ances and never of these others, we insensibly grow to attach great importance to the former and to omit the latter altogether in our view. The second reason lies in the error in psychology I have discussed. It is supposed that, while any band of rustics dressing up is relevant to the history of drama, no entertainment given by minstrels is, unless it is full-blown realistic acting. I think that careful consideration of the imagined states of mind of a mediæval, or indeed of a modern, audience, will show that the theatrical emotion begins far before that. Even a single minstrel reciting a tragic story seems to me nearer to evoking it than many apparently more "mimetic" activities. And directly he introduces any representation or imitation-as reciters always tend to do-drama is, in embryo, there. I think it is certain that a single performer can produce all the effects of drama, by representing, conventionally, several characters in turn. Mlle. Yvette Guilbert does it. You get from her the illusion of seeing, with extraordinary insight and vividness, first the prisoner of Nantes, and then the gaoler's daughter, quite as much as you would in an opera. The thing can go further. I myself have seen a mere amateur represent at one time and in his one person two lame men, each lame in a different way, walking

arm-in-arm, with almost complete realism. And when it comes to dialogues and estrifs between two or more performers, it seems to me absurd' pedantry, a judging by forms instead of realities, to deny the presence of drama.

In any case, the mimi went into the darkness, at the end of Rome, performing plays; and the same class reappears, performing plays, as soon as we can discover anything about them, centuries later. The influence of the farces these wanderers were playing towards the end of the middle ages, on early English comedy, is more or less recognised. I think it is very probable they had a great influence also on tragedy and on drama as a whole. Some of them, it is known, used to perform puppet-plays wherever they went. The importance of these in keeping drama and the taste for tragedy and comedy alive in the hearts of the people is immense. These strolling professional entertainers took their part also in other kinds of dramatic performances. We find them helping in folk-plays and festivals; and when the religious plays were secularised, they often appear as aiding the amateurs. Indeed, the "interlude," the favourite dramatic form which develops out of the secularised religious plays, and which led straight to the Elizabethan drama proper, fell largely into the hands

of the "minstrels." About that time they were reinforced, and rivalled, by the various local companies of actors who began touring in a semiprofessional way. They were also strengthened during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by being enrolled in the service of various great lords. Under both popular and aristocratic circumstances these professionals, after severe competition with amateurs during the first part of the sixteenth century, settled, some of them, into theatres, and became the actors of the Elizabethan drama. Their importance in this light is obviously very great. But their true position can be guessed by inspecting Mr. Chambers' appendices of mediæval plays and Mr. Tucker Murray's more recent researches. It was they that were responsible for continual dramatic performances of every kind throughout England. How good or bad these were we cannot tell. The forces of religion opposed them, with varying vigour at different periods, and probably succeeded in degrading them to a low level. But they must have prepared the mind of the people to expect certain things in tragedy or comedy; and they may account for various aspects of Elizabethan plays that neither the religious nor the classical influence explains.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, then,

the drama was in an inchoate condition. Interludes of all kinds, moral, religious, controversial, and farcical, were being played by all sorts of audiences, besides the rough beginnings of popular tragedy and comedy, and many survivals of the old religious plays. In the sixties the real Elizabethan drama began; and one of the chief influences in working the change was the classical one. It came from above, and from amateurs. It was started, it is noteworthy, by people with a fixed, conscious, solemn, artistic aim. They wanted to have tragedies in the real classical way; so they imitated, queerly enough, Seneca! English literature has always been built on a reverent misunderstanding of the classics. Anyhow, anyone is good enough to be a god. The worst art has always been great enough to inspire the best. The iron laws of heredity do not affect literature; and Seneca may father Shakespeare as Macpherson fathered the Romantic Move

ment.

The dates of the Senecan movement in Italy, France, and England have been elaborately worked out. They do not concern us now. The influence of Seneca, and, vaguely, what was thought to be the classical tradition, in accordance with the misunderstood laws of Aristotle, came primarily by two streams, through Italy

and France. Tancred and Gismunda was influenced by the Italian Senecans; Kyd translated Garnier. Italy, of course, the romantic home of all beauty and art, had the most influence. But culture came from France. The English began translating Seneca for themselves in the sixties and seventies. As far as can be seen, the position in the eighties, when Marlowe and Kyd were about to fling English tragedy as we know it shouting into the world, was that the popular stage was scarcely touched at all by this classical, Senecan movement; the children's companies and ordinary court plays were only partly and patchily affected; but private performances in the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn had proudly and completely adopted the Senecan (or, generally, classical) style. As these were often given before the Queen, they had great influence in spreading the impression that this type of tragedy was the highest, the only type intellectual and cultivated people could aspire to. The Senecan boom did not leave much directly to Elizabethan drama; far less than is generally made out. It left perhaps a ghost tradition, the muchadvertised and over-valued "revenge motive," and the tendency to division into five acts. But indirectly it had value in tightening up the drama, pulling the scattered scenes which appeal