ABSTRACT
And twenty years later Thomas Heywood, defending his art in his Apology for Actors, enlarged on the same theme: “ Plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous his tories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English chronicles; and what man have you now of that weak capacity that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conqueror, nay, from the landing of Brute, until this day?”2
