or indirectly from Biblical sources; in the Moralities there was, apparently, an attempt to create new figures. These figures were more abstract and far less human than their immediate predecessors in the pageants, but they may have had the value of a halting and uncertain attempt to create instead of reproduce. The first result was, apparently, a retrogression from the dramatic idea: the earlier plays had shown some skill in the development of character; in the Moralities the stage was surrendered to the personifications of abstract virtues. In place of a very real Devil, revelling in grotesque humour, and an equally real Herod, who gave free play to the melodramatic element so dear to the uncultivated in every age, appeared those very tenuous and shadowy abstractions, the World, the Flesh, the Devil, not as actors in the world's tragedy, but as personifications of the principle of evil; with Genus Humanum, Pleasure, Slander, Perseverance, and the Seven Deadly Sins. These prolix and monotonous plays cover a wide range of subjects, from the popular" Everyman," which deals, not without dignity, with the supreme experience of death, to "Wyt and Science," which doubtless, on many a school stage, set forth the charms of knowledge, and presented one of the earliest pleas for athletics.

The Moralities beguiled the darkest period in the literary history of England; the tide of the first dramatic energy had gone out, the tide of the second and greater dramatic movement had not set in. There were freedom, spontaneity, fresh feeling, poetic

imagery, in the ballads; but the Moralities were mechanical, rigid, laboured, and uninspired.

The Moralities marked, however, one important step in the development of the English drama: they created opportunities for professional actors, and made acting as a profession possible. The earlier plays had been in the hands of amateurs; men who had, in many cases, considerable skill in acting, but who were members of guilds, with other and different occupations. Side by side with the Mystery and Miracle plays there had percolated through the long period when the English drama was in the making many kinds of shows, more or less coarse and full of buffoonery, in the hands of roving pantomimists, singers, comedians a class without habitation, standing, or character. These wandering performers, many of them doubtless men of genuine gifts cast upon an unpropitious time, found place at this period in companies supported by noblemen and attached to great houses, or in companies which presented plays in various parts of the country in the courts of inns and, on great occasions, in large towns and cities. For all classes dearly loved the bravery, excitement, and diversion of the pageant, the masque, and the play of every kind. The parts were entirely in the hands of men; no women appeared on the stage until after the time of Shakespeare; the female characters were taken by boys.

The transition from the Moralities to the fully developed play was gradual, and was not marked by logical gradations. The tendency to allegory gave

place slowly to the tendency to character-drawing, to the unfolding of a story, and to the humour and liveliness of the comedy. One of the earliest forms which comedy took was the Interlude - —a transitional dramatic form with which the name of John Heywood is identified. A London boy, believed to have sung for a time in the choir of the Chapel Royal, Heywood studied at Oxford, was befriended by that great Englishman, Sir Thomas More, and early became attached to the Court of Henry the Eighth as a player. Players were still under social and religious interdict, but Heywood's sincerity as a Catholic withstood the test of the withdrawal of the royal favour at a time when a king's smile was fortune in a most tangible form. There was a manly integrity in the nature of John Heywood, as in that of many of his fellow-actors. The Interlude in his hands was less ambitious in construction than a play; shorter, more vivacious, and much closer to the life of the time. It was often rude, but it was oftener racy, direct, and effective in expression; using the familiar colloquial speech of the day with great effectiveness. The interest turned on a humorous situation, and the dialogue was enlivened by the play of shrewd native wit. In the "Four P's" the characters were so well known that the audience hardly needed the stimulus of wit to awaken its interest. The Palmer, the Poticary, the Pedlar, and the Pardoner brought the playwright and his auditors into easy and immediate contact, and furnished ample opportunity to satirize or ridicule the vices, hypocrisies, and follies of the time. The structure of the Inter

lude was simple, and its wit not too fine for the coarse taste of the time; but it was a true growth of the English soil, free from foreign influence; the virility, the gayety, and the license of the early English spirit were in it.

"Ralph Roister Doister," the earliest comedy, was produced not later than 1550-—perhaps twenty years after the production of the "Four P's." Heywood had shown how to set character in distinct outlines on the stage; Nicholas Udall, an Oxford student, a scholar, holding the head-mastership first of Eton College and later of Westminster School, brought the comedy to completeness by adding to the interest of characters essentially humorous the more absorbing interest of a well-defined plot. Udall was a schoolmaster, but there was no pedantry in him; he felt the deep classical influence which had swept Europe like a tide, but he took his materials from the life about him, and he used good native speech. He had learned from the Latin comedy how to construct both a plot and a play, and his training gave him easy mastery of sound expression; but he composed his comedies in terms of English life. "Roister Doister" was a type of man instantly recognized by an English audience of every social grade; a coward who was also a boaster, whose wooing, like that of Falstaff, affords ample opportunity for the same rollicking fun. The significance of the piece lay in its freshness, its freedom, and its ease qualities which were prophetic of the birth of a true drama.

"Gammer Gurton's Needle," a broad, coarse, but

effective picture of rustic manners, generally believed to have been written by John Still, a Lincolnshire man by birth, a Cambridge man by education, and a Bishop by vocation, marks the first appearance of the fully developed farce in English, and is notable for vigorous characterization in a mass of vulgar buffoonery. That such a piece should come from the hand of the stern divine, with Puritan aspect, who lies at rest in Wells Cathedral, and that it was performed before a college audience in Cambridge, shows that the social and intellectual conditions which permitted so close a juxtaposition of the sacred and the vulgar in the Mystery and Miracle plays still prevailed. The saving grace of this early dramatic writing was its vitality; in this, and in its native flavour and its resistance to foreign influence, lay its promise.

The earlier development of comedy as compared with tragedy is not difficult to account for. Tragedy exacts something from an audience; a certain degree of seriousness or of culture must be possessed by those who are to enjoy or profit by it. Comedy, on the

other hand, appeals to the untrained no less than the trained man; it collects its audience at the village blacksmith's or the country shop as readily as in the most amply appointed theatre. Moreover, it kept close to popular life and taste at a time when the influence of the classical literatures was putting its impress on men of taste and culture. Italy, by virtue of its immense service in the recovery of classical thought and art, and in the production of great works of its own in literature, painting, sculpture, and archi