Drama

Drama.  (Continued from Volume 8 Slice 6.)

10. Medieval Drama

While the scattered and persecuted strollers thus kept alive something of the popularity, if not of the loftier traditions, of their art, neither, on the other hand, was there an utter absence of written compositions to bridge the Ecclesiastical and monastic literary drama. gap between ancient and modern dramatic literature. In the midst of the condemnation with which the Christian Church visited the stage, its professors and votaries, we find individual ecclesiastics resorting in their writings to both the tragic and the comic form of the ancient drama. These isolated productions, which include the Χριστὀς πάσχων (Passion of Christ) formerly attributed to St Gregory Nazianzen, and the Querolus, long fathered upon Plautus himself, were doubtless mostly written for educational purposes—whether Euripides and Lycophron, or Menander, Plautus and Terence, served as the outward models. The same was probably Hrosvitha. the design of the famous “comedies” of Hrosvitha, the Benedictine nun of Gandersheim, in Eastphalian Saxony, which associate themselves in the history of Christian literature with the spiritual revival of the 10th century in the days of Otto the Great. While avowedly imitated in form from the comedies of Terence, these religious exercises derive their themes—martyrdoms,1 and miraculous or otherwise startling conversions2—from the legends of Christian saints. Thus, from perhaps the 9th to the 12th centuries, Germany and France, and through the latter, by means of the Norman Conquest, England, became acquainted with what may be called the literary monastic drama. It was no doubt occasionally performed by the children under the care of monks or nuns, or by the religious themselves; an exhibition of the former kind was that of the Play of St Katharine, acted at Dunstable about the year 1110 in “copes” by the scholars of the Norman Geoffrey, afterwards abbot of St Albans. Nothing is known concerning it except the fact of its performance, which was certainly not regarded as a novelty.

These efforts of the cloister came in time to blend themselves with more popular forms of the early medieval drama. The natural agents in the transmission of these popular forms were those mimes, whom, while the representatives The joculatores, jongleurs, minstrels. of more elaborate developments, the “pantomimes” in particular, had inevitably succumbed, the Roman drama had left surviving it, unextinguished and unextinguishable. Above all, it is necessary to point out how in the long interval now in question—the “dark ages,” which may, from the present point of view, be reckoned from about the 6th to the 11th century—the Latin and the Teutonic elements of what may be broadly designated as medieval “minstrelsy,” more or less imperceptibly, coalesced. The traditions of the disestablished and disendowed mimus combined with the “occupation” of the Teutonic scôp, who as a professional personage does not occur in the earliest Teutonic poetry, but on the other hand is very distinctly traceable under this name or that of the “gleeman,” in Anglo-Saxon literature, before it fell under the control of the Christian Church. Her influence and that of docile rulers, both in England and in the far wider area of the Frank empire, gradually prevailed even over the inherited goodwill which neither Alfred nor even Charles the Great had denied to the composite growth in which mimus and scôp alike had a share.

How far the joculatores—which in the early middle ages came to be the name most widely given to these irresponsible transmitters of a great artistic trust—kept alive the usage of entertainments more essentially dramatic than the minor varieties of their performances, we cannot say. In different countries these entertainers suited themselves to different tastes, and with the rise of native literatures to different literary tendencies. The literature of the troubadours of Provence, which communicated itself to Spain and Italy, came only into isolated contact with the beginnings of the religious drama; in northern France the jongleurs, as the joculatores were now called, were confounded with the trouvères, who, to the accompaniment of vielle or harp, sang the chansons de geste commemorative of deeds of war. As appointed servants of particular households they were here, and afterwards in England, called menestrels (from ministeriales) or minstrels. Such a histrio or mimus (as he is called) was Taillefer, who rode first into the fight at Hastings, singing his songs of Roland and Charlemagne, and tossing his sword in the air and catching it again. In England such accomplished minstrels easily outshone the less versatile gleemen of pre-Norman times, and one or two of them appeared as landholders in Domesday Book, and many enjoyed the favour of the Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet kings. But here, as elsewhere, the humbler members of the craft spent their lives in strolling from castle to convent, from village-green to city-street, and there exhibiting their skill as dancers, tumblers, jugglers proper, and as masquers and conductors of bears and other dumb contributors to popular wonder and merriment. Their only chance of survival finally came to lie in organization under the protection of powerful nobles; but when, in the 15th century in England, companies of players issued forth from towns and villages, the profession, in so far as its members had not secured preference, saw itself threatened with ruin.

In any attempt to explain the transmission of dramatic elements from pagan to Christian times, and the influence exercised by this transmission upon the beginnings of the medieval drama, account should finally be taken Survivals and adaptations of pagan festive ceremonies and usages. of the pertinacious survival of popular festive rites and ceremonies. From the days of Gregory the Great, i.e. from the end of the 6th century onwards, the Western Church tolerated and even attracted to her own festivals popular customs, significant of rejoicing, which were in truth relics of heathen ritual. Such were the Mithraic feast of the 25th of December, or the egg of Eostre-tide, and a multitude of Celtic or Teutonic agricultural ceremonies. These rites, originally symbolical of propitiation or of weather-magic, were of a semi-dramatic nature—such as the dipping of the neck of corn in water, sprinkling holy drops upon persons or animals, processions of beasts or men in beast-masks, dressing trees with flowers, and the like, but above all ceremonial dances, often in disguise. The sword-dance, recorded by Tacitus, of which an important feature was the symbolic threat of death to a victim, endured (though it is rarely mentioned) to the later middle ages. By this time it had attracted to itself a variety of additional features, and of characters familiar as pace-eggers, mummers, morris-dancers (probably of distinct origin), who continually enlarged the scope of their performances, especially as regarded their comic element. The dramatic “expulsion of death,” or winter, by the destruction of a lay-figure—common through western Europe about the 8th century—seems connected with a more elaborate rite, in which a disguised performer (who perhaps originally represented summer) was slain and afterwards revived (the Pfingstl, Jack in the Green, or Green Knight). This representation, after acquiring a comic complexion, was annexed by the character dancers, who about the 15th century took to adding still livelier incidents from songs treating of popular heroes, such as St George and Robin Hood; which latter found a place in the festivities of May Day with their central figure, the May Queen. The earliest ceremonial observances of this sort were clearly connected with pastoral and agricultural life; but the inhabitants of the towns also came to have a share in them; and so, as will be seen later, did the clergy. They were in particular responsible for the buffooneries of the feast of fools (or asses), which enjoyed the greatest popularity in France (though protests against it are on record from the 11th century onwards to the 17th), but was well known from London to Constantinople. This riotous New Year’s celebration was probably derived from the ancient Kalend feasts, which may have bequeathed to it both the hobby-horse and the lord, or bishop, of misrule. In the 16th century the feast of fools was combined with the elaborate festivities of courts and cities during the twelve Christmas feast-days—the season when throughout the previous two centuries the “mummers” especially flourished, who in their disguisings and “viseres” began as dancers gesticulating in dumb-show, but ultimately developed into actors proper.

Thus the literary and the professional element, as well as that of popular festive usages, had survived to become tributaries to the main stream of the early Christian drama, which had its direct source in the liturgy of the Church The liturgy the main source of the medieval religious drama. itself. The service of the Mass contains in itself dramatic elements, and combines with the reading out of portions of Scripture by the priest—its “epical” part—a “lyrical” part in the anthems and responses of the congregation. At a very early period—certainly already in the 5th century—it was usual on special occasions to increase the attractions of public worship by living pictures, illustrating the Gospel narrative and accompanied by songs; and thus a certain amount of action gradually introduced itself into the service. The insertion, before or after sung portions Tropes. of the service, of tropes, originally one or more verses of texts, usually serving as introits and in connexion with the gospel of the day, and recited by the two halves of the choir, naturally led to dialogue chanting; and this was frequently accompanied by illustrative fragments of action, such as drawing down the veil from before the altar.

This practice of interpolations in the offices of the church, which is attested by texts from the 9th century onwards (the so-called “Winchester tropes” belong to the 10th and 11th), progressed, till on the great festivals of the The liturgical mystery. church the epical part of the liturgy was systematically connected with spectacular and in some measure mimical adjuncts, the lyrical accompaniment being of course retained. Thus the liturgical mystery—the earliest form of the Christian drama—was gradually called into existence. This had certainly been accomplished as early as the 10th century, when on great ecclesiastical festivals it was customary for the priests to perform in the churches these offices (as they were called). The whole Easter story, from the burial to Emmaus, was thus presented, the Maries and the angel adding their lyrical planctus; while the surroundings of the Nativity—the Shepherds, the Innocents, &c.—were linked with the Shepherds of Epiphany by a recitation of “Prophets,” including Vergil and the Sibyl. Before long, from the 11th century onwards, mysteries, as they were called, were produced in France on scriptural subjects unconnected with the great Church festivals—such as the Wise and Foolish Virgins, Adam (with the fall of Lucifer), Daniel, Lazarus, &c. Compositions on the last-named two themes remain from the hand of one of the very earliest of medieval play-writers, Hilarius, who may have been an Englishman, and who certainly studied under Abelard. He also wrote a “miracle” of St Nicholas, one of the most widely popular of medieval saints. Into the pieces founded on the Scripture narrative outside characters and incidents were occasionally introduced, by way of diverting the audience.

These mysteries and miracles being as yet represented by the clergy only, the language in which they were usually written is Latin—in many varieties of verse with occasional prose; but already in the 11th century the further The collective mystery. step was taken of composing these texts in the vernacular—the earliest example being the mystery of the Resurrection. In time a whole series of mysteries was joined together; a process which was at first roughly and then more elaborately pursued in France and elsewhere, and finally resulted in the collective mystery—merely a scholars’ term of course, but one to which the principal examples of the English mystery-drama correspond.

The productions of the medieval religious drama it is usual technically to divide into three classes. The mysteries proper deal with scriptural events only, their purpose being to set forth, with the aid of the prophetic or preparatory Mysteries, miracles, and morals distinguished. history of the Old Testament, and more especially of the fulfilling events of the New, the central mystery of the Redemption of the world, as accomplished by the Nativity, the Passion and the Resurrection. But in fact these were not kept distinctly apart from the miracle-plays, or miracles, which are strictly speaking concerned with the legends of the saints of the church; and in England the name mysteries was not in use. Of these species the miracles must more especially have been fed from the resources of the monastic literary drama. Thirdly, the moralities, or moral-plays, teach and illustrate the same truths—not, however, by direct representation of scriptural or legendary events and personages, but allegorically, their characters being personified virtues or qualities. Of the moralities the Norman trouvères had been the inventors; and doubtless this innovation connects itself with the endeavour, which in France had almost proved victorious by the end of the 13th century, to emancipate dramatic performances from the control of the church.

The attitude of the clergy towards the dramatic performances which had arisen out of the elaboration of the services of the church, but soon admitted elements from other sources, was not, and could not be, uniform. As the plays grew The clergy and the religious drama. longer, their paraphernalia more extensive, and their spectators more numerous, they began to be represented outside as well as inside the churches, at first in the churchyards, and the use of the vulgar tongue came to be gradually preferred. A Beverley Resurrection play (1220 c.) and some others are bilingual. Miracles were less dependent on this connexion with the church services than mysteries proper; and lay associations, gilds, and schools in particular, soon began to act plays in honour of their patron saints in or near their own halls. Lastly, as scenes and characters of a more or less trivial description were admitted even into the plays acted or superintended by the clergy, as some of these characters came to be depended on by the audiences for conventional extravagance or fun, every new Herod seeking to out-Herod his predecessor, and the devils and their chief asserting themselves as indispensable favourites, the comic element in the religious drama increased; and that drama itself, even where it remained associated with the church, grew more and more profane. The endeavour to sanctify the popular tastes to religious uses, which connects itself with the institution of the great festival of Corpus Christi (1264, confirmed 1311), when the symbol of the mystery of the Incarnation was borne in solemn procession, led to the closer union of the dramatic exhibitions (hence often called processus) with this and other religious feasts; but it neither limited their range nor controlled their development.

It is impossible to condense into a few sentences the extremely varied history of the processes of transformation undergone by the medieval drama in Europe during the two centuries—from about 1200 to about 1400—in which it ran Progress of the medieval drama in Europe. a course of its own, and during the succeeding period, in which it was only partially affected by the influence of the Renaissance. A few typical phenomena may, however, be noted in the case of the drama of each of the several chief countries of the West; where the vernacular successfully supplanted Latin as the ordinary medium of dramatic speech, where song was effectually ousted by recitation and dialogue, and where finally, though the emancipation was on this head nowhere absolute, the religious drama gave place to the secular.

In France, where dramatic performances had never fallen entirely into the hands of the clergy, the progress was speediest and most decided towards forms approaching those of the modern drama. The earliest play in the French France. tongue, however, the 12th-century Adam, supposed to have been written by a Norman in England (as is a fragmentary Résurrection of much the same date), still reveals its connexion with the liturgical drama. Jean Bodel of Arras’ miracle-play of St Nicolas (before 1205) is already the production of a secular author, probably designed for the edification of some civic confraternity to which he belonged, and has some realistic features. On the other hand, the Theophilus of Rutebeuf (d. c. 1280) treats its Faust-like theme, with which we meet again in Low-German dramatic literature two centuries later, in a rather lifeless form but in a highly religious spirit, and belongs to the cycle of miracles of the Virgin of which examples abound throughout this period. Easter or Passion plays were fully established in popular acceptance in Paris as well as in other towns of France by the end of the 14th century; and in 1402 the Confrérie de la Passion, who at first devoted themselves exclusively to the performance of this species, obtained a royal privilege for the purpose. These series of religious plays were both extensive and elaborate; perhaps the most notable series (c. 1450) is that by Arnoul Greban, who died as a canon of Le Mans, his native town. Its revision, by Jean Michel, containing much illustrative detail (first performed at Angers in 1486), was very popular. Still more elaborate is the Rouen Christmas mystery of 1474, and the celebrated Mystère du vieil testament, produced at Abbeville in 1458, and performed at Paris in 1500. Most of the Provençal Christmas and Passion plays date from the 14th century, as well as a miracle of St Agnes. The miracles of saints were popular in all parts of France, and the diversity of local colouring naturally imparted to these productions contributed materially to the growth of the early French drama. The miracles of Ste Geneviève and St Denis came directly home to the inhabitants of Paris, as that of St Martin to the citizens of Tours; while the early victories of St Louis over the English might claim a national significance for the dramatic celebration of his deeds. The local saints of Provence were in their turn honoured by miracles dating from the 15th and 16th centuries.

It is less easy to trace the origins of the comic medieval drama in France, connected as they are with an extraordinary variety of associations for professional, pious and pleasurable purposes. The ludi inhonesti in which the students of a Paris college (Navarre) were in 1315 debarred from engaging cannot be proved to have been dramatic performances; the earliest known secular plays presented by university students in France were moralities, performed in 1426 and 1431. These plays, depicting conflicts between opposing influences—and at bottom the struggle between good and evil in the human soul—become more frequent from about this time onwards. Now it is (at Rennes in 1439) the contention between Bien-avisé and Mal-avisé (who at the close find themselves respectively in charge of Bonne-fin and Male-fin); now, one between l’homme juste and l’homme mondain; now, the contrasted story of Les Enfants de Maintenant, who, however, is no abstraction, but an honest baker with a wife called Mignotte. Political and social problems are likewise treated; and the Mystère du Concile de Bâle—an historical morality—dates back to 1432. But thought is taken even more largely of the sufferings of the people than of the controversies of the Church; and in 1507 we even meet with a hygienic or abstinence morality (by N. de la Chesnaye) in which “Banquet” enters into a conspiracy with “Apoplexy,” “Epilepsy” and the whole regiment of diseases.

Long before this development of an artificial species had been consummated—from the beginning of the 14th century onwards—the famous fraternity or professional union of the Basoche (clerks of the Parlement and the Châtelet) had been entrusted with the conduct of popular festivals at Paris, in which, as of right, they took a prominent personal share; and from a date unknown they had performed plays. But after the Confrérie de la Passion had been allowed to monopolize the religious drama, the basochiens had confined themselves to the presentment of moralities and of farces (from Italian farsa, Latin farcita), in which political satire had as a matter of course when possible found a place. A third association, calling themselves the Enfans sans souci, had, apparently also early in the 15th century, acquired celebrity by their performances of short comic plays called soties—in which, as it would seem, at first allegorical figures ironically “played the fool,” but which were probably before long not very carefully kept distinct from the farces of the Basoche, and were like these on occasion made to serve the purposes of State or of Church. Other confraternities and associations readily took a leaf out of the book of these devil-may-care good-fellows, and interwove their religious and moral plays with comic scenes and characters from actual life, thus becoming more and more free and secular in their dramatic methods, and unconsciously preparing the transition to the regular drama.

The earliest example of a serious secular play known to have been written in the French tongue is the Estoire de Griseldis (1393); which is in the style of the miracles of the Virgin, but is largely indebted to Petrarch. The Mystère du siege d’Orléans, on the other hand, written about half a century later, in the epic tediousness of its manner comes near to a chronicle history, and interests us chiefly as the earliest of many efforts to bring Joan of Arc on the stage. Jacques Milet’s celebrated mystery of the Destruction de Troye la grant (1452) seems to have been addressed to readers and not to hearers only. The beginnings of the French regular comic drama are again more difficult to extract from the copious literature of farces and soties, which, after mingling actual types with abstract and allegorical figures, gradually came to exclude all but the concrete personages; moreover, the large majority of these productions in their extant form belong to a later period than that now under consideration. But there is ample evidence that the most famous of all medieval farces, the immortal Maistre Pierre Pathelin (otherwise L’Avocat Pathelin), was written before 1470 and acted by the basochiens; and we may conclude that this delightful story of the biter bit, and the profession outwitted, typifies a multitude of similar comic episodes of real life, dramatized for the delectation of clerks, lawyers and students, and of all lovers of laughter.

In the neighbouring Netherlands many Easter and Christmas mysteries are noted from the middle of the 15th century, attesting the enduring popularity of these religious plays; and with them the celebrated series of the Seven Joys of The Netherlands. Maria—of which the first is the Annunciation and the seventh the Ascension. To about the same date belongs the small group of the so-called abele spelen (as who should say plays easily managed), chiefly on chivalrous themes. Though allegorical figures are already to be found in the Netherlands miracles of Mary, the species of the moralities was specially cultivated during the great Burgundian period of this century by the chambers or lodges of the Rederijkers (rhetoricians)—the well-known civic associations which devoted themselves to the cultivation of learned poetry and took an active share in the festivals that formed one of the most characteristic features of the life of the Low Countries. Among these moralities was that of Elckerlijk (printed 1495 and presumably by Peter Dorlandus), which there is good reason for regarding as the original of one of the finest of English moralities, Everyman.

In Italy the liturgical drama must have run its course as elsewhere; but the traces of it are few, and confined to the north-east. The collective mystery, so common in other Western countries, is in Italian literature Italy. represented by a single example only—a Passione di Gesù Cristo, performed at Revello in Saluzzo in the 15th century; though there are some traces of other cyclic dramas of the kind. The Italian religious plays, called figure when on Old, vangeli when on New, Testament subjects, and differing from those of northern Europe chiefly by the less degree of coarseness in their comic characters, seem largely to have sprung out of the development of the processional element in the festivals of the Church. Besides such processions as that of the Three Kings at Epiphany in Milan, there were the penitential processions and songs (laude), which at Assisi, Perugia and elsewhere already contained a dramatic element; and at Siena, Florence and other centres these again developed into the so-called (sacre) rappresentazioni, which became the most usual name for this kind of entertainment. Such a piece was the San Giovanni e San Paolo (1489), by Lorenzo the Magnificent—the prince who afterwards sought to reform the Italian stage by paganizing it; another was the Santa Teodora, by Luigi Pulci (d. 1487); San Giovanni Gualberto (of Florence) treats the religious experience of a latter-day saint; Rosana e Ulimento is a love-story with a Christian moral. Passion plays were performed at Rome in the Coliseum by the Compagnia del Gonfalone; but there is no evidence on this head before the end of the 15th century. In general, the spectacular magnificence of Italian theatrical displays accorded with the growing pomp of the processions both ecclesiastical and lay—called trionfi already in the days of Dante; while the religious drama gradually acquired an artificial character and elaboration of form assimilating it to the classical attempts, to be noted below, which gave rise to the regular Italian drama. The poetry of the Troubadours, which had come from Provence into Italy, here frequently took a dramatic form, and may have suggested some of his earlier poetic experiments to Petrarch.

It was a matter of course that remnants of the ancient popular dramatic entertainments should have survived in particular abundance on Italian soil. They were to be recognized in the improvised farces performed at the courts, in the churches (farse spirituali), and among the people; the Roman carnival had preserved its wagon-plays, and various links remained to connect the modern comic drama of the Italians with the Atellanes and mimes of their ancestors. But the more notable later comic developments, which belong to the 16th century, will be more appropriately noticed below. Moralities proper had not flourished in Italy, where the love of the concrete has always been dominant in popular taste; more numerous are examples of scenes, largely mythological, in which the influence of the Renaissance is already perceptible, of eclogues, and of allegorical festival-plays of various sorts.

In Spain hardly a monument of the medieval religious drama has been preserved. There is manuscript evidence of the 11th century attesting the early addition of dramatic elements to the Easter office; and a Spanish fragment Spain. of the Three Kings Epiphany play, dating from the 12th century, is, like the French Adam, one of the very earliest examples of the medieval drama in the vernacular. But that religious plays were performed in Spain is clear from the permission granted by Alphonso X. of Castile (d. 1284) to the clergy to represent them, while prohibiting the performance by them of juegos de escarnio (mocking plays). The earliest Spanish plays which we possess belong to the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century, and already show humanistic influence. In 1472 the couplets of Mingo Revulgo (i.e. Domingo Vulgus, the common people), and about the same time another dialogue by the same author, offer examples of a sort resembling the Italian contrasti (see below).

The German religious plays in the vernacular, the earliest of which date from the 14th and 15th centuries, and were produced at Trier, Wolfenbuttel, Innsbruck, Vienna, Berlin, &c., were of a simple kind; but in some of them, though Germany. they were written by clerks, there are traces of the minstrels’ hands. The earliest complete Christmas play in German, contained in a 14th-century St Gallen MS., has nothing in it to suggest a Latin original. On the other hand, the play of The Wise and the Foolish Virgins, in a Thuringian MS. thought to be as early as 1328, a piece of remarkable dignity, was evidently based on a Latin play. Other festivals besides Christmas were celebrated by plays; but down to the Reformation Easter enjoyed a preference. In the same century miracle-plays began to be performed, in honour of St Catherine, St Dorothea and other saints. But all these productions seem to belong to a period when the drama was still under ecclesiastical control. Gradually, as the liturgical drama returned to the simpler forms from which it had so surprisingly expanded, and ultimately died out, the religious plays performed outside the churches expanded more freely; and the type of mystery associated with the name of the Frankfort canon Baldemar von Peterweil communicated itself, with other examples, to the receptive region of the south-west. The Corpus Christi plays, or (as they were here called) Frohnleichnamsspiele, are notable, since that of Innsbruck (1391) is probably the earliest extant example of its class. The number of non-scriptural religious plays in Germany was much smaller than that in France; but it may be noted that (in accordance with a long-enduring popular notion) the theme of the last judgment was common in Germany in the latter part of the middle ages. Of this theme Antichrist may be regarded as an episode, though in 1469 an Antichrist appears to have occupied at Frankfort four days in its performance. The earlier (12th century) Antichrist is a production quite unique of its kind; this political protest breathes the Ghibelline spirit of the reign (Frederick Barbarossa’s) in which it was composed.

Though many of the early German plays contain an element of the moralities, there were few representative German examples of the species. The academical instinct, or some other influence, kept the more elaborate productions on the whole apart from the drolleries of the professional strollers (fahrende Leute), whose Shrove-Tuesday plays (Fastnachtsspiele) and cognate productions reproduced the practical fun of common life. Occasionally, no doubt, as in the Lübeck Fastnachtsspiel of the Five Virtues, the two species may have more or less closely approached to one another. When, in the course of the 15th century, Hans Rosenplüt, called Schnepperer—or Hans Schnepperer, called Rosenplüt—the predecessor of Hans Sachs, first gave a more enduring form to the popular Shrove-Tuesday plays, a connexion was already establishing itself between the dramatic amusements of the people and the literary efforts of the “master-singers” of the towns. But, while the main productivity of the writers of moralities and cognate productions—a species particularly suited to German latitudes—falls into the periods of Renaissance and Reformation, the religious drama proper survived far beyond either in Catholic Germany, and, in fact, was not suppressed in Bavaria and Tirol till the end of the 18th century.3

It may be added that the performance of miracle-plays is traceable in Sweden in the latter half of the 14th century; and that the German clerks and laymen who immigrated into the Carpathian lands, and into Galicia in particular, Sweden, Carpathian lands, &c. in the later middle ages, brought with them their religious plays together with other elements of culture. This fact is the more striking, inasmuch as, though Czech Easter plays were performed about the end of the 14th century, we hear of none among the Magyars, or among their neighbours of the Eastern empire.

