of the city; 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." It may here be said, that the mutual hostility of the players and the Puritans continued until the suppression of the theatres under the Commonwealth; and for fifty or sixty years the Puritans were only mentioned by the dramatists to be mercilessly satirized. Even Shakespeare's catholic mind was not broad enough to include them in the range of its sympathies.

so that, when the bells toll to the

That this opposition to the stage by the staid and sober citizens was not without cause, soon became manifest. The characteristic of the drama, before Shakespeare, was intellectual and moral lawlessness; and most of the dramatists were men as destitute of eminent genius as of common principle. Stephen Gosson, a Puritan, in a tract published in 1581, attacks them on grounds equally of taste and morals; and five years afterwards Sir Philip Sidney speaks of the popular plays as against all "rules of honest civility and skilful

poetry." But Gosson indicates also the sources of their plots. Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," a series of not over-modest tales from the Italian; "The Golden Ass"; "The Ethiopian History"; "Amadis of France"; "The Round Table";—all the licentious comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish were thoroughly ransacked, he tells us, "to furnish the play-houses of London." The result, of course, was a chaos; but a chaos whose materials were wide and various, indicating that the English mind was in contact with, and attempting roughly to reproduce, the genius of Greece and Rome, of France, Spain, and Italy, the chronicles and romances of the Middle Ages, and was hospitable to intellectual influences from all quarters. What was needed was the powerful personality and shaping imagination of genius, to fuse these seemingly heterogeneous materials into new and original forms. "The Faerie Queene" of Spenser, and the drama of Shakespeare, evince the same assimilation of incongruous elements which Gosson derides and denounces as it appeared in the shapeless works of mediocrity. There was not merely to be a new drama, but a new art, and new principles of criticism to legitimate its creative audacities. The materials were rich and various. The difficulty was, that to combine them into original forms required genius, and genius higher, broader, more energetic, more imagi

native, and more humane than had ever before been directed to dramatic composition.

The immediate predecessors of Shakespeare-Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe - were all educated at the Universities, and were naturally prejudiced in favor of the classics. But they were, at the same time, wild Bohemian youths, thrown upon the world of London to turn their talents and accomplishments into the means of livelihood or the means of debauch. They depended principally on the popular theatres, and of course addressed the popular mind. Why, indeed, should they write according to the rules of the classic drama? The classic drama was a growth from the life of the times in which it appeared. Its rules were simply generalizations from the practice of classic dramatists. A drama

suited to the tastes and wants of the people of Greece or Rome was evidently not suited to the tastes and wants of the people of England. The whole framework of society, customs, manners, feelings, aspirations, traditions, superstitions, religion, — had changed; and, as the drama is a reflection of life, either as actually existing or ideally existing, it is evident that both the experience and the sentiments of the English audiences demanded that it should be the reflection of a new life. These dramatists, however, in emancipating themselves from the literary jurisprudence of Greece

and Rome, put little but individual caprice in its place. Released from formal rules, they did not rise into the artistic region of principles, but fell into the pit of anarchy and mere lawlessness. Lacking the higher imagination which conceives living ideas and organizes living works, their dramas evince no coherence, no subordination of parts, no grasp of the subject as a whole. There is a German play in which Adam is represented as passing across the stage, "going to be created." The drama of the age of Elizabeth, in the persons of Greene, Peele, Kyd, and others, indicates, in some such rude way, that it is "going to be created."

That this dramatic shapelessness was not inconsistent with single poetic conceptions of the greatest force and fineness, might be proved by abundant quotations. Lodge, for example, was a poor dramatist; but what living poet would not be proud to own this exquisite description, in his lyric of "Rosaline," of the person and influence of beauty?

"Like to the clear in highest sphere,

Where all imperial glory shines,

Of selfsame color is her hair,

Whether unfolded or in twines.

"Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,

Refining heaven by every wink;
The gods do fear whenas they glow,

And I do tremble when I think.

"Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud
That beautifies Aurora's face;

Or like the silver-crimson shroud,

That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace.

"Her lips are like two budded roses,

Whom ranks of lilies neighbor nigh,
Within which bounds she balm encloses,
Apt to entice a deity.

"Her neck like to a stately tower,

Where Love himself imprisoned lies,

To watch for glances every hour

From her divine and sacred eyes.

"With orient pearl, with ruby red,

With marble white, with sapphire blue,

Her body everyway is fed,

Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view.

"Nature herself her shape admires;

The gods are wounded in her sight;
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires,

And at her eyes his brand doth light."

But a more potent spirit than any we have mentioned, and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors, was Christopher Marlowe, a man of humble parentage, but with Norman blood in his brains, if not in his veins. He was, indeed, the proudest and fiercest of intellectual aristocrats. The son of a shoemaker, and born in 1564, his unmistakable genius seems to have gained him