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to itself. We can trace the evolution of this kind very distinctly from the old English morality. We can see the morality, first tinctured with history, and so becoming an historical morality, and then gradually shedding the morality and assuming the features of the chronicle history familiar to us in King John and Richard III. The process may be observed in an interlude like the Kyng Johan (1548) of John Bale (1495-1563), a Suffolk and St. John's, Cambridge, man, who married and took orders, thus committing himself to the Protestant side, and, after the ordinary vicissitudes of that age, was promoted by Edward VI. to a bishopric (Ossory) and confirmed by Elizabeth. He treats King John as a victim of papal tyranny, and in doing this the veil of allegory gets torn aside and the real personalities of history stand revealed. Here we can see, as it were, the abstractions of the older morality resolving themselves into historical characters. Thus Sedition becomes Stephen Langton; Private Wealth, Cardinal Pandulph; Usurped Power, Innocent III.; and so on. It is clearly a step forward from this to the "troublesome" chronicles which were the immediate forerunners of Shakespeare's histories. The admixture of the foreign element and of classical influence in the evolution of the chronicle drama is comparatively very small. But the type serves as a very valuable link between the development of comedy and the development of tragedy.

Another important link was the strong taste for the plays of Seneca and for Italian versions of one or two of the plays of Euripides, which set in about the middle of the sixteenth century. Seneca appealed strongly to the Italians as a famous bridge between the greater models of Greek antiquity and the more facile ideals of the Renaissance, and a taste for Seneca must rank high in the list of Italian novelties which the English scholars of the sixteenth century were so proud of importing from the Trans

alpine peninsula. The rising confraternity of critics (it is hardly an exaggeration to say) would not look at a serious play unless it were modelled upon an Italian design, and by preference an Italian adaptation from Seneca or one of the remoter stars of antiquity. Early in Elizabeth's reign Seneca's Tenne Tragedies were successively translated into English by five scholars-Neville, Nuce, Studley, Jasper Heywood, and John Newton-and collected in a single volume by the last-mentioned in 1581. Long before this the direct influence of Seneca upon English drama was shown in the first English tragedy, entitled Gorboduc, which was acted on Twelfth Night, 1561, by gentlemen of the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth. Gorboduc (printed 1565, and again in 1571 as Ferrex and Porrex) was a joint production, being the work of Thomas Norton (1532-1584), a London, Cambridge, and Inner Temple man, who married a daughter of Cranmer's, and though successful at the Bar, gave much attention to literature, in conjunction with Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, author of the stately Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates (1559-63); Sackville wrote the last two acts, and perhaps revised the whole. The plot of Gorboduc was derived from a British legend of the King Lear variety, to be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History; but the management of it is thoroughly Senecan. The action is not represented on the stage, but is reported by professional messengers or eye-witnesses, after the Greek fashion. As a substitute for it, we have a dumb-show before each act, signifying allegorically the nature of the events to follow, and finally there is a chorus of four sage men of Britain who comment upon the course of events at the close of each act. The external form of the piece, with its acts and scenes, choruses, stock characters, ghosts, and ghastly incidents reported-not enacted-is thus absolutely Sen

ecan; while the moral is one grateful to Tudor ears, the curse of civil war and the horrors of a disputed succession. But one novel feature in Gorboduc, perhaps the most important of all, remains still to be noted.

Since the appearance of Trissino's Sophonisba in 1515, the Italians had been increasingly given to combine prose and verse, tragic and comic effect, and rhyme with blank verse. The two English authors, now, in their attempt to be completely faithful in form to their classical and Italian models, discarded the rhymed metre (generally twelve or fourteen-syllable couplets), which had hitherto been the sole dramatic vehicle, and adopted in its place the new blank verse which Surrey had but recently used, as we have seen, for his version of two books of Virgil's Eneid, and which seemed to them, as to him, to be the one way of reproducing the unrhymed measures of Greece and Rome. The verse, like the texture of the play generally, is thoroughly wooden. There may be flesh and blood, as Charles Lamb remarked, if we could only get at it; but we can't. Ligneous as the drama is, however, and as its immediate successors are, their importance as fixing the type for the drama of air and fire that was to come, and to which Marlowe was to lend the resonance of his "mighty line," can hardly be overrated.

