they had a ready credence of the imagination for the heroic achievements of their ancestors as set forth in these Histories. They had even some of the elements of a true historic sense.

§23. Shakespeare's immediate predecessors in the drama were scholar-poets, who yet, with one exception that of John Lyly-may be said to have used popular methods, and to have made their appeal not to scholarly or courtly spectators, but to the public. As poets of the Renaissance they delighted in classical allusion and classical imagery, but these served chiefly as a colour and varnish of their art; in conception it was essentially romantic and English of the Elizabethan days. The tragedies of Marlowe in their plots are pure melodrama, but the melodrama is glorified by the genius of a poet who was a lofty idealist in art, and whose imagination hungered and thirsted after beauty. In each of his earlier plays a great protagonist stands forth who is the incarnation of some supreme passion; Tamburlaine, embodying the mere lust of sway in its crudest form; Barabas, the passion of avarice with attendant power; Faustus, the desire of boundless knowledge with the empire that knowledge brings. In Edward II. the dramatist gave the model of a noble historical play, from which Shakespeare perhaps made studies in writing scenes of his own Richard II. Comedy owed nearly as much to Greene and Peele as tragedy owed to Marlowe. They first lifted comedy out of its mean surroundings and made it poetical. Not that they despised buffooneries and horseplay as modes of raising a laugh, but they did not rest content with these.

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Amid the sordid haunts and coarse excesses of his London life Greene had an imagination which delighted in the beauty and innocence of the countryside and rural pleasures, real or Arcadian; in the company of knaves and trulls he could conceive, as no other dramatist of his time, the purity and sweetness of English wife and maiden. From each of his predecessors Shakespeare gained something for his art, and he quickly surpassed them all. From Marlowe he learnt the use of that majestic measure, blank verse, first heard on a public stage in the tragedy of Tamburlaine; and it became ductile in his hands and capable of infinite variety. From Greene he learnt the use of the rhymed couplet, which he employed with such happy facility in his earlier plays. Kyd it may have been who instructed him in various pieces of rhetorical sleight of hand in verse, which could be adapted to the expression of dramatic passion or to the control of that expression. The prose of lively dialogue, with quick turns of wit and repartee, which we find in the first comedies of Shakespeare, was in large measure derived from Lyly.

§ 24. In all that is external and mechanical the theatre was still comparatively rude. During Shakespeare's connection with the stage the buildings used for dramatic entertainments were of two classes-public theatres, and those which were called private. The private theatres were the smaller in size, and were wholly roofed in, whereas the public theatres, except over the stage and boxes, were open to the sky. In private theatres the performances commonly took place by the

light of candles or cressets; in public theatres, by daylight. In both the play began in the afternoon, often at three o'clock, and ended at five or between five and six o'clock. The spectators who occupied the pit or "yard" were obliged in public theatres to stand; in private theatres they were seated. The interior form of theatres was usually circular or oval, and the boxes or "rooms" and galleries or "scaffolds" rose above one another in tiers as they do at present. The prices for admittance to various houses and to various parts of the house ranged from one penny or twopence to two shillings or half-a-crown. In public theatres young men of rank and fashion were accommodated with stools on each side of the rush-strewn stage, where their attendants waited upon them and supplied them with their pipes of tobacco. Ladies visiting the theatre sometimes wore masks. Movable painted scenery had not yet been devised; but stage properties, some of which served as elements of scenery, were numerous; rocks and tombs, stairs and steeples, banks and bay-trees, are enumerated in an old inventory. Costumes were often rich and costly. In front of the stage ran curtains which could be drawn and withdrawn as was needful, and at the back of the stage similar curtains, named "traverses", occupied the place of our scenery, and could be used for exits and entrances of actors. When a tragedy was represented the stage was sometimes hung with black. Towards the rear of the stage rose an upper stage, from which, when it seemed suitable, part of the dialogue could be spoken. This upper stage might be imagined the

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walls of a besieged city as in King John, or a balcony as in Romeo and Juliet, or a stage within the stage as in the play-scene of Hamlet. The opening of the play was announced by three soundings or flourishes of the trumpet; during its performance a flag displayed from the roof informed the public in the streets that entertainment was provided for them within. A player wearing a black velvet cloak delivered the prologue. In the intervals of acting the band, stationed below at the side of the stage, helped to beguile the time. Occasionally an epilogue was pronounced; we find that such was the case with As You Like It, where the epilogue is spoken by Rosalind in prose, and The Tempest, where it is spoken by Prospero in verse. A prayer for the reigning monarch, recited by the actors kneeling on the stage, closed the piece. But this devout exercise was often immediately preceded or followed by the clown's "jig", a humorous or burlesque effusion in verse, often rhymed, which the merryman sang, sometimes dancing while he sang, to the accompaniment of pipe and tabor. It must be remembered as one of the most important differences between the Elizabethan stage and the stage subsequent to the Restoration of King Charles II., that in the earlier period female parts were taken by boys. "By 'r lady," says Hamlet to the growing youth who acted the Player Queen, "your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God, your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring." And among the possible indignities on which the

imagination of the Egyptian queen dwells is that of being presented by the comedians on the stage, where some "squeaking Cleopatra" might "boy her greatness". We can well believe that Shakespeare would have rejoiced if it were possible to intrust such parts as those of Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, to an actress of genius, capable of entering into all his meanings, instead of to a performer of the other sex, "not old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before 't is a peascod, or a codling when 't is almost an apple". Nor can we suppose that he was contented with the scanty resources of the Elizabethan theatre, or thought its poverty an advantage to his art. In the Prologue to King Henry V. he apologizes for the very inadequate representation of great historical events, and appeals to the imagination of the spectators to supply the deficiencies of the stage.

A rude sketch of the interior of the Swan Theatre, London, as it was about the year 1596, was not long since brought to light in the University Library, Utrecht. It is from the hand of a learned Dutchman, Johannes de Witt, who visited England towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth.1 The stage, strongly supported on timber bulks, is occupied by three actors, and has for all its furniture a bench on which a female figure is seated. Neither curtains nor traverses appear. At the back of the stage, which is open to the weather, is the tiring-room, to which two doors give entrance, and above this rises

1 See Zur Kenntnis der Altenglischen Bühne, by Karl Theodore Gaedertz (Bremen, 1888).