Coming now to the English religious drama, we find that from its extant literature a fair general idea may be derived of the character of these medieval productions. The miracle-plays, miracles or plays (these being the terms used in Religious drama in England. England) of which we hear in London in the 12th century were probably written in Latin and acted by ecclesiastics; but already in the following century mention is made—in the way of prohibition—of plays acted by professional players. (Isolated moralities of the 12th century are not to be regarded as popular productions.) In England as elsewhere, the clergy either sought to retain their control over the religious plays, which continued to be occasionally acted in churches even after the Reformation, or else reprobated them with or Cornish miracle-plays. without qualifications. In Cornwall miracles in the native Cymric dialect were performed at an early date; but those which have been preserved are apparently copies of English (with the occasional use of French) originals; they were represented, unlike the English plays, in the open country, in extensive amphitheatres constructed for the purpose—one of which, at St Just near Penzance, has recently been restored.

The flourishing period of English miracle-plays begins with the practice of their performance by trading-companies in the towns, though these bodies were by no means possessed of any special privileges for the purpose. Of this practice Localities of the performance of miracle-plays. Chester is said to have set the example (1268-1276); it was followed in the course of the 13th and 14th centuries by many other towns, while in yet others traces of such performances are not to be found till the 15th, or even the 16th. These towns with their neighbourhoods include, starting from East Anglia, where the religious drama was particularly at home, Wymondham, Norwich, Sleaford, Lincoln, Leeds, Wakefield, Beverley, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, with a deviation across the border to Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In the north-west they are found at Kendal, Lancaster, Preston, Chester; whence they may be supposed to have migrated to Dublin. In the west they are noticeable at Shrewsbury, Worcester and Tewkesbury; in the Midlands at Coventry and Leicester; in the east at Cambridge and Bassingbourne, Heybridge and Manningtree; to which places have to be added Reading, Winchester, Canterbury, Bethesda and London, in which last the performers were the parish-clerks. Four collections, in addition to some single examples of such plays, The York, Towneley, Chester and Coventry plays. have come down to us, the York plays, the so-called Towneley plays, which were probably acted at the fairs of Widkirk, near Wakefield, and those bearing the names of Chester and of Coventry. Their dates, in the forms in which they have come down to us, are more or less uncertain; that of the York may on the whole be concluded to be earlier than that of the Towneley, which were probably put together about the middle of the 14th century; the Chester may be ascribed to the close of the 14th or the earlier part of the 15th; the body of the Coventry probably belongs to the 15th or 16th. Many of the individual plays in these collections were doubtless founded on French originals; others are taken direct from Scripture, from the apocryphal gospels, or from the legends of the saints. Their characteristic feature is the combination of a whole series of plays into one collective whole, exhibiting the entire course of Bible history from the creation to the day of judgment. For this combination it is unnecessary to suppose that they were generally indebted to foreign examples, though there are several remarkable coincidences between the Chester plays and the French Mystère du vieil testament. Indeed, the oldest of the series—the York plays—exhibits a fairly close parallel to the scheme of the Cursor mundi, an epic poem of Northumbrian origin, which early in the 14th century had set an example of treatment that unmistakably influenced the collective mysteries as a whole. Among the isolated plays of the same type which have come down to us may be mentioned The Harrowing of Hell (the Saviour’s descent into hell), an East-Midland production which professes to tell of “a strif of Jesu and of Satan” and is probably the earliest dramatic, or all but dramatic, work in English that has been preserved; and several belonging to a series known as the Digby Mysteries, including Parfre’s Candlemas Day (the massacre of the Innocents), and the very interesting miracle of Mary Magdalene. Of the so-called “Paternoster” and “Creed” plays (which exhibit the miraculous powers of portions of the Church service) no example remains, though of some we have an account; the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the MS. of which is preserved at Dublin, and which seems to date from the latter half of the 15th century, exhibits the triumph of the holy wafer over wicked Jewish wiles.

To return to the collective mysteries, as they present themselves to us in the chief extant series. “The manner of these plays,” we read in a description of those at Chester, dating from the close of the 16th century, “were:—Every English collective mysteries. company had his pageant, which pageants were a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they played, being all open at the top, that all beholders might hear and see them. The places where they played them was in every street. They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor, and so to every street, and so every street had a pageant playing before them at one time till all the pageants appointed for the day were played; and when one pageant was near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so they might come in place thereof, exceedingly orderly, and all the streets have their pageants afore them all at one time playing together; to see which plays was great resort, and also scaffolds and stages made in the streets in those places where they determined to play their pageants.”

Each play, then, was performed by the representative of a particular trade or company, after whom it was called the fishers’, glovers’, &c., pageant; while a general prologue was spoken by a herald. As a rule the movable stage sufficed for the action, though we find horsemen riding up to the scaffold, and Herod instructed to “rage in the pagond and in the strete also.” There is no probability that the stage was, as in France, divided into three platforms with a dark cavern at the side of the lowest, appropriated respectively to the Heavenly Father and his angels, to saints and glorified men, to mere men, and to souls in hell. But the last-named locality was frequently displayed in the English miracles, with or without fire in its mouth. The costumes were in part conventional,—divine and saintly personages being distinguished by gilt hair and beards, Herod being clad as a Saracen, the demons wearing hideous heads, the souls black and white coats according to their kind, and the angels gold skins and wings.

Doubtless these performances abounded in what seem to us ludicrous features; and, though their main purpose was serious, they were not in England at least intended to be devoid of fun. But many of the features in question Character of the Plays. are in truth only homely and naïf, and the simplicity of feeling which they exhibit is at times pathetic rather than laughable. The occasional grossness is due to an absence of refinement of taste rather than to an obliquity of moral sentiment. These features the four series have more or less in common, still there are certain obvious distinctions between them. The York plays (48), which were performed at Corpus Christi, are comparatively free from the tendency to jocularity and vulgarity observable in the Towneley; several of the plays concerned with the New Testament and early Christian story are, however, in substance common to both series. The Towneley Plays or Wakefield Mysteries (32) were undoubtedly composed by the friars of Widkirk or Nostel; but they are of a popular character; and, while somewhat over-free in tone, are superior in vivacity and humour to both the later collections. The Chester Plays (25) were undoubtedly indebted both to the Mystère du vieil testament and to earlier French mysteries; they are less popular in character than the earlier two cycles, and on the whole undistinguished by original power of pathos or humour. There is, on the other hand, a notable inner completeness in this series, which includes a play of Antichrist, devoid of course of any modern application. While these plays were performed at Whitsuntide, the Coventry Plays (42) were Corpus Christi performances. Though there is no proof that the extant series were composed by the Grey Friars, they reveal a considerable knowledge of ecclesiastical literature. For the rest, they are far more effectively written than the Chester Plays, and occasionally rise to real dramatic force. In the Coventry series there is already to be observed an element of abstract figures, which connects them with a different species of the medieval drama.

The moralities corresponded to the love for allegory which manifests itself in so many periods of English literature, and which, while dominating the whole field of medieval literature, was nowhere more assiduously and effectively Moralities. cultivated than in England. It is necessary to bear this in mind, in order to understand what to us seems so strange, the popularity of the moral-plays, which indeed never equalled that of the miracles, but sufficed to maintain the former species till it received a fresh impulse from the connexion established between it and the “new learning,” together with the new political and religious ideas and questions, of the Reformation age. Moreover, a specially popular element was supplied to these plays, which in manner of representation differed in no essential point from the miracles, in a character borrowed from the latter, and, in the moralities, usually provided with a companion The Devil and the Vice. whose task it was to lighten the weight of such abstractions as Sapience and Justice. These were the Devil and his attendant the Vice, of whom the latter seems to have been of native origin, and, as he was usually dressed in a fool’s habit, was probably suggested by the familiar custom of keeping an attendant fool at court or in great houses. The Vice had many aliases (Shift, Ambidexter, Sin, Fraud, Iniquity, &c.), but his usual duty is to torment and tease the Devil his master for the edification and diversion of the audience. He was gradually blended with the domestic fool, who survived in the regular drama. There are other concrete elements in the moralities; for typical figures are often fitted with concrete names, and thus all but converted into concrete human personages.

The earlier English moralities4—from the reign of Henry VI. to that of Henry VII.—usually allegorize the conflict between good and evil in the mind and life of man, without any side-intention of theological controversy. Such also Groups of English moralities. is still essentially the purpose of the extant morality by Henry VIII.’s poet, the witty Skelton.5 Everyman (pr. c. 1529), perhaps the most perfect example of its class, with which the present generation has fortunately become familiar, contains passages certainly designed to enforce the specific teaching of Rome. But its Dutch original was written at least a generation earlier, and could have no controversial intention. On the other hand, R. Wever’s Lusty Juventus breathes the spirit of the dogmatic reformation of the reign of Edward VI. Theological controversy largely occupies the moralities of the earlier part of Elizabeth’s reign,6 and connects itself with political feeling in a famous morality, Sir David Lyndsay’s Satire of the Three Estaitis, written and acted (at Cupar, in 1539) on the other side of the border, where such efforts as the religious drama proper had made had been extinguished by the Reformation. Only a single English political morality proper remains to us, which belongs to the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth.7 Another series connects itself with the ideas of the Renaissance rather than the Reformation, treating of intellectual progress rather than of moral conduct;8 this extends from the reign of Henry VIII. to that of his younger daughter. Besides these, there remain some Elizabethan moralities which have no special theological or scientific purpose, and which are none the less lively in consequence.9

The transition from the morality to the regular drama in England was effected, on the one hand, by the intermixture of historical personages with abstractions—as in Bishop Bale’s Kyng Johan (c. 1548)—which easily led over to Heywood’s interludes. the chronicle history; on the other, by the introduction of types of real life by the side of abstract figures. This latter tendency, of which instances occur in earlier plays, is observable in several of the 16th-century moralities;10 but before most of these were written, a further step in advance had been taken by a man of genius, John Transition from the morality to the regular drama. Heywood (b. c. 1500, d. between 1577 and 1587), whose “interludes”11 were short farces in the French manner. The term “interludes” was by no means new, but had been applied by friend and foe to religious plays, and plays (including moralities) in general, already in the 14th century. But it conveniently serves to designate a species which marks a distinct stage in the history of the modern drama. Heywood’s interludes dealt entirely with real—very real—men and women. Orthodox and conservative, he had at the same time a keen eye for the vices as well as the follies of his age, and not the least for those of the clerical profession. Other writers, such as T. Ingeland,12 took the same direction; and the allegory of abstractions was thus undermined on the stage, very much as in didactic literature the ground had been cut from under its feet by the Ship of Fooles. Thus the interludes facilitated the advent of comedy, without having superseded the earlier form. Both moralities and miracle-plays survived into the Elizabethan age after the regular drama had already begun its course.

Such, in barest outline, was the progress of dramatic entertainments in the principal countries of Europe, before the revival of classical studies brought about a return to the examples of the classical drama, or before this return had Pageants. distinctly asserted itself. It must not, however, be forgotten that from an early period in England as elsewhere had flourished a species of entertainments, not properly speaking dramatic, but largely contributing to form and foster a taste for dramatic spectacles. The pageants—as they were called in England—were the successors of those ridings from which, when they gladdened “Chepe,” Chaucer’s idle apprentice would not keep away; but they had advanced in splendour and ingenuity of device under the influence of Flemish and other foreign examples. Costumed figures represented before gaping citizens the heroes of mythology and history, and the abstractions of moral, patriotic, or municipal allegory; and the city of London clung with special fervour to these exhibitions, which the Elizabethan drama was neither able nor—as represented by most of its poets who composed devices and short texts for these and similar shows—willing to oust from popular favour. Some of the greatest and some of the least of English dramatists were the ministers of pageantry; and perhaps it would have been an advantage for the future of the theatre if the legitimate drama and the Triumphs of Old Drapery had been more jealously kept apart. With the reign of Henry VIII. there also set in a varied succession of entertainments at court and in the houses of the great nobles, which may be said to have lasted through the Tudor and early Stuart periods; but it would be an endless task to attempt to discriminate the dramatic elements contained in these productions. The “mask,” stated to have been introduced from Italy into England as a new diversion in 1512-1513, at first merely added a fresh element of “disguising” to those already in use; as a quasi-dramatic species (“mask” or “masque”) capable of a great literary development it hardly asserted itself till quite the end of the 16th century.

11. The Modern National Drama

The literary influence which finally transformed the growths noticed above into the national dramas of the several countries of Europe, was that of the Renaissance. Among the remains of classical antiquity which were studied, Influence of the Renaissance. translated and imitated, those of the drama necessarily held a prominent place. Never altogether lost sight of, they now became subjects of devoted research and models for more or less exact imitation, first in Greek or Latin, then in modern tongues; and these essentially literary endeavours came into more or less direct contact with, and acquired more or less control over, dramatic performances and entertainments already in existence. This process it will be most convenient to pursue seriatim, in connexion with the rise and progress of the several dramatic literatures of the West. For no sooner had the stream of the modern drama, whose source and contributories have been described, been brought back into the ancient bed, than its flow diverged into a number of national currents, unequal in impetus and strength, and varying in accordance with their manifold surroundings. And even of these it is only possible to survey the most productive or important.

(a) Italy.

The priority in this as in most of the other aspects of the Renaissance belongs to Italy. In ultimate achievement the Italian drama fell short of the fulness of the results obtained elsewhere—a surprising fact when it is The modern Italian drama. considered, not only that the Italian language had the vantage-ground of closest relationship to the Latin, but that the genius of the Italian people has at all times led it to love the drama. The cause is doubtless to be sought in the lack, noticeable in Italian national life during a long period, and more especially during the troubled days of division and strife coinciding with the rise and earlier promise of Italian dramatic literature, of those loftiest and most potent impulses of popular feeling to which a national drama owes so much of its strength. This deficiency was due partly to the peculiarities of the Italian character, partly to the political and ecclesiastical experiences which Italy was fated to undergo. The Italians were alike strangers to the enthusiasm of patriotism, which was as the breath in the nostrils of the English Elizabethan age, and to the religious devotion which identified Spain with the spirit of the Catholic revival. The clear-sightedness of the Italians had something to do with this, for they were too intelligent to believe in their tyrants, and too free from illusions to deliver up their minds to their priests. Finally, the chilling and enervating effects of a pressure of foreign domination, such as no Western people with a history and a civilization like those of Italy has ever experienced, contributed to paralyse for many generations the higher efforts of the dramatic art. No basis was permanently found for a really national tragedy; while literary comedy, after turning from the direct imitation of Latin models to a more popular form, lost itself in an abandoned immorality of tone and in reckless insolence of invective against particular classes of society. Though its productivity long continued, the poetic drama more and more concentrated its efforts upon subordinate or subsidiary species, artificial in origin and decorative in purpose, and surrendered its substance to the overpowering aids of music, dancing and spectacle. Only a single form of the Italian drama, improvised comedy, remained truly national; and this was of its nature dissociated from higher literary effort. The revival of Italian tragedy in later times is due partly to the imitation of French models, partly to the endeavour of a brilliant genius to infuse into his art the historical and political spirit. Comedy likewise attained to new growths of considerable significance, when it was sought to accommodate its popular forms to the representation of real life in a wider range, and again to render it more poetical in accordance with the tendencies of modern romanticism.

The regular Italian drama, in both its tragic and its comic branches, began with a reproduction, in the Latin language, of classical models—the first step, as it was to prove, towards the transformation of the medieval into the modern drama, and the birth of modern dramatic literature. But the process was both tentative and tedious, and must have died away but for the pomp and circumstance with which some of the patrons of the Renaissance at Florence, Rome and elsewhere surrounded these manifestations of a fashionable taste, and for the patriotic inspiration which from the first induced Italian writers to dramatize themes of national historic interest. Greek tragedy had been long forgotten, and one or two indications in the earlier part of the 16th century of Italian interest in the Greek drama, chiefly due to the printing presses, may be passed by.13 To the later middle ages classical tragedy meant Seneca, and even his plays remained unremembered till the study of them was revived by the Paduan judge Lovato de’ Lovati (Lupatus, d. 1309). Of the comedies of Plautus three-fifths were not rediscovered till 1429; and though Terence was much read in the schools, he found no dramatic imitators, pour le bon motif or otherwise, since Hrosvitha.

Thus the first medieval follower of Seneca, Albertino Mussato (1261-1330) may in a sense be called the father of modern dramatic literature. Born at Padua, to which city all his services were given, he in 1315 brought out his Eccerinis, a Latin tragedy very near to the confines of epic poetry, intended to warn the Paduans against the designs of Can Grande della Scala by the example of the tyrant Ezzelino. Other tragedies of much the same type followed during the ensuing century; such as L. da Fabiano’s De casu Caesenae (1377) a sort of chronicle history in Latin prose on Cardinal Albornoz’ capture of Caesena.14 Purely classical themes were treated in the Achilleis of A. de’ Loschi of Vicenza (d. 1441), formerly attributed to Mussato, several passages of which are taken verbally from Seneca; in the celebrated Progne of the Venetian Gregorio Cornaro, which is dated 1428-1429, and in later Latin productions included among the translations and imitations of Greek and Latin tragedies and comedies by Bishop Martirano (d. 1557), the friend of Pope Leo X.,15 and the efforts of Pomponius Laetus and his followers, who, with the aid of Cardinal Raffaele Riario (1451-1521), sought to revive the ancient theatre, with all its classical associations, at Rome.

In this general movement Latin comedy had quickly followed suit, and, as just indicated, it is almost impossible, when we reach the height of the Italian Renaissance under the Medici at Florence and at Rome in particular, to review the progress of either species apart from that of the other. If we possessed the lost Philologia of Petrarch, of which, as of a juvenile work, he declared himself ashamed, this would be the earliest of extant humanistic comedies. As it is, this position is held by Paulus, a Latin comedy of life on the classic model, by the orthodox P. P. Vergerio (1370-1444); which was followed by many others.16

Early in the 16th century, tragedy began to be written in the native tongue; but it retained from the first, and never wholly lost, the impress of its origin. Whatever the source of its subjects—which, though mostly of classical Italian tragedy in the 16th century. origin, were occasionally derived from native romance, or even due to invention—they were all treated with a predilection for the horrible, inspired by the example of Seneca, though no doubt encouraged by a perennial national taste. The chorus, stationary on the stage as in old Roman tragedy, was not reduced to a merely occasional appearance between the acts till the beginning of the 17th century, or ousted altogether from the tragic drama till the earlier half of the 18th. Thus the changes undergone by Italian tragedy were for a long series of generations chiefly confined to the form of versification and the choice of themes; nor was it, at all events till the last century of the course which it has hitherto run, more than the aftergrowth of an aftergrowth. The honour of having been the earliest tragedy in Italian seems to belong to A. da Pistoia’s Pamfila (1499), of which the subject was taken from Boccaccio, introduced by the ghost of Seneca, and marred in the taking. Carretto’s Sofonisba, which hardly rises above the art of a chronicle history, though provided with a chorus, followed in 1502. But the play usually associated with the beginning of Italian tragedy—that with which “th’ Italian scene first learned to glow”—was another Sofonisba, acted before Leo X. in 1515, and written in blank hendecasyllables instead of the ottava and terza rima of the earlier tragedians (retaining, however, the lyric measures of the chorus), by G. G. Trissino, who was employed as nuncio by that pope. Other tragedies of the former half of the 16th century, largely inspired by Trissino’s example, were the Rosmunda of Rucellai, a nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1516); Martelli’s Tullia, Alamanni’s Antigone (1532); the Canace of Sperone Speroni, the envious Mopsus of Tasso, who, like Guarini, took Sperone’s elaborate style for his model; the Orazia, the earliest dramatic treatment of this famous subject by the notorious Aretino (1549); and the nine tragedies of G. B. Giraldi (Cinthio) of Ferrara, among which L’Orbecche (1541) is accounted the best and the bloodiest. Cinthio, the author of those Hecatommithi to which Shakespeare was indebted for so many of his subjects, was (supposing him to have invented these) the first Italian who was the author of the fables of his own dramas; he introduced some novelties into dramatic construction, separating the prologue and probably also the epilogue from the action, and has by some been regarded as the inventor of the pastoral drama. But his style was arid. In the latter half of the 16th century may be mentioned the Didone and the Marianna of L. Dolce, the translator of Euripides and Seneca (1565); A. Leonico’s Il Soldato (1550); the Adriana (acted before 1561 or 1586) of L. Groto, which treats the story of Romeo and Juliet; Tasso’s Torrismondo (1587); the Tancredi of Asinari (1588); and the Merope of Torelli (1593), the last who employed the stationary chorus (coro fisso) on the Italian stage. Leonico’s Soldato is noticeable as supposed to have given rise to the tragedia cittadina, or domestic tragedy, of which there are few examples in the Italian drama, and De Velo’s Tamar (1586) as written in prose. Subjects of modern historical interest were in this period treated only in isolated instances.17

The tragedians of the 17th century continued to pursue the beaten track, marked out already in the 16th by rigid prescription. In course of time, however, they sought by the introduction of musical airs to compromise with the Italian tragedy in the 17th and 18th centuries. danger with which their art was threatened of being (in Voltaire’s phrase) extinguished by the beautiful monster, the opera, now rapidly gaining ground in the country of its origin. (See Opera.) To Count P. Bonarelli (1589-1659), the author of Solimano, is on the other hand ascribed the first disuse of the chorus in Italian tragedy. The innovation of the use of rhyme attempted in the learned Pallavicino’s Erminigildo (1655), and defended by him in a discourse prefixed to the play, was unable to achieve a permanent success in Italy any more than in England; its chief representative was afterwards Martelli (d. 1727), whose rhymed Alexandrian verse (Martelliano), though on one occasion used in comedy by Goldoni, failed to commend itself to the popular taste. By the end of the 17th century Italian tragedy seemed destined to expire, and the great tragic actor Cotta had withdrawn in disgust at the apathy of the public towards the higher forms of the drama. The 18th century was, however, to witness a change, the beginnings of which are attributed to the institution of the Academy of the Arcadians at Rome (1690). The principal efforts of the new school of writers and critics were directed to the abolition of the chorus, and to a general increase of freedom in treatment. Maffei. Before long the marquis S. Maffei with his Merope (first printed 1713) achieved one of the most brilliant successes recorded in the history of dramatic literature. This play, which is devoid of any love-story, long continued to be considered the masterpiece of Italian tragedy; Voltaire, who declared it “worthy of the most glorious days of Athens,” adapted it for the French stage, and it inspired a celebrated production of the English drama.18 It was followed by a tragedy full of horrors,19 noticeable as having given rise to the first Italian dramatic parody; and by the highly esteemed productions of Metastasio. Granelli (d. 1769) and his contemporary Bettinelli. P. T. Metastasio (1698-1782), who had early begun his career as a dramatist by a strict adherence to the precepts of Aristotle, gained celebrity by his contributions to the operatic drama at Naples, Venice and Vienna (where he held office as poeta cesareo, whose function was to arrange the court entertainments). But his libretti have a poetic value of their own;20 and Voltaire pronounced much of him worthy of Corneille and of Racine, when at their best. The influence of Voltaire had now come to predominate over the Italian drama; and, in accordance with the spirit of the times, greater freedom prevailed in the choice of tragic themes. Thus the greatest of Italian tragic poets. Alfieri. Count V. Alfieri (1749-1803), found his path prepared for him. Alfieri’s grand and impassioned treatment of his subjects caused his faultiness of form, which he never altogether overcame, to be forgotten. His themes were partly classical;21 but the spirit of a love of freedom which his creations22 breathe was the herald of the national ideas of the future. Spurning the usages of French tragedy, his plays, which abound in soliloquies, owe part of their effect to an impassioned force of declamation, part to those “points” by which Italian acting seems pre-eminently capable of thrilling an audience. He has much besides the subjects of two of his dramas23 in common with Schiller, but his amazon-muse (as Schlegel called her) was not schooled into serenity, like the muse of the German poet. Among his numerous plays (21), Merope and Saul, and perhaps Mirra, are accounted his masterpieces.

