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Such was the happy fortune of the Elizabethan drama fortune that comes to the human race at rare intervals. While Sackville, Gascoigne, and Daniel were composing scholarly imitations of the Greek drama to produce a feeble agitation of pity and terror in the minds of Cynthia and her courtiers, lifeless shadows of a once glorious form, Fortune beckoned to Marlowe and showed him the way to a new dramatic world. Marlowe was really the Columbus of the English drama. It is not very easy to say now what it was that induced him, a university man, to give his pen to the service of the common stage, and try to redeem it from "the jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits;" it is not impossible that he had heard of the success of the popular drama in Spain. But whatever moved him to write "Tamburlaine" for a vulgar audience, he was the first to enter in and take possession of a region which offered infinite new possibilities to the dramatist.

The representation of passionate conflict was insuperably hampered by the conditions of the Greek stage. The large Greek theatres necessitated masks and padded and stiffened figures: and thus lively conflict, whether of mind or of body, was rendered impossible. English dramatists, writing for actors who came on the stage in their natural faces and figures, were throwing away their opportunities for giving a more vivid representation of life when they accommodated themselves to Greek models. By good luck or sagacious insight, Marlowe initiated a drama that took full advantage of the changed manner of stage representation. Men could now be brought face to face in passionate antagonism, and all the vicissitudes of the struggle put before the spectator with lifelike force. What a revelation it was! what a fascination it must have had upon all dramatic minds! The Elizabethans were called upon to re-write the history of human passion in all its phases and stages: and there were men among them who took delight in the task that Fate or Fortune had imposed. They fulfilled their mission with keen emulation: they reaped the harvest with such thoroughness as to leave little behind for the gleaners of after-times.

Many circumstances favoured them: many things must contribute to the success of such an enterprise. England had very recently passed through the crisis of the Reformation, and was still excited and exalted to an unusual pitch of energy by apprehensions of intestine plots and foreign invasion: the pulse of the country beat high with success and thirst for new enterprise. When men are unfortunate and despondent, they have no heart to go and look at the mimicry of action and passion it is only when their enterprises succeed that they can go with free hearts and applaud the heroics of Tamburlaine or weep over the sorrows of Desdemona. The Elizabethans were prosperous in war and

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in commerce they repelled the Spaniard, and brought home richly laden argosies from east and west: they were strong, thriving, hopeful men, with nerves that could bear a good thrill of tragic horror, and sides that the most boisterous laughter was unable to shake too rudely. But one must have no small confidence in the power of general conditions over specific effects who would venture to say that our dramatists would never have come into existence, or would have sought some other line of activity, had Mary remained upon the throne instead of Elizabeth, and had England continued at peace with Spain. Doubtless a material basis of prosperity was indispensable to the support of dramatic entertainments: it was absolutely necessary that there should be enough free wealth to fill the theatres. But one fails to see what the stir of the Reformation had to do with the dramatic tendencies of Marlowe, or how the defeat of the Armada was concerned in the migration of Shakespeare from Stratford to the London stage.

A more vital condition of the great dramatic outburst was the abundance of material lying ready to the shaping and inspiring genius of the dramatist. There were numberless tales and chronicles of love and war to furnish him with plots or suggestions of plots: even if he knew no language but his own, the enterprise of printers had furnished him not only with the works of native poets and chroniclers, but with hosts of translations from Italian, French, and Latin. Observation of men was a prevailing passion, and literature was crowded with sententious maxims of character and politics. The passion of love had been expressed in many different moods and phases, and attempts had been made to treat with becoming gravity the tragic themes of disaster and death. Literature was undoubtedly ripe for dramatic embodiment.

In studying the development of the drama under Elizabeth, a broad distinction must be drawn between the Court stage and the popular stage. The Court stage was ruled by classical traditions and Italian precedents; it was in the popular stage that the new drama was rooted, and it is there that we must look for the first sprouts of its vigorous life. It was an age of widespread interest in play-acting; but there were two very different kinds of theatrical audience, and the plays that pleased the one would have been far from satisfactory to the other. The difference was as great as the difference now is between east-end theatres and west-end, probably greater and more clearly marked. The audiences had different tastes, and plays were written and acted to correspond. Amateur companies were formed at the public schools, at the universities, at the Inns of Court, and their performances were graced occasionally with the presence of royalty. Between 1568 and 1580, Mr Collier tells us, some fifty dramas were presented at Court. To judge from such specimens as remain, the authors of these fashion

able plays followed literary usages in their compositions. Their comedies were modelled on the new Italian comedy; their tragedies abstained from the actual exhibition of violent passion, and dreadful deeds were told but not enacted. Lyly and Daniel, rivals for the Mastership of the Revels, furnish a clue to the Queen's taste, by which the fashion was determined. Her predecessor, "Bloody" Mary, had apparently a liking for broad and boisterous farce. But Queen Elizabeth was a person of much more culture and refinement. The light sparkling word-play of Lyly, and the gentle decorous passion of Daniel, were more after her standard than farcical buffoonery or violent tragedy. How high the quarrel ran at the end of her reign between the fashionable critics and the caterers for the common stage, we may gather from the conversation between Hamlet and Rosencrantz on the subject: "There was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question."

This rough distinction between the Court stage and the common stage is of importance, because it is true in the main to say that the great work effected by the genius of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was the reconciliation of the two stages by the union of what was best in both. Doubtless, in all that they had to say against coarseness, rant, bombast, absurd and revolting incident, the literary critics were in the right. So far, their contemptuous laughter at the common stage was well founded. But they failed to see that the common stage, in throwing off the restrictions of Horace and Aristotle upon violent incident—restrictions due to the accidents of Greek theatrical representation—had set dramatists free for a new kind of work. The preposterous half-serious tyrants of Mysteries, Moralities, and Chronicle Histories, the Pilate, the Herod, the Magnificence, the King Cambyses, when they committed and superintended deeds of blood before the eyes of a half-shuddering, half-laughing audience, were making possible the full presentation on the stage of such characters as Othello and Macbeth. But for the infusion of new life from the common stage, Daniel's "Cleopatra" might have remained the high-water mark of the poetic drama; and but for the ingrafting of the culture of centuries on its wild stock, the common stage might never have risen above the vein of King Cambyses.

