general conditions over specific effects who would venture to say that our dramatists would never have come into existence, or would have sought some other line of activity, had Mary remained upon the throne instead of Elizabeth, and had England continued at peace with Spain. Doubtless a material basis of prosperity was indispensable to the support of dramatic entertainments: it was absolutely necessary that there should be enough free wealth to fill the theatres. But one fails to see what the stir of the Reformation had to do with the dramatic tendencies of Marlowe, or how the defeat of the Armada was concerned in the migration of Shakespeare from Stratford to the London stage.

One thing is clear from the study of the literature preceding the great dramatic outburst, and that is, that there was abundance of material lying ready to the shaping and inspiring genius of the dramatist. There were numberless tales and chronicles of love and war to furnish him with plots or suggestions of plots: even if he knew no language. but his own, the enterprise of printers had furnished him not only with the works of native poets and chroniclers, but with hosts of translations from Italian, French, and Latin. Observation of men was a prevailing passion, and literature was crowded with sententious maxims of character and politics. The passion of love had been expressed in many different moods and phases, and attempts had been made to treat with becoming gravity the tragic themes of disaster and death. Literature was undoubtedly ripe for dramatic embodiment. But why the accumulated wisdom and sentiment was thrown into the form of dramas and not into the form of prose tales, and why the dramatic form rose to such greatness, are problems that refuse to be solved by a study of general conditions: they throw us back for explanation upon the power of individual genius.

The adoption of the dramatic form by no means began with Marlowe. We have seen how tragedies and comedies were written by Sackville, Edwards, and Gascoigne, in imitation and emulation of the Italians. Between 1568 and 1580, Mr Collier tells us, some fifty dramas from various

sources, modern and classical, were presented at Court. But these, it may be presumed, were on the classical model, and the art of the classical drama is in a large measure narrative; the most moving incidents are related, not acted. Gascoigne and the translators of Seneca were unable to rise in their narrative above the level of the 'Mirror for Magistrates.' And if we may judge from the more original works of Sackville and Daniel, no productions on the classical model could have engaged public interest. Many tragedies were composed in English before Marlowe's "Tamburlaine;" but Marlowe may be called the founder of English tragedy, inasmuch as he gave the first conspicuous example of the fresh form that was taken up with such ardour by the great line of Elizabethan dramatists.

Marlowe was not exactly the first to represent on the stage actions that the Greek dramatist supposed to take place behind the scenes and communicated to the audience in a subsequent narrative by an eyewitness. Among Mr Collier's reprints is an example of a mixed morality and history, containing the revenge of Orestes upon his mother and her paramour, and mixing up personified abstractions, Vice, Nature, Truth, Fame, Duty, with Orestes, Clytemnestra, Ægisthus, Menelaus, and other actual personages. In this drama there is a lively battle upon the stage, with a direction, "let it be long ere you can win the city ;" and though Clytemnestra is dismissed under custody, Ægisthus is seized, dragged violently, and hanged before the audience in spite of his entreaties for mercy. The date of this drama is 1567, and from it we may conclude that as early as that date the popular instinct had broken through the restrictions of Horace, founded as they were upon the natural limitations of a stage wholly different in structure and appointments from our own. While, at Court, frigid and artificial restrictions were maintained when the necessity for them no longer existed, they were cast aside in performances for the entertainment of the rude vulgar. Marlowe's position, therefore, is this: he did not originate the idea of bringing tragic action on the stage, but he was the

first writer of plays whose genius was adequate to the powerful situations introduced by the popular instinct for dramatic effect.

I. JOHN LYLY (1554-1606).

John Lyly, the Euphuist,1 "the witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lyly," was our first extensive writer of comedies. He produced no fewer than nine pieces-one in blank verse, seven in prose, and one in rhyme. "The Woman in the Moon" (which is in blank verse, and which he calls "his first dream in Phoebus' holy bower," though not printed till 1597); "Alexander and Campaspe" (printed in 1584); "Sappho and Phao" (1584); "Endymion" (1591); "Galathea" (1592); "Midas" (1592); "Mother Bombie" (1594); "The Maid's Metamorphosis" (in rhyme and only probably his, 1600); "Love's Metamorphosis" (1601). Lyly's plays are the sort of gay, fantastic, insubstantial things that may catch widely as a transient fashion, but are too extravagant to receive sympathy from more than one generation : critics in general set their heels on his delicate constructions. His plays were acted by the children of the Revels, and he would seem to have indulged in airy and childish caprices of fancy to match. Perhaps he wrote with an abiding consciousness that ladies were to make the chief part of his audience, and thought only of bringing smiles on their faces with pretty quibbles and mildly sentimental or childishly jocular situations. In "Endymion," Tellus expresses surprise that Corsites, being a captain, "who should sound nothing but terror, and suck nothing but blood," talks so softly and politely. "It agreeth not with your calling," she says, "to use words so soft as that of love." And

