In “The Brazen Age” there is somewhat more of dramatic unity or coherence than in the two bright easy-going desultory plays which preceded it:  it closes at least with a more effective catastrophe than either of them in the death of Hercules.  However far inferior to the haughty and daring protest or appeal in which Sophocles, speaking through the lips of the virtuous Hyllus, impeaches and denounces the iniquity of heaven with a steadfast and earnest vehemence unsurpassed in its outspoken rebellion by any modern questioner or blasphemer of divine providence, the simple and humble sincerity of the English playwright has given a not unimpressive or inharmonious conclusion to the same superhuman tragedy.  In the previous presentation of the story of Meleager, Heywood has improved upon the brilliant and passionate rhetoric of Ovid by the introduction of an original and happy touch of dramatic effect:  his Althaea, after firing the brand with which her son’s life is destined to burn out, relents and plucks it back for a minute from the flame, giving the victim a momentary respite from torture, a fugitive recrudescence of strength and spirit, before she rekindles it.  The pathos of his farewell has not been overpraised by Lamb:  who might have added a word in recognition of the very spirited and effective suicide of Althaea, not unworthily heralded or announced in such verses as these: 

                                   This was my son,
   Born with sick throes, nursed from my tender breast,
   Brought up with feminine care, cherished with love;
   His youth my pride; his honor all my wishes;
   So dear, that little less he was than life.

The subsequent adventures of Hercules and the Argonauts are presented with the same quiet straightforwardness of treatment:  it is curious that the tragic end of Jason and Medea should find no place in the multifarious chronicle which is nominally and mainly devoted to the record of the life and death of Hercules, but into which the serio-comic episode of Mars and Venus and Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly as it is humorously and dramatically presented.  The rivalry of Omphale and Deianeira for their hero’s erratic affection affords a lively and happy mainspring—­not suggested by Caxton—­for the tragic action and passion of the closing scenes.

At the opening of “The Iron Age,” nineteen years later in date of publication, we find ourselves at last arrived in a province of dramatic poetry where something of consecutive and coherent action is apparently the aim if not always the achievement of the writer.  These ten acts do really constitute something like a play, and a play of serious, various, progressive, and sustained interest, beginning with the elopement and closing with the suicide of Helen.  There is little in it to suggest the influence of either Homer or Shakespeare:  whose “Troilus and Cressida” had appeared in print, for the helplessly bewildered admiration of an eternally mystified world,