extant. The fragment of Mortimer his Fall which appears in Jonson's works was possibly once complete and may be identified with the play of Mortymore for which Henslowe provided “ij sewtes a licke” (i. e., two suits alike), in September, 1602.¹³ By the fragment, which is preceded by an argument of the five acts, it is manifest that this play must have exhibited a complete departure from the customary traditions of the popular Chronicle History. If we are to judge by the indicated choruses “of Ladyes celebrating the worthinesse of the Queene,” of “Countrey Justices and their Wives telling how they were deluded and made beleeve the old king lived, etc.,” Jonson's Mortimer his Fall must have been an attempt to carry the English Chronicle History back to a stricter accord with the classical traditions and usages which obtain in Jonson's Roman tragedies, especially Cataline. Such an attempt is precisely what we might expect of Jonson's theories as to literature and the drama, theories which combine an intelligent and independent appreciation of the excellence of ancient literature with an equally intelligent and independent desire to adapt whatever was adaptable to English conditions. It is much to be regretted that we have not Jonson's experiment of an English chronicle play conformed to classical usage in its fulness.

In the treatment of Shakespeare's and of Marlowe's part in the evolution of historical tragedy of passion out of the epical Chronicle Play, special mention was made of the popularity of the Wars of the Roses, particularly the events involving the rise to power of Richard III., as a theme for both epic and dramatic poetry. We have seen too how the reviser of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (otherwise called 2 Contention) heightened the portrait of Gloucester, how The True Tragedy of King Richard sketched in rivalry a gross if vigorous picture of the same deformed usurper, and how Shakespeare's Richard III. surpassed as it succeeded these three earlier plays, not only in the presentation of the protagonist but in the conduct of the whole story as well. This working over of material of approved popularity is one of the most usual as it is one of the most interesting characteristics of the Elizabethan drama, although there are few instances in which it can be traced with the certainty which the case before us exhibits. To the succession of plays just enumerated must be added Heywood's two chronicle histories on the reign of Edward IV. Here the author gathered up whatever was left by his predecessors and presented what he was compelled to repeat in a guise at once familiar and yet novel. Moreover this play, while representing in a sense a return to the epic type of the Chronicle Play of mingled history and comedy, marks likewise a falling away from that type, because of the prominence which it gives to the element of pathos and to the picturing of contemporary London life. The elaborate title of the two plays of Heywood on the reign of Edward IV. has been given above and need not be repeated here.¹⁴ The two parts contain no less than five different stories more or less loosely connected by personages which take part in two or more. On the more strictly historical side we have the attack on London by rebels under the adventurer Falconbridge, the last feeble attempt of the defeated Lancastrians to restore saintly and incapable Henry to his crown;¹⁵ secondly, Edward's abortive expedition into France with what the title calls “the trecherous falshood of the Duke of Burgundie and the Constable of France”; and thirdly, the events which immediately preceded and followed the death of Edward, including the murder of the Duke of Clarence and of the young princes and Richard's succession to the crown. To all this is added the episodic scenes of King Edward's diversions with the loyal, outspoken Hob, the Tanner of Tamworth,¹⁶ and the pathetic story of Jane Shore, the king's mistress, her temptation and fall and her pitiful death. Of these stories the last alone finds place in both parts. Except for the scenes with the Tanner which the author had from a contemporary ballad, and barring a few modifications (among them the harrowing details of the deaths of the Shores), the material is derived directly from the Chronicle of Holinshed which includes, as is well known, Sir Thomas More's Life of Richard III., although the intervention of an earlier play, such as The Siege of London, mentioned as revived by Henslowe in 1594, is not impossible.¹⁷ That the author of this facile production is Thomas Heywood cannot admit of a moment's doubt. The manner is uniformly his in its ease, its unaffectedness and its freedom from the gawds of contemporary poetic diction. In the scenes which concern Shore and his wife, we meet again and again Heywood's generous conception of character and that wholesome and unrestrained pathos which is peculiarly his. Indeed the whole treatment of that delicate subject, the relation of a true and honorable man to the wife who has wronged him, but whom he continues to love in a spirit chastened by his wrongs, is handled with the same innate delicacy, the same wide tolerance and sympathy and yet with the ethical soundness, which Heywood displays with such effect in his characters, the Franklins, in A Woman Killed with Kindness—qualities in which Heywood is practically alone amongst his contemporaries. The changes which Heywood made in the story of Jane Shore are significant. Shore, the husband, is dignified with an important part in the defense of London against Falconbridge by a transfer to him of the rôle actually played in the chronicles by Alderman Basset.¹⁸ This links the story of the siege with that of Jane and leads naturally to her meeting with the king at a civic feast.¹⁹ Once more Shore is identified with a party of shipsmen who have become constructively pirates, though really innocent, and Jane, unknowing, becomes instrumental in saving her husband's life.²⁰ Lastly the story of the murder of the young princes is linked with that of Jane by the device by which Shore, as the assistant of Sir Robert Brackenbury, Keeper of the Tower, falls into an altercation with Tyrrel and his cutthroats and receives a dagger thrust in the arm.²¹ In the upshot Heywood departs from all the chronicles, narratives and ballads, in making Shore defy Richard's tyrannical command that no one offer relief or harborage to Jane after her public penance with sheet and candle, and in the final tragedy by which the reunited husband and wife perish of want and hunger together.²²

