Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ROYALL KING AND THE LOYALL SUBJECT. The Royall King and the Loyall Subject may claim an especial interest from students for at least two reasons: first, because it furnishes an excellent illustration of the ease with which the playwrights of the great period of the English drama converted a story from a foreign source into a thoroughly English play; and second, because it gives them an opportunity to compare the method of a realistic poet with that of a romanticist working on the same theme. Moreover, certain questions arise in connection with this play, to which scholars have given varying, and sometimes contradictory answers. Of these questions, the following are perhaps the chief: Who wrote The Royall King? If Thomas Heywood, as the earliest edition, published in his life-time, asserts, did he work alone ? or did he have in it only a "main finger" ? Is it possible that we have a record of this play, otherwise unmentioned, in Henslowe's Diary under the name of "Marshalle Oserecke"? In setting forth a new edition of this play, and one that aims to be fuller and, if possible, freer from faults, than the three modern reprints that have preceded it, it seems proper to reconsider these questions, and to go into the matter of the source of the story, and its analogues in other plays, a little more fully, than has yet been done. This, then, will be the attempt of the Introduction. I. The Royall King and the Loyall Subject is a sort of pseudo-chronicle play, dealing with the relations between a king and his High Marshal, or chief minister. Neither king nor marshal is named, and it is improbable that a parallel for the story could be found in any English chronicle,or history.1 Indeed, the source is quite other, as we shall see. The spirit of the play is intensely English and, a...