study for Shakespeare in his happiest vein, opens up the domestic scenery of the metropolis, warm with reality. Its scholastic authorship, as well as its merry-making, is shown in a proposal of marriage sent by the conceited fop to the widow, which is read to her with its sense reversed by changing the true punctuation: Now by these presents I do you advertise

That I am minded to marry you in no wise.

For your goods and substance I could be content
To take you as ye are. If ye mind to be my wife,
Ye shall be assured for the time of my life

I will keep ye right well from good raiment and fare;
Ye shall not be kept but in sorrow and care.
Ye shall in no wise live at your own liberty;
But when ye are merry, I will be all sad;
When ye seck your heart's ease I will be unkind;
At no time in me shall ye much gentleness find.'

The tragic muse was not far behind. The first English heroic tale divided into acts and scenes, and clothed in the formalities of a regular Tragedy, was Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville (1562). Gorboduc, king of Britain about five hundred years before Christ, divides his kingdom between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. A quarrel between the princes results in civil war, and Ferrex is slain by his brother. The mother revenges his death by murdering Porrex in his sleep. The people, exasperated at the unnatural deed, rise in rebellion, and kill both her and the king. The nobility collect an army and destroy the rebels, but immediately fall to destroying one another. The lineal succession to the Crown is lost; and the country, without a head, is wasted by slaughter and famine. Like Roister Doister, Gorboduc is cast in the mould of classical antiquity; but instead of individual nature and real passion, it deals only in vague and labored declamations which never entered any head but the author's. Nothing is intricate, nothing unravelled, and little. pathetic. It has the form of dialogue without the spirit. Singularly frigid and unimaginative, it is not without justness, weight, and fertility of thought. Its diction is transparent. It is celebrated, moreover, as being our first tragedy in blank verse. But the measure, though the embryon of Shakespeare's, conveys no notion of that elasticity and variety which it was destined shortly to attain. The following are the most animated lines in the whole play:

'O mother, thou to murder thus thy child!

Even Jove with justice must with lightning flames
From heaven send down some strange revenge on thee.
Ah, noble prince, how oft have I beheld

Thee mounted on thy fierce and trampling steed,

Shining in armor bright before the tilt,

And with thy mistress' sleeve tied on thy helm,
And charge thy staff-to please thy lady's eye-
That bowed the headpiece of thy friendly foe!'

In these exact lines, stealing on with care but with fear, we fail to discover the potent spirit who planned the Mirror for Magistrates,' and, resigning that noble scheme to inferior hands, left as its model the Induction. Tragical, like Gorboduc, in idea and plot, it has the vigor of creative imagination. It is the congenial offspring of a gloomy genius in a night of storm, which may be thought to receive a ghastly complexion from the lurid flames that wrap the victims of persecution. Amid the shadows of the darkening day, across the faded fields swept by the wintry wind, the poet, as he pursues his lonely way, marks the gray grass, the blasted flowers, the bare boughs, the wan clouds, and sees in them the type of the state of man; but suddenly as he redoubles his pace,

'In black all clad there fell before my face

A piteous wight. . .

Her body small, forwithered and forspent,
As is the stalk with summer's drouth opprest;
Her wealked face with woful tears besprent,
Her colour pale, and as it seemd her best,
In woe and plaint reposed was her rest;
And, as the stone that drops of water wears,
So dented were her cheeks with fall of tears."

Sorrow guides him into the region of death, there to hear from the dead the stories of their woes.

and hideous shapes, is Old Age:

Here, among other dreadful

'Crooked-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed,
Went on three feet, and sometime crept on four;
With old lame bones, that rattled by his side;

His scalp all piled, and he with eld forelore:
His withered fist still knocking at death's door;
Fumbling and drivelling as he draws his breath;
For brief, the shape and messenger of Death.'

[bald

It is the recurrence of the deep poetic instinct, the feeling of misery and mortality, the sad sense of limitless darkness, the sombre conception of the world, which this race has manifested from its origin, which it will preserve to its end.

A series of poetic narratives of the disasters of men eminent in English story.

Thenceforward the drama makes rapid progress, passing from youth to a splendid maturity with enormous strides, and extending in a single generation over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy, with that breadth of anticipation and intoxication of heart which the ardent soul may experience, when from being a child it has become a man and feels a new-glowing joy shoot through nerve and vein. Expanding with the growing taste, it quits the Palace, the Inns, the Universities, where it is compressed, and creates in 1576 a public theatre and a national audience. Before the end of the century, eleven theatres and nearly two hundred dramas attest the absorbing passion. Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, are ransacked 'to furnish the playhouse of London.' Listen to the groans of the Puritan:

The daily abuse of stage plays is such an offense 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; . . . so that, when the bells toll to the 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 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.'

