of wild adventure with the spirit of commercial thrift. Something imaginative, something which partook of the sentiment of the old time, was mingled with the bustling practicalities of the present. If we look at a man like Sir Francis Drake from the mere understanding, we find it difficult to decide whether his enterprises were private or national, whether the patriot predominated over the pirate, or the pirate over the patriot; but if we look at him from the Elizabethan point of view, it is not difficult to discern an enthusiastic, chivalric, loyal, Protestant spirit as the presiding element of his being and the source of his pecuniary success. He did many things which, if done now, would very properly send a sailor to the gallows; yet, as a man, he was very much superior to many a modern statesman and judge who would conscientiously order his execution. Vitally right, but formally wrong, he in the Elizabethan age was immensely honored.

This slight reference to a few of these eminent men of action shows that literature' was but one out of many expressions of the roused energies of the national heart and brain, and that those who performed actions which poetry celebrates were as numerous as the poets. As the external inducements to adopt literature as a profession were not so great as in our day, as there was no reading public in our sense of the term, we are at first surprised that so much genius was diverted into this path. But Elizabeth and James were both learned sovereigns. Both were writers; and in the courts of both, literature and learning were in the fashion, and often the avenues to distinction in Church and State. It was found that literary ability was but one phase of general ability. Buckhurst was an eminent statesman. Sidney and Spenser were men of affairs. Raleigh could do anything. Bacon was a lawyer and jurist. Hooker, Hall, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, and Donne were in the Church. The patronage of educated and accomplished nobles was extended

to numerous writers like Daniel and Drayton, who could not have subsisted by the sale of their works. None of these can be styled authors by profession: that sad distinction was confined to the dramatists. In the time of Elizabeth and James the theatre was almost the only medium of communication between writers and the people, and attracted to it all those who aimed to gain a livelihood out of the products of their hearts and imaginations. Its literature was the popular literature of the age. It was newspaper, magazine, novel, all in one. It was the Elizabethan "Times," the Elizabethan " Blackwood," the Elizabethan "Temple Bar ": it tempted into its arena equally the Elizabethan Thackerays and the Elizabethan Braddons; but the remuneration it afforded to the most distinguished of the swarm of playwrights who depended on it for bread was small. All experienced the full bitterness of poverty, if we except Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher. Shakespeare was an excellent man of business, a part-proprietor of a theatre, and made his fortune. Jonson was patronized by James, and was as much a court poet as a popular poet. Fletcher, though the most fertile of the three in the number of his plays, and the greatest master of theatrical effect, did not, it is supposed, altogether depend on the stage for his support. But Chapman, Dekker, Field, Rowley, Massinger, and all the other professional playwrights, were wretchedly poor. And it must be said, that, though we are in the custom of affirming that the circumstances of the age of Elizabeth were pre-eminently favorable to literature, most of the writers, including such names as Spenser and Jonson, were in the habit of moaning or grumbling at its degeneracy, and wishing that they had been born in happier times.

There were, then, three centres for the literature of the period, — the Court, the Church, and the Theatre. Let us consider the drama first, as it was nearer the popular heart, was the medium through which the grandest as well as meanest minds found expression, and

