land Lacy, and all these favors which you have shown to me this day in my poor house, will make Simon Eyre live longer by one dozen of warm summers more than he should. King. Nay, my mad lord mayor, that shall be thy name;

If any grace of mine can length thy life, One honor more I'll do thee: that new building,

Which at thy cost in Cornhill is erected, Shall take a name from us; we'll have it call'd

The Leadenhall, because in digging it You found the lead that covereth the

King. Mad Sim, I grant your suit, you shall have patent

To hold two market-days in Leadenhall, Mondays and Fridays, those shall be the times.

Will this content you?

All. Eyre. In the name of these my poor brethren shoemakers, I most humbly thank your grace. But before I rise, seeing you are in the giving vein and we in the begging, grant Sim Eyre one boon more. King. What is it, my lord mayor? Eyre. Vouchsafe to taste of a poor banquet that stands sweetly waiting for your sweet presence.

Jesus bless your grace!!

King. I shall undo thee, Eyre, only with feasts;

Already have I been too troublesome;
Say, have I not?

Eyre. O my dear king, Sim Eyre was taken unawares upon a day of shroving," which I promist long ago to the prentices of London.

For, an 't please your highness, in time
past,

I bare the water-tankard,78 and my coat
Sits not a whit the worse upon my back;
And then, upon a morning, some mad
boys,

It was Shrove Tuesday, even as 't is now,
gave me my breakfast, and I swore then
by the stopple of my tankard, if ever I
came to be lord mayor of London, I
would feast all the prentices. This day,
my liege, I did it, and the slaves had an
hundred tables five times covered; they
are gone home and vanisht;

Yet add more honor to the gentle trade,
Taste of Eyre's banquet, Simon's happy

made.

66

As The Shoemakers' Holiday represents domestic, or bourgeois, drama on the side of comedy, so A Woman Killed with Kindness is an example, and the best example, of domestic, or bourgeois, tragedy. The two plays spring from the same environment, and were written for identical audiences, by men who had a good deal in common. Both Dekker and Heywood were of the middle class themselves, and reflect in their work the temper and moral soundness of the solid citizenry of London. Like the earlier play, A Woman Killed with Kindness was written for Henslowe, and brought the same price of three pounds; as an interesting illustration of the comparative value of plays and costumes in the manager's eyes, we may note that on March 7, 1603, the day after he paid for the play, he spent ten shillings on a black satin dress for Mrs. Frankford.

No other piece of dramatic criticism has had the influence of Aristotle's attempt in his Poetics to formulate, from the practice of the Athenian dramatists, the laws of tragedy and comedy. One of Aristotle's conclusions was that tragedy was concerned with the fate of persons of high rank, or at least illustrious above their fellows. This limitation was accepted by Renascence scholars, and in general governed the practice, of Elizabethan, Restoration, and eighteenth-century writers of tragedy. It is, for instance, true of Shakespeare's tragedy, for even in Romeo and Juliet, though the personages may not be called illustrious in a strict sense, yet we think of the Capulets and Montagues as of the aristocracy of Verona, and the starcrossed lovers themselves are by their passion and unhappy fate sensibly, if not actually,

raised above ordinary citizens. There were, however, in the Elizabethan period men who realized that tragic feeling was not necessarily confined to the palace; that circumstance might lift to tragic dignity the lives of obscure people. One of the most powerful of pre-Shakesperean plays, so grim and stark in its realism, so impressive in the portrayal of the murderess its heroine, that conjecture as to its authorship has even been busy with Shakespeare's name, is Arden of Feversham, written before 1590. This dramatization of Holinshed's account of a murder of a husband by a wife and her paramour, is the first extant example, though we hear of such plays earlier, of a group of murder plays, domestic tragedies, frequently taken from real life. For a number of years about the turn of the century, under the influence of a general swing toward realism manifest also in comedy, where Ben Jonson led a revolt against romantic comedy and chroniclehistory, plays of this sort were especially popular. Henslowe's Diary gives us the names of several no longer extant, and surviving plays such as A Warning for Fair Women (1599), Two Lamentable Tragedies (1599), and The Yorkshire Tragedy (1605), are home-bred tragedies dealing in rather artless fashion with family strife and bloodshed. Another kind of domestic drama, also popular in the same period, was that which showed the trials of a virtuous wife at the hands of a prodigal and unfaithful husband; such plays, though full of pathos, usually stopped short of tragedy, and ended in the reform of the erring husband and his reconciliation with his patient wife. The Shoemakers' Holiday, in the episode of Jane, has a hint of the motive, and, in Patient Grissil, Dekker deals with the subject more at large. How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602), The London Prodigal (1605), and Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605) are representative of the type.

A Woman Killed with Kindness, belonging specifically to the first of the above-mentioned groups, is thus related to a considerable body of plays of its own day. Heywood may fairly be called the most important of writers of domestic drama, not alone because of the number of examples he has given us, but from his sincere and affecting handling of his material. Once he treats the wrongedwife motive, in his comedy The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (printed 1638). Usually, however, he deals seriously with domestic in

felicity, and always from the point of view of a husband whose wife has transgressed. The story of Jane Shore in the two-part chronicle play Edward IV (1598), although involving two kings, is in effect a domestic tragedy; "the whole treatment of that delicate subject, the relation of a true and honorable man to the wife who has wronged him, but whom he continues to love in a spirit chastened by his wrongs, is handled with the same delicacy, the same wide tolerance and sympathy, and yet with the ethical soundness, which Heywood displays with so much effect in A Woman Killed with Kindness" (Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, I. 283). Heywood returned to the theme in The English Traveller (1633), a very fine play, and in The Late Lancashire Witches (1634,) where the wife, having fallen from grace by indulging in witchcraft, is handed over to justice by her husband. What chiefly distinguishes Heywood's domestic tragedies in which an adulterous wife figures from those by other men is the wife's treatment at the hands of her husband. The Elizabethan code of morals

justified summary and bloody vengeance. Such a punishment, indeed, Mrs. Frankford expects:

Mark not my face,
Nor hack me with your sword; but let me go
Perfect and undeformed to my tomb.
I am not worthy that I should prevail
In the least suit; no, not to speak to you,
Nor look on you, nor to be in your presence;
Yet, as an abject, this one suit I crave;

This granted, I am ready for my grave."

Heywood's delicacy of feeling and perception of true honor in such circumstances win our admiration, as he shows the husband remembering that vengeance is God's and leaving the wife to the torture of her guilty conscience. So, in The English Traveller, young Geraldine, discovering the adultery of Mrs. Wincot, with whom he has exchanged vows of fidelity, forbears punishment more severe than a passionate upbraiding of her crime, and allows her to die of a broken heart. It is no easy matter for a dramatist to handle a situation of this sort in such a way as to preserve our sympathy and respect for the injured husband. It would have been far easier, as well as more theatrically effective, for Heywood to have had Frankford take refuge behind "the unwritten law," and satisfy the natural expectation of his audience with a scene of bloody retribution. Heywood makes his solution possible and sympathetic by a thorough characterization of Frankford as a Christian gentleman, and by a masterly depiction of the man's emotion at the crisis. He prays for patience before he disturbs the guilty pair, his first natural impulse toward immediate revenge displays itself when he pursues Wendoll with drawn sword, and he has to struggle in private with his anger before he can pronounce the lenient sentence on his wife. We see in action his better nature contending with his worse, and the struggle

humanizes as the victory ennobles him. Heywood commands our admiration, moreover, by the fine restraint with which he handles the story. Neither in the climactic scenes nor in the equally difficult scenes of Mrs. Frankford's repentance and death in act five, does he allow intrusion of sentimentality. Frankford indulges in no false heroics, Mrs. Frankford in no mawkish agonizings. No better illustration could be found of the difference between true sentiment and false sentimentality; the sentimental dramatists of the eighteenth century could have studied this play with profit. The only speeches which do not ring true are those of Wendoll in V. iii, but from him we should not expect honest penitence.