Having dealt so fully with Gorboduc, it will be necessary to do little more than enumerate its Senecan successors, such as The Lamentable Tragedy mixed full of pleasant Mirth, conteyning the Life of Cambises, King of Persia, his many Wicked Deeds and Odious Death, written in 1570 by Thomas Preston (1537-1598), another Cambridge man; the Tancred and Gismunda, by Robert Wilmot, played before the Queen at the Inner Temple, in 1568, the story again taken from the Italian and treated in the Italian manner; the Promos and Cassandra of George Whetstone (1544-1587), taken from the Hecatom mithi of Cinthio and printed in 1578; the Jocasta of George Gas

coigne, based on the Italian version of the Euripidian Phænissa, by Ludovico Dolci, and written in blank verse much after the pattern of Gorboduc; and The Misfortunes of Arthur, produced before the Queen at Greenwich by eight members of Gray's Inn (of whom Francis Bacon was one) in February, 1588. Impossible from the point of view of intrinsic literary interest, these plays are all of an historical value as illustrating the final process by which English tragedy (which admittedly owed more to foreign examples than even comedy) was evolved from mysteries and moralities through the transitional phase of chroniclehistories. The enumeration brings us to the threshold of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare; to the mysterious ten years from 1580 to 1590, when the bats that flit about the twilight of the drama give place to the immediate harbingers of the mightiest dawn in all our literature.

In order to understand this marvellous transformationscene we shall have to go for some assistance to the political and social history of the period.1

1 Among the more indispensable books for the study of the rise of the Drama in England are J. Payne Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, 1879; Dr. A. W. Ward's English Dramatic Literature, 1899; E. K. Chambers's The Mediaval Stage,* 1903; A. W. Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes (ed. 1904); Gayley's Representative English Comedies, 1903. In addition to these the student of the ancient English Drama will be anxious to consult Dodsley's Collection of Old English Plays, and the texts of the four great cycles of miracle plays, edited-the York Plays, by Lucy Toulmin Smith; the Chester Plays, by T. Wright; the Towneley or Wakefield Plays, by England and Pollard; and the Ludus Coventria, by Halliwell Phillipps. And references on the subject generally may also be given to Ten Brink's History of English Literature (Bell, vol. ii.), Jusserand's Le Théâtre en Angleterre, Davidson's Studies in the English Miracle Plays (1892), Courthope's History of English Poetry (vol. i.), Creizenach's Geschichte des neueren Dramas, 1893, and K. L. Bates's The English Religious Drama, 1893, with a bibliography.

CHAPTER V

PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA

"It is especially with reference to the drama and its characteristics in any given nation, or at any particular period, that the dependence of genius on the public taste becomes a matter of the deepest importance."-COLERIDGE, Lectures.

Actors and theatres-Lyly-Greene-Peele-Kyd-Marlowe— Tamburlaine-Faustus-Edward II.—Arden of Feversham.

THE marvellously rapid expansion of English life and literature in the middle of Elizabeth's reign is seen nowhere more clearly than in that exuberance of dramatic production which first made itself felt between 1580 and 1590. The famous writer of interludes, John Heywood, lived to the very threshold of this period, but the interludes themselves had long been superseded as an oldfashioned transitional form. Deeper still in oblivion were the moralities or allegorical plays from which the interludes had, in a sense, been evolved. Such plays lingered on, to be sure, in the country and among ruder town audiences, but in cultured circles they were quite eclipsed by novelties bearing the stamp of Italy or the classics. Comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish were thoroughly "raked," as Greene expressly declares, to furnish the playhouses of London. Between these admirers of classical models and the conservative audiences who loved the old medleys, there were, no doubt, some eclectics who aimed at creating a drama out of elements furnished by each of the other schools. Nearly all the attempts in the various kinds at the period have utterly disappeared. Those that have survived best are the most ambitious and

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