Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/36

the worst must almost certainly be that 'Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell' which the infallible verdict of German intuition has discovered to be 'not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but worthy to be classed among his best and maturest works.' About midway between these two I should be inclined to rank 'The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt,' a mangled and deformed abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane Grey. In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took decidedly the greater part. The shambling and slipshod metre, which seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of simple and exquisite melody—the lazy vivacity and impulsive inconsequence of style—the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with interludes of absolute and headlong collapse—are qualities by which a very novice in the study of dramatic form may recognise the reckless and unmistakable presence of Dekker. The curt and grim precision of Webster's tone, his terse and pungent force of compressed rhetoric, will be found equally difficult to trace in any of these three plays. 'Northward Ho!' a clever, coarse, and vigorous study of the realistic sort, has not a note of poetry in it, but is