It must be admitted that the play, considering it as a whole, is not a model structurally. It is typical of one method of Elizabethan construction, which violates unity of action by a combination of two plots essentially unconnected. Heywood was a frequent offender in this respect: The English Traveller and The Captives are flagrant examples. In this case the sub-plot does not, as sometimes, offer so violent a contrast in feeling with the main plot that the dignity of the play is practically destroyed. Here the sub-plot, dealing as it does with a question of personal and family honor, in a way supports the more serious ethical problem of the main plot. There is also this to be said for the sub-plot, that by the rapidity of its development it helps to conceal the bareness of the main plot, whose exposition is very leisurely. But the actual binding of the plots is of the flimsiest: the two groups of people are brought together in the opening scene. Wendoll and Cranwell are transferred from one group to the other, the people of the sub-plot are present at Mrs. Frankford's death, but of interaction between the groups there is none. As for the main plot itself. barring the slowness of the exposition, it is well done, with one important exception. The climactic upbuilding to the scene of the discovery is strong; devices like Frankford's unwillingness to believe Nicholas's story, the card game, and the feigned letter are ef fectively used. The climax is stirring, the pathos of the situation enhanced by the skil ful introduction of the children, and the last act avoids anticlimax; the business of the lute is particularly effective. The use of suspense is notable, in Frankford's hesitation before entering the house and at the door of the chamber, and in the pause before Mrs. Frankford's fate is made known. The one great flaw in the play is the ease with which Mrs. Frankford falls. This is altogether a matter of characterization. Nothing in the exposition of the woman's character prepares us for the abruptness of her yielding. nor is Wendoll presented as so attractive as to make it credible. Heywood was a master in portraying a gentleman - he was no hand

wrote George Barnwell in 1731 that bourgeois tragedy appeared again upon the London stage. By that time the sentimentalizing and moralizing tendency had become so strong that Barnwell is as strenuously didactic as a Morality. Not until we come to the modern realistic drama do we find any achievement in domestic tragedy so appealing as A Woman Killed with Kindness. The simplicity of method, the sanity, the sound ethics, the freedom from preaching, of this, the flower of Elizabethan domestic tragedies, are enough to insure for Heywood an honorable place in the history of the drama.

Was given you in the church I'll borrow.-- Sound!

This marriage music hoists me from the ground.

Frank. Aye, you may caper; you are light and free!

Marriage hath yok'd my heels; pray, then, pardon me. Sir F. I'll have you dance too, brother! Sir C. Master Frankford,

You are a happy man, sir, and much joy Succeed your marriage mirth: you have a wife

So qualified, and with such ornaments Both of the mind and body. First, her birth

Is noble, and her education such

As might become the daughter of a prince;

Her own tongue speaks all tongues, and her own hand

Can teach all strings to speak in their best grace.

From the shrill'st treble to the hoarsest base.

To end her many praises in one word, She's Beauty and Perfection's eldest daughter,

Only found by yours, though many a heart hath sought her.

Frank. But that I know your virtues and chaste thoughts,

I should be jealous of your praise, Sir
Charles.

Cran. He speaks no more than you approve.

Mal. Nor flatters he that gives to her her due.

Mrs. F. I would your praise could find a fitter theme

Than my imperfect beauties to speak on!

Such as they be, if they my husband please,

They suffice me now I am married.

His sweet content is like a flattering glass,

To make my face seem fairer to mine eye;

But the least wrinkle from his stormy brow

Will blast the roses in my cheeks that

This morning, which to many seems a burden,

Too heavy to bear, is unto you a pleas

Consort and expectation of much joy,

5 reduces her to submission.

6 harmony.