1 I have given some account of his Euphuism in my Manual of English Prose Literature. Lyly was a great tobacco-taker: one wonders that no devoted champion of the weed has ever remarked the coincidence between its introduction and the beginning of the greatness of the English drama.

Corsites replies with the utmost urbanity-"Lady, it were unfit of wars to discourse with women, into whose minds nothing can sink but smoothness." In accordance with this idea, Lyly's subjects, except in "Alexander and Campaspe" and "Mother Bombie," are mythological and pastoral and in none of them is any deep feeling excited. He is careful not to alarm his courtly audience with the prospect of terrible consequences: the stream of incidents moves with very slight interruptions to a happy conclusion, enlivened with fantastic love-talk, fantastic moralisings on ambition, war, peace, avarice, illicit love, and other commonplaces, and the pranks and puns of mischievous vivacious boys. The fabric is so slight and artificial that we are in danger of undervaluing the powers of the workman, who was a most ingenious and original man, and deserved all the adjectives of his publisher. His plays are vessels filled to the brim with sparkling liquor, which stands to Shakespeare's comedy in the relation of lemonade to champagne. The whole thing is a sort of ginger-pop intoxication; with airy bubbles of fanciful conceits winking all over.

If there is no extravagance of passion in Lyly, there is the utmost extravagance of ingenious fancy. Wit being defined as an ingenious and unexpected play upon words, Lyly's comedies are full of it. There is hardly a sentence in the whole of them that does not contain some pun, or clever antithesis, or far-fetched image. He is so uninterruptedly witty that he destroys his own wit: the play on words and images ceases to be unexpected, and so falls out of the definition. Yet a little of it is very pretty even now; and if we could call up the Children of the Chapel Royal to fire off his crackers, and poise his glittering conceits, and imagine ourselves listening with the much-flattered Cynthia, we might conceive the possibility of sitting out a whole comedy with pleased faces.

Lyly carries his love of contrast and delicate symmetrical arrangement into the structure of his plays, scene being balanced against scene, and character against character. In

"Alexander and Campaspe," his first published play, he attempted, after the model of Edwards's "Damon and Pythias," more substantial characters than he afterwards produced in his mythological and pastoral conceptions. One of his most elaborate and characteristic personages is Sir Tophas, in "Endymion," a fat, vainglorious, foolish squire, who struts about armed with weapons of sport, and breathing out bloodthirsty sentiments against wrens, blackbirds, sheep, and other such harmless enemies. Sir Tophas is the Falstaff of children, reminding us of the story that Shakespeare when a boy used to kill a calf with an air: he. has also points of resemblance with Pistol, Holofernes, and Don Armado. He has a little follower Epiton, like Armado's Moth, with whom he holds discourses, and he falls in love with Dipsas, as Armado with Jaquenetta.

"Tophas. Epi.

Epiton. Here, sir.

Top. I brook not this idle humour of love; it tickles not my liver, from whence lovemongers in former ages seemed to infer it should proceed.

Epi. Love, sir, may lie in your lungs, and I think it doth, and that is the cause you blow and are so pursy.

Top. Tush, boy; I think it is but some device of the poet to get money.

Epi. A poet; what's that?

Top. Dost thou not know what a poet is?

Epi. No.

Top. Why, fool, a poet is as much as one should say—a poet. But soft! yonder be two wrens; shall I shoot at them? Epi. They are two lads.

Top. Larks or wrens, I will kill them.

Epi. Larks? are you blind? they are two little boys.

Top. Birds or boys, they are but a pittance for my breakfast; therefore have at them, for their brains must as it were embroider my bolts."

The finest things in Lyly's plays are the occasional songs. "Cupid and my Campaspe played" is often quoted, and Sappho's song is hardly less pretty.