These are examples of that instinctive insight into the possibilities of a subject which mark the born dramatist. Not less successful is Heywood's adaptability evidenced in the evasion of repetitions where repetition seems all but unavoidable, and in throwing a new light on incidents already treated by others in a previous play. The events of the two parts of Edward IV. range from a scene in which King Edward's mother, the Duchess of York, is represented chiding Lady Grey for her marriage with Edward to the moment when King Richard, secure as he thinks in the possession of his ill-gotten throne, disregards the ominous mention of Harry Richmond's name to proceed to “the princely ceremonies” of the founding of the Order of the Bath. Between these extremes there are several points at which Heywood's play comes into contact with Shakespeare's Richard III. and The True Tragedy of Richard III., the latter of which treats not only the steps of Richard's rise to power but the consequences of Edward's death on the fortunes of Jane Shore. In each of these cases it is Heywood's cue to avoid the actual repetition of scenes already part of the earlier plays and to illuminate well-known events with the side light of novelty. In the induction of The True Tragedy the ghost of the Duke of Clarence appears, after the Senecan manner, to call for vengeance on his murderer. In Richard III. Clarence is shown face to face with his murderers in agonized pleading for his life, while in Edward IV. the news of his death by drowning in a butt of malmsey is thrown into a conversation between Lovell and Dr. Shaw, two creatures of the usurper, and thus presented in contrast with the natural sympathies of the beholder.²³The True Tragedy of Richard III. devotes many scenes to the intrigues and subterfuges by which the young princes are separated from their friends, their mother and from each other, to fall into Richard's hands. Shakespeare subordinates all this to the higher unity in which Richard becomes the center of the stage, while Edward IV. goes at once to the imprisonment of the princes in the Tower. There is a simple pathos in this short scene between the motherless little princes which exhibits Heywood at his best. The scene is a bedroom in the Tower. The young princes Edward and Richard enter “in their gowns and caps, vnbuttoned and vntrust.”

RIC.
How does your lordship?
ED.
Well, good brother Richard.
How does yourself? you told me your head aked.
RIC.
Indeed it does, my Lord feele with your hands
How hot it is.
He laies his hand on his brothers head.
ED.
Indeed you haue caught cold,
With sitting yesternight to heare me read.
I pray thee go to bed, sweet Dick, poore little
          heart.
RIC.
Youle giue me leaue to wait vpon your lordship.
ED.
I had more need, brother, to wait on you.
For you are sick; and so am not I.
RIC.
Oh, lord, methinks this going to our bed,
How like it is to going to our graue.
ED.
I pray thee, do not speake of graues sweetheart,
Indeed thou frightest me.
RIC.
Why, my lord brother, did not our tutor teach vs,
That when at night we went vnto our bed,
We still should think we went vnto our graue?
ED.
Yes, thats true,
If we should do as eu'ry Christian ought,
To be prepard to die at euery hour,
But I am heauy.
RIC.
Indeed, and so am I.
ED.
Then let vs say our prayers and go to bed.
They kneel, and solemn musicke the while within. The musicke ceaseth, and they rise.
RIC.
What, bleeds your grace?
ED.
I two drops and no more.
RIC.
God blesse vs both; and I desire no more.
ED.
Brother [Opening his prayer-book], see here
          what Dauid says, and so say I:
Lord! in thee will I trust, although I die.(24)

In The True Tragedy the innocent doubts and apprehensions of the young princes with their murderers' contrasted brutality and flickering qualms of conscience had entered as elements in a rude but effective scene.²⁵ Shakespeare reduced all this to a score of pathetic and poetic lines which he put somewhat unfittingly into the mouth of Tyrrel, the instrument of the children's death.