Some of the theatres are used as cock-pits, some for bull-baiting and bear-baiting, all are poor and squalid. On the banks of the Thames rises the principal one, the Globe, a hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy ditch, surmounted by a red flag, and roofed by the sky, retaining in its form and arrangements traces of the old model-the inn-yard. Into the pit, the sun shines and the rain falls without let or hindrance; but their bodies are inured to exposure, and they don't trouble themselves about it. The poor are there, as well as the rich; for they have sixpenny, twopenny, and even penny seats. With the actors, on the rushstrewn stage, which is covered with thatch, are the elegant and the dainty, who pay a shilling for admittance. For an extra shilling, they can have a stool. If stools or benches are lacking, they stretch themselves on the floor. They smoke, drink, swear, insult the pit, who pay them back in kind, and fling apples at them in the bargain. Over them, in a lofty gallery are the musicians. Below, in the circle of the pit, while they wait for the piece, cards are shuffled, oaths resound, ale-pots clatter, blows are exchanged. When the beer takes effect, there is a receptacle

for general use. When the fumes rise, they cry, 'Burn the juniper!' They are amusing themselves after their fashion. At one o'clock - Sundays included—the flag is hoisted, to announce the hour of the performance. When the trumpet sounds, a figure in a long black velvet cloak comes forward to recite the prologue. Then the play begins, the players in masks and wigs, and attired in the richest dress of the day. If the house are not suited, they hiss, whistle, crow, yell, perhaps fall upon the actors and turn the theatre upside down. The appointments are barbarous, but imaginations are fervid and supply what is wanting. Wooden imitations of animals, towers, forests, etc., are the scenery. A bed suggests a bed-room. A rough table, with drinking vessels, replaces a dingy throne and turns a palace into a tavern. A young man, just shaven, stands for a queen. A scroll in big letters, hung out in view of the spectators, informs them that they are in London, Athens, or Paris. Three combatants on a side determine the fate of an empire. Says Sir Philip Sidney:

You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africke of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Plaier when hee comes in must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now shall you have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and by wee heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a rocke; . . . while in the meane time two armies flie in, represented with foure swordes and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?'

The actors- - at first strolling companies under the patronage of some nobleman, as security against the laws which brand all strollers as vagabonds and rogues are neglected or despised by those whom they entertain. Their social position is not far above that of the jester who shakes his cap and bells at the tables of the great. Nearly all are writers. Most are born of the people, yet educated. The majority are accomplished in the classics. The manager gives them work, advances them money, and receives their manuscripts or their wardrobes. For a play he allows them seven or eight pounds. Their trade of author scarcely brings bread. Rarely, like Shakespeare, they contrive, by a judicious investment of early gains to acquire a third and more fruitful source of income, a theatre-share. Generally, they are wild Bohemians, improvident, poor, full of excess, and die untimely by exhaustion or violence.

Such are the externals. We have seen what the interior must

be; for the drama is but the moral, social, and physical expression of the age in which it lives; and the poets who establish it carry in themselves the intensified sentiments and passions of those around them. They will reproduce the entire man,-his finest aspirations and his savagest appetites, the low and the lofty, the ideal and the sensual. So does Marlowe, the true founder of the dramatic school, the mightiest of Shakespeare's pioneers. Born in 1564, son of a shoemaker, he was the proudest and fiercest of aristocrats. At seventeen he was in Cambridge. Studied theology, and became a sceptic. Returning to London, he turned actor, broke his leg in a scene of debauchery, and turned author. Rebellious in manners, he was rebellious in creed; declared Moses a juggler; was accused of saying that 'yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent and a more admirable methode'; was prosecuted for avowed infidelity, and, if time had not failed, would probably have been brought to the stake. In love with a harlot, he tried to stab his rival; his hand was turned, and the blade entered his own eye and brain, and he died, at thirty, cursing and blaspheming. A Puritan ballad, in which he is called Wormall, draws the moral:

'Take warning, ye that plays do make,

And ye that them do act.

Desist in time, for Wormall's sake,
And think upon his fact.'

His first play, Tamburlaine the Great, is characteristic,-a picture of boundless ambition and murderous rage. The hero is a shepherd, who aspires to the throne of Persia, scornful of restraint, and ready to put men to the sword or to rail at the gods. He says, giant-like:

For in a field, whose superficies

Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil,

And sprinkled with the brains of slaughtered men

My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd;

And he that means to place himself therein,

Must armed wade up to the chin in blood, . .

And I would strive to swim through pools of blood,

Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses,

Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks,

Ere I would lose the title of a king.'

Seated in a chariot, drawn by captive kings, he berates them for

their slowness: