Written on the brink of the Stuart era, Thomas Heywood's very popular If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie; or, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1603–1), which apparently was performed for “overflow houses,” offers a tenuous break with the Elizabethan past by engaging both diachronic and synchronic representations of the past. The play still draws on the hallmark traits of the Elizabethan history play by telling a nostalgic, diachronic tale of an English princess in distress, but it also offers an unmistakable sample of the type of synchronic approach which is to blossom in the course of the seventeenth century, and which squarely undercuts the diachronic story. Based on the play's content it is unlikely that Heywood is trying to be particularly radical. Nevertheless, the presence of these two historiographies, each driven by its own ideological agenda, invests the drama with both incongruence and tension. Therefore, the play offers a fairly cautious and conservative political message (perhaps to the newly crowned King James) and simultaneously exposes the ideological dimensions of historiographical propaganda under the Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes. Structurally as well as politically, one could call If You Know Not Me a confused play, but whatever confusion there is it is certainly not of the aesthetic variety. Rather, it reveals a change in the “inner logic” of the genre – a subtle mutation which still gives the audience the powerful diachronic and cathartic narrative described by Alvin Kernan (see chapter 2), but which also draws the attention away from the play's and culture's heroine, Elizabeth.