The tyrannous and bloodie Act is done,
The most arch deed of pittious massacre
That euer yet this Land was guilty of:
Dighton and Forrest, who I did suborne
To do this peece of ruthfull Butchery,
Albeit they were flesht Villaines, bloody Dogges,
Melted with tendernesse, and milde compassion,
Wept like to Children, in their deaths sad Story.
O thus (quoth Dighton) lay the gentle Babes:
Thus, thus (quoth Forrest) girdling one another
Within their Alablaster innocent Armes:
Their lips were foure red Roses on a stalke,
And in their Summer Beauty kist each other.
A Booke of Prayers on their pillow lay,
Which one (quoth Forrest) almost chang'd my minde:
But oh the Diuell, there the Villaine stopt:
When Dighton thus told on, we smothered
The most replenished sweet worke of Nature,
That from the prime Creation ere she framed.
Hence both are gone with Conscience and Remorse,
They could not speake, and so I left them both,
To beare this tydings to the bloody King.(26)

In like strait, while the very deed is doing, Heywood's Tyrell thus communes with his own blackened soul:

I haue put my hand into the foulest murder
That euer was committed since the world.
The very senselesse stones here in the walles
Breake out in teares but to behold the fact.
Methinkes the bodies lying dead in graues,
Should rise and cry against vs—O hark, [a noise within] harke,
The mandrakes shrieks are music to their cries,
The very night is frighted, and the starres
Do drop like torches, to behold this deed:
The very centre of the earth doth shake,
Methinks the Towre should rent down from the toppe,
To let the heauen look on this monstrous deede.(27)

“Heywood,” says Charles Lamb, in a much-quoted passage, “is a sort of prose Shakespeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we miss the Poet, that which in Shakespeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature.”²⁸ Is it too bold to query whether the poet in Shakespeare's Tyrrel, taken with the beauty of “the gentle Babes” more than is a murderer's wont—“their Alabaster innocent Armes” and lips, “foure red Roses on a stalke”—“appears out and above the surface of the nature” somewhat to that nature's detriment?

It is in such touches of nature as these that Heywood excels and it is with expectation rather than with surprise, therefore, that we record the play of Edward IV. as a notable example of the falling away from the epic type of Chronicle Play by the substitution of interests of diverse kind from that which centered in the delineation of events which appealed to patriotic spirit and national feeling. The central story of Edward IV. is, after all, that of Jane Shore. The scenes of the rise of Richard are repetitions in sketchy outline; the siege of London and the king's journey into France possesses next to no power of dramatic appeal. In short the romantic tale of a kingly and conquering lover with the involved emotion of a woman's remorse for sin and a man's constancy and magnanimity have outweighed political intrigues and the bluster of arms. To posit strict chronological order in developments and changes of literary taste and form such as this is to lose sight of the facts and obscure their true relations in the attempt to work out a theory. That later chronicle plays were more exposed to the intrusion of extraneous influences than the earlier ones is, however, undeniable; although this species of drama was open from the first to admixture and to modifications from without, most of them referable to two influences: the emphasis of the element of comedy, and the centralization of the whole play in biographical particulars which concerned a single individual.

Of the several classes of quasi-chronicles in which the comedy element has gained an ascendancy, an interesting though limited group has its basis in stories of the heroes of popular balladry. Though the direct evidences are slight, we have already seen that there is much reason to believe that mummings, dialogues and interludes celebrating the deeds of Robin Hood and his associates enjoyed at one time considerable prevalence and popularity. It is then a return to an old and tried subject and the adaptation of it to altered conditions that we recognize in the appropriately named A pleasant conceyted Comedie of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, the work of Robert Greene. This play is mentioned three times by Henslowe,²⁹ under date of December, 1592, and the January following. The external evidence attributing this play to Greene is slight; but its style and manner are all but indubitably his. In this play the dramatist has drawn the ideal of the sturdy English yeoman of his day. George a Greene is faithful and loyal to his king though independent in his bearing before him, daring in open fight yet sagacious in stratagem against his sovereign's enemies and magnanimous to them in their overthrow. The Earl of Kendall has revolted from his allegiance to King Edward and sends Sir Nicholas Mannering to Wakefield to demand supplies for the rebel army. On being refused, Mannering threatens the citizens and George a Greene interposes:

GEORGE.
Proud dapper Iacke, vayle bonnet to the bench
That represents the person of the King;
Or sirra, Ile lay thy head before thy feete.
MAN.
Why, who art thou?
GEORGE.
Why, I am George a Greene,
True liegeman to my king,
Who scornes that men of such esteeme as these,
Should brooke the braues of any trayterous
          squire:
You of the bench, and you my fellowe friends,
Neighbours, we subiects all vnto the King
We are English borne, and therefore Edwards
          friends,
Voude vnto him euen in our mothers wombe;
Our mindes to God, our hearts vnto our King,
Our wealth, our homage, and our carcases,
Be all King Edwards: then, sirra, we haue
Nothing left for traytours, but our swordes,
Whetted to bathe them in your bloods, and
          dye
Gainst you, before we send you any victuals.(30)

