Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/131

Rh Changeling, and no character that is not merely repellent. Crime overtaken by vengeance was the receipt for tragedy which the Elizabethans, and not the Elizabethans only, learned from Seneca. There were but few whose instinct guided them as it did Shakespeare, after his first aberrations, to the truth that the tragic hero must have some claim upon our respect and sympathy, a point which Balzac elaborated with acuteness in his criticism of Heinsius' Herodes Infanticida.

A more humdrum and prosaic representative of the journeyman dramatist is Thomas Heywood, a voluminous author of plays, poems, pamphlets, and entertainments. Like Dekker, he caters mainly for a citizen audience. He sings the praises of the Lord Mayor and the London 'prentices. His sentiment is kindly, and his morality sound. He dramatises every sort of story, mythological, romantic, historic, and domestic. His histories, Edward IV. (1600) and The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (1605), are in the regular chronicle style, and almost pre-Shakespearean in their want of dignity in the serious scenes and the buffoonery of the comic portions. His mythological plays, The Golden Age, The Silver Age, &c., dramatise simply enough a variety of stories from Ovid. The Rape of Lucrece (1608) blends familiar Roman tragedy with outrageous Elizabethan