been accused of having in
_Edward I._ adopted or perhaps even invented the basest and most groundless
scandals against the noble and stainless memory of Eleanor of Castile;
while in his _Battle of Alcazar_ he certainly gratifies to the utmost the
popular anti-Spanish and anti-Popish feeling. So angry have critics been
with Peele's outrage on Eleanor, that some of them have declared that none
but he could have been guilty of the not dissimilar slur cast on Joan of
Arc's character in _Henry VI._, the three parts of which it has been the
good pleasure of Shakesperian commentators to cut and carve between the
University Wits _ad libitum_. I cannot myself help thinking that all this
has arisen very much from the idea of Peele's vagabondism given by the
untrustworthy "Jests." The slander on Queen Eleanor was pretty certainly
supplied to him by an older ballad. There is little or nothing else in
Peele's undoubted writings which is at all discreditable. His miscellaneous
poems show a man by no means given to low company or low thoughts, and one
gifted with the truest poetic vein; while his dramas, besides exhibiting a
greater command over blank verse than any of his predecessors and than any
except Marlowe of his contemporaries can claim, are full of charming
passages. _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which has been denied to him--an
interesting play on the rare basis of the old romance--is written not in
blank verse but in the fourteener. The _Old Wives' Tale_ pretty certainly
furnished Milton with the subject of Comus, and this is its chief merit.
_Edward I._ and _The Battle of Alcazar_, but especially the latter, contain
abundance of the hectoring rant which has been marked as one of the
characteristics of the school, and which is half-excused by the sparks of
valour that often break from its smoke and clatter. But Peele would
undoubtedly stand higher, though he might not be so interesting a literary
figure, if we had nothing of his save _The Arraignment of Paris_ and _David
and Bethsabe_. _The Arraignment_ (written in various metres, but mainly in
a musical and varied heroic couplet), is partly a pastoral, partly a
masque, and wholly a Court play. It thus comes nearest to Lyly, but is
altogether a more dramatic, livelier, and less conceited performance than
anything by the author of _Euphues_. As for _David and Bethsabe_, it is
crammed with beauties, and Lamb's curiously faint praise of it has always
been a puzzle to me. As Mar