England had a drama as early as the twelfth century, - a drama used by the priests as a mode of amusing the people into a knowledge of religion. Its products were called Miracle Plays. They were written, and often acted, by ecclesiastics; they represented the persons and events of the Scriptures, of the apocryphal Gospels, and of the legends of saints and martyrs, and were performed sometimes in the open air, on temporary stages and scaffolds, sometimes in churches and chapels. The earliest play of this sort of which we have any record was performed between the years 1100 and 1110. The general characteristic of these plays, if we should speak after the ideas of our time, was blasphemy, and blasphemy of the worst kind; for the irreverent utterance of sacred names is venial compared with the irreverent representation of sacred persons. The object of the writers was to bring Christianity within popular apprehension; and in the process they burlesqued it. They belonged to a class of writers and speakers, as common now as then, who vulgarize the highest subjects in the attempt to popularize them, who degrade religion in the attempt to make it efficient. The writers of the Miracle Plays only appear worse than their Protestant successors, from the greater rudeness in the minds and manners to which they appealed. They did not aim to lift the people up, but to bring the Divinity down; and not being in any sense poets, they could not make what was sacred familiarly apprehended, and at the same time preserve that ideal remoteness from ordinary life which is the condition of its being reverently apprehended. Their religious dramas, accordingly, were mostly monstrous farces, full of buffoonery and indecency, though not without a certain coarse humor and power of characterization. Thus, in the play of the Deluge, Noah and his wife are close copies of contemporary character and manners, projected on the Bible narrative.

refuses to leave her gossips and go into the ark; scolds Noah, and is soundly whipped by him; then wishes herself a widow, and thinks she but echoes the feeling of all the wives in the audience, in hoping for them the same good luck. Noah then takes occasion to inform all the husbands present that their proper course is to break in their wives after his fashion. By this time the water is nearly up to his wife's neck, and she is partly coaxed and partly forced into the ark by one of her sons. Again, in a play on the Adoration of the Shepherds, the shepherds are three English boors, who meet with a variety of the most coarsely comical adventures in their journey to Bethle hem; who, just before the star in the east appears, get into a quarrel and fight, after having feasted on Lancashire jammocks and Halton ale; and who, when they arrive at their destination, present three gifts to the infant Saviour, namely, a bird, a tennis-ball, and a bob of cherries.

The Miracle Plays were very popular, and did not altogether die out before the reign of James. In some of them personified abstractions came to be blended with the persons of the drama; and in the fifteenth century a new class of dramatic performances arose, called Moral Plays, in which these personified abstractions pushed persons out of the piece, and ethics supplanted theology. There is, in some of these Moral Plays, a great deal of ingenuity displayed in the impersonation of qualities, and in their allegorical representation. They took strong hold of the English mind. Pride, gluttony, sensuality, worldliness, meekness, temperance, faith, in their single and in their blended action, were often happily characterized; and, though they were eventually banished from the drama, they reappeared in the pageants of Elizabeth and in the poetry of Spenser. But their popularity was doubtless owing more to their fun than their ethics; and the two characters of the Devil and Vice, the laughable monster and the

laughable buffoon, were the darlings of the multitude. In Ben Jonson's "Staple of News," Gossip Tattle exclaims: "My husband, Timothy Tattle, God rest his soul! was wont to say that there was no play without a fool and a Devil in 't: he was for the Devil still, God bless him! The Devil for his money, he would say; I would fain see the Devil."

Nearer to the modern Play than either the Miracle or the Moral, was the Interlude, so called from its being acted in the intervals of a banquet. It was a farce in one act, and devoted to the humorous and satirical representation of contemporary manners and character, especially of professional character. John Heywood, the jester of Henry VIII., was the best maker of these Interludes.

At the time that all of these three forms of the drama were more or less in esteem, Nicholas Udall, a classical scholar, produced, about the year 1540, the first English comedy, "Ralph Roister Doister," very much superior, in incident and characterization, to "Gammer Gurton's Needle," written twenty years afterwards, though neither rises above the mere prosaic delineation, the first of civic, the last of country life. The poetic element, which was afterwards so conspicuous in the Elizabethan drama, did not even appear in the first English tragedy, "Gorboduc," though it was written by Thomas Sackville, the author of the Induction to the "Mirror of Magistrates," and the only great poet that rose between Chaucer and Spenser. "Gorboduc" was acted before Queen Elizabeth, at Whitehall, by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple, in January, 1562. It was received with great applause; but it appears, as read now, singularly frigid and unimpassioned, with not even, as Campbell says,

wearisomely monotonous, and conveys no notion of the elasticity and variety of which it was afterwards found capable, when used by Marlowe and Shakespeare. The tragedy is not deficient in terrible events, but even its murders make us yawn.

