Were there nothing further to commend in the two parts of the historical
play or chronicle history of "King Edward IV.," this would suffice to
show that the dramatic genius of Heywood was not unjustified of its
early and perilous venture: but the hero of these two plays is no royal
or noble personage, he is plain Matthew Shore the goldsmith. We find
ourselves at once in what Coleridge would have called the anachronic
atmosphere of Elizabethan London; our poet is a champion cockney, whose
interest is really much less in the rise and fall of princes than in the
homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the sturdy gallantry of their
apprentices. The lively, easy, honest improvisation of the opening
scenes has a certain value in its very crudity and simplicity: the
homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are signs at once of the date
and of the class to which these plays must be referred. The parts of the
rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the comic or burlesque part
of Josselin is very cheap and flimsy farce. The peculiar powers of
Heywood in pathetic if not in humorous writing were still in abeyance or
in embryo. Pathos there is of a true and manly kind in the leading part
of Shore; but it has little or nothing of the poignant and intense
tenderness with which Heywood was afterward to invest the similar part
of Frankford.
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