In these two volumes are collected the best of those plays
founded on English history that have been spared to us
from the larger supply existing in Shakespeare's time,—fire,
neglect, and perhaps fanaticism, having deprived us of
many others. Taking Shakespeare's ten chronicles as a
basis, nearly all the gaps that he left in the continuity of
his English history are here filled in with plays written by
his contemporaries: Peele, Marlowe, Heywood, and Ford
having all lived in the time of the great master. We have
thus placed before us a series of plays by our greatest
dramatists, representing the chief incidents of three hundred
years, among the most eventful in English history. These
are not, however, mere reprints of the old plays, but they
are resettings of them in what is thought to be the simplest
and most effective form for dramatic performance.
need hardly be said that all these plays were written to be
acted, and yet fully one half are unknown to the modern
stage, while many of them have not been produced in an
English theatre since the time of the Stuarts; the reason
commonly assigned for this neglect being that, as written,
they cannot be acted. Indeed, in the form in which we