It is probable that the fifty-two plays performed at court between 1568 and 1580, and of which nothing is preserved but the names, contained little to make us regret their loss. Neither at the Royal Palace, nor the Inns of Court, nor the Universities, at all of which plays were performed, could a free and original national drama be built up. This required a public theatre, and an audience composed of all classes of the people. Accordingly, the most important incident in the history of the English stage was the patent granted by the crown, in 1574, to James Burbage and his associates, players under the protection of the Earl of Leicester, to perform in the City and Liberties of London, and in all other parts of the kingdom; "as well," the phraseology runs, "for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our own solace and pleasure, when we shall think fit to see them."

But the Corporation of London, thorough Puritans, were determined, as far as their power extended, to prevent the Queen's subjects from having any such "recreation," and her Majesty herself from enjoying any such "solace and pleasure." "Forasmuch as the playing of interludes, and the resort to the same, are very dangerous for the infection of the plague, whereby infinite burdens and losses to the city may increase; and are very hurtful in corruption of youth with incontinence and lewdness; and also great wasting both of the time and thrift of many poor people; and great provoking of the wrath of God, the ground of all plagues; great withdrawing of the people from public prayer, and from the service of God; and daily cried out against by all preachers of the word of God; therefore," the Corporation ordered, "all such interludes in public places,

and the resort to the same, shall wholly be prohibited as ungodly, and humble suit made to the Lords, that like prohibitation be in places near the city."

The players, thus expelled the city, withdrew to the nearest point outside the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction, and, in 1576, erected their theatre in Blackfriars. Two others, "The Curtain" and "The Theatre," were erected by other companies in Shoreditch. Before the end of the century there were at least eleven. To these round wooden buildings, open to the sky, with only a thatched roof over the stage, the people flocked daily for mental excitement. There was no movable scenery; the female characters were played by boys; and the lowest theatres of our day are richer in appointments than were the finest of the age of Elizabeth. "Such," says Malone, " was the poverty of the old stage, that the same person played two or three parts; and battles on which the fate of an empire was supposed to depend were decided by three combatants on a side." It is difficult for us to conceive of the popularity of the stage in those days. One of the spies of Secretary Walsingham, writing to his employer in 1586, thus groans over the taste of the people: "The daily abuse of stage plays is such an offence to the godly, and so great a hindrance to the Gospel, as the Papists do exceedingly rejoice at the blemish thereof, and not without cause; for every day in the week the player's bills are set up in sundry places of the city; . . . . so that, when the bells toll to the lecturer, the trumpets sound to the stages. Whereat the wicked faction of Rome laugheth for joy, while the godly weep for sorrow. . . . . It is a woful sight to see two hundred proud players jet in their silks, while five hundred poor people starve in the streets.....Woe is me! the play-houses are pestered when the churches are naked. At the one, it is not possible to get a place; at the other, void seats are plenty." It may here be said, that the mutual hostility of the players and the Puritans continued un

til the suppression of theatres under the Commonwealth; and for fifty or sixty years the Puritans were only mentioned by the dramatists to be mercilessly satirized. Even Shakespeare's catholic mind was not broad enough to include them in the range of its sympathies.