The political colouring given by Alfieri to Italian tragedy reappears in the plays of U. Foscolo and A. Manzoni, both of whom are under the influence of the romantic school of modern literature; and to these names must be Tragedians since Alfieri. added those of S. Pellico and G. B. Niccolini (1785-1861), Paolo Giacometti (b. 1816) and others, whose dramas24 treat largely national themes familiar to all students of modern history and literature. In their hands Italian tragedy upon the whole adhered to its love of strong situations and passionate declamation. Since the successful efforts of G. Modena (1804-1861) renovated the tragic stage in Italy, the art of tragic acting long stood at a higher level in this than in almost any other European country; in Adelaide Ristori (Marchesa del Grillo) the tragic stage lost one of the greatest of modern actresses; and Ernesto Rossi (1827-1896) and Tommaso Salvini long remained rivals in the noblest forms of tragedy.

In comedy, the efforts of the scholars of the Italian Renaissance for a time went side by side with the progress of the popular entertainments noticed above. While the contrasti of the close of the 15th and of the 16th century were Italian comedy; popular forms. disputations between pairs of abstract or allegorical figures, in the frottola human types take the place of abstractions, and more than two characters appear. The farsa (a name used of a wide variety of entertainments) was still under medieval influences, and in this popular form Alione of Asti (soon after 1500) was specially productive. To these popular diversions a new literary as well as social significance was given by the Neapolitan court-poet Sannazaro (c. 1492); about the same time a capitano valoroso, Venturino of Pesara, first brought on the modern stage the capitano glorioso or spavente, the military braggart, who owed his origin both to Plautus25 and to the Spanish officers who abounded in the Italy of those days. The popular character-comedy, a relic of the ancient Atellanae, likewise took a new lease of life—and this in a double form. The improvised comedy (commedia a soggetto) was now as a rule performed by professional actors, members of a craft, and was Commedia dell’ arte. thence called the commedia dell’ arte, which is said to have been invented by Francesco (called Terenziano) Cherea, the favourite player of Leo X. Its scenes, still unwritten except in skeleton (scenario), were connected together by the ligatures or links (lazzi) of the arlecchino, the descendant of the ancient Roman sannio (whence our zany). Harlequin’s summit of glory was probably reached early in the 17th century, when he was ennobled in the person of Cecchino by the emperor Matthias; of Cecchino’s successors, Zaccagnino and Truffaldino, Masked comedy. we read that “they shut the door in Italy to good harlequins.” Distinct from this growth is that of the masked comedy, the action of which was chiefly carried on by certain typical figures in masks, speaking in local dialects,26 but which was not improvised, and indeed from the nature of the case hardly could have been. Its inventor was A. Beolco of Padua, who called himself Ruzzante (joker), and is memorable under that name as the first actor-playwright—a combination of extreme significance for the history of the modern stage. He published six comedies in various dialects, including the Greek of the day (1530). This was the masked comedy to which the Italians so tenaciously clung, and in which, as all their own and imitable by no other nation, they took so great a pride that even Goldoni was unable to overthrow it. Improvisation and burlesque, alike abominable to comedy proper, were inseparable from the species.

Meanwhile, the Latin imitations of Roman, varied by occasional translations of Greek, comedies early led to the production of Italian translations, several of which were performed at Ferrara in the last quarter of the 15th century, Early Italian regular comedy. whence they spread to Milan, Pavia and other towns of the north. Contemporaneously, imitations of Latin comedy made their appearance, for the most part in rhymed verse; most of them applying classical treatment to subjects derived from Boccaccio’s and other novelle, some still mere adaptations of ancient models. In these circumstances it is all but idle to assign the honour of having been “the first Italian comedy”—and thus the first comedy in modern dramatic literature—to any particular play. Boiardo’s Timone (before 1494), for which this distinction was frequently claimed, is to a large extent founded on a dialogue of Lucian’s; and, since some of its personages are abstractions, and Olympus is domesticated on an upper stage, it cannot be regarded as more than a transition from the moralities. A. Ricci’s I Tre Tiranni (before 1530) seems still to belong to the same transitional species. Among the earlier imitators of Latin comedy in the vernacular may be noted G. Visconti, one of the poets patronized by Ludovico il Moro at Milan;27 the Florentines G. B. Araldo, J. Nardi, the historian,28 and D. Gianotti.29 The step—very important had it been adopted consistently or with a view to consistency—of substituting prose for verse as the diction of comedy, is sometimes attributed to Ariosto; but, though his first two comedies were originally written in prose, the experiment was not new, nor did he persist in its adoption. Caretto’s I Sei Contenti dates from the end of the 15th century, and Publio Filippo’s Formicone, taken from Apuleius, followed quite early in the 16th. Machiavelli, as will be seen, wrote comedies both in prose and in verse.

But, whoever wrote the first Italian comedy, Ludovico Ariosto was the first master of the species. All but the first two of his comedies, belonging as they do to the field of commedia erudita, or scholarly comedy, are in blank verse, to which he gave a singular mobility by the dactylic ending of the line (sdrucciolo). Ariosto’s models were the masterpieces of the palliata, and his morals those of his age, which emulated those of the worst days of ancient Rome or Byzantium in looseness, and surpassed them in effrontery. He chose his subjects accordingly; but his dramatic genius displayed itself in the effective drawing of character,30 and more especially in the skilful management of complicated intrigues.31 Such, with an additional brilliancy of wit and lasciviousness of tone, are likewise the characteristics of Machiavelli’s famous prose comedy, the Mandragola (The Magic Draught);32 and at the height of their success, of the plays of P. Aretino,33 especially the prose Marescalco (1526-1527) whose name, it has been said, ought to be written in asterisks. It may be added that the plays of Ariosto and his followers were represented with magnificent scenery and settings. Other dramatists of the 16th century were B. Accolti, whose Virginia (prob. before 1513) treats the story from Boccaccio which reappears in All’s Well that Ends Well; G. Cecchi, F. d’Ambra, A. F. Grazzini, N. Secco or Secchi and L. Dolce—all writers of romantic comedy of intrigue in verse or prose.

During the same century the “pastoral drama” flourished in Italy. The origin of this peculiar species—which was the bucolic idyll in a dramatic form, and which freely lent itself to the introduction of both mythological The pastoral drama. and allegorical elements—was purely literary, and arose directly out of the classical studies and tastes of the Renaissance. It was very far removed from the genuine peasant plays which flourished in Venetia and Tuscany early in the 16th century. The earliest example of the artificial, but in some of its productions exquisite, growth in question was the renowned scholar A. Politian’s Orfeo (1472), which begins like an idyll and ends like a tragedy. Intended to be performed with music—for the pastoral drama is the parent of the opera—this beautiful work tells its story simply. N. da Correggio’s (1450-1508) Cefalo, or Aurora, and others followed, before in 1554 A. Beccari produced, as totally new of its kind, his Arcadian pastoral drama Il Sagrifizio, in which the comic element predominates. But an epoch in the history of the species is marked by the Aminta of Tasso (1573), in whose Arcadia is allegorically mirrored the Ferrara court. Adorned by choral lyrics of great beauty, it presents an allegorical treatment of a social and moral problem; and since the conception of the characters, all of whom think and speak of nothing but love, is artificial, the charm of the poem lies not in the interest of its action, but in the passion and sweetness of its sentiment. This work was the model of many others, and the pastoral drama reached its height of popularity in the famous Pastor fido (written before 1590) of G. B. Guarini, which, while founded on a tragic love-story, introduces into its complicated plot a comic element, partly with a satirical intention. It is one of those exceptional works which, by circumstance as well as by merit, have become the property of the world’s literature at large. Thus, both in Italian and in other literatures, the pastoral drama became a distinct species, characterized, like the great body of modern pastoral poetry in general, by a tendency either towards the artificial or towards the burlesque. Its artificiality affected the entire growth of Italian comedy, including the commedia dell’ arte, and impressed itself in an intensified form upon the opera. The foremost Italian masters of the last-named species, so far as it can claim to be included in the poetic drama, were A. Zeno (1668-1750) and P. Metastasio.

The comic dramatists of the 17th century are grouped as followers of the classical and of the romantic school, G. B. della Porta (q.v.) and G. A. Cicognini (whom Goldoni describes as full of whining pathos and commonplace Comedy in the 17th and 18th centuries. drollery, but as still possessing a great power to interest) being regarded as the leading representatives of the former. But neither of these largely intermixed groups of writers could, with all its fertility, prevail against the competition, on the one hand of the musical drama, and on the other of the popular farcical entertainments and those introduced in imitation of Spanish examples. Italian comedy had fallen into decay, when its reform was undertaken by the wonderful Goldoni. theatrical genius of C. Goldoni. One of the most fertile and rapid of playwrights (of his 150 comedies 16 were written and acted in a single year), he at the same time pursued definite aims as a dramatist. Disgusted with the conventional buffoonery, and ashamed of the rampant immorality of the Italian comic stage, he drew his characters from real life, whether of his native city (Venice)34 or of society at large, and sought to enforce virtuous and pathetic sentiments without neglecting the essential objects of his art. Happy and various in his choice of themes, and dipping deep into a popular life with which he had a genuine sympathy, he produced, besides comedies of general human character,35 plays on subjects drawn from literary biography36 or from fiction.37 Goldoni, whose style was considered defective by the purists whom Italy has at no time lacked, met with a severe critic and a temporarily successful Gozzi. rival in Count C. Gozzi (1722-1806), who sought to rescue the comic drama from its association with the actual life of the middle classes, and to infuse a new spirit into the figures of the old masked comedy by the invention of a new species. His themes were taken from Neapolitan38 and Oriental39 fairy tales, to which he accommodated some of the standing figures upon which Goldoni had made war. This attempt at mingling fancy and humour—occasionally of a directly satirical turn40—was in harmony with the tendencies of the modern romantic school; and Gozzi’s efforts, which though successful found hardly any imitators in Italy, have a family resemblance to those of Tieck and of some more recent writers whose art wings its flight, through the windows, “over the hills and far away.”

During the latter part of the 18th and the early years of the 19th century comedy continued to follow the course marked out by its acknowledged master Goldoni, under the influence of the sentimental drama of France and other Comedians after Goldoni. countries. Abati Andrea Villi, the marquis Albergati Capacelli, Antonio Simone Sografi (1760-1825), Federici, and Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731-1815), the historian of the drama, are mentioned among the writers of this school; to the 19th century belong Count Giraud, Marchisio (who took his subjects especially from commercial life), and Nota, a fertile writer, among whose plays are three treating the lives of poets. Of still more recent date are L. B. Bon and A. Brofferio. At the same time, the comedy of dialect to which the example of Goldoni had given sanction in Venice, flourished there as well as in the mutually remote spheres of Piedmont and Naples. Quite modern developments must remain unnoticed here; but the fact cannot be ignored that they signally illustrate the perennial vitality of the modern drama in the home of its beginnings. A new realistic style set fully in about the middle of the 18th century with P. Ferrari and A. Torelli; and though an historical reaction towards classical and medieval themes is associated with the names of P. Cossa and G. Giacosa, modernism reasserted itself through P. Bracco and other dramatists. It should be noted that the influence of great actors, more especially Ermete Novelli and Eleanora Duse, must be credited with a large share of the success with which the Italian stage has held its own even against the foreign influences to which it gave room. And it would seem as if even the paradoxical endeavour of the poet Gabrielle d’ Annunzio to lyricize the drama by ignoring action as its essence were a problem for the solution of which the stage can furnish unexpected conditions of its own. In any event, both Italian tragedy and Italian comedy have survived periods of a seemingly hopeless decline; and the fear has vanished that either the opera or the ballet might succeed in ousting from the national stage the legitimate forms of the national drama.

(b) Greece.

The dramatic literature of the later Hellenes is a creation of the literary movement which preceded their noble struggle for independence, or which may be said to form part of that struggle. After beginning with dramatic Modern Greek and Dalmatian drama. dialogues of a patriotic tendency, it took a step in advance with the tragedies of J. R. Nerulos41 (1778-1850), whose name belongs to the political as well as to the literary history of his country. His comedies—especially one directed against the excesses of journalism42—largely contributed to open a literary life for the modern Greek tongue. Among the earlier patriotic Greek dramatists of the 19th century are T. Alkaeos, J. Zampelios (whose tragic style was influenced by that of Alfieri),43 S. K. Karydis and A. Valaoritis. A. Zoiros44 is noteworthy as having introduced the use of prose into Greek tragedy, while preserving to it that association with sentiments and aspirations which will probably long continue to pervade the chief productions of modern Greek literature. The love of the theatre is ineradicable from Attic as it is from Italian soil; and the tendencies of the young dramatic literature of Hellas which is not wholly absorbed in the effort to keep abreast of recent modern developments, seem to justify the hope that a worthy future awaits it.

Under Italian influence an interesting dramatic growth attained to some vitality in the Dalmatian lands about the beginning of the 16th century, where the religious drama, whose days were passing away in Italy, found favour with a people with a scant popular literature of its own. At Ragusa Italian literary influence had been spread by the followers of Petrarch from the later years of the 15th century; here several Servo-Croatian writers produced religious plays in the manner of the Italian rappresentazioni; and a gifted poet, Martin Držić, composed, besides religious plays and farces, a species of pastoral which enjoyed much favour.

(c) Spain.

Spain is the only country of modern Europe which shares with England the honour of having achieved, at a relatively early date, the creation of a genuinely national form of the regular drama. So proper to Spain was the form of the drama which she produced and perfected, that to it the term romantic has been specifically applied, though so restricted a use of the epithet is clearly unjustifiable. The influences which from the Romance peoples—in whom Christian and Germanic elements mingled with the legacy of Roman law, learning and culture—spread to the Germanic nations were represented with the most signal force and fulness in the institutions of chivalry,—to which, in the words of Scott, “it was peculiar to blend military valour with the strongest passions which actuate the human mind, the feelings of devotion and those of love.” These feelings, in their combined operation upon the national character, and in their reflection in the national literature, were not confined to Spain; but nowhere did they so long or so late continue to animate the moral life of a nation.

Outward causes contributed to this result. For centuries after the crusades had become a mere memory, Spain was a battle-ground between the Cross and the Crescent. And it was just at the time when the Renaissance was establishing new starting-points for the literary progress of Europe, that Christian Spain rose to the height of Catholic as well as national self-consciousness by the expulsion of the Moors and the conquest of the New World. From their rulers or rivals of so many centuries the Spaniards derived that rich, if not very varied, glow of colour which became permanently distinctive of their national life, and more especially of its literary and artistic expressions; they also perhaps derived from the same source a not less characteristically refined treatment of the passion of love. The ideas of Spanish chivalry—more especially religious devotion and a punctilious sense of personal honour—asserted themselves (according to a process often observable in the history of civilization) with peculiar distinctness in literature and art, after the period of great achievements to which they had contributed in other fields had come to an end. The ripest glories of the Spanish drama belong to an age of national decay—mindful, it is true, of the ideas of a greater past. The chivalrous enthusiasm pervading so many of the masterpieces of its literature is indeed a distinctive feature of the Spanish nation in all, even in the least hopeful, periods of its later history; and the religious ardour breathed by these works, though associating itself with what is called the Catholic Reaction, is in truth only a manifestation of the spirit which informed the noblest part of the Reformation movement itself. The Spanish drama neither sought nor could seek to emancipate itself from views and forms of religious life more than ever sacred to the Spanish people since the glorious days of Ferdinand and Isabella; and it is not so much in the beginnings as in the great age of Spanish dramatic literature that it seems most difficult to distinguish between what is to be termed a religious and what a secular play. After Spain had thus, the first after England among modern European countries, fully unfolded that incomparably richest expression of national life and sentiment in an artistic form—a truly national dramatic literature,—the terrible decay of her greatness and prosperity gradually impaired the strength of a brilliant but, of its nature, dependent growth. In the absence of high original genius the Spanish dramatists began to turn to foreign models, though little supported in such attempts by popular sympathy; and it is only in more recent times that the Spanish drama has sought to reproduce the ancient forms from whose masterpieces the nation had never become estranged, while accommodating them to tastes and tendencies shared by later Spanish literature with that of Europe at large.

The earlier dramatic efforts of Spanish literature may without inconvenience be briefly dismissed. The reputed author of the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo (R. Cota the elder) likewise composed the first act of a story of intrigue and Early efforts. character, purely dramatic but not intended for representation. This tragic comedy of Calisto and Meliboea, which was completed (in 21 acts) by 1499, afterwards became famous under the name of Celestina; it was frequently imitated and translated, and was adapted for the Spanish stage by R. de Zepeda in 1582. But the father of the Spanish drama was J. de la Enzina, whose representaciones under the name of “eclogues” were dramatic dialogues of a religious or pastoral character. His attempts were imitated more especially by the Portuguese Gil Vicente. Gil Vicente, whose writings for the stage appear to be included in the period 1502-1536, and who wrote both in Spanish and in his native tongue. A further impulse came, as was natural, from Spaniards resident in Italy, and especially from B. de Torres Naharro, who in 1517 published, as the chief among the “firstlings of his genius” (Propaladia), a series of eight comedias—a term generally applied in Spanish literature to any kind of drama. He claimed some knowledge of the theory of the ancient drama, divided his plays into jornadas45 (to correspond to acts), and opened them with an introyto (prologue). Very various in their subjects, and occasionally odd in form,46 they were gross as well as audacious in tone, and were soon prohibited by the Inquisition. The church remained unwilling to renounce her control over such dramatic exhibitions as she permitted, and sought to suppress the few plays on not strictly religious subjects which appeared in the early part of the reign of Charles I. Though the universities produced both translations from the classical drama and modern Latin plays, these exercised very little general effect. Juan Perez’ (Petreius’) posthumous Latin comedies were mainly versions of Ariosto.47

Thus the foundation of the Spanish national theatre was reserved for a man of the people. Cervantes has vividly sketched the humble resources which were at the command of Lope de Rueda, a mechanic of Seville, who with his Lope de Rueda and his followers. friend the bookseller Timoneda, and two brother authors and actors in his strolling company, succeeded in bringing dramatic entertainments out of the churches and palaces into the public places of the towns, where they were produced on temporary scaffolds. The manager carried about his properties in a corn-sack; and the “comedies” were still only “dialogues, and a species of eclogues between two or three shepherds and a shepherdess,” enlivened at times by intermezzos of favourite comic figures, such as the negress or the Biscayan, “played with inconceivable talent and truthfulness by Lope.” One of his plays at least,48 and one of Timoneda’s,49 seem to have been taken from an Italian source; others mingled modern themes with classical apparitions,50 one of Timoneda’s was (perhaps again through the Italian) from Plautus.51 Others of a slighter description were called pasos,—a species afterwards termed entremeses and resembling the modern French proverbes. With these popular efforts of Lope de Rueda and his friends a considerable dramatic activity began in the years 1560-1590 in several Spanish cities, and before the close of this period permanent theatres began to be fitted up at Madrid. Yet Spanish dramatic literature might still have been led Classical dramas. to follow Italian into an imitation of classical models. Two plays by G. Bermudez (1577), called by their learned author “the first Spanish tragedies,” treating the national subject of Inez de Castro, but divided into five acts, composed in various metres, and introducing a chorus; a Dido (c. 1580) by C. de Virues (who claimed to have first divided dramas into three jornadas); and the tragedies of L. L. de Argensola (acted 1585, and praised in Don Quixote) alike represent this tendency.

Such were the alternatives which had opened for the Spanish drama, when at last, about the same time as that of the English, its future was determined by writers of original genius. The first of these was the immortal Cervantes, who, Cervantes. however, failed to anticipate by his earlier plays (1584-1588) the great (though to him unproductive) success of his famous romance. In his endeavour to give a poetic character to the drama he fell upon the expedient of introducing personified abstractions speaking a “divine” or elevated language—a device which was for a time favourably received. But these plays exhibit a neglect or ignorance of the laws of dramatic construction; their action is episodical; and it is from the realism of these episodes (especially in the Numancia, which is crowded with both figures and incidents), and from the power and flow of the declamation, that their effect must have been derived. When in his later years (1615) Cervantes returned to dramatic composition, the style and form of the national drama had been definitively settled by a large number of writers, the brilliant success of whose acknowledged chief may previously have diverted Cervantes from his labours for the theatre. His influence upon the general progress of dramatic literature is, however, to be sought, not only in his plays, but also in those novelas exemplares—incomparable alike in their clearness and their terseness of narrative—to which more than one drama is indebted for its plot, and for much of its dialogue to boot.

Lope de Vega, one of the most astonishing geniuses the world has known, permanently established the national forms of the Spanish drama. Some of these were in their beginnings taken over by him from ruder predecessors; some Lope de Vega. were cultivated with equal or even superior success by subsequent authors; but in variety, as in fertility of dramatic production, he has no rivals. His fertility, which was such that he wrote about 1500 plays, besides 300 dramatic works classed as autos sacramentales and entremeses, and a vast series of other literary compositions, has indisputably prejudiced his reputation with those to whom he is but a name and a number. Yet as a dramatist Lope more fully exemplifies the capabilities of the Spanish theatre than any of his successors, though as a poet Calderon may deserve the palm. Nor would it be possible to imagine a truer representative of the Spain of his age than a poet who, after suffering the hardships of poverty and exile, and the pangs of passion, sailed against the foes of the faith in the Invincible Armada, subsequently became a member of the Holy Inquisition and of the order of St Francis, and after having been decorated by the pope with the cross of Malta and a theological doctorate, honoured by the nobility, and idolized by the nation, ended with the names of Jesus and Mary on his lips. From the plays of such a writer we may best learn the manners and the sentiments, the ideas of religion and honour, of the Spain of the Philippine age, the age when she was most prominent in the eyes of Europe and most glorious in her own. For, with all its inventiveness and vigour, the genius of Lope primarily set itself the task of pleasing his public,—the very spirit of whose inner as well as outer life is accordingly mirrored in his dramatic works. In them we have, in the words of Lope’s French translator Baret, “the movement, the clamour, the conflict of unforeseen intrigues suitable to unreflecting spectators; perpetual flatteries addressed to an unextinguishable national pride; the painting of passions dear to a people never tired of admiring itself; the absolute sway of the point of honour; the deification of revenge; the adoration of symbols; buffoonery and burlesque, everywhere beloved of the multitude, but here never defiled by obscenities, for this people has a sense of delicacy, and the foundation of its character is nobility; lastly, the flow of proverbs which at times escape from the gracioso” (the comic servant domesticated in the Spanish drama by Lope)—“the commonplace literature of those who possess no other.”

The plays of Lope, and those of the national Spanish drama in general, are divided into classes which it is naturally not always easy, and which there is no reason to suppose him always to have intended, to keep distinct from one Comedias de capa y espada. another. After in his early youth composing eclogues, pastoral plays, and allegorical moralities in the old style, he began his theatrical activity at Madrid about 1590, and the plays which he thenceforth produced have been distributed under the following heads. The comedias, all of which are in verse, include (1) the so-called c. de capa y espada—not comedies proper, but dramas in which the principal personages are taken from the class of society that wears cloak and sword. Gallantry is their main theme, an interesting and complicated, but well-constructed and perspicuous intrigue their chief feature; and this is usually accompanied by an underplot in which the gracioso plays his part. Their titles are frequently taken from the old proverbs or proverbial phrases of the people52 upon the theme suggested, by which the plays often (as G. H. Lewes admirably expresses it) constitute a kind of gloss (glosa) in action. This is the favourite species of the national Spanish theatre; and to the plots of the plays belonging to it the drama of other nations owes a debt almost incalculable in extent. Heróicas. (2) The c. heróicas are distinguished by some of their personages being of royal or very high rank, and by their themes being often historical and largely53 (though not invariably54) taken from the national annals, or founded on contemporary or recent events.55 Hence they exhibit a greater gravity of tone; but in other respects there is no difference between them and the cloak-and-sword comedies with which they share the element of comic underplots. Occasionally Lope condescended in the opposite direction, to (3) plays of which the scene is laid in common life, but for which no special name appears to have existed.56 Meanwhile, both he and his successors were too devoted sons of the church not to acknowledge in some sort her claim to influence the national drama. This claim she had never relinquished, even when she could no longer retain an absolute control over the stage. For a time, indeed, she was able to reassert even this; for the exhibition of all secular plays was in 1598 prohibited by the dying Philip II., and remained so for two years; and Lope with his usual facility proceeded to supply religious plays of various kinds. After a few dramas on scriptural subjects he turned to the legends of the saints; and Comedias de santos. the comedias de santos, of which he wrote a great number, became an accepted later Spanish variety of the miracle-play. True, however, to the popular instincts of his genius, he threw himself with special zeal and success into the composition of another kind of religious plays—a development of the Corpus Christi pageants, in honour of which all the theatres had to close their doors for a month. Autos sacramentales. These were the famous autos sacramentales (i.e. solemn “acts” or proceedings in honour of the Sacrament), which were performed in the open air by actors who had filled the cars of the sacred procession. Of these Lope wrote about 400. These entertainments were arranged on a fixed scheme, comprising a prologue in dialogue between two or more actors in character (loa), a farce (entremes), and the auto proper, an allegorical scene of religious purport, as an example of which Ticknor cites the Bridge of the World,—in which the Prince of Darkness in vain seeks to defend the bridge against the Knight of the Cross, who finally leads the Soul of Entremeses. Man in triumph across it. Not all the entremeses of Lope and others were, however, composed for insertion in these autos. This long-lived popular species, together with the old kind of dramatic dialogue called eclogues, completes the list of the varieties of his dramatic works.