In the upshot Mannering is compelled by George to swallow the seals of his rebels' commission and is thrust out of Wakefield. Mention has already been made of the borrowing of this incident by the authors of Oldcastle. The trick of his namesake is related by Nashe as having been actually performed by the dramatist Greene on an apparator come to serve a citation on him. As pinner, penner or impounder of Wakefield, it is George's duty to impound all strays and to prevent trespass on the crops and the commons of the town. He finds the horses of the Earl of Kendall in the town's corn and orders them to the pound, but is immediately surrounded by the Earl's followers. Craftily pretending to yield to the rebels' invitation to join them, George induces the Earl to visit a holy hermit of the neighborhood to consult him on the prospect of the success of his revolt. The Earl comes with but two attendants. The hermit, who is none other than George in disguise, kills one and puts the other to flight, and makes the Earl his prisoner. King Edward now happens into the neighborhood and comes to “merrie Bradford” in disguise. There he and his courtiers are compelled to trail their staves by the stalwart shoemakers of that town, who will permit no man to carry his staff on his shoulder in traversing the town unless he fight for that right. George enters at this juncture with Robin Hood, Much and Scarlet, who have just tasted to their sorrow of the pinner's valor at quarter-staff, and the disguised king and his nobles are put to the dilemma of fighting the shoemakers for carrying their staves on their shoulders or George and Robin for trailing them. After a merry fight which comes to an end on the shoemakers' discovery of the identity of George, a keg of ale is broached in the street and all join in merriment. To the king's praises for his capture of the rebel Earl, George modestly replies:

I humbly thanke your royall Maiestie.
That which I did against the Earle of Kendal,
It was but a subiects duetie to his Soueraigne,
And therefore little merit[s] such good words.(31)

The king of Scots is among the royal prisoners and King Edward asks George to fix his ransom. This after some reluctance George consents to do. But instead of seeking a large sum of money for himself, after the custom of his time, the honest pinner only demands:

                              Then let king Iames make good
Those townes which he hath burnt vpon the borders;
Giue a small pension to the fatherlesse,
Whose fathers he caus'd murthered in those warres;
Put in pledge for these things to your grace,
And so returne.(32)

Just before this, when urged to ask something for himself, George begs for the king's intercession in procuring the consent of the father of Bettris, his sweetheart, to their marriage. But the king is not content thus to leave the young hero, and after bestowing upon him some of the estates of the rebels, bids him kneel.

GEORGE.
What will your maiestie do?
EDWARD.
Dub thee a knight, George.
GEORGE.
I beseech your grace, grant me one thing.
EDWARD.
What is that?
GEORGE.
Then let me liue and die a yeoman still:
So was my father, so must liue his sonne.
For tis more credite to men of base degree,
To do great deeds, than men of dignitie.(33)

We can imagine how such an apotheosis of the yeomanry of England must have stirred the audience of the Earl of Sussex's servants at the Rose. Indeed it would be difficult to find in the plays of the period a happier realization of that honest loyalty, that spirit of fair play and generosity of heart, which are among the best as they are among the most enduring qualities of the English people.

If we turn to the sources of this comedy we meet with some difficulty. In English balladry only one fragment remains to associate George a Green with the Robin Hood ballads. That fragment exists in several copies but in only two versions, little differing. “It is thoroughly lyrical, and therein ‘like the old age,’ and was pretty well sung to pieces before it ever was printed,” says the late Professor Child.³⁴The Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, as the ballad is entitled, relates how the report had gone abroad that such was the prowess of George a Green that none

Dare make a trespasse to the town of Wakefield,
But his pledge goes to the pinfold.

Robin Hood and his men, Scarlet and John, determine to test this report. They “make a path over the corn” and are challenged by George, who fights each of them in turn until Robin calls for a truce. After bread, beef and ale at the pinner's house, Robin makes his usual offer that George go the greenwood with him, which George accepts upon condition that he first fulfil the obligation of his engagement to his master to serve him till Michaelmas Day. The subject-matter of this ballad forms the tenth and twelfth scenes of the play but is given a turn, not in the ballad though in the romance presently to be noticed, by making the enmity which the reported beauty of Bettris Grimes, the “leman” of George, has inspired in Maid Marian the cause of Robin's trespass. The immediate source usually ascribed to Greene's play is a prose romance entitled The History of George a Greene, Pinder of the Town of Wakefield, his Birth, Calling, Valor, etc., a late version of which is printed by Thomas.³⁵ This editor's preface contains mention of an earlier extant version of 1632, and it is altogether likely that still earlier versions once existed. Although the play and the story exhibit such striking likenesses that it may be regarded as certain that they are either dependent, the one on the other, or referable to a common source, there are points of difference. The chief divergence consists in the introduction into the play of the episode of Lady Barley's spirited resistance to the suit of King James and the subsequent capture of that monarch. Neither of these matters immediately concerns the story of the pinner and both are subversive of unity. These things with the change of the king from Richard I. to Edward, presumably Edward III., and some minor differences seem to point to the fact that here, as is the more usual course, the play followed the tale. On the other hand, the Robin of the play is “poor Robin,” and Marian seems reasonably jealous of her equal in station, Bettris, the squire's daughter; while in the story the rank of Robin Hood as Robert Earl of Huntington and Marian as “Matilda daughter to the Lord Fitzwalters” is carefully set forth with a reference to the solicitations of Prince John under which the fair lady was still suffering. These things it is well known are late sophistications of the old ballads, though it must be confessed not too late for Greene to have met. Lastly, it may be noted that in the scene in which George forces Mannering to swallow the seals of his commission, the playwright (supposing that he had the story before him) appears to have thrown away a point which heightens the climax by omitting the mock courtesy of a cup of ale wherewith to wash down the unusual diet. Altogether it would be difficult to determine whether Greene founded his material on an earlier version of the prose tale or adapted his play from more general sources and was copied by later prose romancers.

That the most popular hero of the old ballads was not unknown to the Elizabethan stage in a treatment more complete than that accorded him in this minor rôle in George a Greene is proved by an entry at the Stationers' Register of A Pastoral Pleasant Comedy of Robin Hood and Little John in May, 1594. In December, 1600, Henslowe records a play of Haughton's which he calls Roben hoodes penerthes.³⁶ None the less it is somewhat remarkable that two plays of Munday and Chettle should be the only ones now extant in which the deeds of Robin Hood are treated in extenso as the major theme of a drama. The complete titles of these plays run: The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, afterwards called Robin Hood of merrie Sherwodde: with his love to chaste Matilda, the Lord Fitzwaters Daughter, afterwarde his faire Maide Marian; and The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington, Otherwise called Robin Hood of merrie Sherwodde: with the lamentable Tragedie of chaste Matilda, his faire maid Marian, poysoned at Dunmowe by King John. Both were published in 1601 and are mentioned by Henslowe under date of February, 1598, as acted by the Admiral's company. These plays are disappointing for several reasons, but chiefly because of their inadequate handling of a topic rich in dramatic possibilities and their total failure to reproduce the fresh atmosphere of Sherwood Forest which breathes through the ballads. The authors of these plays laid under contribution many ballads, reproducing one of them at least in full and quoting snatches of others.³⁷ But they have employed their materials carelessly, adapting at will and seldom for the better; and they have subordinated the deeds of Robin, who as an earl loses half his interest, to the story of “Matilda Lord Fitzwater's daughter” in whose dignified repulse of the solicitations of the Prince John and tragic death we lose the sprightly maiden companion of Robin. The general sources of the historical parts of these plays have been traced to Holinshed and Grafton. The story of Matilda, explained as a composite picture of the adventures of no less than three maidens of that name has been referred to the recently published treatment of that theme by Drayton in Englands Heroicall Epistles and to a passage in Stow's Annales which is quoted from the Chronicle of Dunmow.³⁸The Downfall is set in an Induction in which the poet Skelton is represented as conducting the rehearsal of a performance intended for the ear of his master, King Henry VIII. An inartificial device for merriment is that by which Skelton is made to forget from time to time his part of Friar Tuck and fall into Skeltonic doggerel. Several clumsy attempts are made to utilize the device of disguise, whilst among the personages of the elaborate and abortive dumb shows Ambition and Insurrection, personified abstractions of the old drama, still linger. These remnants are doubtless Munday's, for he had been bred in an earlier school. The occasional rise in dignity and the improvement in diction which some scenes display may be confidently attributed to the abler hand of the author of Hoffman. But The Death is little better than The Downfall and the adventures of Matilda, set in an incoherent mass of the bickerings and taunts of characters with difficulty distinguished one from the other, are verily “rough-hewn out by an uncunning hand,” as the epilogue ingenuously informs us. With a perversity not infrequently born of unwitting failure, Munday employed the figure of Robin Hood once more in his masque Metropolis Coronata, 1615.

It is strange that the best dramatic realization of Robin Hood and his merry men should have come from the pen of an avowed classicist and should have been interwoven into that most artificial of all species of the drama, a pastoral play: for The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin Hood is commonly so described. The date of the writing of this fragment of Jonson's is doubtful. It was probably acted, if acted at all, earlier than 1619, for there seems reason in Mr. Fleay's identification of this play with The May Lord mentioned by Jonson in his Conversations with Drummond in that year and generally supposed to be lost.³⁹ As a matter of fact the “forest element,” as it has been not inaptly called, much prevails over the pastoral.⁴⁰ The scene is Sherwood not Arcadia, and the story turns upon an invitation of Robin to the neighboring shepherds to come to the greenwood and feast a day with him. It is difficult for the non-impressionist critic to find any such “preposterous” and “irritating” incongruity, any such “inexcusable” and “inexplicable” artistic offence as Mr. Swinburne contrives to discover in all this.⁴¹ The juxtaposition of Aeglamour, Robin Hood and Puck-hairy under the beeches of Nottinghamshire seems hardly more startling than that of Titania, Theseus and Bottom in the copses bordering a certain very unclassical Athens. Indeed their fine names and the poetry of their lines alone ally Jonson's shepherds and shepherdesses with the old pastoral conventions. The freshness and naturalness with which the familiar figures of Robin and Marian, and the witch of Papplewicke with her attendants Maudlin and Lorell, are drawn scarcely admit of too much praise. The Sad Shepherd is a refreshing piece of open-air realism and is entitled to a place in the drama of English folk-lore with A Midsummer Night's Dream, Friar Bacon and Old Fortunatus.

