"What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,

As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."

Master Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson

"Souls of Poets dead and gone,

What Elysium have ye known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"

Keats.

LONDON:

BRADBURY, AGNEW, & Co., printers, whiteFRIARS.

ON THE DRAMA OF ELIZABETH AND JAMES CONSIDERED AS THE MAIN PRODUCT OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND.

30 much has been written about the origins of the Drama in England, that it will suffice to touch but briefly on this topic. The English, like other European nations, composed and acted Miracle Plays upon the events of sacred history and the main doctrines of the Church. Embracing the whole drama of humanity, from the Creation of the World to the Last Judgment, these Miracles, of which we possess several well-preserved specimens, might rather be regarded as immense epics scenically presented to an audience, than as plays with a plot and action. Yet certain episodes in the lengthy cycle, such for example as the Entrance of Noah into the Ark, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Nativity of our Lord, the story of the Woman taken

in Adultery, and the Repentance of Magdalen, detached themselves from the main scheme, and became the subjects of free dramatic handling.

In this way the English people were familiarized at an early period with tragedy and comedy in the rough, while preparation was made for the emergence of the secular Drama as a specific form of art. Before this happened, however, a second stage had to be accomplished. Between the Miracle Play and the Drama intervened the Morality and the Interlude. The former was a peculiar species of representation, in which abstract conceptions and the personages of allegory were introduced in action under the forms of men and women. The tone of such pieces remained purely didactic, and their machinery was clumsy; yet their authors found it impossible to deal dramatically with Youth and Pleasure, Sin, Grace, and Repentance, the Devil and Death, without developing dialogue, marking character, and painting the incidents of real life. Thus the Morality led to the Interlude, which completed the disengagement of the drama from religious aims, and brought various types of human nature on the stage. The most remarkable specimen of this kind now extant may be mentioned. It is the elder Heywood's Three P's, in which a Pardoner, a Pedlar, and a Palmer, three characteristic figures among contemporary vagrants and impostors, are vividly delineated. From the Interlude to Farce and Comedy there was but a