directly or surreptitiously, into print. Along with this there was beginning to flourish a distinct school of literature which as yet had hardly been recognized as such. This was the theatre. From time immemorial something like a popular drama had flourished in England. The earliest form in which we know it is the Miracle Plays, which were popular dramatic presentations, often in startlingly contemporary terms, of Scriptural stories, originally produced by the clergy, and always more or less under church. supervision. These were followed by what are called. "Moralities," where actors personifying various virtues and vices would go through some very simple dramatic action, usually enlivened by the pranks of Iniquity" or some other Vice.1 Then came similar productions, called "Interludes," which differed from the Moralities only in pretending to deal with less abstract personages. The Miracle Plays, which persisted at least well into the Sixteenth Century, were generally performed on large portable stages, wheeled through the streets like the "floats" in a modern procession; the actors were generally the members of the local guilds, each one of which would traditionally have in charge its own part of the Scripture story and its own travelling stage. The Moralities and Interludes, on the other hand, which

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1 These old Moralities act better than you would suppose. One given verbatim not long ago, though acted by amateurs who were all friends of the audience, had enough dramatic force to hold attention like a good modern play.

required hardly any stage setting, might be played anywhere in an inn-yard, in a gentleman's hall, in some open square. While sometimes performed by such occasional actors as always kept charge of the Miracle Plays, the Moralities and Interludes tended to fall into the hands of strolling players and such other half-artistic vagrants as are sure to exist anywhere. The mountebanks whom one may still see here and there, at country fairs or in the train of quack doctors, preserve, with little change, the aspect of things in which the English drama grew.

When the classical scholarship of the Renaissance began to declare itself in England, it attempted, as in other countries, to revive something resembling the Roman stage. In Ralph Roister Doister and in Gammer Gurton's Needle we have examples of efforts, at once human and scholarly, to civilize the English theatre. In Gorboduc, the first English work in which blank verse is used for dramatic purposes, we have a conscientious effort, on the part of scholarly people, to produce in English a tragedy which should emulate what were then deemed the divine

excellences of Seneca. These efforts, essentially similar to those which until the present century controlled the development of the theatre in France, were very pleasing to the learned few; witness the familiar passage about the theatre in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy. On the other hand, there is little evidence that they ever appealed much to the popular fancy, which certainly persisted in

enjoying the wholly unscholarly traditions of Miracles, Moralities, and Interludes. These permitted in matters theatrical a range of conventional freedom,a serene disregard of limitations either of time or of place, a bold mixture of high matters and low, serious and comic, spiritual and obscene, — which, to any cultivated taste, was quite as barbarous as were the linguistic and metrical crudities reduced to formal civilization by the literary successors of Wyatt and Surrey. For a while it looked as if the theatre of the people would permanently separate itself from all serious literary tradition.

At least from 1576, however, there were regular theatres in London. To a modern mind, though, that very term is misleading. An Elizabethan theatre, a structure adapted to conventions which had arisen among strolling players, was very unlike a theatre of the present day. At least the pit was open to the sky; there was no scenery in the modern sense of the word; there was no proscenium, no curtain; and the more fashionable part of the audience sat in chairs on either side of the stage, smoking pipes after tobacco came into fashion, eating fruit, and, if they saw fit, making game of the performance. The actors, meanwhile, invariably male, for no woman appeared on the English stage until after the Restoration, — appeared with what dignity they could between these two groups of spectators; and whatever the period of the play they were performing, classical, medieval, or contemporary, they always wore

gorgeous clothes of recent fashion, perhaps discarded court finery bought second-hand, and the like. Altogether, the nearest modern approach to the stage conditions of an Elizabethan theatre is to be found in those of the Chinese theatres which may sometimes be discovered in the Chinese quarters of American cities. It was for such a stage as this that all the plays of Shakspere were written.

Decidedly before 1587, however, this unpromising place had begun to produce plays still of some interest, at least historically. Three names of that period are remembered in all histories of English Literature, the names of Robert Greene, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe. These men, all under thirty years of age, had all been educated. at one of the universities, and were all black sheep. Greene, for example, is known to have deserted his wife, and to have lived with a woman named Ball, whose brother was hanged at Tyburn; Peele, whether rightly or wrongly, was, almost in his own time, made the hero of a crudely obscene jest-book; Marlowe was killed at the age of twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl. Yet, by 1587, all three of these men had produced plays of which any reader of Shakspere may form an idea by glancing at Henry VI., Richard III., and Richard II. There is much argument among critics as to whether a considerable part of Henry VI. may not actually have been written by one or more of the three, and as to whether Richard III. be not rather Marlowe's work than Shakspere's; while Richard II.,

though generally admitted to be Shakspere's own, is undoubtedly written in Marlowe's manner. All three of these men combined good education with graceless lives and active wits. Historically they mark a fusion between the traditions of culture and those of the popular theatre. Far removed as their work is from the pseudo-classic tendency so much admired by Sidney, it is just as far removed from the crudely popular Interludes and Moralities; and in technical style in freedom and fluency of verse it is much better than anything before it. Some of Greene's lyrics are thoroughly good; at least in David and Bethsabe, Peele's work shows signs of lasting dramatic merit;1 while Marlowe not only made blank verse the permanent vehicle of English tragedy, but actually expressed in dramatic form a profound sense of tragic fact.

Tamburlaine, to be sure, the first of Marlowe's tragedies, is assigned to this very year, 1587; and is commonly spoken of as if chiefly remarkable for its use of blank verse, finally delivering the stage "from jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits," and for such indubitably bombastic passages as "Holla! ye pamper'd jades of Asia!"2 In point of fact, however, it is still more notable for real power. This shows itself clearly in occasional passages, like the famous one on beauty: 3

1 See particularly the notable scene of the drunken loyal Urias and the perfidious David.

2 Part I. Act IV. sc. iii.

3 Part I. Act V. sc. ii.