of lath. His function was to attend upon the Devil, and to worry, trick, and belabor his master for the amusement of the crowd. The Vice survived in the fool of Shakespeare's plays, though it is hard to recognize him in the philosophical Touchstone of As You Like It, or the musical fool who sings such charming lyrics in Twelfth Night.

Interludes. Out of the moralities arose a species of play known as the Interlude. The name took its origin from the practice observed in the houses of the great, of having these little dramas performed in the intervals of a banquet. In the old play of Sir Thomas More, a band of strolling players is announced while Sir Thomas is dining, and they perform an interlude before him and his guests. Usually these pieces had little action, and required almost no stage-setting. For example, "The Four P's," of John Heywood, "a newe and a very mery enterlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, and a Pedlar," is nothing more than an amusing series of speeches by the four impersonators, in which they vaunt their several callings, make themselves out very arrant rascals indeed, and by so doing satirize the society which they represent. The Interludes treat all kinds of undramatic subjects, such as geography, the weather, the nature of the elements, in fact all the crude natural science of the time. The stage, both at this time and later, largely took the place of the modern school and newspaper.

Robin Hood Plays and Christmas Plays.-"Robin Hood plays," setting forth the merry adventures of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, and Maid Marian, in Sherwood Forest, were also popular; and, all over England, seasons of merry-making were enlivened by the performance of rude Christmas plays, or "mummings," in which figured certain stock characters, such as Old Father Christmas, St. George and the Dragon, Old King Cole, and the Merry Andrew. The student will find in Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native an account of the Christmas mummings as they still exist, or did exist until recent years, in remote corners of England.

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II. CLASSICAL INFLUENCE UPON THE EARLY DRAMA

Early Plays on Classic Models.-Owing to the great revival of interest in Latin literature, which marked the beginning of the Renaissance, it became the fashion in the fifteenth century to present the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence on the stages of grammar schools, with the students as actors. Later, these same plays began to be translated, and given in the English tongue; and from this it was but a step to the composition of simple English comedies on the Latin model. The earliest of these were Ralph Roister Doister, written before 1541, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, written about 1566. The main characters in Gammer Gurton's Needle are studied from real sixteenth century peasants, and the background of English village life is given with much humor and vividness.

In tragedy, Seneca was taken as a model. In 1561, two young gentlemen of the Inner Temple, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, presented before Queen Elizabeth a play called Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, to show what could be done in handling a subject from British legend, on the lines laid down by the Latin tragedian. It is a stately production, and deserves veneration as the first regular tragedy written in English. It had a great influence upon the native drama, just beginning to take permanent form.

Latin Tragedy and Native English Tragedy Contrasted.Latin tragedy has very little stage action; important events, instead of being directly represented, are merely reported on the stage, by messengers or others. The tendency of English tragedy, on the other hand, was from the first to present everything bodily on the stage, even the storming of cities, or battles between great armies, where the means at the disposal of the actors were often laughably inadequate. Latin drama, again, is usually careful to preserve unity of time and place, that is, to make all the action pass in a given locality, and to cover no more than the events of a single day. English playwrights, on the contrary, had no hesitation in shifting the scene to half a dozen

different countries in the course of a single play; and they thought nothing of introducing in the first act a child who grew to manhood in the second act, and in the third died and handed on the story, to be acted out by his sons and grandsons in the remainder. Classic drama also drew a very sharp line between comedy and tragedy, admitting no comic element into a serious play. The English drama, on the contrary, from the miracle plays down, set comedy side by side with tragedy; it mingled the farcical with the august, the laughable with the pathetic, as they actually are mingled in life.

Good Effect of Classic Influence on the Drama.—In the end, the free native form of drama prevailed, in spite of the efforts of the University "wits" (as young men of learning and cleverness were then called) to force the Latin form upon the stage. Nevertheless, the apprenticeship of English playwrights to a foreign master, brief and incomplete though it was, was invaluable. It taught them to impose some restraint upon the riot of their fancy; it showed them the beauty and artistic necessity of good structure; in a word, it brought form out of chaos.