That this opposition to the stage by the staid and sober citizens was not without cause, soon became manifest. The characteristic of the drama, before Shakespeare, was intellectual and moral lawlessness; and most of the dramatists were men as destitute of eminent genius as of common principle. Stephen Gosson, a Puritan, in a tract published in 1581, attacks them on grounds equally of taste and morals; and five years afterwards Sir Philip Sidney speaks of the popular plays as against all "rules of honest civility and skilful poetry." But Gosson indicates also the sources of their plots. Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," a series of not over - modest tales from the Italian; "The Golden Ass"; "The Ethiopian History"; "Amadis of France"; "The Round Table";—all the licentious comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish were thoroughly ransacked, he tells us, "to furnish the play-houses of London." The result, of course, was a chaos; but a chaos whose materials were wide and various, indicating that the English mind was in contact with, and attempting roughly to reproduce, the genius of Greece and Rome, of France, Spain, and Italy, the chronicles and romances of the Middle Ages, and was hospitable to intellectual influences from all quarters. What was needed was the powerful personality and shaping imagination of genius, to fuse these seemingly heterogeneous materials into new and original forms. "The Faerie Queene" of Spenser, and the drama of Shakespeare, evince an assimilation of the same incongruous elements which Gosson derides and denounces, as they appeared in the shapeless works of mediocrity. There was not merely to be a new drama, but a new art, and new principles of

criticism to legitimate its creative audacities. The materials were rich and various. The difficulty was, that to combine them into original forms required genius, and genius higher, broader, more energetic, more imaginative, and more humane than had ever before been directed to dramatic composition.

The immediate predecessors of Shakespeare Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe - were all educated at the Universities, and were naturally prejudiced in favor of the classics. But they were, at the same time, wild Bohemian youths, thrown upon the world of London to turn their talents and accomplishments into the means of livelihood or the means of debauch. They depended principally on the popular theatres, and of course addressed the popular mind. Why, indeed, should they write according to the rules of the classic drama? The classic drama was a growth from the life of the times in which it appeared. Its rules were simply generalizations from the practice of classic dramatists. A drama suited to the tastes and wants of the people of Greece or Rome was evidently not suited to the tastes and wants of the people of England. The whole framework of society, customs, manners, feelings, aspirations, traditions, superstitions, character, religion, had changed; and, as the drama is a reflection of life, either as actually existing or ideally existing, it is evident that both the experience and the sentiments of the English audiences demanded that it should be the reflection of a new life. These dramatists, however, in emancipating themselves from the literary jurisprudence of Greece and Rome, put little but individual caprice in its place. Released from formal rules, they did not rise into the artistic region of principles, but fell into the pit of anarchy and mere lawlessness. Lacking the higher imagination which conceives living ideas and organizes living works, their dramas evince no coherence, no subordination of parts, no grasp of the subject as a

whole. There is a German play in which Adam is represented as passing across the stage, "going to be created." The drama of the age of Elizabeth, in the persons of Greene, Peele, Kyd, and others, indicates, in some such rude way, that it is "going to be created."

That this dramatic shapelessness was not inconsistent with single poetic conceptions of the greatest force and fineness, might be proved by abundant quotations. Lodge, for example, was a poor dramatist; but what living poet would not be proud to own this exquisite description, in his lyric of "Rosaline," of the person and influence of beauty?

"Like to the clear in highest sphere,
Where all imperial glory shines,
Of selfsame color is her hair,
Whether unfolded or in twines.

"Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,

Refining heaven by every wink; The gods do fear whenas they glow, And I do tremble when I think.

"Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud
That beautifies Aurora's face;
Or like the silver-crimson shroud,
That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace.

"Her lips are like two budded roses,

Whom ranks of lilies neighbor nigh, Within which bounds she balm encloses, Apt to entice a deity.

"Her neck like to a stately tower,

Where Love himself imprisoned lies, To watch for glances every hour

From her divine and sacred eyes.

"With orient pearl, with ruby red, With marble white, with sapphire blue, Her body everyway is fed,

Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view.

"Nature herself her shape admires ;

The gods are wounded in her sight; And Love forsakes his heavenly fires,

And at her eyes his brand doth light."

But a more potent spirit than any we have mentioned, and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors, was Christopher Marlowe, a man of humble parentage, but with Norman blood in his brains, if not in his veins. He was, indeed, the proudest and fiercest of intellectual aristocrats. The son of a shoemaker, and born in 1564, his unmistakable genius seems to have gained him