to Theatres, and turn away our eyes from beholding of vanity, the greatest storm of abuse will be overblown, and a fair way trodden to amendment of life. Were we not so foolish to taste every drug and buy every trifle, Players would shut in their shops and carry their trash to some other country.' Finally the indictment is summed up from the rigidly Senecan point of view, by Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defense of Poesy, 1583. 'Our tragedies and comedies,' he states, are cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry.' By these 'rules' he means chiefly the strict observance of the Unities, and his remarks on their violation are so characteristic that they deserve to be quoted in full. Where the stage should always represent but one place; and the uttermost time presupposed in it, should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day: there is both many days, and many places, inartificially imagined. You shall have Asia on the one side and Afric of the other, and so many other under kingdoms, that the player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now shall you have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and bye, we hear news of shipwreck in the same place; then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave; while, in the meantime, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now of time they are much more liberal; for ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in love: after many traverses she is got with child: delivered of a fair boy: he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours' space; which, how absurd it is in sense even sense may imagine; and art hath taught and all ancient examples justified, and at this day the ordinary players in Italy will not err in.' He then proceeds to make the further charge against the plays of the period, that they violate dramatic unity by their medley of light and serious episodes: 'they be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns.' And

he points with admiration to the ancients who 'never or very daintily, match hornpipes and funerals.'

Thus here from the mouth of the typical scholar and humanist of the Elizabethan age, only a few years before the advent of Marlowe and Shakspere, we have an uncompromising philippic against the contemporary stage. And we, who can now judge of the romantic drama by its fruits, to whom it calls up Hamlet and King Lear, Egmont and Faust, Wallenstein and Don Carlos, may with easy self-complacence make merry over Sidney's want of insight and foresight. But it is true of many contests, intellectual and political, that the best men on the wrong side are often only just inferior to, and have much in common with, the best men on the right. We may therefore feel sure that so fine a 'wit' as the author of the Arcadia was not wholly beside the mark in his strictures. He saw before him, on the one hand, the compact, stately, well-ordered structure of ancient drama, dealing with high themes, in fitting language: on the other, the straggling, invertebrate compositions that found favour with his countrymen, wherein tragedy jostled against buffoonery and grossness, and 'jigging' rhymes were the only vehicle of the theatrical Muse. It was but natural that he should think meanly of the work of his contemporaries. Even if we take plays like Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Faustus, so much finer than anything spoken of in the Defense of Poesy, we see sufficiently plainly the faults against which Sidney aimed his shafts. Tamburlaine is a series of dramatic pictures rather than a drama in the true sense; it lacks cohesion and unity of design. In these qualities, it stands far below the least admirable work of Euripides. Again, the humorous episodes in Tamburlaine, and in Faustus, are a blot upon the tragic matter rather than a genuine comic relief: Sidney's words are fatally apt, 'they thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion.' Sir Philip has just grounds for his indictment; he puts his finger on real faults. But he was mistaken in the remedies that he proposed. He thought that the glories of the classical drama could be reproduced by compliance with a few definite canons, the caput mortuum which criticism had blindly substituted for

the living spirit of ancient art. He could not discern that a new and equally noble tragic type was winning its way to victory, dissimilar to the drama of the Greek world in its outlook upon life, and in its methods of working, yet really akin in that it was the spontaneous growth of a native, energizing instinct. Almost at the time that Sidney was penning his Defense of Poesy new circumstances were coming into play which were to be decisive against his ideas and aspirations, and which thus mark an important epoch in dramatic history.

CHAPTER III.

THE RISE OF THE THEATRES.

DRAMATIC REFORM.

MARLOWE'S

WITH the third decade of Elizabeth's reign opens its most glorious period, political and intellectual. One of the tendencies of the Renaissance epoch throughout Europe was to break down the mediaeval hierarchy of classes, and to substitute a compact national body with the throne as head and centre of its life. This movement had affected England, but it had been partially checked by the religious and political troubles springing from the Reformation, which had created so much discord during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and the earlier years of Elizabeth. Twenty years, however, of the maiden queen's strong government had produced, broadly speaking, order and unity in Church and State. The mass of the people were thoroughly well affected to the throne and to its policy; Roman Catholics on the one hand, and Puritan extremists on the other, might chafe or conspire against the existing settlement, but they were powerless to upset it. The days of Elizabeth's coquetting with France or Spain were over; the logic of events and the aspirations of the people were more and more clearly defining the position of England as the champion of the Protestant cause in the west. The national spirit ran higher year by year, and found for itself splendid expression in deeds of adventure and daring. Between 1577 and 1580, Frobisher made his voyages to the northern seas, Humphrey Gilbert visited the shores of America, Drake sailed round about the earth. In the years

immediately following, Raleigh sent forth his Virginian expeditions, Davis tracked his way nearer to the Pole than any of his forerunners, Philip Sidney found a hero's grave at Zutphen. Then, to crown all, came the annus mirabilis of 1588, when national life and death hung in the balance, and in a fashion as decisive as it was unforeseen, the scale dipped to the side of life. From the day that the Armada turned northwards to its doom, England thrilled with a patriotism as intense and operative as that of Athens after Salamis. And this feeling, ardent at all points, glowed, as it were, into flame about the person of the sovereign. Elizabeth, to the men of her day, was no longer merely a woman or even a Queen: she became the incarnation of England, an ideal and romantic figure, a fount of inspiring energy. Such she remains to all time as the Gloriana of The Faerie Queene.

It was natural that this growing national spirit should leave its mark on literature, and that it should give an impulse to the forces that were of native growth. Its first epoch-making product is Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, 1579, wherein the poet, bursting through the trammels of quantitative verse to which Sidney and Harvey had sought to bind him down, compelled a generation, that had almost forgotten Chaucer, to give ear anew to the melody of English rhythms. Almost at the same date Lyly and Sidney woke the English novel into fresh life. Stow and Holinshed, by the publication of their Chronicles of Britain, gave proof of the renewed interest in the national annals; Warner in his Albion's England made these annals a theme of epical verse. Hakluyt, in putting forth his first collection of Seamen's Voyages called the world to witness that all lands were full of the labours of his countrymen.

It was inevitable that the drama should feel the force of the same quickening touch. But, before we speak of this in detail, another point claims notice. For the literature of the stage is not solely the result of intellectual forces. There is a determining factor of a material kind, the condition of the theatre. In this respect, as in others, the period that we have reached saw a notable fresh departure.

We have seen that Miracle Plays had been acted principally

D