Marlowe was not exactly the first to represent on the stage actions that the Greek dramatist supposed to take place behind the scenes and communicated to the audience in a subsequent narrative by an eyewitness. Among Mr Collier's reprints is an example of a mixed morality and history, containing the revenge of Orestes upon his mother and her paramour, and mixing up personified abstractions, Vice, Nature, Truth, Fame, Duty, with Orestes, Clytemnestra, Ægisthus, Menelaus, and other actual per

sonages. In this drama there is a lively battle upon the stage, with a direction, "let it be long ere you can win the city;" and though Clytemnestra is dismissed under custody, Ægisthus is seized, dragged violently, and hanged before the audience in spite of his entreaties for mercy. The date of this drama is 1567, and from it we may conclude that as early as that date the popular instinct had broken through the restrictions of Horace, founded as they were upon the natural limitations of a stage wholly different in structure and appointments from our own. While, at Court, frigid and artificial restrictions were maintained when the necessity for them no longer existed, they were cast aside in performances for the entertainment of the rude vulgar. Marlowe's position, therefore, is this: he did not originate the idea of bringing tragic action on the stage, but he was the first writer of plays whose genius was adequate to the powerful situations introduced by the popular instinct for dramatic effect.

I. JOHN LYLY (1554-1606).

John Lyly, the Euphuist,1 "the witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lyly," was our first extensive writer of comedies. He produced no fewer than nine pieces-one in blank verse, seven in prose, and one in rhyme. "The Woman in the Moon" (which is in blank verse, and which he calls "his first dream in Phoebus' holy bower," though not printed till 1597); "Alexander and Campaspe" (printed in 1584); "Sappho and Phao" (1584); " Endymion" (1591); "Galathea" (1592); “Midas" (1592); Mother Bombie" (1594); "The Maid's Metamorphosis" (in rhyme and only probably his, 1600); "Love's Metamorphosis" (1601). Lyly's plays are the sort of gay, fantastic, insubstantial things that may catch widely as a transient fashion, but are too extravagant to receive sympathy from more than one generation critics in general set their heels on his delicate constructions. His plays were acted by the children of the Revels, and he would seem to have indulged in airy and childish caprices of fancy to match. Perhaps he wrote with an abiding consciousness that ladies were to make the chief part of his audience, and thought only of bringing smiles on their faces with pretty quibbles and mildly sentimental or childishly jocular situations. In "Endymion," Tellus expresses surprise that Corsites, being a captain, "who should sound nothing but terror, and suck nothing but blood," talks so softly and politely. "It agreeth not with your

1 I have given some account of his Euphuism in my 'Manual of English Prose Literature. Lyly was a great tobacco-taker; one wonders that no devoted champion of the weed has ever remarked the coincidence between its introduction and the beginning of the greatness of the English drama.

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calling," she says, "to use words so soft as that of love." Corsites replies with the utmost urbanity-"Lady, it were unfit of wars to discourse with women, into whose minds nothing can sink but smoothness." In accordance with this idea, Lyly's subjects, except in "Alexander and Campaspe" and "Mother Bombie," are mythological and pastoral: and in none of them is any deep feeling excited. He is careful not to alarm his courtly audience with the prospect of terrible consequences: the stream of incidents moves with very slight interruptions to a happy conclusion, enlivened with fantastic love-talk, fantastic moralisings on ambition, war, peace, avarice, illicit love, and other commonplaces, and the pranks and puns of mischievous vivacious boys. The fabric is so slight and artificial that we are in danger of undervaluing the powers of the workman, who was a most ingenious and original man, and deserved all the adjectives of his publisher. His plays are vessels filled to the brim with sparkling liquor, which stands to Shakespeare's comedy in the relation of lemonade to champagne. The whole thing is a sort of ginger-pop intoxication; with airy bubbles of fanciful conceits winking all over.

If there is no extravagance of passion in Lyly, there is the utmost extravagance of ingenious fancy. Wit being defined as an ingenious and unexpected play upon words, Lyly's comedies are full of it. There is hardly a sentence in the whole of them that does not contain some pun, or clever antithesis, or far-fetched image. He is so uninterruptedly witty that he destroys his own wit the play on words and images ceases to be unexpected, and so falls out of the definition. Yet a little of it is very pretty even now; and if we could call up the Children of the Chapel Royal to fire off his crackers, and poise his glittering conceits, and imagine ourselves listening with the much-flattered Cynthia, we might conceive the possibility of sitting out a whole comedy with pleased faces.

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Lyly carries his love of contrast and delicate symmetrical arrangement into the structure of his plays, scene being balanced against scene, and character against character. In "Alexander and Campaspe," his first published play, he attempted, after the model of Edwards's "Damon and Pythias," more substantial characters than he afterwards produced in his mythological and pastoral conceptions. One of his most elaborate and characteristic personages is Sir Tophas, in "Endymion," a fat, vainglorious, foolish squire, who struts about armed with weapons of sport, and breathing out bloodthirsty sentiments against wrens, blackbirds, sheep, and other such harmless enemies. Sir Tophas is the Falstaff of children, reminding us of the story that Shakespeare when a boy used to kill a calf with an air: he has also points of resemblance with Pistol, Holofernes, and Don Armado. He has a little