A TRAGEDY, IN FIVE ACTS; BY NICHOLAS ROWE, Esq, AS PERFORMED AT THE THEATRES ROYAL, DRURY LANE AND COVENT-GARDEN. PRINTED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE MANAGERS FROM THE PROMPT BOOK. WITH REMARKS BY MRS. INCHBALD. LONDON: PRINTED FOR HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. 90, CHEAPSIDE. EXCEPT in one particular, Rowe has been perfeetly historical in this play. Jane Shore was, as he has represented, accused of witchcraft; and proof of her guilt, in that instance, having failed, she was next charged with the crime of adultery,‚—an accusation it was in vain to deny ; and by sentence of the ecclesiastical court, she was made to perform penance in St. Paul's church, and then to walk barefooted through some of the adjoining streets. But Jane Shore perishing for hunger is the fiction of an old ballad, and no intelligence from history; or, if she did expire for want of food, it was not in consequence of any judgment passed upon her, as she lived to an advanced age before the event took place : for Sir Thomas More assures his readers, that in the reign of Henry VIII. forty years after her humiliating punishment was inflicted, he has frequently seen her gathering herbs, in a field near the city, for her nightly repast. She was now, he adds, "extremely old and shrivelled, without one trace of her former beauty." Rowe has produced, from the incidents of her singular life, this favourite play. The wife of a goldsmith of Lombard-street has drawn tears from the |