Robin Hood fills an interesting but minor rôle in the sprightly comedy of disguises, Look About You, first printed in 1600 and variously dated between 1594 and that year. Here Robin is represented in his boyhood as the young Earl of Huntington, ward of Prince Richard and the intimate companion and play-fellow of the young and virtuous Lady Fauconbridge, whom the prince courts for her love. On the historical side Look About You deals with the dissensions between Henry II. and his three sons. But the gist of the matter is in the disguises and opposed mystifications of an eccentric earl, Robert of Gloster, and one Skink, a sharper and creature of Prince John. In this intricate comedy Skink passes through nine disguises, Gloster through four, while the princes Richard and John, Lady Fauconbridge and Robin each plays at least one part other than his own. The clearness of design is not less remarkable than the intricacy of this diverting comedy, which belongs, however, in purpose and in kind, despite the scenes which depict Henry's troubles with his sons, with the comedy of disguise. In the long list of non-extant plays the titles of which betray historical subject-matter there is no other apparently that can be connected with a subject drawn from ballad lore. In November, 1602, Henslowe paid Middleton for a play called Randall Earl of Chester. This worthy, known in history as Randulph de Blundevill, is one of the characters in Munday's extant play, John a Kent, and is mentioned with Robin Hood in Piers Plowman.⁴²

One other play fulfils the conditions of a comedy of disguises superimposed upon an historical background. This is The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green, the joint production of John Day and Henry Chettle, first recorded by Henslowe in 1600, and printed for the first time in 1659. The popularity of this play, which was great, seems to have depended chiefly on the character of Old Stroud, a hearty Norfolk yeoman. Two other “parts” are named by Henslowe, in both of which Haughton assisted Day. In the first and only extant part, Lord Momford, a deserving but broken soldier in the French wars, assumes the habit of a beggar and a serving-man, as a counterplot to a conspiracy against his fame and the fortunes of his daughter, and much of the comedy is also supported by similar disguisings of other characters. The play is bustling and full of action, and a spirited trial by combat, over which King Henry VI. presides, brings out the climax. Except for the scenes in which Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Cardinal Beaufort play a very undignified and unhistorical part, the drama displays not the slightest basis in even supposed history. Munday's inferior play, John a Kent and John a Cumber, is likewise a comedy of disguises in which personages supplied with historical names figure. But here not even the shadow of an actual event enters into the plot, and the mystifications are effected by the supernatural powers of two rival magicians as in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. It is with this latter play and with The Marry Devil of Edmonton that John a Kent belongs. The one manuscript of this play is in Munday's own hand, and is dated 1595. Mr. Fleay's identification of it with The Wise Man of West Chester, mentioned by Henslowe as acted at the Rose, in December, 1594, by the Admiral's men seems not improbable.⁴³ The Ballad of British Sidanen, on which this play is in part founded, was entered in the Stationers' Register as early as 1579.

In that species of the vernacular drama which seeks subject-matter in popular folk-lore we have already found history playing a subordinate part. That the adventures of the heroes of romance and drama were fictitious mattered little to the novelty-loving Elizabethan. Other steps in the growth of myth were taken: that of attributing imaginary events to actual personages of history and that of adding to the interest of foreign stories by giving them an English coloring or setting. Thus we find Greene, in his search after novelty, not only attempting a revival of the Robin Hood play but also endeavoring to enhance popular interest in his dramas by both of these devices. In the best of his comedies, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, he heightens the effect by introducing into a tale of magic a story of romantic love and generosity told of an English prince. King Henry III. and Edward his son both appear in this play: but the events in which they figure might with equal irrelevancy attach to any English or other prince. In The Scottish Historie of Iames the fourth, slaine at Flodden. Entermixed with a pleasant Comedie presented by Oboram King of Fayeries we have a play the title of which clothes, besides much else, a romantic tale of love and jealousy until then unconnected with the historical King James. The composition of this play has been assigned to various dates from 1589 to 1592. It was most likely earlier than George a Greene and subsequent to Alphonsus and Orlando. There seems no reason to question the view of Storojenko, “that Greene, dissatisfied with his former plays in which he had imitated the style of Lyly [a point decidedly questionable] and the manner of Marlowe, decided on striking out a new and independent course.”⁴⁴ There is no mention of The Scottish History in Henslowe, and though the play was registered in 1594, the earliest extant edition is that of 1598. A wider departure from history, even from the liberal type of the chronicles, than that of this play it would be difficult to find. The events of two different reigns are confounded and crimes imputed to King James of which he never could have been guilty. But neither intentional misrepresentation nor sheer ignorance need be attributed to the playwright for all that. It was his task to write a play which should strike the fancy of the moment. “James IV., slain at Flodden” was a pure catchpenny, for James is not slain and Flodden does not form a part of the play. Under this misleading title the author set forth a romantic drama which he borrowed entire from a romance of Cinthio's Hecatomithi, although the Irish and Scottish kings of his original may have suggested his fathering the story on James and making Henry VII., of England, a character in it.⁴⁵ Further into the characteristics of this curious and by no means inferior production it is not necessary to go here as in the mingled elements of romance, melodrama, fairy-lore and comedy which form its components the historical is the least conspicuous.