The example of Lope was followed by a large number of writers, and Spain thus rapidly became possessed of a dramatic literature almost unparalleled in quantity—for in fertility also Lope was but the first among many. The school of Lope. Among the writers of Lope’s school, his friend G. de Castro (1569-1631) must not be passed by, for his Cid57 was the basis of Corneille’s; nor J. P. de Montalban, “the first-born of Lope’s genius,” the extravagance of whose imagination, like that of Lee, culminated in madness. Soon after him died (1639) Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, in whose plays, as contrasted with those of Lope, has been recognized the distinctive element of a moral purpose. To G. Tellez, called Tirso de Molina (d. 1648), no similar praise seems due; but the frivolous gaiety of the inventor of the complete character of Don Juan was accompanied by ingenuity in the construction of his excellent58 though at times “sensational”59 plots. F. de Rojas Zorrilla (b. 1607), who was largely plundered by the French dramatists of the latter half of the century, survived Molina for about a generation. In vain scholars of strictly classical tastes protested in essays in prose and verse against the ascendancy of the popular drama; the prohibition of Philip II. had been recalled two years after his death and was never renewed; and the activity of the theatre spread through the towns and villages of the land, everywhere under the controlling influence of the school of writers who had established so complete a harmony between the drama and the tastes and tendencies of the people.

The glories of Spanish dramatic literature reached their height in P. Calderon de la Barca, though in the history of the Spanish theatre he holds only the second place. He elaborated some of the forms of the national drama, but brought Calderon. about no changes of moment in any of them. Even the brilliancy of his style, glittering with a constant reproduction of the same family of tropes, and the variety of his melodious versification, are mere intensifications of the poetic qualities of Lope, while in their moral and religious sentiments, and their general views of history and society, there is no difference between the two. Like Lope, Calderon was a soldier in his youth and an ecclesiastic in his later years; like his senior, he suited himself to the tastes of both court and people, and applied his genius with equal facility to the treatment of religious and of secular themes. In fertility Calderon was inferior to Lope (for he wrote not many more than 100 plays); but he surpasses the elder poet in richness of style, and more especially in fire of imagination. In his autos (of which he is said to have left not less than 73), Calderon probably attained to his most distinctive excellence; some of these appear to take a wide range of allegorical invention,60 while they uniformly possess great beauty of poetical detail. Other of his most famous or interesting pieces are comedias de santos.61 In his secular plays he treats as wide a variety of subjects as Lope, but it is not a dissimilar variety; nor would it be easy to decide whether a poet so uniformly admirable within his limits has achieved greater success in romantic historical tragedy,62 in the comedy of amorous intrigue,63 or in a dramatic work combining fancy and artificiality in such a degree that it has been diversely described as a romantic caprice and as a philosophical poem.64

During the life of the second great master of the Spanish drama there was little apparent abatement in the productivity of its literature; while the autos continued to flourish in Madrid and elsewhere, till in 1765 (shortly before Contemporaries of Calderon. the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain) their public representation was prohibited by royal decree. In the world of fashion, the opera had reached Spain already during Calderon’s lifetime, together with other French influences, and the great dramatist had himself written one or two of his plays for performance with music. But the regular national Moreto and the comedia de figuron. drama continued to command popular favour, and with A. Moreto may be said to have actually taken a step in advance. While he wrote in all the forms established by Lope and cultivated by Calderon, his manner seems most nearly to approach the masterpieces of French and later English comedy of character; he was the earliest writer of the comedias de figuron, in which the most prominent personage is (in Congreve’s phrase) “a character of affectation,” in other words, the Spanish fop of real life.65 His masterpiece, a favourite of many stages, is one of the most graceful and pleasing of modern comedies—simple but interesting in plot, and true to nature, with something like Shakespearian truth.66 Other writers trod more closely in the footsteps of the masters without effecting any noticeable changes in the form of the Spanish drama; even the saynete (tit-bit), which owes its name to Benavente (fl. 1645), was only a kind of entremes. The Spanish drama in all its forms retained its command over the nation, because they were alike popular in origin and character; nor is there any other example of so complete an adaptation of a national art to the national taste and sentiment in its ethics and aesthetics, in the nature of the plots of the plays (whatever their origin), in the motives of their actions, in the conduct and tone and in the very costume of their characters.

National as it was, and because of this very quality, the Spanish drama was fated to share the lot of the people it so fully represented. At the end of the 17th century, when the Spanish throne at last became the declared apple of Decay of the national Spanish drama. discord among the governments of Europe, the Spanish people lay, in the words of an historian of its later days, “like a corpse, incapable of feeling its own impotence.” That national art to which it had so faithfully clung had fallen into decline and decay with the spirit of Spain itself. By the time of the close of the great war, the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy—authors on the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now The French school of the 18th century. French, and in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the arbiter of taste in Europe. With the restoration of peace accordingly began isolated attempts to impose the French canons of dramatic theory, and to follow the example of French dramatic practice; and in the middle of the century these endeavours assumed more definite form. Montiano’s bloodless tragedy of Virginia (1750), which was never acted, was accompanied by a discourse endeavouring to reconcile the doctrines of the author with the practice of the old Spanish dramatists; the play itself was in blank verse (a metre never used by Calderon, though occasionally by Lope), instead of the old national ballad-measures (the romance-measure with assonance and the rhymed redondilla quatrain) preferred by the old masters among the variety of metres employed by them. The earliest Spanish comedy in the French form (a translation only, though written in the national metre)67 (1751), and the first original Spanish comedy on the same model, Nicolas Moratin’s Petimetra (Petite-Maîtresse), printed in 1726 with a critical dissertation, likewise remained unacted. In 1770, however, the same author’s Hormesinda, an historic drama on a national theme and in the national metre, but adhering to the French rules, appeared on the stage; and similar attempts followed in tragedy by the same writer and others (including Ayala, who ventured in 1775 to compete with Cervantes on the theme of Numantia), and in comedy by Iriarte and Jovellanos (afterwards minister under Godoy), who produced a sentimental comedy in Diderot’s manner.68 But Other later dramatists. these endeavours failed to effect any change in the popular theatre, which was with more success raised from its deepest degradation by R. de la Cruz, a fertile author of light pieces of genuine humour, especially saynetes, depicting the manners of the middle and lower classes. In literary circles Garcia de la Huerta’s voluminous collection of the old plays (1785) gave a new impulse to dramatic productivity, and the conflict continued between representatives of the old school, such as Luciano Francisco Comella (1716-1779) and of the new, such as the younger Moratin, whose comedies—of which the last and most successful69 was in prose—raised him to the foremost position among the dramatists of his age. In tragedy N. de Cienfuegos likewise showed some originality. After, however, the troubles of the French domination and the war had come to an end, the precepts and examples of the new school failed to reassert themselves.

Already in 1815 an active critical controversy was carried on by Böhl de Faber against the efforts of J. Faber and Alcalá Galiano to uphold the principles of classicism; and with the aid of the eminent actor Máiquez the old romantic masterpieces were easily reinstated in the public favour, which as a matter of fact they had never forfeited. The Spanish dramatists of the 19th century, after passing, as in the instance of F. Martinez de la Rosa and Bréton de los Herreros, from the system of French comedy to the manner of the national drama, appear either to have stood under the influence of the French romantic school, or to have returned once more to the old Spanish models. Among the former class A. Gil y Zarate, of the latter J. Zorrilla, are mentioned as specially prominent. The most renowned Spanish dramatist at the opening of the 20th century was the veteran politician and man of letters J. Echegaray.

Meanwhile, the old religious performances are not wholly extinct in Spain, and the relics of the solemn pageantry with which they were associated may long continue to survive there, as in the case of the pasos, which claim to have been exhibited in Holy Week at Seville for at least three centuries. As to the theatre itself, there can be no fear either that the imitation of foreign examples will satisfy Spanish dramatists—especially when, like the author of Doña Perfecta (Perez Galdos), they have excellent home material of their own for adaptation,—or that the Spanish public itself, with fine actors and actresses still upholding the lofty traditions of the national drama, will remain too fatigued to consume the drama unless bit by bit—in the shape of zarzuelas and similar one-act confections. Whatever may be the future of one of the noblest of modern dramatic literatures, it may confidently be predicted that, so long as Spain is Spain, her theatre will not be permanently either denationalized or degraded.

(d) Portugal.

The Portuguese drama in its earlier phases, especially before in the latter part of the 14th century the nation completely achieved its independence, seems to have followed much the same course as the Spanish; and the religious The Portuguese drama. drama in all its prevailing forms and direct outgrowths retained its popularity even by the side of the products of the Renaissance. In the later period of that movement translations of classical dramas into the vernacular were stimulated by the cosmopolitan example of George Buchanan, who for a time held a post in the university of Coimbra; to this class of play Teive’s Johannes (1553) may be supposed to have belonged. In the next generation Antonio Ferreira70 and others still wrote comedies more or less on the classical model. But the rather vague title of “the Plautus of Portugal” is accorded to an earlier comic writer, the celebrated Gil Vicente, who died about 1536, after, it is stated, producing forty-two plays. He was the founder of popular Portuguese comedy, and his plays were called autos, or by the common name of praticas.71 Among his most gifted successors are mentioned A. Ribeiro, called Chiado (the mocking-bird), who died in 1590;72 his brother Jeronymo, B. Dias, A. Pires, J. Pinto, H. Lopes and others. The dramatic efforts of the illustrious poet Luis de Camões (Camoens) are relatively of slight importance; they consist of one of the many modern versions of the Amphitruo, and of two other comedies, of which the earlier (Filodemo) was acted at Goa in 1553, the subjects having a romantic colour.73 Of greater importance were the contributions to dramatic literature of F. de Sá de Miranda, who, being well acquainted with both Spanish and Italian life, sought early in his career to domesticate the Italian comedy of intrigue on the Portuguese stage;74 but he failed to carry with him the public taste, which preferred the autos of Gil Vicente. The followers of Miranda were, however, more successful than he had been himself, among them the already-mentioned Antonio Ferreira; the prose plays of Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, which bear some resemblance to the Spanish Celestina, are valuable as pictures of contemporary manners in city and court.75

The later Portuguese dramatic literature seems also to have passed through phases corresponding to those of the Spanish, though with special features of its own. In the 18th century Alcino Mycenio (1728-1770), known as Domingos dos Reis Quito in everyday life, in which his avocation was that of Allan Ramsay, was remarkably successful with a series of plays,76 including of course an Inez de Castro, which in a subsequent adaptation by J. B. Gomes long held the national stage. Another dramatist, of both merit and higher aspirations, was Lycidas Cynthio (alias Manoel de Figueiredo, 1725-1801).77 But the romantic movement was very late in coming to Portugal. Curiously enough, one of its chief representatives, the viscount da Almeida Garrett, exhibited his sympathy with French, revolutionary and anti-English ideas by a tragedy on the subject of Cato;78 but his later works were mainly on national subjects.79 The expansive tendencies of later Portuguese dramatic literature are illustrated by the translations of A. F. de Castilho, who even ventured upon Goethe’s Faust (1872). Among 19th-century dramatists are to be noted Pereira da Cunha, R. Cordeiro, E. Biester, L. Palmeirin, and Garrett’s disciple F. G. de Amorim, by whom both political and social themes have been freely treated. The reaction against romanticism observable in Portuguese poetic literature can hardly fail to affect (or perhaps has already affected) the growth of the national drama; for the receptive qualities of both are not less striking than the productive.

(e) France.

France was the only country, besides Italy, in which classical tragedy was naturalized. In 1531 the Benedictine Barthélemy of Loches printed a Christus Xylonicus; and a very notable impulse was given both to the translation and The French regular drama. to the imitation of ancient models by a series of efforts made in the university of Paris and other French places of learning. The most successful of these attempts was the Johannes Baptistes of George Buchanan, who taught in Paris for five years and at a rather later date resided at Bordeaux, where in 1540 he composed this celebrated tragedy (afterwards translated into four or five modern languages), in which it is now ascertained that he had in view the trial and condemnation of Sir Thomas More. He also wrote Jephthah, and translated into Latin the Medea and Alcestis of Euripides. At a rather later date the great scholar M. A. Muret (Muretus) produced his Julius Caesar, a work perhaps superior in correctness to Buchanan’s tragic masterpiece, but inferior to it in likeness to life. About the same time the enthusiasm of the Paris classicists showed itself in several translations of Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedies into French verse.80

Thus the beginnings of the regular drama in France, which, without absolutely determining, potently swayed its entire course, came to connect themselves directly with the great literary movement of the Renaissance. Du Bellay sounded the note of attack which converted that movement in France into an endeavour to transform the national literature; and in Ronsard the classical school of poetry put forward its conquering hero and sovereign lawgiver. Among the disciples who gathered Jodelle. round Ronsard, and with him formed the “Pleiad” of French literature, Étienne Jodelle, the reformer of the French theatre, soon held a distinguished place. The stage of this period left ample room for the enterprise of this youthful writer. The popularity of the old entertainments had reached its height when Louis XII., in his conflict with Pope Julius II., had not scrupled to call in the aid of Pierre Gringoire (Gringon), and when the Mère sotte had mockingly masqueraded in the petticoats of Holy Church. In the reign of Francis I. the Inquisition, and on occasion the king himself, had to some extent succeeded in repressing the audacity of the actors, whose follies were at the same time an utter abomination in the eyes of the Huguenots. For a time the very mysteries of the Brethren of the Passion had been prohibited; while the moralities and farces had sunk to an almost contemptible level. Yet to this reign belong the contributions to farce-literature of three writers so distinguished as Rabelais (non-extant), Clément Marot and Queen Margaret of Navarre. Meanwhile isolated translations of Italian81 as well as classical dramas had in literature begun the movement which Jodelle now transferred to the stage itself. His tragedy Cléopatre captive was produced there on the same day as his comedy L’Eugène, in 1552, his Didon se sacrifiant following in 1558. Thus at a time when a national theatre was perhaps impossible in a country distracted by civil and religious conflicts, whose monarchy had not yet welded together a number of provinces attached each to its own traditions, and whose population, especially in the capital, was enervated by frivolity or enslaved by fanaticism, was born that long-lived artificial growth, the so-called classical tragedy of France. For French comedy, though subjected to the same influences as tragedy, had a national basis upon which to proceed, and its history is partly that of a modification of old popular forms.

The history of French tragedy begins with the Cléopâtre captive, in the representation of which the author, together with other members of the “Pleiad,” took part. It is a tragedy in the manner of Seneca, devoid of action French tragedy in the 16th century. and provided with a ghost and a chorus. Though mainly written in the five-foot Iambic couplet, it already contains passages in the Alexandrine metre, which soon afterwards J. de La Péruse by his Médée (pr. 1556) established in French tragedy, and which Jodelle employed in his Didon. Numerous tragedies followed in the same style by various authors, among whom Gabriel Bounyn produced the first French regular tragedy on a subject neither Greek nor Roman,82 and the brothers de la Taille,83 and J. Grévin,84 distinguished themselves by their style. In the reign of Charles IX. a vain attempt was made by Nicolas Filleul to introduce the pastoral style of the Italians into French tragedy;85 and the Brotherhood of the Passion was intermingling with pastoral plays its still continued reproductions of the old entertainments, and the religious drama making its expiring efforts, among which T. Le Coq’s interesting mystery of Cain (1580) should be noted. Beza’s Abraham sacrifiant (1550), J. de Coignac’s Goliath (dedicated to Edward VI.), Rivandeau’s Haman (1561), belong to a group of Biblical tragedies, inspired by Calvinist influences. But these more and more approached to the examples of the classical school, which, in spite of all difficulties and rivalries, prevailed. Among its followers Montchrétien exhibited unusual vigour of rhetoric,86 and in R. Garnier French tragedy reached the greatest height in nobility and dignity of style, as well as in the exhibition of dramatic passion, to which it attained before Corneille. In his tragedies87 choruses are still interspersed among the long Alexandrine tirades of the dialogue.

During this period comedy had likewise been influenced by classical models; but the distance was less between the national farces and Terence, than between the mysteries and moralities, and Seneca and the Greeks. L’Eugène Comedy under Italian influence. differs little in style from the more elaborate of the old farces; and while it satirizes the foibles of the clergy without any appreciable abatement of the old licence, its theme is the favourite burden of the French comic theatre in all times—le cocuage. The examples, however, which directly facilitated the productivity of the French comic dramatists of this period, among whom Jean de la Taille was the first to attempt a regular comedy in prose,88 were those of the Italian stage, which in 1576 established a permanent colony in France, destined to survive there till the close of the 17th century, by which time it had adopted the French language, and was ready to coalesce with French actors, without, however, relinquishing all remembrance of its origin. R. Belleau, a member of the “Pleiad,” produced a comedy in which the type (already approached by Jodelle) of the swaggering captain appears,89 J. Grévin copied Italian intrigue, characters and manners;90 O. de Turnèbe (d. 1581) borrowed the title of one Italian play91 and perhaps parts of the plots of others; the Florentine F. d’Amboise (d. 1558) produced versions of two Italian comedies;92 and the foremost French comic poet of the century, P. de Larivey, likewise an Italian born (of the name of Pietro Giunto), openly professed to imitate the poets of his native country. His plays are more or less literal translations of L. Dolce,93 Secchi94 and other Italian dramatists; and this lively and witty author, to whom Molière owes much, thus connects two of the most important and successful growths of the modern comic drama.

The close conjunction between the history of a living dramatic literature and that of the theatre can least of all be ignored in the case of France, where the actor’s art has gone through so ample an evolution, and where the theatre has so long and continuously formed an important part of the national life. By the middle of the 16th century not only had theatrical representations, now quite emancipated from clerical control, here and there already become matters of speculation and business, but the acting profession was beginning to organize itself as such; strolling companies of actors had become a more or less frequent experience; and the attitude of the church and of civic respectability were once more coming to be systematically hostile to the stage and its representatives.

Before, however, either tragedy or comedy in France entered into the period of their history when genius was to illuminate both of them with creations of undying merit, and before the theatre had associated itself enduringly French tragedy and comedy in the 17th century before Corneille. with the artistic and literary divisions of court and society and the people at large, the country had passed through a new phase of the national life. When the troubles and terrors of the great civil and religious wars of the 16th century were over at last, they were found to have produced a reaction towards culture and refinement which spread from certain spheres of society whose influence was for a time prevailing. The seal had been set upon the results of the Renaissance by Malherbe, the father of French style. The masses meanwhile continued to solace or distract their weariness and their sufferings with the help of the accredited ministers of that half-cynical gaiety which has always lighted up the darkest hours of French popular life. In the troublous days preceding Richelieu’s definitive accession to power (1624), the tabarinades—a kind of street dialogue recalling the earliest days of the popular drama—had made the Pont-Neuf the favourite theatre of the Parisian populace. Meanwhile the influence of Spain, which Henry IV. had overcome in politics, had throughout his reign and afterwards been predominant in other spheres, and not the least in that of literature. The stilo culto, of which Gongora was the native Spanish, Marino the Italian, and Lyly the English representative, asserted its dominion over the favourite authors of French society; the pastoral romance of Honoré d’Urfé—the text-book of pseudo-pastoral gallantry—was the parent of the romances of the Scudérys, de La Calprenède and Mme de La Fayette; the Hôtel de Rambouillet was in its glory; the true (not the false) précieuses sat on the heights of intellectual society; and J. L. G. de Balzac (ridiculed in the earliest French dramatic parody)95 and Voiture were the dictators of its literature. Much of the French drama of this age is of the same kind as its romance-literature, like which it fell under the polite castigation of Boileau’s satire. Heroic love (quite a technical passion), “fertile in tender sentiments,” seized hold of the theatre as well as of the romances; and La Calprenède, G. de Scudéry96 and his sister and others were equally fashionable in both species. The Gascon Cyrano de Bergerac, though not altogether insignificant as a dramatist,97 gained his chief literary reputation by a Rabelaisian fiction. Meanwhile, Spanish and Italian models continued to influence both branches of the drama. Everybody knew by heart Gongora’s version of the story of “young Pyramus and his love Thisbe,” as dramatized by Th. Viaud (1590-1626); and the sentiment of Tristan98 (1601-1655) overpowered Herod on the stage, and drew tears from Cardinal Richelieu in the audience. J. Mairet was noted for superior vigour.99 P. Du Ryer’s style is described as, while otherwise superior to that of his contemporaries, Italian in its defects. A mixture of the forms of classical comedy with elements of Spanish and of the Italian pastoral was attempted with great temporary success by A. Hardy, a playwright who thanked Heaven that he knew the precepts of his art while preferring to follow the demands of his trade. The mixture of styles begun by him was carried on by the marquis de Racan,100 J. de Rotrou and others; and among these comedies of intrigue in the Spanish manner the earliest efforts of Corneille himself101 are to be classed. Rotrou’s noteworthier productions102 are later in date than the event which marks an epoch in the history of the French drama, the appearance of Corneille’s Cid (1636).

P. Corneille is justly revered as the first, and in some respects the unequalled, great master of French tragedy, whatever may have been unsound in his theories, or defective in his practice. The attempts of his predecessors had been Corneille. without life, because they lacked really tragic characters and the play of really tragic passions; while their style had been either pedantically imitative or a medley of plagiarisms. He conquered tragedy at once for the national theatre and for the national literature—and this, not by a long tentative process of production, but by a few masterpieces, which may be held to be comprehended within the ten years 1636 to 1646; for in his many later tragedies he never again proved fully equal to himself. The French tragedy, of which the great age begins with the Cid, Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte and Rodogune, was not, whatever it professed to be, a copy of the classical tragedy of Greeks or Romans, or an imitation of the Italian imitations of these; nor, though in his later tragedies Corneille depended less and less upon characters, and more and more, after the fashion of the Spaniards, upon situations, and even upon spectacle, were the forms of the Spanish drama able to assert their dominion over the French tragic stage. The mould of French tragedy was cast by Corneille; but the creative power of his genius was unable to fill it with more than a few examples. His range of passions and characters was limited; he preferred, he said, the reproach of having made his women too heroic to that of having made his men effeminate. His actions inclined too much to the exhibition of conflicts political rather than broadly ethical in their significance. The defects of his style are of less moment; but in this, as in other respects, he was, with all his strength and brilliancy, not one of those rarest of artists who are at the same time the example and the despair of their successors. The examens which he printed of all his plays up to 1660 show how much self-criticism (though it may not always be as in this case conscious) contributes to the true fertility of genius.

In comedy also Corneille begins the first great original epoch of French dramatic literature; for it was to him that Molière owed the inspiration of the tone and style which he made those of the higher forms of French comedy. But Le Menteur (the parent, with its sequel, of a numerous dramatic progeny103) was itself derived from a Spanish original,104 which it did not (as was the case with the Cid) transform into something new. French tragi-comedy Corneille can hardly be said to have invented;105 and of the mongrel growths of sentimental comedy and of domestic drama or drame, he rather suggested than exemplified the conditions.

