turns of thought and phrase prove that he had read pretty deep in the classics, and read for fun. He was romantic in form, then, not for want of knowing better, but as a matter of deliberate taste or policy. As such, too, he was not only persistently euphuistic in style, but he was also constantly experimental in matters of mere stage-business. In his comedies, for example, one finds, for the first time in English, such fantastically ingenious plays on words and repartee as nowadays, reaching their acme in Much Ado About Nothing, are commonly thought peculiar to Shakspere. Again, perhaps influenced by the fact that all his players were male, and consequently ill at ease in skirts, he first introduced on the English stage the device so repeatedly used by Shakspere of disguising his heroine as a man. Throughout, in short, with frankly persistent ingenuity, these light, graceful, fantastic plays of Lyly's appeal, like the style of Euphues, to a taste which delights above all else in clever, apparently civilized novelty. Such, in general, was the state of the English stage in 1587. Committed to the still untrammelled freedom of romantic form, it displayed in its fashionable aspect and in its popular alike every evidence of appealing to an insatiable taste for novelty. The very simplicity of its material conditions, however, combined with the prevalent literary taste of the time to make the actual novelties it offered to its public principally verbal. With none of the modern distractions of scenery or of realistic costume, with hardly any mechanical help to the temporary illusion which must always be dear to a theatre-going heart, an Elizabethan audience found its attention centred, to a degree now hardly imaginable, on the actual words of the play. While certain conventional kinds of drama, then, which may be discussed best in connection with the actual works of Shakspere, were beginning to define themselves, all had in common the trait of a constantly ingenious, experimental phrasing, to be appreciated nowadays only when you can force yourself into the mood of an every-day theatre-goer who should enjoy a new turn of language as heartily as a modern playgoer would enjoy a new popular tune. What now appeals to us in Marlowe's Tamburlaine is the profound tragic feeling which underlies it; in its own day what made it popular was the ranting sonorousness of its verse. In all but purely lyric style, clearly enough, the taste of 1587 was still rather childishly crude. With lyric verse the case was different. The fashion of verbal experiment, which had persisted since the time of Wyatt, combined with the thin melody of contemporary music not only to make words do much of the essentially musical work of which modern songwriters are relieved by our enormous musical development, but also to develop the positive lyric power of the language to a degree which has never been surpassed. Wyatt himself, we have seen, wrote Forget not Yet; John Lyly wrote Cupid and Campaspe. What delights one in these, and in the hundreds of songs for which we must here let them be typical, is not that they mean much, but that, with indefinable subtlety, they are so exquisitely musical. To such effects as theirs the public of 1587 was sensitive to a degree now hard to imagine; the purity of a sense of beauty new to a whole nation had not yet been corrupted. By 1587, then, the Elizabethan lyric was almost at its best. Fantastic as the statement seems, though, it is probably true that the ultimate secret of lyric beauty the only permanent effect which Elizabethan literature had as yet achieved is identical with that which made Euphues so popular. The lyric poet is technically the most ingenious conceivable juggler with words. - For all their common verbal ingenuity, however, and their common, eager endeavor to carry out the work begun by Wyatt and lastingly to civilize what had seemed a wildly barbarous language, the pure men of letters, for whom Sidney and Lyly may stand representative, differed very widely in private consideration from the men of the theatre, such as Greene, or Peele, or Marlowe. As a class the former were respectable or better; as a class the latter were disreputable. For the moment fashion favored polite literary effort to a degree unusual in human history; the theatre, meanwhile, was what the theatre always has been everywhere, the centre not only of artistic activity, but also of organized vice. We touch here on a delicate matter, which of late it has been the fashion to ignore. By rather deliberately ignoring it, however, most modern critics have failed to make clear the actual circumstances in which Shakspere found himself when he came to London. Beyond doubt there were good and sturdy men connected with the Elizabethan stage, just as good and sturdy people may always be found among stage-folk everywhere. Beyond doubt, the remaining fragments of Elizabethan dramatic writing, even if we throw out of our consideration the works of Shakspere, comprise much, indeed most, of the noblest poetry of their time. Equally beyond doubt, however, the Elizabethan theatre of 1587 was not a socially respectable place, and Elizabethan theatrical people - the Bohemians of a society where there was no alternative between formal respectability and the full license of professional crime were very low company. As early as 1579, one Stephen Gosson, then an ardent Puritan, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney an attack on the immorality of poetry and of the stage, under the apt title, the School of Abuse. Sidney, who had not authorized the dedication, evinced his displeasure by coming to the rescue with his Defence of Poesy. Gosson was certainly scurrilous, and modern critics have usually confined themselves to this aspect of his work, which they attribute to the fact that he himself had once been little better than one of the wicked; it is said that he had unsuccessfully tried to write plays. Sidney's Defence remains a beautiful, elevated piece of English prose, full of a peculiar quality which faintly suggests what the charm of Sidney's actual personality must have been. For all this, however, for all the snarling vulgarity of Gosson and the noble amenity of Sidney, there is an aspect in which Gosson rather than Sidney is in the right. Wherever an organized theatre develops itself, one is sure to find along with this centre of more or less serious art an equally organized centre of moral corruption. Without the Elizabethan theatre, to be sure, we could never have had Shakspere; yet the very forces which produced Shakspere were producing at the same time a growing state of social degradation. To our minds, at a distance of three hundred years, the Elizabethan theatre seems chiefly the source from which has come to us a noble school of poetry. To Elizabethan Puritans, to the very men whose blood still runs in the veins of New England, the Elizabethan poets were the panders who kept full those schools of vice, the play-houses. Nor can all the patronizing amenity of Sir Philip Sidney, blinding himself like other apologists to what he did not choose to see, blind us to the fact that the evils which Gosson so hatefully attacked were real, lasting, and bound to be the price which any society must pay for the enjoyment of a professional stage. In Gosson's time, too, this state of things affected the personal life of theatrical people rather more than usual. They were then just emerging from the condition of strolling players. None of them were yet rich enough to emerge, as Shakspere emerged thirty years later, into a solidly respectable social station. We have seen what sort of life Greene |