to such plays as these as mixed and peculiar a quality as though the playwright’s aim or ambition had been to unite in his humble and homespun fashion the two parts of an epic or patriotic historian and a political or social caricaturist; a poet and a pamphleteer on the same page, a chronicler and a jester in the same breath.  Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and registered fact:  the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else omnivorous appetite of censure so humble an example of such obsequious and unambitious fidelity.  Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next to none.  In Thomas Drue’s play of “The Duchess of Suffolk,” formerly and plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part of the same ground is gone over in much the same fashion and to much the same effect; but the subject, a single interlude of the Marian persecution, has more unity of interest than can be attained by any play running on the same line as Heywood’s, from the opening to the close of the most hideous episode in our history.  That the miserable life and reign of Mary Tudor should have been “staged to the show” for the edification and confirmation of her half-sister’s subjects in Protestant and patriotic fidelity of animosity toward Rome and Spain is less remarkable than that the same hopelessly improper topic for historical drama should in later days have been selected for dramatic treatment by English writers and on one occasion by a great English poet.  As there are within the range of any country’s history, authentic or traditional, periods and characters in themselves so naturally fit and proper for transfiguration by poetry that the dramatist who should attempt to improve on the truth—­the actual or imaginary truth accepted as fact with regard to them—­would probably if not certainly derogate from it, so are there others which cannot be transfigured without transformation.  Such a character is the last and wretchedest victim of a religious reaction which blasted her kingdom with the hell-fire of reviving devil-worship, and her name with the ineffaceable brand of an inseparable and damning epithet.  If even the genius of Tennyson could not make the aspirations and the agonies of Mary as acceptable or endurable from the dramatic or poetic point of view as Marlowe and Shakespeare could make the sufferings of such poor wretches as their Edward II. and Richard II., it is hardly to be expected that the humbler if more dramatic genius of Heywood should have triumphed over the desperate obstacle of a subject so drearily repulsive:  but it is curious that both should have attempted to tackle the same hopeless task in the same fruitless fashion.  The “chronicle history” of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare’s self attempted it, could scarcely have been other—­if we may judge by our human and fallible lights of the divine possibilities open