The tragic art of Racine supplements rather than surpasses that of his older contemporary. His works reflect the serene and settled formality of an age in which the sun of monarchy shone with an effulgence no clouds seemed Racine. capable of obscuring, and in which the life of a nation seemed reducible to the surroundings of a court. The tone of the poetic literature of such an age is not necessarily unreal, because the range of its ideas is limited, and because its forms seem to exist by an immutable authority. That Racine should permanently hold the position which belongs to him in French dramatic literature is due to the fact that to him it was given to present these forms—the forms approved by his age—in what may reasonably be called perfection; and, from the point of view of workmanship, Sophocles could not have achieved more. What his plays contain is another question. They suit themselves so well to the successive phases in the life of Louis XIV., that Madame de Sévigné described Racine as having in his later years loved God as he had formerly loved his mistresses; and this sally at all events indicates the range of passions which inspired his tragic muse. His heroes are all of one type—that of a gracious gloriousness; his heroines vary in their fortunes, but they are all the “trophies of love,”106 with the exception of the scriptural figures, which stand apart from the rest.107 T. Corneille, Campistron, Joseph Duché (1668-1704), Antoin de Lafosse (c. 1653-1708) and Quinault were mere followers of one or both of the great masters of tragedy, though the last named achieved a reputation of his own in the bastard species of the opera.

The type of French tragedy thus established, like everything else which formed part of the “age of Louis XIV.,” proclaimed itself as the definitively settled model of its kind, and was accepted as such by a submissive world. Proud Characteristics of French classical tragedy. of its self-imposed fetters, French tragedy dictatorially denied the liberty of which it had deprived itself to the art of which it claimed to furnish the highest examples. Yet, though calling itself classical, it had not caught the essential spirit of the tragedy of the Greeks. The elevation of tone which characterizes the serious drama of the age of Louis XIV. is a true elevation, but its heights do not lose themselves in a sphere peopled by the myths of a national religion, still less in the region of great thoughts which ask Heaven to stoop to the aspirations and the failures of man. The personages of this drama are conventional like its themes, but the convention is with itself only; Orestes and Iphigenia have not brought with them the cries of the stern goddesses and the flame on the altar of Artemis; their passions like their speech are cadenced by a modern measure. In construction, the simplicity and regularity of the ancient models are stereotyped into a rigid etiquette by the exigencies of the court-theatre, which is but an apartment of the palace. The unities of time and place, with the Greeks mere rules of convenience, French tragedy imposes upon itself as a permanent yoke. The Euripidean prologue is judiciously exchanged for the exposition of the first act, and the lyrical element essential to Greek tragedy is easily suppressed in its would-be copy; lyrical passages still occur in some of Corneille’s early masterpieces,108 but the chorus is consistently banished, to reappear only in Racine’s latest works109 as a scholastic experiment appropriate to a conventual atmosphere. Its uses for explanation and comment are served by the expedient, which in its turn becomes conventional, of the conversations with confidants and confidantes, which more than sufficiently supply the foil of general sentiments. The epical element is allowed full play in narrative passages, more especially in those which relate parts of the catastrophe,110 and, while preserving the stage intact from realisms, suit themselves to the generally rhetorical character of this species of the tragic drama. This character impressed itself more and more upon the tragic art of a rhetorical nation in an age when the loftiest themes were in the pulpit receiving the most artistic oratorical treatment, and developed in the style of French classical tragedy the qualities which cause it to become something between prose and poetry—or to appear (in the phrase of a French critic) like prose in full dress. The force of this description is borne out by the fact that the distinction between the versification of French tragedy and that of French comedy seems at times imperceptible.

The universal genius of Voltaire found it necessary to shine in all branches of literature, and in tragedy to surpass predecessors whom his own authority declared to have surpassed the efforts of the Attic muse. He succeeded in impressing the world with the belief that his innovations had imparted a fresh Voltaire. vitality to French tragedy; in truth, however, they represent no essential advance in art, but rather augmented the rhetorical tendency which paralyses true dramatic life. Such life as his plays possess lies in their political and social sentiments, their invective against tyranny,111 and their exposure of fanaticism.112 In other respects his versatility was barren of enduring results. He might take his themes from French history,113 or from Chinese,114 or Egyptian,115 or Syrian,116 from the days of the Epigoni117 or from those of the Crusades;118 he might appreciate Shakespeare, with a more or less partial comprehension of his strength, and condescendingly borrow from and improve the barbarian.119 But he added nothing to French tragedy where it was weakest—in character; and where it was strongest—in diction—he never equalled Corneille in fire or Racine in refinement. While the criticism to which French tragedy in this age at last began to be subjected has left unimpaired the real titles to immortality of its great masters, the French theatre itself has all but buried in respectful oblivion the dramatic works bearing the name of Voltaire—a name persistently belittled, but second to none in the history of modern progress and of modern civilization.

As it is of relatively little interest to note the ramifications of an art in its decline, the contrasts need not be pursued among the contemporaries of Voltaire, between his imitator Bernard Joseph Saurin (1706-1781), Saurin’s royalist French classical tragedy in its decline. rival de Belloy, Racine’s imitator Lagrange-Chancel and Voltaire’s own would-be rival, the “terrible” Crébillon the elder, who professed to vindicate to French tragedy, already mistress of the heavens through Corneille, and of the earth through Racine, Pluto’s supplementary realm, but who, though thus essaying to carry tragedy lower, failed to carry it farther. In the latter part of the 18th century French classical tragedy as a literary growth was dying a slow death, however numerous might be the leaves which sprouted from the decaying tree. Its form had been permanently fixed; and even Shakespeare, as manipulated by Ducis120—an author whose tastes were better than his times—failed to bring about a change. “It is a Moor, not a Frenchman, who has written this play,” cried a spectator of Ducis’ Othello (1791); but Talma’s conviction was almost as strong as his capacity was great for convincing his public; and he certainly did much to prepare the influence which Shakespeare was gradually to assert over the French drama, and which was aided by translations, more especially that of Pierre Letourneur (1736-1788), which had attracted the sympathy of Diderot and the execrations of the aged Voltaire.121 Meanwhile, the command which classical French tragedy continued to assert over the stage was due in part, no doubt, to the love of Roman drapery—not always abundant, but always in the grand style—which characterized the Revolution, and which was by the Revolution handed down to the Empire. It was likewise, and more signally, due to the great actors who freed the tragic stage from much of its artificiality and animated it by their genius. No great artist has ever more generously estimated the labours of a predecessor than Talma judged those of Le Kain; but it was Talma himself whose genius was pre-eminently fitted to reproduce the great figures of antiquity in the mimic world, which, like the world outside, both required and possessed its Caesar. He, like Rachel after him, reconciled French classical tragedy with nature; and it is upon the art of great original actors such as these that the theatrical future of this form of the drama in France depends. Mere whims of fashion—even when inspired by political feeling—will not waft back to it a real popularity; nor will occasional literary aftergrowths, however meritorious, such as the admirable Lucrèce of F. Ponsard and the attempts of even more recent writers, suffice to re-establish a living union between it and the progress of the national literature.

The rival influences under which classical tragedy has after a long struggle virtually become a thing of the past in French literature are also to be traced in the history of French comedy, which under the co-operation of other influences Comedy. produced a wide variety of growths. The germs of most of these—though not of all—are to be found in the works of the most versatile, the most sure-footed, and, in some respects, the most consummate master of the comic drama whom the Molière. world has known—Molière. What Molière found in existence was a comedy of intrigue, derived from Spanish or Italian examples, and the elements of a comedy of character, in French and more especially in Italian farce and ballet-pantomime. Corneille’s Menteur had pointed the way to a fuller combination of character with intrigue, and in this direction Molière’s genius exercised the height of its creative powers. After beginning with farces, he produced in the earliest of his plays (from 1652), of which more than fragments remain, comedies of intrigue which are at the same time marvellously lively pictures of manners, and then proceeded, with the École des maris (1661), to begin a long series of masterpieces of comedy of character. Yet even these, the chief of which are altogether unrivalled in dramatic literature, do not exhaust the variety of his productions. To define the range of his art is as difficult as to express in words the essence of his genius. For though he has been copied ever since he wrote, neither his spirit nor his manner has descended in full to any of his copyists, whole schools of whom have missed elements of both. A Molière can only be judged in his relations to the history of comedy at large. He was indeed the inheritor of many forms and styles—remaining a stranger to those of Old Attic comedy only, rooted as it was in the political life of a free imperial city; though even the rich extravagances of Aristophanes’ burlesque was not left wholly unreproduced by him. Molière is both a satirist and a humorist; he displays at times the sentiments of a loyal courtier, at others that gay spirit of opposition which is all but indispensable to a popular French wit. His comedies offer elaborate and subtle—even tender—pictures of human character in its eternal types, lively sketches of social follies and literary extravagances, and broad appeals to the ordinary sources of vulgar merriment. Light and perspicuous in construction, he is master of the delicate play of irony, the penetrating force of wit, and the expansive gaiety of frolicsome fun. Faithful to the canons of artistic taste, and under the sure guidance of true natural humour, his style suits itself to every species attempted by him. His morality is the reverse of rigid, but its aberrations are not those of prurience, nor its laws those of pretence; and, wholly free as he was from the didactic aim which is foreign to all true dramatic representation, the services rendered by him to his art are not the less services rendered to society, concerning which the laughter of genuine comedy tells the truth. He raised the comedy of character out of the lower sphere of caricature, and in his greatest creations subordinated to the highest ends of all dramatic composition the plots he so skilfully built, and the pictures of the manners he so faithfully reproduced.

Even among the French comic dramatists of this age there must have been many who “were not aware” that Molière was its greatest poet. For though he had made the true path luminous to them, their efforts were still often Molière’s contemporaries and successors. of a tentative kind, and one was reviving Pathelin while another was translating the Andria. A more unique attempt was made in one of the very few really modern versions of an Aristophanic comedy, which deserves to be called an original copy—the Plaideurs of Racine. The tragic poets Quinault and Campistron likewise wrote comedies, one122 or more of which furnished materials to contemporary English dramatists, as did one of the felicitous plays in which Boursault introduced Mercury and Aesop into the theatrical salon.123 Antoine Montfleury (1640-1685), Baron and Dancourt, who were actors like Molière, likewise wrote comedies. But if the mantle of Molière can be said to have fallen upon any of his contemporaries or successors, this honour must be ascribed to J. F. Regnard, who imitated the great master in both themes and characters,124 while the skilfulness of his plots, and his gaiety of the treatment even of subjects tempting into the by-path of sentimental comedy,125 entitle him to be regarded as a comic poet of original genius. With him C. R. Dufresny occasionally collaborated.

In the next generation (that of Voltaire) comedy gradually—but only gradually—surrendered for a time the very essence of its vitality to the seductions of a hybrid species, which disguised its identity under more than a single name. A. R. le Sage, who as a comic dramatist at first followed successfully in the footsteps of Molière, proved himself on the stage as well as in picturesque fiction a keen observer and inimitable satirist of human life.126 The light texture of the playful and elegant art of J. B. L. Gresset was shown on the stage in a character comedy of merit;127 and in a comedy which reveals something of his pointed wit, A. Piron produced something like a new type of enduring ridiculousness.128 P. C. de Marivaux, the French Spectator, is usually supposed to have formed the connecting link between the “old” French comedy and the “new” and bastard variety. Yet, though his minute analysis of the tender passion excited the scorn of Voltaire, it should not be overlooked that in marivaudage proper the wit holds the balance to the sentiment, and that in some of this frequently misjudged writer’s earlier and most delightful plays the elegance and gaiety of diction are as irresistible as the pathetic sentiment, which is in fact rather an ingredient in his comedy than the pervading characteristic of it.129 Some of the comedies of P. H. Destouches no doubt have a serious basis, and in his later plays he comes near to a kind of drama in which the comic purpose has been virtually submerged.130 The writer who is actually to be credited with the transition to sentimental comedy, and who was fully conscious of the change which he was helping to effect, was Nivelle de La Chaussée, in whose hands French comedy became a champion of the sanctity of marriage, and reproduced the sentiments—in one instance even the characters—of Richardson.131 To his play La Fausse Antipathie the author supplied a critique, amounting to an apology for the new species of which it was designed as an example.

The new species known as comédie larmoyante was now fairly in the ascendant; and it would be easy to show how even Voltaire, who had deprecated the innovation, had to yield to a power greater than his own, and introduced the sentimental element into some of his comedies.132 The further step, by which comédie larmoyante was transformed into tragédie bourgeoise, from which the comic element was to all intents and purposes extruded, was taken by a great French writer, D. Diderot; to whose influence it was largely due that the species which had attained to this consummation for more than a generation ruled supreme in the dramatic literature of Europe. But the final impulse, as Diderot himself virtually acknowledged in the entretiens subjoined by him to his Fils naturel (1757), had been given by a far humbler citizen of the world of letters, the author of The London Merchant. Diderot’s own plays were a literary rather than a theatrical success. Le Fils naturel ou les épreuves de la vertu was not publicly performed till 1771, and then only in deference to the determination of a single actor of the Français (Molé); nor was the performance of it repeated. Diderot’s second play, Le Père de famille, printed in 1758 with a Discours sur la poésie dramatique, went through a few public performances in 1761; and a later revival was unsuccessful. But “at a distance,” as was well said, the effect of Diderot’s endeavours, the earlier in particular, was extremely great, and Lessing, though very critical as to particular points, greatly helped to spread it. Diderot had for the first time consciously sought to proclaim the theatre an agency of social reform, and to entrust to it as its task the propagation of the gospel of philanthropy. Though the execution of his dramatic works fell far short of his aims; though Madame de Staël was not far wrong in denouncing them as exhibiting not nature itself, but “the affectation of nature,” yet they contained, in a measure almost unequalled in the history of the modern drama, the fermenting element which never seems to subside. Their author announced them as examples of a third dramatic form—the genre sérieux—which he declared to be the consummation of the dramatic art. Making war upon the frigid artificiality of classical tragedy, he banished verse from the new species. The effect of these plays was intended to spring from their truth to nature—a truth such as no spectator could mistake, and which should bring home its moral teachings to the business as well as the bosoms of all. The theatre was to become a real and realistic school of the principles of society and of the conduct of life—it was, in other words, to usurp functions with which it has no concern, and to essay the direct reformation of mankind. The idea was neither new nor just; but its speciousness will probably continue to commend it to many enthusiastic minds, whensoever and in whatsoever shape it is revived.

From this point the history of the French drama becomes that of a conflict between an enfeebled artistic school and a tendency which is hardly to be dignified by the name of a school at all. Among the successful dramatists The comedy of the Revolution and the first empire. following on Diderot may be mentioned the critical and versatile J. F. Marmontel, and more especially M. J. Sedaine, who though chiefly working for the opera, produced two comedies of acknowledged merit.133 P. A. C. de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), who for his early sentimental plays,134 in which he imitated Diderot, invented the appellation drame—so convenient in its vagueness that it became the accepted name of the hybrid species to which they belonged—in two works of a very different kind, the famous Barbier de Séville and the still more famous Mariage de Figaro, boldly carried comedy back into its old Spanish atmosphere of intrigue; but, while surpassing all his predecessors in the skill with which he constructed his frivolous plots, he drew his characters with a lightness and sureness of touch peculiar to himself, animated his dialogue with an unparalleled brilliancy of wit, and seasoned action as well as dialogue with a political and social meaning, which caused his epigrams to become proverbs, and which marks his Figaro as a herald of the Revolution. Such plays as these were ill suited to the rule of the despot whose vigilance could not overlook their significance. The comedy of the empire is, in the hands of Collin d’Harleville, Louis Picard (1769-1828), A. Duval, Étienne and others, mainly a harmless comedy of manners; nor was the attempted innovation of N. Lemercier—who was fain to invent a new species, that of historical comedy—more than a flattering self-delusion. The theatre had its share in all the movements and changes which ensued in France; though the most important revolution which the drama itself was to undergo was not one of wholly native origin. Those branches of the drama which belong specifically to the history of the opera, or which associate themselves with it, are here passed by. Among them was the vaudeville (from Val de Vire in Calvados), which began as an interspersion of pantomime with the airs of popular songs, and which, after the Italian masks had been removed Vaudevilles, etc. from it, was cultivated by Ponsard and Marmontel, while Sedaine wrote a didactic poem on the subject (1756). Sedaine was the father of the opéra-comique proper;135 Marmontel,136 as well as Rousseau,137 likewise composed opérettes—a smaller sort of opera, at first of the pastoral variety; and these flexible species easily entered into combination. The melodrama proper, of which the invention is also attributed to Rousseau,138 in its latter development became merely a drama accentuated by music, though usually in little need of any accentuation.

The chief home of the regular drama, however, demanded efforts of another kind. At the Théâtre Français, or Comédie Française, whose history as that of a single company of actors had begun in 1680, the party-strife of the The stage. times made itself audible; and the most prominent tragic poet of the Revolution, M. J. de Chénier, a disciple of Voltaire in dramatic poetry as well as in political philosophy, wrote for the national stage the historical drama—with a political moral139—in which in the memorable year 1789 the actor Talma achieved his first complete triumph. But the victorious Revolution proclaimed among other liberties that of the theatres in Paris, of which soon not less than 50 were open. In 1807 the empire restricted the number to 9, and reinstated the Théâtre Français in sole possession (or nearly such) of the right of performing the Transition to the romantic school. classic drama. No writer of note was, however, tempted or inspired by the rewards and other encouragements offered by Napoleon to produce such a classic tragedy as the emperor would have willingly stamped from out of the earth. The tragedies of C. Delavigne represent the transition from the expiring efforts of the classical to the ambitious beginnings of the romantic school of the French drama.

Of modern romantic drama in France it must suffice to say that it derives some of its characteristics from the general movement of romanticism which in various ways and at various points of time transformed nearly every The romantic school. modern European literature, others from the rhetorical tendency which is a French national feature. Victor Hugo was the founder whom it followed in a spirit of high emprise to success upon success, his own being the most conspicuous of all;140 A. Dumas the elder its unshrinking middleman. The marvellous fire and grandeur of genius of the former, always in extremes but often most sublime at the height of danger, was nowhere more signally such than in the drama; Dumas was a Briareus, working, however, with many hands besides his own. Together with them may, with more or less precision, be classed in the romantic school of dramatists A. de Vigny141 and George Sand,142 neither of whom, however, attained to the highest rank in the drama, and Jules Sandeau;143 A. de Musset, whose originality pervades all his plays, but whose later works, more especially in his prose “proverbs” and pieces of a similar kind, have a flavour of a delicacy altogether indescribable;144 perhaps also P. Mérimée (1803-1870), who invented not only Spanish dramas but a Spanish dramatist, and who was never more audacious than when he seemed most naïf.145

The romantic school was not destined to exercise a permanent control over French public taste; but it can hardly be said to have been overthrown by the brief classical revival begun by F. Ponsard, and continued, though in closer contact with modern ideas, both by him146 and by E. Augier, a dramatist who gradually attained to an extraordinary effectiveness in the self-restrained Modern schools. treatment of social as well as of historical themes.147 While the theatrical fecundity and the remarkable constructive ability of E. Scribe148 supplied a long series of productions attesting the rapid growth of the playwright’s mastery over the secrets of his craft the name of his competitors is legion. Among them may be mentioned, if only as the authors of two of the most successful plays of the historical species produced in the century, two writers of great eminence—C. Delavigne149 and E. Legouvé.150 Later developments of the drama bore the impress of a period of social decay, prepared to probe its own sufferings, while glad at times to take refuge in the gaiety traditional in France in her more light-hearted days, but which even then had not yet deserted either French social life or the theatre which reflected it. After a fashion which would have startled even Diderot, while recalling his efforts in the earnestness of its endeavour to arouse moral interests to which the theatre had long been a stranger, A. Dumas the younger set himself to reform society by means of the stage.151 But the technical skill which he and contemporary dramatists displayed in the execution of their self-imposed task was such as had been undreamt of by Diderot. O. Feuillet, more eminent as a novelist than on the stage, applied himself, though with the aid of fewer prefaces, to the solution of the same or similar problems; while the extraordinary versatility of V. Sardou and his unfailing constructive skill was applied by him to almost every kind of serious, or serio-comic, drama—even the most solid of all.152 In the same period, while E. Pailleron revived some of the most characteristic tendencies of the best French satirical comedy in ridiculing the pompous pretentiousness of learning for its own sake,153 the light-hearted gaiety of E. Labiche changed into something not altogether similar in the productions of the comic muse of L. Halévy and H. Meilhac, ranging from the licence of the musical burlesque which was the congenial delight of the later days of the Second Empire to a species of comedy in which the ingredients of bitterness and even of sadness found a place.154

Dramatic criticism in France has had a material share in the maintenance of a deep as well as wide national interest in the preservation of a high standard of excellence both in the performance of plays and in the plays themselves. Tendencies of the drama and of the theatre in France. Among its modern representatives the foremost place would probably be by common consent allowed to F. Sarcey, whose Monday theatrical feuilleton in the Temps was long awaited week by week as an oracle of dramaturgy. But he was only the first among equals, and the successor and the predecessor of writers who have at least sought to be equal to a function of real public importance. For it seems hardly within the range of probability to suppose that the theatre will for many a generation to come lose the hold which it has established over the intellectual and moral sympathies of nearly the whole of the educated—to say nothing of a great part of the half-educated—population of France. This does not, of course, imply that the creative activity of French dramatic literature is certain to endure. Since the great changes set in which were consequent upon the disastrous war of 1870, French dramatic literature has reflected more than one phase of national sentiment and opinion, and has represented the aspirations, the sympathies and the philosophy of life of more than one class in the community. Thus it has had its episodes of reaction in the midst of an onward flow of which it would be difficult to predict the end. The tendency of what can only vaguely be described as the naturalistic school of writers has corresponded to that even more prominent in the dramatic literatures of certain other European nations; but it must be allowed that a new poetic will have to be constructed if the freedom of development which the dramatic, like all other arts, is entitled to claim is to be reconciled to laws deducible from the whole previous history of the drama. The reaction towards earlier forms has asserted itself in various ways—through the poetic plays of the later years of F. Coppée; in the success (notable for reasons other than artistic) of Vicomte H. de Bornier’s first tragedy; and of late more especially in the dramas—highly original and truly romantic in both form and treatment—of E. Rostand.

The art of acting is not altogether dependent upon the measure of contemporary literary productivity, even in France, where the connexion between dramatic literature and the stage has perhaps been more continuously intimate than in many other countries. Talma and Mlle Mars flourished in one of the most barren ages of the French literary drama; and though this cannot be asserted of the two most brilliant stars of the French 19th century tragic stage, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, or of their comic contemporaries from Frédérick-Lemaître down to types less unique than the “Talma of the boulevards,” the constantly accumulating experience of the successive schools of acting in France may here ensure to the art a future not less notable than its past. Moreover, the French theatre has long been, and is more than ever likely to continue, an affair of the state as well as of the nation; and the judicious policy of not leaving the chief theatres at the mercy of shifting fashion and the base demands of idleness and sensuality will remain the surest guarantee for the maintenance of a high standard both in principle and in practice. So long as France continues to maintain her ascendancy over other nations in matters of taste, and in much else that adorns, brightens and quickens social life, the predominant influence of the French theatre over the theatres of other nations is likewise assured. But dramatic literature is becoming international to a degree hardly dreamt of half a century ago; and the distinctive development of the French theatre cannot fail to be affected by the success or failure of the national drama in retaining and developing its own most characteristic qualities. Its history shows periods of marvellously rapid advance, of hardly less swift decline, and of frequent though at times fitful recovery. Its future may be equally varied; but it will remain not less dependent on the conditions which in every people, ancient or modern, have proved to be indispensable to national vigour and vitality.

Recent French Drama.—The last twenty-five years of the 19th century witnessed an important change in the constructive methods, as well as in the moral tendencies, of the French playwrights. Of the two leading dramatists who reigned supreme over the haute comédie in 1875, one, Émile Augier, had almost ended his career, but the other, Alexandre Dumas, was to maintain his ascendancy for many years longer. Sardou’s fertility of invention, and extraordinary cleverness at manipulating a complicated intrigue, were also greatly admired, and much was expected from Edouard Pailleron’s brilliant and—as it seemed—inexhaustible wit in satirizing the whims and weaknesses of high-born and highly-cultured society. Alexandre Dumas had created and still monopolized the problem play, of which Le Demi-monde, Le Fils naturel, La Question d’argent, Les Idées de Madame Aubray, La Femme de Claude, Monsieur Alphonse, La Visite de noces, L’Étrangère, Francillon and Denise may be mentioned as the most characteristic specimens. The problem play is the presentation of a particular case, with a view to a general conclusion on some important question of human conduct. This afforded the author, who was, in his way, a moralist and a reformer, excellent opportunities for humorous discussions and the display of that familiar eloquence which was his greatest gift and most effective faculty. Among other subjects, the social position of women had an all-powerful attraction for his mind, and many of his later plays were written with the object of placing in strong relief the remarkable inequality of the sexes, both as regards freedom of action and responsibility, in modern marriage. Like all the dramatists of his time, he adhered to Scribe’s mode of play-writing—a mixture of the drame bourgeois, as initiated by Diderot, and the comedy of character and manners, long in vogue—from the days of Molière, Regnard, Destouches and Marivaux, down to the beginning of the 19th century. In his prefaces Dumas often undertook the defence of the system which, in his estimation, was best calculated to serve the purpose of the artist, the humorist and the moralist—a dramatist being, as he conceived, a combination of the three.

Though the majority of French playgoers continued to side with him, and to cling to the time-honoured theatrical beliefs, a few young men were beginning to murmur against the too elaborate mechanism and artificial logic. Scribe and his successors, whose plays were a combination of comedy and drama, were wont to devote the first act to a brilliant and witty presentation of personages, then to crowd the following scenes with incidents, until the action was brought to a climax about the end of the fourth act, invariably concluding, in the fifth, with an optimistic dénouement, just before midnight, the time appointed by police regulations for the closing of playhouses. At the same time a more serious and far-reaching criticism was levelled at the very principles on which the conception of human life was then dependent. A new philosophy, based on scientific research, had been gradually gaining ground and penetrating the French mind. A host of bold writers had been trying, with considerable firmness and continuity of purpose, to start a new kind of fiction, writing in perfect accordance with the determinist theories of Auguste Comte, Darwin and Taine. The long-disputed success of the Naturalistic School carried everything before it during the years 1875-1885, and its triumphant leaders were tempted to make the best of their advantage by annexing a new province and establishing a footing on the stage. In this they failed signally, either when they were assisted by professional dramatists or when left to their own resources. It became evident that Naturalism, to be made acceptable on the stage, would have to undergo a special process of transformation and be handled in a peculiar way. Henry Becque succeeded in embodying the new theories in two plays, which at first met with very indifferent success, but were revived at a later period, and finally obtained permanent recognition in the French theatre—even with the acquiescence of the most learned critics, when they discovered, or fancied they discovered, that Becque’s comedies agreed, in the main, with Molière’s conception of dramatic art. In Les Corbeaux and La Parisienne the plot is very simple; the episodes are incidents taken from ordinary life. No extraneous character is introduced to discuss moral and social theories, or to acquaint us with the psychology of the real dramatis personae, or to suggest humorous observations about the progress of the dramatic action. The characters are left to tell their own tale in their own words, which are sometimes very comical, sometimes very repulsive, but purport to be always true to nature. Human will, which was the soul and mainspring of French tragedy in the 17th century, and played such a paramount part in the drame bourgeois and the haute comédie of the 19th, appears in M. Becque’s plays to have fallen from its former exalted position and to have ceased to be a free agent. It is a mere passive instrument to our inner desires and instincts and appetites, which, in their turn, obey natural laws. Thus, in Becque’s comedies, as in the old Greek drama, destiny, not man, is the chief actor, the real but unseen protagonist.

Becque was not a prolific writer, and when he died, in 1899, it was remarked that he had spent the last ten years of his life in comparative inactivity. But during these years his young and ardent disciples had spared no effort in putting their master’s theories to the test. It had occurred to a gifted and enterprising actor-manager, named André Antoine, that the time had come for trying dramatic experiments in a continued and methodical manner. For this purpose he gathered around him a number of young authors, and produced their plays before a select audience of subscribers, who had paid in advance for their season-tickets. The entertainment was a strictly private one. In this way Antoine made himself independent of the censors, and at the same time was no longer obliged to consider the requirements of the average playgoer, as is the case with ordinary managers, anxious, above all things, to secure long runs. At the Théâtre Libre the most successful play was not to be performed for more than three nights.

The reform attempted was to consist in the elimination of what was contrary to nature in Dumas’s and Augier’s comedies: of the intrigue parallèle or underplot, of the over-numerous and improbable incidents which followed the first act and taxed the spectator’s memory to the verge of fatigue; and, lastly, of the conventional dénouement for which there was no justification. A true study of character was to take the place of Sardou’s complicated fabrications and Dumas’s problem plays. The authors would present the spectator with a fragment of life, but would force no conclusion upon him at the termination of the play. The reformation in histrionic art was to proceed apace. The actors and actresses of the preceding period had striven to give full effect to certain witty utterances of the author, or to preserve and to develop their own personal peculiarities or oddities. Antoine and his fellow-artists did their best to make the public realize, in every word and every gesture, the characteristic features and ruling passions of the men and women they were supposed to represent.

It was in the early autumn of 1887 that the Théâtre Libre opened its doors for the first time. It struggled on for eight years amidst unfailing curiosity, but not without encountering some adverse, or even derisive, criticism from a considerable portion of the public and the press. The Théâtre Libre brought under public notice such men as George Courteline and George Ancey, who gave respectively, in Bonbouroche and La Dupe, specimens of a comic vein called the “comique cruel.” Fabre, in L’Argent, approached if not surpassed his master, Henry Becque. Brieux, in Blanchette, gave promise of talent, which he has since in a great measure justified. In Les Fossiles and L’Envers d’une sainte, by François de Curel, were found evidences of dramatic vigour and concentrated energy, allied with a remarkable gift for the minute analysis of feeling. Antoine’s activity was not exclusively confined to the efforts of the French Naturalistic School; he included the Norwegian drama in his programme, and successively produced several of Ibsen’s plays. They received a large amount of attention from the critics, the views then expressed ranging from the wildest enthusiasm to the bitterest irony. Francisque Sarcey was decidedly hostile, and Jules Lemaître, who ranked next to him in authority, ventured to suggest that Ibsen’s ideas were nothing better than long-discarded social and literary paradoxes, borrowed from Pierre Leroux through George Sand, and returned to the French market as novelties. Ibsen was not understood by the French public at large, though his influence could be clearly traced on thoughtful men like Paul Hervieu and François de Curel.

The authors of the Théâtre Libre were sadly wanting in tact and patience. They went at once to extremes, and, while trying to free themselves from an obsolete form of drama, fell into a state of anarchy. If a too elaborate plot is a fault, no plot at all is an absurdity. The old school had been severely taken to task for devoting the first act to the delineation of character, and the delineation of character was now found to have extended over the whole play; and worse still, most of these young men seemed to find pleasure in importing a low vocabulary on to the stage; they made it their special object to place before the spectator revolting pictures of the grossest immorality. In this they were supported by a knot of noisy and unwise admirers, whose misplaced approval largely contributed towards bringing an otherwise useful and interesting undertaking into disrepute. The result was that after the lapse of eight years the little group collected round Antoine had lost in cohesion and spirit, that it was both less hopeful and less compact than it had been at the outset of the campaign. But some authors who had kept aloof from the movement were not slow in reaping the moral and intellectual profit of these tentative experiments. Among them must be cited George de Porto-Riche, Henri Lavedan, Paul Hervieu, Maurice Donnay and Jules Lemaître. Alone among the authors of the Théâtre Libre, É. Brieux secured an assured position on the regular stage. Instead of attacking the vices and follies of his times, he has made a name by satirizing the weak points or the wrong application of certain fundamental principles by which modern institutions are supported. He mocked at universal suffrage in L’Engrenage, at art in Ménages d’artistes, at popular instruction in Blanchette, at charity in Les Bienfaiteurs, at science in L’Évasion, and then at law in La Robe rouge. Of Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, one is an old maid with a strong bent towards mysticism, another is a star in the demi-monde, and the third is married. Neither religion, nor free love, nor marriage has made one of the three happy. The strange fact about Brieux is that he propounds his uncomfortable ideas with an incredible amount of dash and spirit.

All the plays written by the above-mentioned authors, and by those who follow in their steps, have been said to constitute the “new comedy.” But one may question the advisability of applying the same name to literary works which present so little, if any, family likeness. It was tacitly agreed to remove the intricacies of the plot and the forced dénouement. But no one will trace in those plays the uniformity of moral purpose which would justify us in comprising them under the same head, as products of the same school. Then, before the Naturalistic, or half-Naturalistic, School had attained to a practical result or taken a definite shape, a wave of Romanticism swept over the French public, and in a measure brought back the old artistic and literary dogmas propounded by Victor Hugo and the generation of 1830. Signs of a revival in French dramatic poetry were not lacking. The success of La Fille de Roland, by the Vicomte de Bornier, was restricted to the more cultivated classes, but the vogue of Jean Richepin’s Chemineau was at once general and lasting. Cyrano de Bergerac, produced in the last days of 1897, brought a world-wide reputation to its young author, Edmond Rostand. This play combines sparkling wit and brilliancy of imagination with delightful touches of pathos and delicate tenderness. It was assumed that Rostand was endowed to an extraordinary degree both with theatrical genius and the poetic faculty. L’Aiglon fell short of this too favourable judgment. It is more a dramatic poem than a real drama, and the author handles history with the same childish incompetence and inaccuracy as Hugo did in Cromwell, in Ruy Blas and Hernani. The persistent approbation of the public seemed, however, to indicate a growing taste for poetry, even when unsupported by dramatic interest—a curious symptom among the least poetical of modern European races.

To sum up, the French, as regards the present condition of their drama, were confronted with two alternative movements. Naturalism, furthered by science and philosophy, was contending against traditions three centuries old, and seemed unable to crystallize into masterly works; while romantic drama, founded on vague and exploded theories, had become embodied in productions of real artistic beauty, which have been warmly welcomed by the general playgoer. It should nevertheless be noted that in Cyrano and L’Aiglon human will, which was the main-spring of Corneille’s tragedy and Hugo’s drama, tried to reassert itself, but was baffled by circumstance, and had to submit to inexorable laws. This showed that the victorious school would have to reckon with the doctrines of the defeated party, and suggested that a determinist theatre might be the ultimate outcome of a compromise.

(f) English Drama.

Among the nations of Germanic descent the English alone succeeded, mainly through the influence of the Renaissance movement, in transforming the later growths of the medieval drama into the beginnings of a great and enduring national dramatic literature, second neither in volume nor in splendour to any other in the records of the world. And, although in England, as elsewhere, the preparatory process had been continuing for some generations, its consummation coincided with one of the greatest epochs of English national history, and indeed forms one of the chief glories of that epoch itself; so that, in thinking or speaking of the Elizabethan age and the Elizabethan drama, the one can scarcely be thought or spoken of without the other.

It is of course conceivable that the regular drama, or drama proper, might in England have been called into life without the direct influence of classical examples. Already in the reign of Edward VI. the spirit of the Reformation had Beginnings of the regular drama. (with the aid of a newly awakened desire for the study of history, which was no doubt largely due to Italian examples) quickened the relatively inanimate species of the morality into the beginning of a new development.155 But though the Kyng Johan of Bale (much as this author abhorred the chronicles as written by ecclesiastics) came very near to the chronicle histories, there is no proof whatever that the work, long hidden away for very good reasons, actually served as a transition to the new species; and Bale’s production was entirely unknown to the particular chronicle history which treated the same subject. Before the earliest example of this transitional species was produced, English tragedy had directly connected its beginnings with classical models.

Much in the same way, nothing could have been more natural and in accordance with the previous sluggish evolution of the English drama than that a gradual transition, however complete in the end, should have been effected from the moralities to comedy. It was not, however, John Heywood himself who was to accomplish any such transition; possibly, he was himself the author of the morality Genus humanum performed at the coronation feast of Queen Mary, whose council speedily forbade the performance of interludes without the queen’s licence. Nor are we able to conjecture the nature of the pieces bearing this name composed by Richard Farrant, afterwards the master of the Children of St George’s at Windsor, or of William Hunnis, master under Queen Elizabeth of the Children of the Chapel Royal. But the process of transition is visible in productions, also called interludes, but charged with serious purpose, such as T. Ingeland’s noteworthy Disobedient Child (before 1560), and plays in which the element of abstractions is perceptibly yielding to that of real personages, or in which the characters are for the most part historical or the main element in the action belongs to the sphere of romantic narrative.156 The demonstration would, however, be alien to the purpose of indicating the main conditions of the growth of the English drama. The immediate origin of the earliest extant English comedy must, like that of Imitation of classical examples. the first English tragedy, be sought, not in the development of any popular literary or theatrical antecedents, but in the imitation, more or less direct, of classical models. This cardinal fact, unmistakable though it is, has frequently been ignored or obscured by writers intent upon investigating the origines of our drama, and to this day remains without adequate acknowledgment in most of the literary histories accessible to the great body of students.

It is true that in tracing the entrance of the drama into the national literature there is no reason for seeking to distinguish very narrowly between the several tributaries to the main stream which fertilized this as well as other fields under Renaissance culture. The universities then still remained, and for a time became more prominently than ever, the leading agents of education in all its existent stages; and it is a patent fact that no influence could have been so strong upon the Elizabethan dramatists as that to which they had been subjected during the university life through which the large majority of them had passed. The corporate life of the universities, and the enthusiasms (habitually unanimous) of their undergraduates and younger graduates, communicated this influence, as it were automatically, to the students, and to the learned societies themselves, of the Inns of Court. In the Tudor, as afterwards in the early Stuart, times, these Inns were at once the seminaries of loyalty, and the obvious resort for the supply of young men of spirit desirous of honouring a learned court by contributing to its choicer amusements. Thus, whether we trace them in the universities, in the “bowers” or halls of the lawyers, or in the palaces of the sovereign, the beginnings of the English academical drama, which in later Elizabethan and Jacobean literature cannot claim to be more than a subordinate species of the national drama, in an earlier period served as the actual link between classical tragedy and comedy and the surviving native growths, and supplied the actual impulse towards the beginnings of English tragedy and comedy.

The academical drama of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign and of the preceding part of the Tudor period—including the school-drama in the narrower sense of the term and other performances of academical origin—consisted, The earlier academical drama. apart from actual reproductions of classical plays in original Latin or in Latin versions of the Greek, in adaptations of Latin originals, or of Latin or English plays directly modelled on classical examples. A notable series of plays of this kind was performed in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, from the first year of Edward VI. onward, when N. Grimald’s Archipropheta, treating in classic form the story of St John the Baptist, but introducing the Vice and comic scenes, was brought out.157 Others were J. Calfhill’s Progne and R. Edwardes’ Palaemon and Arcyte (both 1566), and, from about 1580 onwards, a succession of Latin plays by William Gager, beginning with the tragedy Meleager, and including, with other tragedies,158 a comedy Rivales. Yet another comedy, acted at Christ Church, and extolled in 1591 by Harington for “harmless mirth,” was the Bellum grammaticale, or Civil War between Nouns and Verbs, which may have been a revision of a comedy written by Bale’s friend, R. Radcliff, in 1538, but of which in any case the ultimate origin was a celebrated Italian allegorical treatise.159 In Cambridge, as is not surprising, the activity of the early academical friends and favourers of the drama was even more marked. At St John’s College, where Bishop Watson’s Latin tragedy called Absolom was produced within the years 1534 and 1544, plays were, according to Ascham, repeatedly performed about the middle of the century; at Christ’s a controversial drama in the Lutheran interest called Pammachius, of which Gardiner complained to the privy council, and which seems afterwards to have been translated by Bale, was acted in 1544; and at Trinity there was a long series of performances which began with Christopherson’s Jephtha about 1546, and consisted partly of reproductions of classical works,160 partly of plays and “shows” unnamed; while on one occasion at all events, in 1559, “two English plays” were produced. In 1560 was acted, doubtless in the original Latin, and not in Palsgrave’s English translation (1540) for schoolboys, the celebrated “comedy” of Acolastus, by W. Gnaphaeus, on the story of the Prodigal Son. The long series of Trinity plays interspersed with occasional plays at King’s (where Udall’s Ezechias was produced in English in 1564), at St John’s (where T. Legge’s Richardus III. was first acted in 1573), and, as will be seen below, at Christ’s, continued, with few noticeable breaks, up to the time when the Elizabethan drama was in full activity.161 Among the “academical” plays not traceable to any particular university source may be mentioned, as acted at court so early as the end of 1565 or the beginning of 1566, the Latin Sapientia Solomonis, which generally follows the biblical narrative, but introduces a comic element in the sayings of the popular Marcolph, who here appears as a court fool.

It was under the direct influence of the Renaissance, viewed primarily, in England as elsewhere, as a revival of classical studies, and in connexion with the growing taste in university and cognate circles of society, and at a Influence of Seneca. court which prided itself on its love and patronage of learning, that English tragedy and comedy took their actual beginnings. Those of comedy, as it would seem, preceded those of tragedy by a few years. Already in Queen Mary’s reign, translation was found the readiest form of expression offering itself to literary scholarship; and Italian examples helped to commend Seneca, the most modern of the ancient tragedians, and the imitator of the most human among the masters of Attic tragedy, as a favourite subject for such exercises. In the very year of Elizabeth’s accession—seven years after Jodelle had brought out the earliest French tragedy—a group of English university scholars began to put forth a series of translations of the ten tragedies of Seneca, which one of them, T. Newton, in 1581 collected into a single volume. The earliest of these versions was that of the Troades (1559) by Jasper Heywood, a son of the author of the Interludes. He also published the Thyestes (1560) and the Hercules Furens (1561); the names of his fellow-translators were A. Neville, T. Nuce, J. Studley and the T. Newton aforesaid. These translations, which occasionally include original interpolations (“additions,” a term which was to become a technical one in English dramaturgy), are in no instance in blank verse, the favourite metre of the dialogue being the couplets of fourteen-syllable lines best known through Chapman’s Homer.

The authority of Seneca, once established in the English literary world, maintained itself there long after English drama had emancipated itself from the task of imitating this pallid model, and, occasionally, Seneca’s own prototype, Earliest English tragedies. Euripides.162 Nor can it be doubted that some translation of the Latin tragic poet had at one time or another passed through Shakespeare’s own hands. But what is of present importance is that to the direct influence of Seneca is to be ascribed the composition of the first English tragedy which we possess. Of Gorboduc (afterwards re-named Ferrex and Porrex), first acted on the 18th of January 1562 by the members of the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth, the first three acts are stated to have been written by T. Norton; the rest of the play (if not more) was the work of T. Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and earl of Dorset, whom Jasper Heywood praised for his sonnets, but who is better known for his leading share in The Mirror for Magistrates. Though the subject of Gorboduc is a British legend, and though the action is neither copied nor adapted from any treated by Seneca, yet the resemblance between this tragedy and the Thebais is too strong to be fortuitous. In all formal matters—chorus, messengers, &c.—Gorboduc adheres to the usage of classical tragedy; but the authors show no respect for the unities of time or place. Strong in construction, the tragedy is—like its model, Seneca—weak in characterization. The dialogue, it should be noticed, is in blank verse; and the device of the dumb-show, in which the contents of each act are in succession set forth in pantomime only, is employed at once to instruct and to stimulate the spectator.

The nearly contemporary Apius and Virginia (c. 1563), though it takes its subject—destined to become a perennial one on the modern stage—from Roman story; the Historie of Horestes (pr. 1567); and T. Preston’s Cambises King of Percia (1569-1570), are somewhat rougher in form, and, the first and last of them at all events, more violent in diction, than Gorboduc. They still contain elements of the moralities (above all the Vice) and none of the formal features of classical tragedy. But a Julyus Sesyar seems to have been performed, in precisely the same circumstances as Gorboduc, so early as 1562; and, four years later, G. Gascoigne, the author of the satire The Steele Glass, produced with the aid of two associates (F. Kinwelmersh and Sir Christopher Yelverton, who wrote an epilogue), Jocasta, a virtual translation of L. Dolce’s Giocasta, which was an adaptation, probably, of R. Winter’s Latin translation of the Phoenissae of Euripides.163 Between the years 1567 and 1580 a large proportion of the plays presented at court by choir- or school-boys, and by various companies of actors, were taken from Greek legend or Roman history; as was R. Edwardes’ Damon and Pithias (perhaps as early as 1564-1565), which already shades off from tragedy into what soon came to be called tragi-comedy.164 Simultaneously with the influence, exercised directly or indirectly, of classical literature, that of Italian, both dramatic and narrative, with its marked tendency to treat native themes, asserted itself, and, while diversifying the current of early English tragedy, infused into it a long-abiding element of passion. There are sufficient grounds for concluding that a play on the subject of Romeo and Juliet, which L. da Porto and M. Bandello had treated in prose narrative—that of the latter having through a French version formed itself into an English poem—was seen on an English stage in or before 1562. Gismonde of Salerne, a play founded on Boccaccio, was acted before Queen Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1568, nearly a generation before it was published, rewritten in blank verse by R. Wilmot, one of the performers, then in holy orders; G. Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, founded on G. Cinthio (from which came the plot of Measure for Measure), followed, printed in 1578; and there were other “casts of Italian devices” belonging to this age, in which the choice of a striking theme still seemed the chief preoccupation of English tragic poets.

From the double danger which threatened English tragedy in the days of its infancy—that it would congeal on the wintry heights of classical themes, or dissolve its vigour in the glowing heat of a passion fiercer than that of the Italians—Ingleso Italianato è un diavolo incarnato—it was preserved more than by any other cause by its happy association with the traditions of the national history. An exceptional position might seem to be in this respect occupied by T. Hughes’ interesting tragedy The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587). But the author of this play—in certain portions of whose framework there were associated with him seven other members of Gray’s Inn, including Francis Bacon, and which was presented before Queen Elizabeth like Gorboduc—in truth followed the example of the authors of that work both in choice of theme, in details of form, and in a general though far from servile imitation of the manner of Seneca; nor does he represent any very material advance upon the first English tragedy.

Fortunately, at the very time when from such beginnings as those just described the English tragic drama was to set forth upon a course in which it was to achieve so much, a new sphere of activity suggested itself. And in this, Chronicle histories. after a few more or less tentative efforts, English dramatists very speedily came to feel at home. In their direct dramatization of passages or portions of English history (in which the doings and sufferings of King Arthur could only by courtesy or poetic licence be included) classical models would be of scant service, while Italian examples of the treatment of national historical subjects, having to deal with material so wholly different, could not be followed with advantage. The native species of the chronicle history, which designedly assumed this name in order to make clear its origin and purpose, essayed nothing more or less than a dramatic version of an existing chronicle. Obviously, while the transition from half historical, half epical narrative often implied carrying over into the new form some of the features of the old, it was only when the subject matter had been remoulded and recast that a true dramatic action could result. But the histories to be found among the plays of Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans are true dramas, and it would be inconvenient to include these in the transitional species of those known as chronicle histories. Among these ruder compositions, which intermixed the blank verse introduced on the Stage by Gorboduc with prose, and freely combined or placed side by side tragic and comic ingredients, we have but few distinct examples. One of these is The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, known to have been acted before 1588; in which both the verse and the prose are frequently of a very rude sort, while it is neither divided into acts or scenes nor, in general, constructed with any measure of dramatic skill. But its vigour and freshness are considerable, and in many passages we recognize familiar situations and favourite figures in later masterpieces of the English historical drama. The second is The Troublesome Raigne of King John, in two parts (printed in 1591), an epical narrative transferred to the stage, neither a didactic effort like Bale’s, nor a living drama like Shakespeare’s, but a far from contemptible treatment of its historical theme. The True Chronicle History of King Leir (acted in 1593) in form resembles the above, though it is not properly on a national subject (its story is taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth); but, with all its defects, it seems only to await the touch of the master’s hand to become a tragedy of supreme effectiveness. A yet further step was taken in the Tragedy of Sir Thomas More (c. 1590)—in which Shakespeare’s hand has been thought traceable, and which deserves its designation of “tragedy” not so much on account of the relative nearness of the historical subject to the date of its dramatic treatment, as because of the tragic responsibility of character here already clearly worked out.

Such had been the beginnings of tragedy in England up to the time when the genius of English dramatists was impelled by the spirit that dominates a great creative epoch of literature to seize the form ready to their hands. Earliest comedies. The birth of English comedy, at all times a process of less labour and eased by an always ready popular responsiveness to the most tentative efforts of art, had slightly preceded that of her serious sister. As has been seen from the brief review given above of the early history of the English academical drama, isolated Latin comedies had been performed in the original or in English versions as early as the reign of Henry VIII.—perhaps even earlier; while the morality and its direct descendant, the interlude, pointed the way towards popular treatment in the vernacular of actions and characters equally well suited for the diversion of Roman, Italian and English audiences. Thus there was no innovation in the adaptation by N. Udal (q.v.) of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus under the title of Ralph Roister Doister, which may claim to be the earliest extant English comedy. It has a genuinely popular vein of humour, and the names fit the characters after a fashion familiar to the moralities. The second English comedy—in the opinion of at least one high authority our first—is Misogonus, which was certainly written as early as 1560. Its scene is laid in Italy; but the Vice, commonly called “Cacurgus,” is both by himself and others frequently designated as “Will Summer,” in allusion to Henry VIII.’s celebrated jester. Gammer Gurton’s Needle, long regarded as the earliest of all English comedies, was printed in 1575, as acted “not long ago in Christ’s College, Cambridge.” Its authorship was till recently attributed to John Still (afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells), who was a resident M.A. at Christ’s, when a play was performed there in 1566. But the evidence of his authorship is inconclusive, and the play “made by Mr. S., Master of Arts,” may be by William Stevenson, or by some other contemporary. This comedy is slighter in plot and coarser in diction than Ralph Roister Doister, but by no means unamusing.

