originate at all? This question could scarcely be answered by those who like Simpson and others dated the play 1586 or 1587, i.e. at a time when the English Chronicle play was of absolutely different character. On trying to ascertain the position of Sir Thomas More, one’s first endeavour, then, must be to find out the group to which it belongs. Now there can be little doubt that it forms part of a group which shows in some respects a surprising similarity. These are The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1600) and The True Chronicle History of the whole Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602). Oldcastle is usually looked upon as the result of a more or less ineffectual endeavour to challenge Shakespeare. Ineffectual the play indeed is, if compared with Shakespeare’s art. But one must not overlook that it is a comparatively modern idea to make a man like Oldcastle the hero of a play. Not in the sense that he is not a king or a royal personage. Sir Thomas Stukeley, too, is not of royal blood. But to select him for the leading figure of a play was to create a hero-type hitherto almost unknown in Elizabethan drama, a man who was not “a dramatic character” in the traditional sense at all. It is true that, before Oldcastle, dramatic art had occasionally celebrated men of note in civic affairs, but never before had so detailed a portrait been attempted of a man who had not earned any warlike laurels or made himself famous by daring adventures. Oldcastle held a place in the history of his country’s civilisation which allowed the dramatist to hold up as an example one who was human, kindhearted, cheerful and trustworthy, charitable, self-controlled and devout, tender to his wife, for whose sake only his suffering weighs upon him, and above all a staunch adherent to principle as regards both his advanced religious creed and his loyalty to the King. When the two clash he unflinchingly decides for the first and tells the King so with great frankness, who, however, is far too generous to “incroach upon his conscience.” The hero in The Life and Death of Cromwell is of course in many ways of a different stamp, still something of the spirit of Oldcastle is in him too. Schelling says (The English Chronicle Play, p. 217): “Cromwell stands for the glorification, the very apotheosis, of citizen virtue. It is his honorable thrift and capacity in trade, his temperance, piety, and staunch Protestantism, which are dwelt on and extolled. He befriends the broken debtor and outwits the wrongdoer. He is mindful of others’ favours to him, forgetful of his own,” etc. Another embodiment of
