licable and eccentric as were the moods and fashions of dramatic
poetry in an age when Shakespeare could think fit to produce anything so
singular in its composition and so mysterious in its motive as 'Troilus
and Cressida,' the most eccentric and inexplicable play of its time, or
perhaps of any time, is probably 'The Rape of Lucrece.'" This may
naturally be the verdict of a hasty reader at a first glance over the
party-colored scenes of a really noble tragedy, crossed and checkered
with the broadest and quaintest interludes of lyric and erotic farce.
But, setting these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we must
recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and romantic rather than
classical or mythological drama; one, if not belonging properly or
essentially to the third rather than to the second of the four sections
into which Heywood's existing plays may be exhaustively divided, which
stands on the verge between them with something of the quaintest and
most graceful attributes of either. The fine instinct and the simple
skill with which the poet has tempered the villany of his villains
without toning down their atrocities by the alloy of any incongruous
quality must be acknowledged as worthily characteristic of a writer who
at his ethical best might be defined as something of a plebeian Sidney.
There are touches of criminal heroism and redeeming humanity even in the
parts of Sextus and Tullia: the fearless desperation of the doomed
ravisher, the conjugal devotion of the hunted parricide, give to the
last defiant agony of the abominable mother and son a momentary tone of
almost chivalrous dignity. The blank verse is excellent, though still
considerably alloyed with rhyme: a fusion or alternation of metrical
effects in which the young Heywood was no less skilful and successful,
inartistic as the skill and illegitimate as the success may seem to
modern criticism, than the young Shakespeare.

The eleven plays already considered make up the two divisions of
Heywood's work which with all their great and real merit have least in
them of those peculiar qualities most distinctive and representative of
his genius: those qualities of which when we think of him we think
first, and which on summing up his character as a poet we most
naturally associate with his name. As a historical or mythological
playwright, working on material derived from classic legends or from
English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers,