(in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1589) this version was a storehouse of phrases to contemporary dramatists, 'English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as Blood is a beggar and so forth. But a more important tribute to Seneca's influence than this translation was the production of an English tragedy, Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, modelled as closely as possible upon his style. The play was the joint work of Thomas Norton, a lawyer of eminence, and Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, a brilliant courtier and man of letters. It was acted, for the first time, in January, 1562, before Elizabeth, at the Inner Temple. The plot is drawn from the legendary history of early Britain, and, in its main motive, reminds us of King Lear. It shows how Gorboduc, the king, divides his realm during his lifetime between his two sons Ferrex and Porrex, and how from this rash act spring unnatural crime, 'domestic fury and fierce civil strife.' While the story is thus thoroughly national, the treatment is completely in the debased classical manner. There is no attempt to exhibit character in action, no collision of personalities, no development on the stage of incident or intrigue. The dramatis personae come upon the scene only to utter long sententious monologues; the murders, rebellions, battles, with which the plot is rife, do not take place before the eyes of the spectators, but are related by messengers. The play, in imitation of the Roman model, is divided into five acts, a practice which henceforth became universal in tragedy. Each act is preceded by an allegorical dumb show, and concluded by a chorus spoken by 'four ancient and sage men of Britain,' who moralize upon the situation.

Thus Gorboduc is Senecan to the core, and judged from this standard it has very real merits. Its theme is serious, and of tragic significance; the treatment is dignified and, from the special point of view, adequate; there is no lack (to use Sidney's words) of 'stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style.' As a fact, it is in the language rather than in the matter that the main interest of the play lies. In their attempt to be completely faithful to their classical model, the authors discarded the rhymed metres which had hitherto

been the sole dramatic vehicle, and adopted in its place the new blank verse which Surrey had just used for his translation of the Aeneid, and which seemed to them, as to him, to be the one way of reproducing the unrhymed measures of Greece and Rome. Thus the use of blank verse was, in the first instance, due, like so much else in that age, to conscious and deliberate imitation; it came of the same spirit that strove to force the Hexameter and the Sapphic upon English poetry. Yet the one experiment resulted in glorious success, and the other in disastrous failure. The reason thereof lay in a vital difference, overlooked by the men of the time. The genuine classical metres are based upon the principle of quantity, and they can never be reproduced save as the feeblest of exotics, in the modern languages which take accent as the basis of their prosody. But the heroic measure, the iambic pentameter employed by Surrey, Sackville, and Norton, is native to our tongue: by throwing aside rhyme, though it gains immeasurably in freedom, flexibility, and range, in its essential nature it continues unaltered. The verse of Gorboduc, though not without vigour in parts, is monotonous and stiff, but it had in it, far beyond the conception of those who first used it, infinite possibilities. They had thought of it as a pale replica of classical measures: it was really destined to an existence in the world of art as independent, as glorious, as immortal as theirs. To have discovered the fitness of blank verse for high dramatic purposes is the distinctive achievement of the English classical playwrights.

Sackville and Norton soon found followers among the scholars and wits of the day. We have already seen that in 1566 the members of Gray's Inn acted a prose comedy translated by Gascoigne from the Italian: together with it was performed a tragedy by the same author, called Jocasta, and modelled upon an adaptation from Euripides, by Dolce, the Italian translator of Seneca. Like Gorboduc it was written in blank verse, and introduced choruses and explanatory opening scenes of dumb show. Another drama directly inspired by Senecan influence is Tancred and Gismunda, written and performed by members of the Inner Temple, in 1568. The plot is borrowed from the

Decamerone, but the style is modelled on that of the Roman playwright. In the 'epistle dedicatory' the work is asserted to be 'in stateliness of show, depth of conceit, or true ornaments of poetical art, inferior to none of the best in that kind: no, were the Roman Seneca the censurer.' Originally written in rhyme, it was afterwards recast into blank verse, to recommend it more fully to the fastidious taste of the polite world. It employs the classical machinery of prologue, chorus, and messenger; and the principal incidents, except the death of the heroine and her father in the last act, take place behind the scenes.

