citizen virtue (with frequent reference to the surroundings where it grew from, i.e. the city of London) is Sir Thomas More. He has been carefully divested of those traits which might create antipathy against him with an Elizabethan audience, especially his strict catholicism, and some of those very qualities upon which stress was laid in Oldcastle and Cromwell are thrown into bold relief instead. A childlike cheerfulness and joviality combine with absolute self-control, kindness, and social feeling, with severity against himself. Although he is the most tender husband and father, still the love for his family does not influence his attitude where his conscience is concerned. For his character is tested like Oldcastle’s in the adherence to his principles when they prove fatal to him. He makes in this way an extremely modern impression as a hero, nay, he reminds us of the very type of hero of Galsworthy’s “Mob” in resisting the adjuration of his nearest relatives, even his wife, to desert his cause. There is a spirit of advanced humanity about him that pervades the whole play and makes itself particularly felt in the description of the treatment of the Mayday revolt by the authorities, which shows a deviation from the very different and unpleasant statement of the historical sources looking almost like a distinct tendency.
But the similarity between these plays does not confine itself to such more general and—most critics will say—vague likenesses. Especially Cromwell and More show a near relation. They both of them to a great extent want the unity of action. Individual careers are represented in a series of scenes of sometimes anecdotal character. Occasionally the matter used for the one play is taken from the very source of the other, as the episode of the long-haired Faulkner in More, which is related in Fox in connection with Thomas Cromwell (Tucker Brooke, Shakespeare Apocrypha, liv). Striking single resemblances have been repeatedly drawn attention to (cf. Fleay, Life of Shakespeare, p. 298; W. Streit’s diss. p. 53 seq.; and the present writer in Engl. Stud. 46, p. 242). They might be multiplied.[1] But the most important point has never been noticed. As Fleay rightly remarks: “In Act IV (of Cromwell) the chorus apologises for the omission of Wolsey’s life. That had, in fact, been treated already by Chettle in August, 1601, and by Chettle,
- ↑ Compare, e.g., Cromwell, III, iii, the endeavour to make the three great men, Wolsey, More, and Gardiner, appear in a brilliant “causerie,” with the same attempt concerning More, Erasmus, and Surrey in Sir Thomas More, III, ii.