An example of the assignment of fictitious adventures to a well-known name which is even more striking is to be found in a play which may possibly antedate The Scottish History. This is A Pleasant Comedie of Faire Em, The Millers Daughter of Manchester. With the Love of William the Conqueror, the main plot of which is a wholly absurd quest into Denmark undertaken by King William in search of a fair lady whose face he has beheld painted on the shield of one of his knights. The source of this story, which suggests the extravagance of degenerate heroic romance, has not been traced although Simpson thought that he discerned “some distant resemblance” to Greene's Arbasto.⁴⁶ The two plots, which are remarkable for their complete independence, may well have been invented by the author of the play whoever he was. Fair Em is one of several plays which the credulity of Tieck assigned to the authorship of Shakespeare on the strength of a book-binder's blunder. This notion Simpson supported with painstaking and futile ingenuity.⁴⁷ Mr. Fleay attributes this comedy to Robert Wilson the Elder, the known or putative author of several early plays, the diction and general nature of which are not altogether unlike those of Fair Em.⁴⁸ This is not the place in which to discuss the question of personal satire and controversy supposed by some critics to be involved in this play. The thing which allies it to the group of chronicle histories—as with The Scottish History of James IV.—is the use in the title of a well-known historical name to cloak adventures altogether fictitious, a relationship surely very slight. A later instance of the assignment of apocryphal adventures to an actual historical personage may be found in Anthony Brewer's mediocre tragedy The Lovesick King, in which King Canute is represented as reaching the tragedy of his life through an unholy infatuation which impels him to force the beautiful nun, Cartesmunda, to become his wife. This play, although not printed before 1655, has been assigned by Mr. Fleay, not without a show of reason, to about the year 1604.⁴⁹ An earlier play on Canute is mentioned by Henslowe in 1597. Even less tied to the merest semblance of history must have been the original English comedy from which was translated Eine schoene lustige triumphirende Comoedia von eines Koeniges Sohn aufs Engellandt vnd des Koeniges Tochter aufs Schottlandt, one of a collection of Engelische Comedien vnd Tragedien printed in Germany in the year 1620. In this production the English prince is named Serule, the Scottish princess, Astrea. The two countries are at war and the prince, disguised as a fool, visits the princess, his beloved. An element of the supernatural is added in the black art of one Runcifax.⁵⁰ Tieck regarded this as one of the oldest plays of the collection.⁵¹

The chronicle histories in which Dekker had a hand in his earlier career have perished, but the simplicity of his nature and the realism of his art made Dekker precisely the dramatist from whom an adherence to English scenes might be expected so far as the fashion of the day might permit. Accordingly, beside his share in such non-extant chronicle plays as The Famous Wars of Henry I. and the Prince of Wales, the two plays on Godwin and his sons, Conan of Cornwall and Robert II. of Scots, we find Dekker contriving to give an English coloring to several dramas the actual design of which is wide of the Chronicle Play. In the fanciful and highly poetical Comedy of Old Fortunatus the scene of the adventures of the sons of that universal personage, who was the hapless possessor of the inexhaustible purse and the cap which rendered the wearer of it invisible, is laid in an imaginary England of Athelstan, while Satiromastix, Dekker's reply to Jonson's satirical attack on his fellow playwrights, as we have seen, is preposterously placed at the court of William Rufus. The Shoemakers' Holiday, a happily-conceived and well-executed comedy of London life, introduces an indeterminable English king whose function it is to straighten out the complications of a troubled course of true love. Another play in which an English king is employed as a deus ex machina to unravel the difficulties of a dramatic situation is the domestic drama, The Fair Maid of Bristow, in which, as in 2 Robert Earl of Huntington, Richard I. so figures. Equally remote from the genuine Chronicle Play are such productions as Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, “a Machiavelian revenge-play,” attributed to George Chapman, in which appear a Richard of Cornwall and a young English Prince Edward; and Heywood's Royal King and Loyal Subject. This last play is referable to the story of the Persian king Artaxerxes and his seneschal Ariobarzanes, as told in Painter's Palace of Pleasure.⁵² It is an instance of the sporadic reversion from Italian dukedoms and pseudo-Greek courts to an English scene. Whether modelled on an earlier play of Heywood and Smith, entitled Marshall Osric, referred to by Henslowe in 1602,⁵³ or a new play a few years before its publication in 1637, the spirit of nationality, if it may so be called, has wholly evaporated from this play, and it may be regarded as a specimen of the final absorption of the Chronicle History into romantic drama.

