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and place; but in obedience to the English love of moral truth, it struggled after that greater unity, the unity of dramatic interest. With a contempt of the conventional peculiarly English, it sought the preser tation of an idealized picture of real life, which life is neither pure tragedy nor pure comedy, and in which mirth and sadness, kings

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 dayes and manie places artificially imagined. But if it bee so in Gorboduck, how much more in all the rest, where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick 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 conc ed. Now you shall have three ladies walke to gather flow, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear newes of a shipwrack in the same place; then, we are to blame if we accept it not for a rocke. Upon the backe 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 flie in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard hart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now, of time they are much more liberal; for ordinarie it is that two young Princes fall in love: after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy e is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get and r child, and all this in two houres' space: which how absur is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, ar icient examples justified, and at this daye the ordinarie p Italie wil not erre in. . . . . But besides these grosse ab su ties how all their Playes be neither right Tragedies nor right Comedies, mingling Kings and Clownes, not because the matter so carieth it, but thrust in the Clowne by head and shoulders, to play a part in Majestical matters with neither decencie nor discretion; so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor right sportfulness is by their mongrell Tragi-comedy obtained."

and clowns, do mingle.* It clung to its confused collocation of heterogeneous materials, because it was striving to work them together into a natural symmetry, a symmetry not austere, limited, and geometrical, like that of a Doric temple, in which one half is the exact counterpart of the other, and the details are the repetition of a single form, but large and free, yet true, like the symmetry of mountains and of trees, in which the masses are irregular and the details unlike, while yet there is perfect balance, and a harmony the more satisfying that it is not constant concord and repeated

sameness.

Our drama, advancing through centuries, had slowly reached this stage of growth, where if its development had been stayed its history would have been utterly without interest, except to the literary antiquarian, when suddenly its homely, uncouth bud burst into flower so sweet, of beauty so glorious, so perennial, as ever after to gladden, to perfume, and to adorn the ages. The rapidity of this transition is astonishing. It is almost like magical transformation. In less than twenty

* There is conventionality enough and to spare in the everyday life of people of English race in the United States, and still more in that of the same race in Great Britain. But they see, and, more, they feel, the unnatural restraint of pure conventionalism. They act under it with an awkward self-consciousness. They scorn it, and have some contempt for themselves for their conformity to it. Whereas the people of the continent of Europe believe in it, accept it without a question, enter into it heartily, and act under it unconsciously.

years from the time when the best plays yet produced by English authors were intrinsically unworthy of a place in literature, the English stage had become illustrious. This change was brought about by the great and increasing taste of the day for dramatic performances, which called into the service of the theatre every needy hand that held a ready pen. A crowd of young men left the learned professions in London, or, abandoning rustic homes, flocked thither, to make money by writing plays. Among these men seven attained distinction; and yet not only so inferior, but of so little intrinsic, enduring interest was the work of six of them, that, with one, and hardly one, exception, their names would not have been known outside of purely literary circles but for the seventh. They were Thomas Kyd, John Lilly, George Peele, George Chapman, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. Of the six, the oldest whose age is known to us was only ten years the senior of the seventh; and the most eminent, Marlowe, was born but two years before him.* Shakespeare got to work in London very early in life. He was using his pen there as a dramatic writer before he was twentyfour years old. These men were therefore in

* Lilly was born about 1553, Peele about the same year, Chap man in 1559, Greene about 1560, Marlowe about 1562, Shakespeare in 1564. The date of Kyd's birth can only be conjectured.

† See Section XII. of the Essay on the Authorship of King

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both the strictest and the broadest sense his contemporaries, — his contemporaries as men and as authors. The mere fact that he found four of them, Kyd, Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, in the front rank of dramatic writers on his arrival in London, does not properly entitle them to consideration as his predecessors in the English drama. Being so absolutely contemporaneous with him in age, they could be justly regarded as his predecessors only as having been the founders of a school of which he was an eminent disciple, or to which he had established a rival or a successor. But he stood to them in neither of these relations. He and they were all, with a single exception, of one school, of which neither one of them was the founder. With this one exception, these men were all striving to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same way. The time had come when it was to be done, and the time brought the men who were to do it, each according to his ability. And not only were their aims identical, but there is the best reason, short of competent contemporary testimony, for believing that four of them, including Shakespeare, were co-laborers upon still existing works.*

Henry the Sixth, Vol. VII. of the author's edition of Shakespeare's Works.

* See the Introduction to the Taming of the Shrew, and the Essay upon King Henry the Sixth, in the author's edition of Shakespeare's Works.

The exception to this unity of purpose was John Lilly, the Euphuist. Lilly is known in dramatic literature as the author of eight comedies written to be performed at the court of Elizabeth.* They are in all respects opposed to the genius of the English drama. They do not even pretend to be representations of human life and human character, but are pure fantasy-pieces, in which the personages are a heterogeneous medley of Grecian gods and goddesses and impossible colorless creatures with sublunary names, all thinking with one brain and speaking with one tongue, the conceitful crotchety brain and the dainty, well-trained tongue of clever, witty John Lilly. They are all in prose, but contain some pretty, fanciful verses called songs, which are as unlyric in spirit as the plays in which they appear are undramatic. From these plays Shakespeare borrowed a few thoughts, but they exercised no modifying influence upon his genius, nor did they at all conform to that of the English drama, upon which they are a mere grotesque excrescence.

Chapman, one of the elder and the stronger of the six above named, is not known as the author, even in part, of any play older than Shakespeare's

*Lilly's plays are Endimion, Campaspe, Sapho and Phao, Gallathea, Mydas, Mother Bombie, The Woman in the Moone, and Love's Metamorphosis. The Maid's Metamorphosis, which was published anonymously in 1600, has been attributed to him, as also has A Warning for Faire Women, which was published anonymously in 1599; but neither of them bears traces of his style.

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