bly. The Elizabethans were above all men of the theatre, and planned performances. It is important always to keep this in mind when reading their "plays," always to be trying to visualise the whole performance from the text, and to judge it so, and always to look with suspicion on those who judge the text as literature. It may be good literature, sometimes; but it was not primarily that. To judge The Duchess of Malfi from the book of the words which we happen to possess is a little like judging a great picture by a good photograph of it. The general plan is given you, and you see all the lines, and shapes, and shading; and you have to supply the colour by an effort of the imagination. Much genuine æsthetic pleasure can be got from this; but no one would be so rash as to assume that, after that, he knew the picture. With plays, people are more presumptuous. But an honest man will sadly have to acknowledge that, in the text, we have only the material for a rough, partial, and hesitating appreciation of The Duchess of Malfi; and that this is the truer because it is an Elizabethan play, that is to say, it is written in a language somewhat different from ours, and pronounced differently too, and it was performed in conditions we do not completely know and cannot at all realise. It was composed for

an audience accustomed to the platform stage and no scenery; which we can never be. It was composed for the stage, and we judge it as literature; we are only readers. It is right enough to attempt to realise imaginatively Elizabethan plays as plays. It is right enough to admire their great literary merits and their rather accidental power as study-drama. But, after all, we have only the text-and that a not always trustworthy one-one factor of several in the play, a residue, fragments of the whole. We are like men who possess sweet-smelling shards of a jar which once held perfumes, and know how fragrant it must have been; but the jar is broken, and the perfumes lost.

CHAPTER II

THE ORIGINS OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

IT needs the imaginative sympathy of a good anthropologist to understand the real nature of the various progenitors of the Elizabethan drama; and it needs the intuition of a good psychologist to interpret it. Luckily much of the outer history, names, dates, and facts, together with a good deal of understanding explanation, has been given us by such writers as Professor Creizenach, and, above all, by Mr. Chambers. Subsequent works, such as The Cambridge History of English Literature, merely follow on his lines, sometimes slightly varying relative importances, nothing more. But as one reads the array of facts and the brilliantly powerful generalisations and inductions of Mr. Chambers, or the patient condensations of his successors, it is impossible not to feel the full sea of scepticism. Where we have records, do we really understand? It is hard enough, four-fifths of the books now written on them witness, not to be wholly out of

touch with the Elizabethans themselves. But they are our brothers and fathers. These others, these white-faced savages who seem to beckon and move in the fog of the Middle Ages or the deeper night behind what have they to do with us? A surface likeness of name and tongue will not hide their foreignness. Their hearts are different, and distant from ours. They live in another universe. The unconscious worshippers of a vegetation-god, the audience of a scốp, the spectators of a miracle-play-what was really in their minds? We triumphantly know that the Feast of Fools was celebrated at Tournai on the eve of Holy Innocents, 1498, that an interlude was given at King's Lynn on Corpus Christi 1385, that the processional religious drama was acted on "pageants," and so forth. But what were the people thinking, as the waggons rolled by or the actors came out? How like was it to an Elizabethan's feeling as he watched The Tragedy of Byron? or to ours when we see The Importance of Being Earnest? It is absurd to pretend we know.

Such are the misgivings with which the honest student looks back on "the origins of the drama." He can pretend he sees how the "platform-stage" arose, and passed into the "picturestage"; he can cheat himself into believing he

has established the generations of an English dramatic form; but what, in our time and race, is the history of those complicated states of mind the witnessing of Hamlet breeds in us-that he dare only wonder.

If he looks beyond the Middle Ages he finds at first more familiar things. Seneca's plays fall recognisable on his modern hearing; and if those were never on the stage, other tragedies and farces which we could, it is imaginable, understand, if not applaud, held the Roman ear. And the modern eye greets even more gladly finer, less recorded, performances. The best taste in Rome loved the intricate exquisite tragedies of the χειρόσοφοι, the dancers. We glibly call them, allow literary people to call them, the decadent successors of the drama. They may, we can believe now, have awoken passionate ecstasies of emotion, beyond our dreams; but they could not be handed down. These "choreodrames" have perished. So we comfortably fall in with the assumption of those who practise literature, that drama, that queer and monstrous birth, is the God of the theatre. Literary people are very kind to each other; and all-powerful over civilisation. Through them come our history, facts, ideas, and arguments; and so our valuations. We see all things through their