In 1587 the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, whose theatrical activity is worth noting, produced at Greenwich before the Queen another work in the Senecan style, The Misfortunes of Arthur. The body of the play is from the hand of Thomas Hughes, but various members of the Inn contributed. The story, as in the case of Gorboduc, is drawn from the legendary annals of early Britain, and was peculiarly adapted to classical treatment, for its theme is one dear to ancient dramatists, the ruin of a royal house through wanton crime. Uther Pendragon, in adulterous love with the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, whom he afterwards slays, begets a son and daughter, Arthur and Anne. These, in their turn, by incestuous union, have a son Mordred, who, when grown to man's estate, seduces Guenevora, the wife of Arthur's later years. Hence arises war between father and son, ending in the death of Mordred at Arthur's hand. It is with the final episode, the conflict between Arthur and Mordred, that the drama mainly deals. It is opened by the Ghost of Gorlois, so foully wronged, who cries for revenge upon the sinful house of Uther, and who, at the end of the play, retires appeased by the penalties of blood. The Ghost is directly borrowed from Seneca, and is thus of distinctly classical origin, though we shall see later to what high destinies it was advanced by Romantic art. Yet even in The Misfortunes of Arthur its introduction is neither unskilful nor unimpressive, and, indeed, the play has real merit throughout, and marks an advance upon Gorboduc1. The characters of Arthur and

1 It should be noticed, however, that Hughes, not content with imitating the general style of Seneca, introduces into the play long extracts from

Mordred have individuality and force; the blank verse is often spirited and vigorous; the whole tone of the drama is less artificial than that of its predecessor. In fact, as has been pointed out by Ward, it has the distinction of reminding us in parts of Greek rather than of Roman tragedy, not of Seneca but of Euripides.

Such was the line of development of classical tragedy in England. But side by side with it there flourished another homelier species of dramatic art. The plays of this class were not written by scholars and gentlemen of the Court who could afford to have them printed and preserved to posterity, nor were they acted by learned societies. They were the outcome of the general popular taste for the drama, the same taste that had fostered Miracles and Moralities; they were played by professional actors in great men's halls, or the yards of inns, or the permanent theatres which were beginning to be built. Many of them remained in the sole possession of the company who performed them, and never found their way into print. But such as were best received by popular audiences were repeated before the Queen, and from the minutes of the Revels we can gather a list of their names. Between 1568 and 1580 fifty-two of these dramas were performed at Court1, dealing with every variety of subject— classical history, Italian fable, mediaeval legend, English tale of domestic life. 'I may boldly say it, because I have seen it,' says Gosson, that The Palace of Pleasure, The Golden Ass, The Aethiopian History, Amadis of France, and The Round Table, comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly raked to furnish the playhouses in London.' Among the classical titles it is significant in the light of later events to notice such names as Caesar and Pompey and Catiline's Conspiracies, and even of greater interest is the fact that one of the first English tragedies drawn from Italian romance was, in all likelihood, a Romeo and Juliet.

several of his dramas. For a list of these, see Appendix II in Cunliffe's The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy.

1 For a list of the plays thus performed, see Fleay's History of the Stage, pp. 14-31.

These dramas, whatever their subject, followed in the track of the Miracles and Moralities. They were written in rhyme; they had no regard for the Unities, and they intermingled lighter matter with the serious stuff of tragedy. They obeyed a native instinct rather than external rule, and their aim was to give a vigorous picture of life in its varied phases. These facts about them may be gathered less from the plays themselves, which have chiefly perished, than from the attacks of contemporary critics. Among these George Whetstone occupies an important and, in many respects, unique position. In the preface to his play, Promos and Cassandra, 1578, he pleads for an intermediate dramatic species, free alike from the monotony of the classical type and from the absurdities of the popular stage. The English playwright, he declares, 'is most vain, indiscreet, and out of order: he first grounds his work on impossibilities; then in three hours runs he through the world: marries, gets children: makes children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and bringeth gods from heaven, and fetcheth devils from hell.' These extravagances, he complains, are rendered even more ridiculous by the use of one order of speech for characters however different. Against this he protests in words which strike the keynote of the true Romantic drama: 'grave old men should instruct young men, strumpets should be lascivious, clowns disorderly, intermingling all these actions in such sort as the grave may instruct and the pleasant delight.' Promos and Cassandra is written to illustrate these principles, and thus uses a medley of styles, including long rhyming lines, ballad metre, the heroic couplet, and blank verse. But it is a loosely-jointed piece in two Parts, each of five Acts, and is chiefly memorable as the source of Measure for Measure. Whetstone's service is to have pointed out the way in which others more richly gifted than himself were hereafter to walk.

Another censor of the popular stage was Stephen Gosson in his School of Abuse, 1579, but it was the Puritan rancour of a renegade playwright, not zeal for the welfare of the drama, that inspired his splenetic onslaught. 'Let us but shut up our ears to Poets, Pipers, and Players, pull our feet back from resort