incongruous materials as to produce a pleasing general effect. He has the merit of simplicity in details, and avoids the pompous circumlocution in vogue among contemporary authors. His main stylistic defect is the employment of cheap Latin mythology in and out of season. But his scenes abound in vivid incidents, which divert criticism from the threadbare thinness of the main conception, and offer opportunities to clever actors. In spite of these good points, we feel how crude and poor a thing the drama still remained. Greene's plays, intermediate between comedy, tragedy, and history, illustrate a step in the development of the Romantic Drama, which had to be taken before Shakspere set his own and final seal upon that form of art. Stale devices of the Miracle and Morality survive, indicating the poet's lack of power to organise the mechanism of a play. The Vice and Devil still amuse the groundlings; and the principal personages introduce their parts, more antiquo, with a blunt description of their qualities and claims to notice. The best of Greene's work realises Cecchi's description of the Farsa. The worst relapses into the insipid buffoonery of the old English jig and merriment.

We possess none of Greene's earlier dramatic compositions. Those which survive are posterior to Marlowe's Tamburlaine.' Greene uses blank verse, but in his use of it betrays the manner of the couplet. His Orlando' is versified from Ariosto, and contains a whole Italian stanza embedded in its English. The Looking-Glass for London' dramatises the

1 See above, p. 260.

GREENE'S PLAYS.

history of Jonah at Nineveh, so moral for the capital of England.

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as to point a

Alphonsus Prince of Arragon' is a stage-show of processions, battles, coronations, and the like, without dramatic merit. James the Fourth of Scotland' claims a somewhat higher place. It partakes of the history play and the novella, pretending to be borrowed from Scotch annals, but relying for its interest upon a romantic love-story. The induction might be mentioned as an early instance of a very popular theatrical device. In order to create more perfect illusion, or to enliven the pauses between the acts with dialogue, our elder dramatists represented the real fruit of their invention as a play within a play, feigning that the persons who first appeared upon the stage fell asleep and saw the drama in a vision, or that it was conjured up by magic art before them, or that they chanced upon some strange adventure while wandering in woody places. The Taming of a Shrew,' before Shakspere touched it, was already furnished with that humorous deception practised upon Sly, which serves to introduce the comedy. Lyly begged his audience to regard two of his pieces as dreams. Peele caused the action of one of his rural medleys to grow from a discussion between travellers belated in a forest. Heywood in his Masque of Love's Mistress' brings Midas and Apuleius on the stage, disputing about poetry. The play occurs as matter for their argument, and they canvass it at intervals between the scenes. Jonson and Marston employed similar artifices for blending criticism with the drama. Beaumont introduced the Knight of the Burning Pestle' with a

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tent.

humorous dialogue between a citizen and his wife, who insist upon their prentice taking part in the performance. The introduction to Greene's 'James the Fourth' brings Oberon with his elves and a discon tented Scot upon the stage. The elves dance; the Scot produces the play in order to explain his disconOberon remains as a spectator, and makes mirth during the intervals by dances of his fairies. The drama illustrates the miseries of states, when flatterers rule the Court, and kings yield to lawless vice. In the portrait of the Lady Ida, for whose love James deserts his wife and plots her murder, Greene conceived and half expressed a true woman's character. There is a simplicity, a perfume of purity, in Ida, which proceeds from the poet's highest source of inspiration. Nor do the romantic adventures and pathetic trials of the queen fall far short of a melodramatic success. That this man, dissolute and vicious. as he was, should have been the first of our playwrights to feel and represent the charm of maiden modesty upon the public stage, is not a little singular. Perhaps it was, in part, to this that Greene owed his popularity. Fawnia in Pandosto,' Margaret in Friar Bacon, Sephestia in Menaphon,' Ida and Dorothea in James the Fourth,' Philomela and the Shepherd's Wife in the Mourning Garment,' belong to one sisterhood, in whom the innocence of country life, unselfish love, and maternity are sketched with delicate and feeling touches.

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'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay' takes its name from the famous Franciscan monk, and closely follows an old English version of his legend in one portion of

'FRIAR BACON AND FRIAR BUNGAY?

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the plot. The conjuring tricks and incantations of the Friar are cleverly interwoven with a romantic tale of Edward Prince of Wales's love for Margaret, the fair maid of Fresingfield; the Earl of Lincoln's honest treachery, who woos her for his lord and wins her for himself; and the history of her two suitors, Lambert and Serlsby, who, together with their sons, are parenthetically killed upon the stage. A double comic interest is sustained by Edward's Court fool Ralph, and Miles the servant of Bacon. Written by a clever story-teller, who, without a high ideal of art or deep insight into character, could piece a tale together with variety of incidents, this play is decidedly interesting. The action never flags. Pretty scenes succeed each other now pastoral at Fresingfield, now grave at Oxford, now terrible in Bacon's cell, now splendid at the Court, now humorous with Miles, the friar's man. A jocund freshness of blithe country air blows through the piece, and its two threads of interest are properly combined in the conclusion. Edward pardons the Earl of Lincoln by giving him Margaret in marriage on the same day that he weds Eleanor of Castile. Friar Bacon foregoes his magic arts; and Miles, who is a lineal descendant of the Vice, dances off the stage upon a merry devil's back, promising to play the tapster in a certain thirsty place where men are marvellous dry.'

In his treatment of the magician, Greene differed widely from his friend Marlowe. Marlowe idealised the character of Faustus, using that legend for his interpretation of the criminal passion for unlawful power. Greene left Bacon as he found him in the popular

romance—a necromancer, whose ambition is to circle England with a brazen wall; a conjuror with familiar spirits at his beck, the maker of the brazen head, and the possessor of a magic glass. His chief exploits are the discomfiture of various obnoxious personages, whom he spirits through the air or strikes with dumbness, and the service rendered to the Prince of Wales by suspending Margaret's marriage rites at the distance of many miles.

The language of the play, in spite of its essentially English character, is curiously defaced with superficial pedantry. The serious characters make use of classical mythology on all occasions. Young Edward describes the keeper's daughter of Fresingfield as sweeping like Venus through the house,' and 'shining among her cream-bowls as Pallas 'mongst her princely housewifery.' Margaret herself is no less glib with allusions to Semele and Paris and Enone. But these flowers of rhetoric are mere excrescences upon a style of silvery simplicity. As a fair specimen of Greene's natural manner, I will quote a description of Oxford, first seen by King Henry and the Emperor riding over Magdalen Bridge:

Trust me, Plantagenet, these Oxford schools

Are richly seated near the river side :

The mountains full of fat and fallow deer,

The battling pastures lade with kine and flocks,
The town gorgeous with high-built colleges,
And scholars seemly in their grave attire,
Learned in searching principles of art.

Writing in direct competition with Marlowe, and striving to produce strong lines,' Greene indulged in extravagant imagery, which, because it lacks the ani