On its republication in 1603, with the title of the Barons’ Wars, the metre was changed to ottava rima, and Drayton showed, in an excellent preface, that he fully appreciated the principles and the subtleties of the metrical art.  While possessing many fine passages, the Barons’ Wars is somewhat dull, lacking much of the poetry of the older version; and does not escape from Drayton’s own criticism of Daniel’s Chronicle Poems:  ’too much historian in verse, ...  His rhymes were smooth, his metres well did close, But yet his manner better fitted prose’.[15] The description of Mortimer’s Tower in the sixth book recalls the ornate style of Endimion and Phoebe, while the fifth book, describing the miseries of King Edward, is the most moving and dramatic.  But there is a general lifelessness and lack of movement for which these purple passages barely atone.  The cause of the production of so many chronicle poems about this time has been supposed[16] to be the desire of showing the horrors of civil war, at a time when the queen was growing old, and no successor had, as it seemed, been accepted.  Also they were a kind of parallel to the Chronicle Play; and Drayton, in any case even if we grant him to have been influenced by the example of Daniel, never needed much incentive to treat a national theme.

About this time, we find Drayton writing for the stage.  It seems unnecessary here to discuss whether the writing of plays is evidence of Drayton’s poverty, or his versatility;[17] but the fact remains that he had a hand in the production of about twenty.  Of these, the only one which certainly survives is The first part of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham, &c.  It is practically impossible to distinguish Drayton’s share in this curious play, and it does not, therefore, materially assist the elucidation of the question whether he had any dramatic feeling or skill.  It can be safely affirmed that the dramatic instinct was nor uppermost in his mind; he was a Seneca rather than a Euripides:  but to deny him all dramatic idea, as does Dr. Whitaker, is too severe.  There is decided, if slender, dramatic skill and feeling in certain of the Nymphals.  Drayton’s persons are usually, it must be said, rather figures in a tableau, or series of tableaux; but in the second and seventh Nymphals, and occasionally in the tenth, there is real dramatic movement.  Closely connected with this question is the consideration of humour, which is wrongly denied to Drayton.  Humour is observable first, perhaps, in the Owle (1604); then in the Ode to his Rival (1619); and later in the Nymphidia, Shepheards Sirena, and Muses Elyzium.  The second Nymphal shows us the quiet laughter, the humorous twinkle, with which Drayton writes at times.  The subject is an [Greek:  agon] or contest between two shepherds for the affections of a nymph called Lirope:  Lalus is a vale-bred swain,