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 arose 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, "the unities of space and time to circumscribe its dulness." It has all the author's justness, weight, and fertility of thought, but little of his imagination; and though celebrated as the first English play written in blank verse, the measure, in Sackville's hands, is 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. Ac

cordingly, 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 pro

hibited 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 theatres, "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,

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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; 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

so that, when the bells toll to the

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 until the suppression of the 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 the same assimilation of incongruous elements which Gosson derides and denounces as it 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 imagi