escape from Drayton's own criticism of Daniel's Chronicle Poems: 'too
much historian in verse, ... His rhymes were smooth, his metres well did
close, But yet his manner better fitted prose'.[15] The description of
Mortimer's Tower in the sixth book recalls the ornate style of _Endimion
and Phoebe_, while the fifth book, describing the miseries of King
Edward, is the most moving and dramatic. But there is a general
lifelessness and lack of movement for which these purple passages barely
atone. The cause of the production of so many chronicle poems about this
time has been supposed[16] to be the desire of showing the horrors of
civil war, at a time when the queen was growing old, and no successor
had, as it seemed, been accepted. Also they were a kind of parallel to
the Chronicle Play; and Drayton, in any case even if we grant him to
have been influenced by the example of Daniel, never needed much
incentive to treat a national theme.

About this time, we find Drayton writing for the stage. It seems
unnecessary here to discuss whether the writing of plays is evidence of
Drayton's poverty, or his versatility;[17] but the fact remains that he
had a hand in the production of about twenty. Of these, the only one
which certainly survives is _The first part of the true and honorable
historie, of the life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham,_ &c.
It is practically impossible to distinguish Drayton's share in this
curious play, and it does not, therefore, materially assist the
elucidation of the question whether he had any dramatic feeling or
skill. It can be safely affirmed that the dramatic instinct was nor
uppermost in his mind; he was a Seneca rather than a Euripides: but to
deny him all dramatic idea, as does Dr. Whitaker, is too severe. There
is decided, if slender, dramatic skill and feeling in certain of the
_Nymphals_. Drayton's persons are usually, it must be said, rather
figures in a tableau, or series of tableaux; but in the second and