Notes

1. See Haslewood, Art of English Poetry, II., 154.

2. On this topic see Josiah Harmar Penniman, The War of the Theatres, 1897, p. 37.

3. See Henslowe's Diary, Sh. Soc. Pub., 1845, pp. 93 et passim, and the list of his plays in Ackermann's ed. of Hoffman, 1894.

4. Henslowe, p. 153, etc.

5. Ibid., pp. 95, 96.

6. Reprinted in Shakespere Allusion Books, p. 186.

7. Palladis Tamia, ed. Haslewood, as above, II. 151.

8. Elton, An Introduction to Michael Drayton, Spenser Society's Publications, 1895, p. 24.

9. Henslowe, pp. 110 and 227.

10. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the Drama 1559-1642, 1891, I. 130 and II. 269.

11. Henslowe, p. 260.

12. Ibid., pp. 156 and 223.

13. Ibid., p. 226.

14. See p. 51.

15. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, ed. 1809, III. 321.

16. See Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1898, V. 67.

17. Henslowe, p. 46, and Fleay, Biographical Chronicle, I. 288.

18. Cf. 1 Edward IV., I. 3 and I. 6, with Holinshed, III. 323.

19. 1 Edward IV., IV. 2.

20. 2 Edward IV., II. 1 and II. 4.

21. Ibid., III. 4.

22. Ibid., IV. 3, V. 1 and 2.

23. Richard III., I. 4; 2 Edward IV., III. 1.

24. Ibid., III. 5.

25. The True Tragedy, ed. Shakespeare Society, 1844, p. 42.

26. Richard III., IV. 3, 1-23. In the folio, the text of which is here followed, this passage forms part of the second scene.

27. 2 Edward IV., III. 5.

28. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, ed. 1893, I. 213.

29. See pp. 31-33.

30. George a Greene, Works of Greene, ed. Grosart, XIV. 126.

31. Ibid., p. 176.

32. Ibid., p. 181.

33. Ibid.

34. Popular Ballads, III. 129.

35. Early English Prose Romances, ed. 1858, II. 150.

36. See Edward Arber's Reprint of the Register of the Stationers' Company, 1875-94, II. 649; and Henslowe, p. 174.

37. See Dodsley, A Select Collection of Old English Plays, 1874, VIII. 138, and cf. Child, Popular Ballads, III. 177.

38. See a Dissertation on the sources of these plays by A. Ruckdeschel, Erlangen, 1897; and Mr. H. L. D. Ward, Catalogue of Romances, 1883, I. 506, on the three Matildas.

39. Biographical Chronicle, I. 379. J. A. Symonds (Shakspere's Predecessors) accepted this view; A. W. Ward (A History of Dramatic Literature, ed. 1899) thinks it not sufficiently proved.

40. Dr. Homer Smith, Pastoral Influences in the English Drama, 1897, pp. 29-32.

41. A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson, 1889, p. 87.

42. Ed. Skeat, Early English Text Society, 1873, p. 121.

43. Biographical Chronicle, II. 114.

44. See Grosart's ed. of Greene, I. 184.

45. The source of this play was discovered by Mr. P. A. Daniel and communicated to the Athenæum, Oct. 8, 1881. There is a play on the subject by Cinthio, entitled Arenopia. Greene follows the story, not the play. Creizenach's paper in Anglia VIII., p. 419, is later 188(5) and adds nothing.

46. Richard Simpson, The School of Shakspere, 1878, II. 341.

47. Das altenglische Theater, Kritische Schriften, 1848, I. 279, and Simpson, as above, II. 337.

48. Biographical Chronicle, II. 281.

49. Ibid., I. 34.

50. See Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865, p. cviii.

51. Die Anfaenge des deutschen Theaters, 1817, Kritische Schriften, I. 353.

52. Ed. Jacobs, 1890, II. 198, and see Koeppel, Quellen-studien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson's, etc., 1895, Muenchener Beitraege, XI. 133-135.

53. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle, I. 300.