A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 06

Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Tapio Riikonen and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
Originally published by Robert Dodsley in the Year 1744.
1874-1876
The Conflict of Conscience The rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune The three Ladies of London The three Ladies and three Lords of London A Knack to know a Knave
Four of the five ensuing Plays belong to a peculiar class of our early dramatic performances never yet especially noticed, nor sufficiently illustrated.
Many specimens have of late years been printed, and reprinted, of Miracle-plays, of Moral-plays, and of productions written in the most matured period of our dramatic literature; but little or nothing has been done to afford information respecting a species of stage-representation which constitutes a link between Moral-plays on the one hand, and Tragedy and Comedy on the other, as Tragedy and Comedy existed at the period when Shakespeare and his contemporaries were writers for various theatres in the metropolis. This deficiency it has been our main object to supply.
Nevertheless, a real and, as he may be considered, an historical, personage is represented in various scenes of the play, and is, in truth, its hero, although the author, for reasons assigned in the Prologue, objected to the insertion of his name in the text. These reasons, however, did not apply to the title-page, where the apostacy of Francis Spira, or Spiera, is announced as the main subject, and of whom an account may be found in Sleidan's Vingt-neuf Livres d'Histoire (liv. xxi. edit. Geneva, 1563). Spiera was an Italian lawyer, who abandoned the Protestant for the Roman Catholic faith, and in remorse and despair committed suicide about thirty years anterior to the date when The Conflict of Conscience came from the press. How long this event had occurred before Nathaniel Woodes wrote his drama upon the story, we have no means of knowing; but the object of the author unquestionably was to forward and fix the Reformation, and we may conclude, perhaps, that an incident of the kind would not be brought upon the stage until some years after Elizabeth had been seated on the throne, and until what was called the new faith was firmly settled in the belief, and in the affections, of the great majority of the nation. We apprehend, therefore, that The Conflict of Conscience was not written until about 1570.