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 adventitious interest to his thinnest or homeliest
work on any subject admitting or requiring the display of such a
quality. In the second and superior part of this dramatic chronicle it
informs the humbler comic parts with more life and spirit, though not
with heartier devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious and
comparatively though modestly high-flown close of the play: which is
indeed in the main rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced
and formal interludes of historical pageant or event, than a regular or
even an irregular historical drama.
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