Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/220

 admirable or memorable of Heywood's other plays. Even the rough-hewn chronicle, 'If you know not me you know nobody,' by which 'the troubles of Queen Elizabeth' before her accession are as nakedly and simply set forth in the first part as in the second are 'the building of the Royal Exchange' and 'the famous victory' over the Invincible Armada, has on the whole more life and spirit, more interest and movement, in action as in style. The class of play to which it belongs is historically the most curious if poetically the least precious of all the many kinds enumerated by Heywood in earnest or by Shakespeare in jest as popular or ambitious of popularity on the stage for which they wrote. Aristophanic license of libel or caricature, more or less ineffectually trammelled by the chance or the likelihood of prosecution and repression, is common under various forms to various ages and countries; but the serious introduction and presentation of contemporary figures and events give 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