SOURCE: Schelling, Felix Emmanuel. “Popular Playwrights: Modifications of the Type.” In The English Chronicle Play: A Study in the Popular Historical Literature Environing Shakespeare, pp. 134-71. New York: MacMillan Company, 1902.

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...