III. BEGINNING OF THE GREAT DRAMATIC PERIOD

The Theatre Becomes the Chief Expression of Elizabethan Life. We now stand on the threshold of that wonderful sixty years (1580-1640) during which the Elizabethan drama ran its magnificent course. As has been shown in the last chapter, England found herself, at the beginning of this period, quickened by three of the most potent influences which can affect the life of a nation: widespread intellectual curiosity; the beginnings of an intense religious ferment; and the pride of suddenly discovered national strength. The young wits who came up from the Universities to London, tingling with the imaginative excitement of the age, seized upon the popular theatre, as the most vital form of art then existing, and the best instrument for the expression of their own swarming fancies.

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Elizabethan Playhouses and Actors.-During the youth of the drama, the performance of plays had been chiefly in the hands of strolling companies, who, attaching themselves nominally to the household of some great lord, and using his name to protect them, wandered about the country, wherever, on village green, at market fair, or in the hall of some noble house, they could find an audience. But shortly before the period we are now studying, regular companies had begun to establish themselves in the suburbs of London, and to erect permanent theatres. The first of these playhouses, known simply as "The Theatre," was built in Finsbury Fields, to the north of the city, by James Burbage, in 1576. It was at this play-house that Shakespeare first found employment. Burbage's company, on the destruction of The Theatre, built the Globe, on the south bank of the Thames; and here, on the Bankside, other places of theatrical entertainment rapidly sprang up. After a time the actors became bold enough to push into the city itself. Burbage built the Blackfriars, as a winter theatre. A rival company built the Fortune, also in the city limits. By the end of the century, eleven theatres existed in the city and in the free lands or "liberties" adjoining.

Performances usually took place at three in the afternoon, and were announced by the hanging out of a flag and the blowing of trumpets. The theatres were round, square, or octagonal structures, unroofed except for a shed or canopy over the stage. The winter theatres, such as the Blackfriars, were entirely roofed in. The stage extended out into the body of the house, was open on three sides, and was sufficiently elevated so that the main bulk of the audience, standing on the bare ground which formed the floor or pit of the theatre, could have a fair view. Persons who could afford to pay a higher price than the "groundlings," took advantage of the boxes built round the pit. Young gallants, for an extra fee, could have seats upon the stage itself, where they smoked their pipes, peeled oranges, cracked nuts, and often interfered with the performance by chaffing a poor actor, or by flirting ostentatiously with the fair occupant of a neighboring box. In accordance with the luxurious taste of the age in dress,

the costumes of the actors were often very rich. All women's parts were played by boys; actresses were not seen in England until after the Restoration. The stage-setting was of the simplest, a change of scene being indicated often merely by a placard, or at most by a roughly painted piece of pasteboard and a few stage properties. A tree and a bench did duty for a garden; a wooden cannon and a paste-board tower indicated a siege. This meagreness of stage-setting, so far from being a misfortune, was in no small measure responsible for the literary greatness of the Elizabethan drama; for it threw the dramatist back upon vivid poetic expression, as the only means of stimulating the imagination of his audience.

The Pre-Shakespearean Playwrights.-The group of young dramatists which sprang up to supply the demand made by the early stage included Robert Greene, George Peele, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Nash, and Christopher Marlowe. Of these Marlowe stands as undisputed leader. He is the true founder of the popular English drama, though himself an outgrowth of the long period of preparation which we have been studying.

IV. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: 1564-1593

Marlowe's Life.-Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker in the old cathedral town of Canterbury, was born in 1564, two months before Shakespeare. He was sent to Cambridge by a patron, who had noticed his quick parts. He graduated at nineteen; and four years later (1587) he astonished London with his first play, Tamburlaine, which he brought out with the Lord Admiral's Men, the rival company to the Lord Chamberlain's Men, whom Shakespeare had joined a short time before. During the six years which intervened between the production of Tamburlaine and his death, Marlowe brought out three more plays, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II. He was killed in 1593, in a tavern-brawl, at Deptford, whither he had gone to take refuge from the plague then devastating London.

Marlowe's "Programme."- In the brief and haughty prologue prefixed to Tamburlaine, Marlowe not only an