In the main, however, early English comedy, while occasionally introducing characters and scenes of thoroughly native origin and complexion (e.g. Grim, the Collier of Croydon),165 was content to borrow its themes from classical or Italian sources.166 G. Gascoigne’s Supposes (acted at Gray’s Inn in 1566) is a translation of I Suppositi of Ariosto, remarkable for the flowing facility of its prose. While, on the one hand, the mixture of tragic with comic motives, which was to become so distinctive a feature of the Elizabethan drama, was already leading in the direction of tragi-comedy, the precedent of the Italian pastoral drama encouraged the introduction of figures and stories derived from classical mythology; and the rapid and diversified influence of Italian comedy, in close touch with Italian prose fiction, seemed likely to affect and quicken continuously the growth of the lighter branch of the English drama.

Out of such promises as these the glories of English drama were ripened by the warmth and light of the great Elizabethan age—of which the beginnings may fairly be reckoned from the third decennium of the reign to which it owes Conditions of the early Elizabethan drama. its name. The queen’s steady love of dramatic entertainments could not of itself have led, though it undoubtedly contributed, to such a result. Against the attacks which a nascent puritanism was already directing against the stage by the hands of J. Northbrooke,167 the repentant playwright S. Gosson,168 P. Stubbes,169 and others,170 were to be set not only the frugal favour of royalty and the more liberal patronage of great nobles,171 but the fact that literary authorities were already weighing the endeavours of the English drama in the balance of respectful criticism, and that in the abstract at least the claims of both tragedy and comedy were upheld by those who shrank from the desipience of idle pastimes. It is noticeable that this period in the history of the English theatre coincides with the beginning of the remarkable series of visits made to Germany by companies of English comedians, which did not come to an end till the period immediately before the Thirty Years’ War, and were occasionally resumed after its close. As at home the popularity of the stage increased, the functions of playwright and actor, whether combined or not, began to hold out a reasonable promise of personal gain. Nor, above all, was that higher impulse which leads men of talent and genius to attempt forms of art in harmony with the tastes and tendencies of their times wanting to the group of writers who can be remembered by no nobler name than that of Shakespeare’s predecessors.

The lives of all of these are, of course, in part contemporary with the life of Shakespeare himself; nor was there any substantial difference in the circumstances under which most of them, and he, led their lives as dramatic The predecessors of Shakespeare. authors. A distinction was manifestly kept up between poets and playwrights. Of the contempt entertained for the actor’s profession some fell to the share of the dramatist; “even Lodge,” says C. M. Ingleby, “who had indeed never trod the stage, but had written several plays, and had no reason to be ashamed of his antecedents, speaks of the vocation of the play-maker as sharing the odium attaching to the actor.” Among the dramatists themselves good fellowship and literary partnership only at times asserted themselves as stronger than the tendency to mutual jealousy and abuse; of all chapters of dramatic history, the annals of the early Elizabethan stage perhaps least resemble those of Arcadia.

Moreover, the theatre had hardly found its strength as a powerful element in the national life, when it was involved in a bitter controversy, with which it had originally no connexion, on behalf of an ally whose sympathy with History of the Elizabethan stage. it can only have been of a very limited kind. The Marprelate controversy, into which, among leading playwrights, Lyly and Nashe were drawn, in 1589 led to a stoppage of stage-plays which proved only temporary; but the general result of the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of political abuse and invective was beyond a doubt to coarsen and degrade both plays and players. Scurrilous attempts and rough repression continued during the years 1590-1593; and the true remedy was at last applied, when from about 1594, the chief London actors became divided into two great rival companies—the lord chamberlain’s and the lord admiral’s—which alone received licences. Instead of half a dozen or more companies whose jealousies communicated themselves to the playwrights belonging to them, there were now, besides the Children of the Chapel, two established bodies of actors, directed by steady and, in the full sense of the word, respectable men. To the lord chamberlain’s company, which, after being settled at “the Theater” (opened as early as 1576 or 1577), moved to Blackfriars, purchased by James Burbage, in 1596, and to the Globe on the Bankside in 1599, Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, the greatest of the Elizabethan actors, belonged; the lord admiral’s was managed by Philip Henslowe, the author of the Diary, and Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, and was ultimately, in 1600, settled at the Fortune. In these and other houses were performed the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, with few adventitious aids, the performance being crowded into a brief afternoon, when it is obvious that only the idler sections of the population could attend. No woman might appear at a playhouse, unless masked; on the stage, down to the Restoration, women’s parts continued to be acted by boys.

It is futile to take no account of such outward circumstances as these and many which cannot here be noted in surveying the progress of the literature of the Elizabethan drama. Like that of the Restoration—and like that of the present day—it was necessarily influenced in its method and spirit of treatment by the conditions and restrictions which governed the place and circumstances of the performance of plays, including the construction of theatre and stage, as well as by the social composition of its audiences, which the local accommodation, not less than the entertainment, provided for them had to take into account. But to these things a mere allusion must suffice. It may safely be said, at the same time, that no dramatic literature which has any claim to rank beside the Elizabethan—not that of Athens nor those of modern Italy and Spain, nor those of France and Germany in their classic periods—had to contend against such odds; a mighty inherent strength alone ensured to it the vitality which it so triumphantly asserted, and which enabled it to run so unequalled a course.

Among Shakespeare’s predecessors, John Lyly, whose plays were all written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul’s, holds a position apart in English dramatic literature. The euphuism, to which his famous Lyly. romance gave its name, likewise distinguishes his mythological,172 quasi-historical,173 allegorical,174 and satirical175 comedies. But his real service to the progress of English drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his imagery—though to his fondness for fairylore and for the whole phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a stimulative precedent, and though in his Endimion at all events he excites curiosity by an allegorical treatment of contemporary characters and events. It does not even lie in the songs interspersed in his plays, though none of his predecessors had in the slightest degree anticipated the lyric grace which distinguishes some of these incidental efforts. It consists in his adoption of Gascoigne’s innovation of writing plays in prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and pretentious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious dialogue—an example to Kyd. which even such successors as Shakespeare and Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd, the author of the Spanish Tragedy (preceded or followed by the first part of Jeronimo), and probably of several plays whose author was unnamed, possesses some of the characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. Marlowe. No slighter tribute than this is assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe, whose violent end prematurely closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play, Tamburlaine the Great, in which the use of blank verse was introduced upon the English public stage, while full of the “high astounding terms” of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the passion which was the poet’s most characteristic feature, and which was to find expression so luxuriantly beautiful in his Doctor Faustus, and so surpassingly violent in his Jew of Malta. His masterpiece, Edward II., is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic Peele. power unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele was a far more versatile writer even as a dramatist; but, though his plays contain passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by the side of Marlowe’s Edward II., compared with which, if indeed not absolutely, Peele’s Chronicle of Edward I. still stands on the level of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His finest play is undoubtedly David and Bethsabe, which resembles Edward I. in construction, but far surpasses it in beauty of language and versification, besides treating its subject with greatly superior dignity. If the difference between Peele and Shakespeare is still, in many respects besides that of genius, an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something like a Greene. Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene—unfortunate perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in the proof which he left behind him of his supercilious jealousy of Shakespeare. Greene’s genius, most conspicuous in plays treating English life and scenes, could, notwithstanding his academic self-sufficiency, at times free itself from the pedantry apt to beset the flight of Peele’s and at times even of Marlowe’s muse; and his most delightful work176 seems to breathe something of the air, sweet and fresh like no other, which blows over an English countryside. Thomas Lodge, whose dramatic, and much less of course his literary activity, is measured by the only play that we know to have been wholly his;177 Thomas Nashe, the redoubtable pamphleteer and the father of the English picaresque novel;178 Henry Chettle, who worked the chords of both pity179 and terror180 with equal vigour, and Anthony Munday, better remembered for his city pageants than for his plays, are among the other more important writers of the early Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be called predecessors of Shakespeare. It is not possible here to enumerate the more interesting of the anonymous plays which belong to this “pre-Shakespearian” period of the Elizabethan drama; but many of them are by intrinsic merit as well as for special causes deserving of the attention of the student.

The common characteristics of nearly all these dramatists and plays were in accordance with those of the great age to which they belonged. Stirring times called for stirring themes, such as those of “Mahomet, Scipio and Common characteristics of the early Elizabethans. Tamerlane”; and these again for a corresponding vigour of treatment. Neatness and symmetry of construction were neglected for fulness and variety of matter. Novelty and grandeur of subject seemed well matched by a swelling amplitude and often reckless extravagance of diction. As if from an inner necessity, the balance of rhymed couplets gave way to the impetuous march of blank verse; “strong lines” were as inevitably called for as strong situations and strong characters. Although the chief of these poets are marked off from one another by the individual genius which impressed itself upon both the form and the matter of their works, yet the stamp of the age is upon them all. Writing for the stage only, of which some of them possessed a personal experience and from which none of them held aloof, they acquired an instinctive insight into the laws of dramatic cause and effect, and infused a warm vitality into the dramatic literature which they produced, so to speak, for immediate consumption. On the other hand, the same cause made rapidity of workmanship indispensable to a successful playwright. How a play was produced, how many hands had been at work upon it, what loans and what spoliations had been made in the process, were considerations of less moment than the question whether it was produced, and whether it succeeded. His harness—frequently double or triple—was inseparable from the lusty Pegasus of the early English drama, and its genius toiled, to borrow the phrase of the Attic comedian, “like an Arcadian mercenary.”

This period of the English drama, though it is far from being one of crude effort, could not therefore yet be one of full consummation. In tragedy the advance which had been made in the choice of great themes, in knitting closer Progress of tragedy and comedy before Shakespeare. the connection between the theatre and the national history, in vindicating to passion its right to adequate expression, was already enormous. In comedy the advance had been less decisive and less independent; much had been gained in reaching greater freedom of form and something in enlarging the range of subjects; but artificiality had proved a snare in the one direction, while the licence of the comic stage, upheld by favourite “clowns,” such as Kemp or Tarlton, had not succumbed before less elastic demands. The way of escaping from the dilemma had, however, been already recognized to lie in the construction of suitable plots, for which a full storehouse was open in the popular traditions preserved in national ballads, and in the growing literature of translated foreign fiction, or of native imitations of it. Meanwhile, the aberration of the comic stage to political and religious controversy, which it could never hope to treat with Attic freedom in a country provided with a strong monarchy and a dogmatic religion, seemed likely to extinguish the promise of the beginnings of English romantic comedy.

These were the circumstances under which the greatest of dramatists began to devote his genius to the theatre. Shakespeare’s career as a writer of plays can have differed little in its beginnings from those of his contemporaries Shakespeare. and rivals. Before or while he was proceeding from the re-touching and re-writing of the plays of others to original dramatic composition, the most gifted of those whom we have termed his predecessors had passed away. He had been decried as an actor before he was known as an author; and after living through days of darkness for the theatre, if not for himself, attained, before the close of the century, to the beginnings of his prosperity and the beginnings of his fame. But if we call him fortunate, it is not because of such rewards as these. As a poet, Shakespeare was no doubt happy in his times, which intensified the strength of the national character, expanded the activities of the national mind, and were able to add their stimulus even to such a creative power as his. He was happy in the antecedents of the form of literature which commended itself to his choice, and in the opportunities which it offered in so many directions for an advance to heights yet undiscovered and unknown. What he actually accomplished was due to his genius, whose achievements are immeasurable like itself. His influence upon the progress of English drama divides itself in very unequal proportions into a direct and an indirect influence. To the former alone reference can here be made.

Already the first editors of Shakespeare’s works in a collected form recognized so marked a distinction between his plays taken from English history and those treating other historical subjects (whether ancient or modern) that, Shakespeare and the national historical drama. while they included the latter among the tragedies at large, they grouped the former as histories by themselves. These histories are in their literary genesis a development of the chronicle histories of Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries, the taste for which had greatly increased towards the beginning of his own career as a dramatist, in accordance with the general progress of national life and sentiment in this epoch. Though it cannot be assumed that Shakespeare composed his several dramas from English history in the sequence of the chronology of their themes, his genius gave to the entire series an inner harmony, and a continuity corresponding to that which is distinctive of the national life, such as not unnaturally inspired certain commentators with the wish to prove it a symmetrically constructed whole. He thus brought this peculiarly national species to a perfection which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his later contemporaries and successors to make more than an occasional addition to his series. None of them was, however, found able or ready to take up the thread where Shakespeare had left it, after perfunctorily attaching the present to the past by a work (probably not all his own) which must be regarded as the end rather than the crown of the series of his histories.181 But to furnish such supplements accorded little with the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans; and with the exception of an isolated work,182 the national historical drama in Shakespeare reached at once its perfection and its close. The ruder form of the old chronicle history for a time survived the advance made upon it; but the efforts in this field of T. Heywood,183 S. Rowley,184 and others are, from a literary point of view, anachronisms.

Of Shakespeare’s other plays the several groups exercised a more direct influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same fidelity as that of the English histories, even more effectively taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes, and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his predecessors, as well as with his successors, “is that nature which they paint and draw.” He threw open to modern tragedy a range of hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never again restrict itself without a consciousness of having renounced its enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive. The comedies of Shakespeare accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference to any method of classification deserving to be called precise; and several of them are comedies only according to a purely technical use of the term. In those in which the instinct of reader or spectator recognizes the comic interest to be supreme, it is still of its nature incidental to the progress of the action; for the criticism seems just, as well as in agreement with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare’s process of construction, that among all his comedies not more than a single one185 is in both design and effect a comedy of character proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled wealth of his invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, he left much to be done by his successors; while the truest secrets of his comic art, which interweaves fancy with observation, draws wisdom from the lips of fools, and imbues with character what all other hands would have left shadowy, monstrous or trivial, are among the things inimitable belonging to the individuality of his poetic genius.

The influences of Shakespeare’s diction and versification upon those of the English drama in general can hardly be overrated, though it would be next to impossible to state them definitely. In these points, Shakespeare’s manner as a writer was progressive; and this progress has been deemed sufficiently well traceable in his plays to be used as an aid in seeking to determine His style and its influence. their chronological sequence. The general laws of this progress accord with those of the natural advance of creative genius; artificiality gives way to freedom, and freedom in its turn submits to a greater degree of regularity and care. In versification as in diction the earliest and the latest period of Shakespeare’s dramatic writing are more easily recognizable than what lies between and may be called the normal period, the plays belonging to which in form most resemble one another, and are least affected by distinguishable peculiarities—such as the rhymes and intentionally euphuistic colouring of style which characterize the earliest, or the feminine endings of the lines and the more condensed manner of expression common to the latest of his plays. But, such distinctions apart, there can be no doubt but that in verse and in prose alike, Shakespeare’s style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to be regarded as the norm of that of the Elizabethan drama; that in it the prose form of English comedy possesses its first accepted model; and that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama established itself as irremovable unless at the risk of an artificial experiment.

The assertion may seem paradoxical, that it is by their construction that Shakespeare’s plays exerted the most palpable influence upon the English drama, as well as upon the modern drama of the Germanic nations in general, Influence of his method of construction. and upon such forms of the Romance drama as have been in more recent times based upon it. For it was not in construction that his greatest strength lay, or that the individuality of his genius could raise him above the conditions under which he worked in common with his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Yet the fact that he accepted these conditions, while producing works of matchless strength and of unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them as inseparable from the Shakespearian drama—to use a term which is perhaps unavoidable but has been often misapplied. The great and irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare’s public was for incident—a demand which of itself necessitated a method of construction different from that of the Greek drama, or of those modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other reason is to be ascribed the circumstance that Shakespeare so constantly combined two actions in the course of a single play, not merely supplementing the one by means of the other as a bye- or under-plot. In no respect is the progress of his technical skill as a dramatist more apparent,—a proposition which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life must be left to prove.

Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in characterization—in the drawing His characters. of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art—that he remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like a flower of spring, and where Othello’s noble nature had suffered and sinned.

By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakespeare or in the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the national drama, every form commending itself to the tastes and sympathies of the national genius was essayed. None were neglected except those from which the spirit of English literature had been estranged by the Reformation, and those which had from the first been artificial importations of the Forms of the later Elizabethan drama. Renaissance. The mystery could not in England, as in Spain, produce such an aftergrowth as the auto, and the confines of the religious drama were only now and then tentatively touched.186 The direct imitations of classical examples were, except perhaps in the continued efforts of the academical drama, few and feeble. Chapman, while resorting to use of narrative in tragedy and perhaps otherwise indebted to ancient models, was no follower of them in essentials. S. Daniel (1562-1619) may be regarded as a belated disciple of Seneca,187 while experiments like W. Alexander’s (afterwards earl of Stirling) Monarchicke Tragedies188 (1603-1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, and more exclusively so than Milton’s imposing Samson Agonistes, which belongs to a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the light gaiety of the Italian and French farce could not establish itself on the English popular stage without more substantial adjuncts; the Englishman’s festive digestion long continued robust, and The pastoral drama. he liked his amusements solid. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many English dramatists found special opportunities for the exercise of their lyrical gifts and of their inventive powers. The former could never become other than an exotic, so long as it retained the artificial character of its origin. Shakespeare had accordingly only blended elements derived from it into the action of his romantic comedies. In more or less isolated works Jonson, Fletcher, Daniel, Randolph, and others sought to rival Tasso and Guarini—Jonson189 coming nearest to nationalizing an essentially foreign growth by the fresh simplicity of his treatment, Fletcher190 bearing away the palm for beauty of poetic execution; Daniel being distinguished by simpler beauties of style in both verse and prose.191

The mask (or masque) was a more elastic kind of composition, mixing in varying proportions its constituent elements of declamation and dialogue, music and dancing, decoration and scenery. In its least elaborate literary form—which, The mask. of course, externally was the most elaborate—it closely approached the pageant; in other instances the distinctness of its characters or the fulness of the action introduced into its scheme, brought it nearer to the regular drama. A frequent ornament of Queen Elizabeth’s progresses, it was cultivated with increased assiduity in the reign of James I., and in that of his successor outshone, by the favour it enjoyed with court and nobility, the attractions of the regular drama itself. Most of the later Elizabethan dramatists contributed to this species, upon which Shakespeare expended the resources of his fancy only incidentally in the course of his dramas; but by far the most successful writer of masks was Ben Jonson, of whose numerous compositions of this kind many hold a permanent place in English poetic literature, and “next” whom, in his own judgment, “only Fletcher and Chapman could write a mask.” From a poetic point of view, however, they were at least rivalled by Dekker and Ford; in productivity and favour T. Campion, who was equally eminent as poet and as musician, seems for a time to have excelled. Inasmuch, however, as the history of the mask in England is to a great extent that of “painting and carpentry” and of Inigo Jones, and as, moreover, this kind of piece, while admitting dramatic elements, is of its nature occasional, it need not further be pursued here. The Microcosmus of T. Nabbes (printed 1637), which is very like a morality, seems to have been the first mask brought upon the public stage. It was the performance of a mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies at Whitehall which had some years previously (1632) been thought to have supplied to the invective of Histrio-Mastix against the stage the occasion for disloyal innuendo; and it was for the performance of a mask in a great nobleman’s castle that Milton—a Puritan of a very different cast—not long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of English poems. Comus has been judged and condemned as a drama—unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetic mask.

The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many illustrious in the The later Elizabethan drama. history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare’s contemporaries and successors there is, however, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson, to whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did filial homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the regular drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success; the weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as they are, his tragic works192 stand almost, though not quite, alone in this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. G. Chapman treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French history,193 always with vigour, and at times with genuine effectiveness; but, though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the supreme art of fully developing a character by means of the action. Mention has been made above of Ford’s isolated effort in the direction of historic tragedy, as well as of excursions into the still popular domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker and others, which cannot be regarded as anything more than retrogressions. With the great body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which crowd English literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme—ranging as these plays do from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance—of equally astonishing variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been perennially augmenting. Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction, original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists clustering round Lope de Vega and Calderon, and the native or naturalized fictions from which they drew their materials supplied a whole arsenal of plots, incidents and situations—among others to Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And, in addition to these resources, a new field of supply was at hand since English dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of domestic life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this description was indeed no novelty on the English stage; Shakespeare himself may have retouched with his master-hand more than one effort of this kind;194 but T. Heywood may be set down as the first who achieved any work of considerable literary value of this class,195 to which some of the plays of T. Dekker, T. Middleton, and others likewise more or less belong. Yet, in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of motives employed—at least as a rule—in the tragic drama of this period was comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the diversity of subjects among the tragic dramas of such writers as Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Scheming ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled masculine passion—such are the motives which constantly recur in the Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is heightened by the want of moderation, by the extravagance of passion, which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally amenable to this charge; in J. Webster,196 master as he is of the effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford,197 surpassingly seductive in his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those marvellously sudden and subtle touches through which their tragic genius creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of passion which F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher undoubtedly exhibit be confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and irresistibly moving situations in a degree unequalled by any of their contemporaries—a power seconded by a beauty of diction and softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest pinnacle of popular esteem, and which entitles them in their conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent worker, to an enduring pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment and occasionally greater width of outlook which ennoble the rhetorical genius of P. Massinger, and the gift of poetic illustration which entitles J. Shirley to be remembered not merely as the latest and the most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked; but they leave unobscured the distinctive features in its individual writers of which a discerning criticism has been able to take note.

In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of “humours” (which found the most palpable expression in two of his earliest plays198), if translated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the presentation of distinctive human types. As such it survived by name into the Restoration age199 and cannot be said to have ever died out. In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist’s labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some of whom, such as R. Brome, were content avowedly to follow in his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual instances of comic creations; in the entirety of its achievements his genius as a comic dramatist remained unapproached. The favourite types of Jonsonian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston and Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the inexhaustible verve of T. Middleton, the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field, and the artistic versatility of Shirley—not to mention many later and not necessarily minor names200—mirrored in innumerable pictures of contemporary life the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As comedians of manners more than one of these surpassed the old master, not indeed in distinctness and correctness—the fruits of the most painstaking genius that ever fitted a learned sock to the representation of the living realities of life—but in a lightness not incompatible with sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity in treatment resulting from accumulated experience, enabled them to advance from success to success. Thus the comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or contemporaneous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W. Cartwright may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or force to its predecessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of the species, that its traditions survived the interregnum of the Revolution, and connected themselves more closely than is sometimes assumed with later growths of English comedy.

Such was also the case with a special growth which had continued side by side, but in growing frequency of contact, with the progress of the national drama. The academical drama of the later Elizabethan period and The later academical drama. of the first two Stuart reigns by no means fell off either in activity or in variety from that of the preceding generations. At Oxford, after an apparent break of several years—though in the course of these one or two new plays, including a Tancred by Sir Henry Wotton at Queen’s, seem to have been produced—a long succession of English plays, some in Latin doubtless from time to time intervening, were performed, from the early years of the 17th century onwards to the dark days of the national theatre and beyond. The production of these plays was distributed among several colleges, among which the most conspicuously active were Christ Church and St John’s, where a whole series of festal performances took place under the collective title of The Christmas Prince (i.e. master of the Christmas revels). They included a wide variety of pieces, from the treatment by an author unnamed of the story of “Ovid’s owne Narcissus” (1602) and S. Daniel’s Queen’s Arcadia (1606) to Barten Holiday’s Technogamia (1618), a complicated allegory on the relations between the arts and sciences quite in the manner of the moralities; interspersed by romantic dramas of the ordinary contemporary type by T. Goffe (1591-1629), W. Cartwright, J. Maine (1604-1672) and others. At Cambridge the list of Latin and English academical plays, performed in the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign at Trinity, St John’s, Queen’s and a few other colleges, contains several examples in each language which for one reason or another possess a special interest. Thus E. Forsett’s Pedantius, probably acted at Trinity in 1581, ridicules a personage who lived very near the rose—the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey;201 a Laelia, acted at Queen’s in 1590 and again in 1598, resembles Twelfth Night in part of its plot; while in Silvanus, performed in 1596, probably at St John’s, there are certain striking similarities to As You Like It. These are in Latin, as are the comedies Hispanus (containing some curious allusions to the Armada, Drake and Dr Lopez) and Machiavellus, acted at St John’s in 1597.202 By far the most interesting of the English plays of the later Cambridge series, and, it may be averred, of the remains of the English academical drama as a whole, are the Parnassus Plays (q.v.), successively produced at St John’s in 1598-1602, which illustrate with much truthfulness as well as fancy the relations between university life and the outside world, including the world of letters and of the stage. Upon a different, but also a very notable, aspect of English university life—the relations between town and gown—a partisan light is thrown by Club-Law, acted at Clare in 1599—and in G. Ruggle’s celebrated Latin comedy of Ignoramus, twice acted by members of Clare at Trinity in 1615 before King James I. On one of these occasions were also produced in English T. Tomkis’ comedy Albumazar (a play absurdly attributed to Shakespeare), and Phineas Fletcher’s Sicelides, a “piscatory” (i.e. a pastoral drama in which the place of the shepherds is taken by fishermen). Latin and English plays continued to be brought out in Cambridge till the year of the outbreak of the Civil War, T. Randolph and A. Cowley203 being among the authors of some of the latest so produced; and with the Restoration the usage recommenced, the Adelphi of Terence and other Latin comedies being performed as they had been a century earlier. A complete survey and classification of the English academical drama, for which the materials are at last being collected and compared, will prove of an importance which is only beginning to be recognized to the future historian of the English drama.

To return to the general current of that drama. The rivals against which it had to contend in the times with which its greatest epoch came to an end have in their turn been noticed. From the masks and triumphs at court and The stage. at the houses of the nobility, with their Olympuses and Parnassuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled with goddesses and nymphs clad in the gorgeous costumes designed by his inventive hand, to the city pageants and shows by land and water—from the tilts and tournaments at Whitehall to the more philosophical devices at the Inns of Court and the academical plays at the universities—down even to the brief but thrilling theatrical excitements of Bartholomew Fair and the “Ninevitical motions” of the puppets—in all these ways the various sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. Foreign performers—French and Spanish actors, and even French actresses—paid visits to London. But the national drama held its ground. The art of acting maintained itself at least on the level to which it had been brought by Shakespeare’s associates and contemporaries, Burbage and Heminge, Alleyn, Lewin, Taylor, and others “of the older sort.” The profession of actor came to be more generally than of old separated from that of playwright, though they were still (as in the case of Field) occasionally combined. But this rather led to an increased appreciation of the artistic merit of actors who valued the dignity of their own profession and whose co-operation the authors learnt to esteem as of independent significance. The stage was purged from the barbarism of the old school of clowns. Women’s parts were still acted by boys, many of whom attained to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus continued which must assuredly have placed the English theatre at a considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never obtained), and which may, while it has been held to have facilitated freedom of fancy, more certainly encouraged the extreme licence of expression cherished by the dramatists. The arrangement of the stage, which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for their being organically connected with one another, remained essentially what it had been in Shakespeare’s days; though the primitive expedients for indicating locality had begun to be occasionally exchanged for scenery more or less appropriate to the place of action. Costume was apparently cultivated with much greater care; and the English stage of this period had probably gone a not inconsiderable way in a direction to which it is obviously in the interests of the dramatic art to set some bounds, if it is to depend for its popular success upon its qualities as such, and upon the interpretation of its agents upon the stage. At the same time, the drama had begun largely to avail itself of adventitious aids to favour. The system of prologues and epilogues, and of dedications to published plays, was more uniformly employed than it had been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their chief patron, the public.

Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its forms continued to enjoy the favour or good-will of the court, although a close supervision was exercised over all attempts to make the stage the vehicle of political The drama and Puritanism. references or allusions. The regular official agent of this supervision was the master of the revels; but under James I. a special ordinance, in harmony with the king’s ideas concerning the dignity of the throne, was passed “against representing any modern Christian king in plays on the stage.” The theatre could hardly expect to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state denied to the public at large; and occasional attempts to indulge in the freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less decisive repression and punishment.204 But the sympathies of the dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court that the real difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the population, well represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the representation of stage-plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and-death kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,205 though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions,206 rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;207 and the comedies of his contemporaries and successors208 abound in caricatured reproductions of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the diversions of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Puritan opposition to all and any stage plays. A patient endeavour to reform instead of suppressing the drama was not to be looked for from such adversaries, should they ever possess the means of carrying out their views; and whenever Puritanism should victoriously assert itself in the state, the stage was doomed. Among the attacks directed against it in its careless heyday of prosperity Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix (1632), while it involved its author in shamefully cruel persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone of the dramatic literature of the subsequent period; but the quarrel between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep to end in any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of its Closing of the theatres. protectors. The Civil War began in August 1642; and early in the following month was published the ordinance of the Lords and Commons, which, after a brief and solemn preamble, commanded “that while these sad causes and set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne.” Many actors and playwrights followed the fortunes of the royal cause in the field; some may have gone into a more or less voluntary exile; upon those who lingered on in the familiar haunts the hand of power lay heavy; and, though there seems reason to believe that dramatic entertainments of one kind or another continued to be occasionally presented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to magistrates against any players found engaged in such proceedings (1647), and bade them treat all stage-players as rogues, and pull down all stage galleries, seats and boxes (1648). A few dramatic works were published in this period;209 while at fairs about the country were acted farces called “drolls,” consisting of the most vulgar scenes to be found in popular plays. Thus, the life of the drama was not absolutely extinguished; and its darkest day proved briefer than perhaps either its friends or its foes could have supposed.

Already “in Oliver’s time” private performances took place from time to time at noblemen’s houses and (though not undisturbed) in the old haunt of the drama, the Red Bull. In 1656 the ingenuity of Sir William Davenant Revival of the drama. whose name (though not really so significant in the dramatic as in another field of English literature) is memorable as connecting together two distinct periods in it, ventured on a bolder step in the production of a quasi-dramatic entertainment “of declamation and music”; and in the following year he brought out with scenery and music a piece which was afterwards in an enlarged form acted and printed as the first part of his opera, The Siege of Rhodes. This entertainment he afterwards removed from the private house where it had been produced to the Cockpit, where he soon ventured upon the performance of regular plays written by himself. Thus, under the cover of two sister arts, whose aid was in the sequel to prove by no means altogether beneficial to its progress, the English drama had boldly anticipated the Restoration, and was no longer hiding its head when that much-desired event was actually brought about. Soon after Charles II.’s entry into London, two theatrical companies are known to have been acting in the capital. For these companies patents were soon granted, under the names of “the Duke (of York)’s” and “the King’s Servants,” to Davenant and one of the brothers Killigrew respectively—the former from 1662 acting at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then at Dorset Garden in Salisbury Court, the latter from 1663 at the Theatre Royal near Drury Lane. These companies were united from 1682, a royal licence being granted in 1695 to a rival company which performed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and which migrated to Covent Garden in 1733. Meanwhile, Vanbrugh had in 1705 built the theatre in the Haymarket; and a theatre in Goodman’s Fields—afterwards rendered famous by the first appearance of Garrick—led a fitful existence from 1729 to 1733. The act of 1737 deprived the crown of the power of licensing any more theatres; so that the history of the English stage for a long period was confined to a restricted area. The rule which prevailed after the Restoration, that neither of the rival companies should ever attempt a play produced by the other, operated beneficially both upon the activity of dramatic authorship and upon the progress of the art of acting, which was not exposed to the full effects of that deplorable spirit of personal rivalry which too often leads even most intelligent actors to attempt parts for which they have no special qualification. There can be little doubt that the actor’s art has rarely flourished more in England than in the days of T. Betterton and his contemporaries, among whose names those of Hart, Mohun, Kynaston, Nokes, Mrs Barry, Mrs Betterton, Mrs Bracegirdle and Mrs Eleanor Gwyn have, together with many others, survived in various connexions among the memories of the Restoration age. No higher praise has ever been given to an actor than that which Addison bestowed upon Betterton, in describing his performance of Othello as a proof that Shakespeare could not have written the most striking passages of the character otherwise than he has done.

It may here be noticed that the fortunes of the Irish theatre in general followed those of the English, of which of course it was merely a branch. Of native dramatic compositions in earlier times not a trace remains in Ireland; and the The Irish stage. drama was introduced into that country as an English exotic—apparently already in the reign of Henry VIII., and more largely in that of Elizabeth. The first theatre in Dublin was built in 1635; but in 1641 it was closed, and even after the Restoration the Irish stage continued in a precarious condition till near the end of the century. About that time an extraordinarily strong taste for the theatre took possession of Irish society, and during the greater part of the 18th century the Dublin stage rivalled the English in the brilliancy of its stars. Betterton’s rival, R. Wilks, Garrick’s predecessor in the homage paid to Shakespeare, Macklin, and his competitor for favour, the “silver-tongued” Barry, were alike products of the Irish stage, as were Mrs Woffington and other well-known actresses. Nor should it be forgotten that three of the foremost English writers of comedy in its later days, Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, were Irish, the first by education, and the latter two by birth also.

Already in the period preceding the outbreak of the Civil War the English drama had perceptibly sunk from the height to which it had been raised by the great Elizabethans. When it had once more recovered possession of that The later Stuart drama. arena with which no living drama can dispense, it would have been futile to demand that the dramatists should return altogether into the ancient paths, unaffected by the influences, native or foreign, in operation around them. But there was no reason why the new drama should not, like the Elizabethan, have been true in spirit to the higher purposes of the dramatic art, to the nobler tendencies of the national life, and to the demands of moral law. Because the later Stuart drama as a whole proved untrue to these, and, while following its own courses, never more than partially returned from the aberrations to which it condemned itself, its history is that of a decay which the indisputable brilliancy, borrowed or original, of many of its productions is incapable of concealing.

Owing in part to the influence of the French theatre, which by this time had taken the place of the Spanish as the ruling drama of Europe, the separation between tragedy and comedy is clearly marked in post-Restoration plays. Tragedy. Comic scenes are still occasionally introduced into tragedies by some dramatists who adhered more closely to the Elizabethan models (such as Otway and Crowne), but the practice fell into disuse; while the endeavour to elevate comedy by pathetic scenes and motives is one of the characteristic marks of the beginning of another period in English dramatic literature. The successive phases through which English tragedy passed in the later Stuart times cannot be always kept distinct from one another; and the guidance offered by the theories put forth by some of the dramatists in support of their practice is often delusive. Following the example of Corneille, Dryden and his contemporaries and successors were fond of proclaiming their adherence to this or that principle of dramatic construction or form, and of upholding, with much show of dialectical acumen, maxims derived by them from French or other sources, or elaborated with modifications and variations of their own, but usually amounting to little more than what Scott calls “certain romantic whimsical imitations of the dramatic art.” Students of the drama will find much entertainment and much instruction in these prefaces, apologies, dialogues and treatises. They will acknowledge that Dryden’s incomparable vigour does not desert him either in the exposing or in the upholding of fallacies, while le bon sens, which he hardly ever fails to exhibit, and which is a more eclectic gift than common-sense, serves as a sure guide to the best intelligence of his age. Even Rymer,210 usually regarded as having touched the nadir of dramatic criticism, will be found to be not wholly without grains of salt. But Restoration tragedy itself must not be studied by the light of Restoration criticism. So long as any dramatic power remained in the tragic poets—and it is absent from none of the chief among them from Dryden to Rowe—the struggle between fashion (disguised as theory) and instinct (tending in the direction of the Elizabethan traditions) could never wholly determine itself in favour of the former.

Lord Orrery, in deference, as he declares, to the expressed tastes of his sovereign King Charles II. himself, was the first to set up the standard of heroic plays.211 This new species of tragedy (for such it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a large extent supplied by recent French romance—the romans de longue haleine of the Scudérys and their contemporaries—and by French plays treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences; and the form, in the application which it was more or less sought to enforce for it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his brother-in-law Sir R. Howard,212 and afterwards more confidently by himself,213 Dryden threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his genius into the scale, which soon rose to the full height of fashionable popularity. At first he claimed for English tragedy the right to combine her native inheritance of freedom with these valuable foreign acquisitions.214 Nor was he dismayed by the ridicule which the celebrated burlesque (by the duke of Buckingham and others) of The Rehearsal (1671) cast upon heroic plays, without discriminating between them and such other materials for ridicule as the contemporary drama supplied to its facetious authors, but returned215 to the defence of a species which he was himself in the end to abandon.216 The desire for change proved stronger than the love of consistency—which in Dryden was never more than theoretical. After summoning tragedy to rival the freedom (without disdaining the machinery) of opera—with whose birth its own revival was as a matter of fact simultaneous—he came to recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of the Elizabethan drama,217 and after audaciously, but in one instance not altogether unhappily, essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own ground,218 produced under the influence of the same views at least one work of striking merit.219 But he was already growing weary of the stage itself as well as of the rhymed heroic drama; and, though he put an end to the species to which he had given temporary vitality, he failed effectively to point the way to a more legitimate development of English tragedy. Among the other tragic poets of this period, N. Lee, in the outward form of his dramas, accommodated his practice to that of Dryden, with whom he occasionally co-operated as a dramatist, and like whom he allowed political partisanship to intrude upon the stage.220 His rhetorical genius was not devoid of genuine energy, nor is he to be regarded as a mere imitator. T. Otway, the most gifted tragic poet of the younger generation contemporary with Dryden, inherited something of the spirit of the Elizabethan drama; he possessed a real gift of tragic pathos and melting tenderness; but his genius had a worse alloy than stageyness, and, though he was often happy in his novel choice of themes, his most successful efforts fail to satisfy tests supplementary to that of the stage.221 Among dramatists who contributed to the vogue of the “heroic” play may be mentioned J. Bankes, J. Weston, C. Hopkins, E. Cooke, R. Gould, S. Pordage, T. Rymer and Elkanah Settle. The productivity of J. Crowne (d. c. 1703)222 covers part of the earlier period as well as of the later, to which properly belong T. Southerne, a writer gifted with much pathetic power, but probably chiefly indebted for his long-lived popularity to his skill in the discovery of “sensational” plots; and Lord Lansdowne (“Granville the polite”) (c. 1667-1735). Congreve, by virtue of a single long celebrated but not really remarkable tragedy,223 and N. Rowe, may be further singled out from the list of the tragic dramatists of this period, many of whom were, like their comic contemporaries, mere translators or adapters from the French. The tragedies of Rowe, whose direct services to the study of Shakespeare deserve remembrance, indicate with singular distinctness the transition from the fuller declamatory style of Dryden to the calmer and thinner manner of Addison.224 In tragedy (as to a more marked degree in comedy) the excesses (both of style and subject) of the past period of the English drama had produced an inevitable reaction; decorum was asserting its claims on the stage as in society; and French tragedy had set the example of sacrificing what passion—and what vigour—it retained in favour of qualities more acceptable to the “reformed” court of Louis XIV. Addison, in allowing his Cato to take its chance upon the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured to it an extraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds, except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar quotations, unconsciously sealed the doom of English national tragedy. The “first reasonable English tragedy,” as Voltaire called it, had been produced, and the oscillations of the tragic drama of the Restoration were at an end.

English comedy in this period displayed no similar desire to cut itself off from the native soil, though it freely borrowed the materials for its plots and many of its figures from Spanish, and afterwards more generally from French, Comedy. originals. The spirit of the old romantic comedy had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. Political and religious partisanship, generally in accordance with the dominant reaction against Puritanism, were allowed to find expression in the directest and coarsest forms upon the stage, and to hasten the necessity for a more systematic control than even the times before the Revolution had found requisite. At the same time the unblushing indecency which the Restoration had spread through court and capital had established its dominion over the comic stage, corrupting the manners, and with them the morals, of its dramatists, and forbidding them, at the risk of seeming dull, to be anything but improper. Much of this found its way even into the epilogues, which, together with the prologues, proved so important an adjunct of the Restoration drama. These influences determine the general character of what is with a more than chronological meaning termed the comedy of the Restoration. In construction, the national love of fulness and solidity of dramatic treatment induced its authors to alter what they borrowed from foreign sources, adding to complicated Spanish plots characters of native English directness, and supplementing single French plots by the addition of others.225 At the same time, the higher efforts of French comedy of character, as well as the refinement of expression in the list of their models, notably in Molière, were alike seasoned to suit the coarser appetites and grosser palates of English patrons. The English comic writers often succeeded in strengthening the borrowed texture of their plays, but they never added comic humour without at the same time adding coarseness of their own. Such were the productions of Sir George Etheredge, Sir Charles Sedley, and the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease”; nor was there any signal difference between their productions and those of a playwright-actor such as J. Lacy (d. 1681), and a professional dramatist of undoubted ability such as J. Crowne. Such, though often displaying the brilliancy of a genius which even where it sank could never wholly abandon its prerogative, were, it must be confessed, the comedies of Dryden himself. On the other hand, the lowest literary deeps of the Restoration drama were sounded by T. D’Urfey, while of its moral degradation the “divine Astraea,” the “unspeakable” Mrs Aphra Behn, has an indefeasible title to be considered the most faithful representative. T. Shadwell, fated, like the tragic poet Elkanah Settle, to be chiefly remembered as a victim of Dryden’s satire, deserves more honourable mention. Like J. Wilson, whose plays seem to class him with the pre-Restoration dramatists, Shadwell had caught something not only of the art, but also of the spirit, of Ben Jonson; but in most of his works he was, like the rest of his earlier contemporaries, and like the brilliant group which succeeded them, content to take his moral tone from the reckless society for which, or in deference to the tastes of which, he wrote.226 The absence of a moral sense, which, together with a grossness of expression often defying exaggeration, characterizes English comic dramatists from the days of Dryden to those of Congreve, is the main cause of their failure to satisfy the demands which are legitimately to be made upon their art. They essayed to draw character as well as to paint manners, but they rarely proved equal to the former and higher task; and, while choosing the means which most readily commended their plays to the favour of their immediate public, they achieved but little as interpreters of those essential distinctions which their art is capable of illustrating.227 Within these limits, though occasionally passing beyond them, and always with the same deference to the immoral tone which seemed to have become an indispensable adjunct of the comic style, even the greatest comic authors of this age moved. W. Wycherley was a comic dramatist of real power, who drew his characters with vigour and distinctness, and constructed his plots and chose his language with natural ease. He lacks gaiety of spirit, and his wit is of a cynical turn. But, while he ruthlessly uncloaks the vices of his age, his own moral tone is affected by their influence in as marked a degree as that of the most light-hearted of his contemporaries.228 The most brilliant of these was indisputably W. Congreve, who is not only one of the very wittiest of English writers, but equally excels in the graceful ease of his dialogue, and draws his characters and constructs his plots with the same masterly skill. His chief fault as a dramatist is one of excess—the brilliancy of the dialogue, whoever be the speaker, overpowers the distinction between the “humours” of his personages. Though he is less brutal in expression than “manly” Wycherley, and less coarse than the lively Sir J. Vanbrugh, licentiousness in him as in them corrupts the spirit of his comic art; but of his best though not most successful play229 it must be allowed that the issue of the main plot is on the side of virtue. G. Farquhar, whose morality is on a par with that of the other members of this group, is inferior to them in brilliancy; but as pictures of manners in a wider sphere of life than that which contemporary comedy usually chose to illustrate, two of his plays deserve to be noticed, in which we already seem to be entering the atmosphere of the 18th-century novel.230 His influence upon Lessing is a remarkable fact in the international history of dramatic literature.

The improvement which now begins to manifest itself in the moral tone and spirit of English comedy is partly due to the reaction against the reaction of the Restoration, partly to the punishment which the excesses of the comic stage had brought upon it in the invective of Jeremy Collier231 (1698), of all the assaults the theatre in England has had to undergo the best-founded, Sentimental comedy. and that which produced the most perceptible results. The comic poets, who had always been more or less conscious of their sins, and had at all events not defended them by the ingenious sophistries which it has pleased later literary criticism to suggest on their behalf, now began with uneasy merriment to allude in their prologues to the reformation which had come over the spirit of the town. Writers like Mrs Centlivre became anxious to reclaim their offenders with much emphasis in the fifth act; and Colley Cibber—whose Apology for his Life furnishes a useful view of this and the subsequent period of the history of the stage, with which he was connected as author, manager and actor (excelling in this capacity as representative of those fools with which he peopled the comic stage)232—may be credited with having first deliberately made the pathetic treatment of a moral sentiment the basis of the action of a comic drama. But he cannot be said to have consistently pursued the vein which in his Careless Husband (1704) he had essayed. His Non-Juror is a political adaptation of Tartuffe; and his almost equally celebrated Provoked Husband only supplied a happy ending to Vanbrugh’s unfinished play. Sir R. Steele, in accordance with his general tendencies as a writer, pursued a still more definite moral purpose in his comedies; but his genius perhaps lacked the sustained vigour necessary for a dramatist, and his humour naturally sought the aid of pathos. From partial233 he passed to more complete234 experiment; and thus these two writers, who transplanted to the comic stage a tendency towards the treatment of domestic themes noticeable in such writers of Restoration tragedy as Southerne and Rowe, became the founders of sentimental comedy, a species which exercised a most depressing influence upon the progress of English drama, and helped to hasten the decline of its comic branch. With Cato English tragedy committed suicide, though its pale ghost survived; with The Conscious Lovers English comedy sank for long into the tearful embraces of artificiality and weakness.

During the 18th century the productions of dramatic literature were still as a rule legitimately designed to meet the demands of the stage, from which its higher efforts afterwards to so large an extent became dissociated. The goodwill The drama and stage in the period before Garrick. of most sections of the public continued to be steadily accorded to a theatre which had ceased to defy the accepted laws and traditions of morality; and the opposition still aroused by it was confined to a small minority of thinkers, though these included some who were far from being puritans. John Dennis was not thought to have the worst of the controversy, when he defended the stage against the attack of an opponent far above him in stature—the great mystic William Law235—and to John Wesley himself it seemed that “a great deal more might be said in defence of seeing a serious tragedy” than of taking part in the amusements of bear-baiting and cock-fighting. On the other hand, the demands of the stage and those of its patrons and of the public of the “Augustan” age, and of that which succeeded it, were, in general, fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of the poetic drama long remained irreconcilable. There is every reason to conclude that the art of acting progressed in the same direction of artificiality, and became stereotyped in forms corresponding to the “chant” which represented tragic declamation in a series of actors ending with Quin and Macklin. In the latter must be recognized features of a precursor, but it was reserved to the genius of Garrick, whose Garrick. theatrical career extended from 1741 to 1776, to open a new era in his art. His unparalleled success was due in the first instance to his incomparable natural gifts; yet these were indisputably enhanced by a careful and continued literary training, and ennobled by a purpose which prompted him to essay the noblest, as he was capable of performing the most various, range of English theatrical characters. By devoting himself as actor and manager with special zeal to the production of Shakespeare, Garrick permanently popularized on the national stage the greatest creations of English drama, and indirectly helped to seal the doom of what survived of the tendency to maintain in the most ambitious walks of dramatic literature the nerveless traditions of the pseudo-classical school. A generation of celebrated actors and actresses, many of whom live for us in the drastic epigrams of Churchill’s Rosciad (1761), were his helpmates or his rivals; but their fame has paled, while his is destined to endure as that of one of the typical masters of his art.

The contrast between the tragedy of the 18th century and those plays of Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans which already before Garrick were known to the English stage, was weakened by the mutilated form Decline of tragedy. in which the old masterpieces generally, if not always, made their appearance there. Even so, however, there are perhaps few instances in theatrical history in which so unequal a competition was so long sustained. In the hands of the tragic poets of the age of Pope, as well as that of Johnson, tragedy had hopelessly stiffened into the forms of its accepted French models. Direct reproductions of these continued, as in Ambrose Philips’s and Charles Johnson’s (1679-1748) translations from Racine, and Aaron Hill’s from Voltaire. Among other tragic dramatists of the earlier part of the century may be mentioned J. Hughes, who, after assisting Addison in his Cato, produced at least one praiseworthy tragedy of his own;236 E. Fenton, a joint translator of “Pope’s Homer” and the author of one extremely successful drama on a theme of singularly enduring interest,237 and L. Theobald the first hero of the Dunciad, who, besides translations of Greek dramas, produced a few more or less original plays, one of which he was daring enough to father upon Shakespeare.238 A more distinguished name is that of J. Thomson, whose unlucky Sophonisba and subsequent tragedies are, however, barely remembered by the side of his poems (The Seasons, &c.). The literary genius of E. Young, on the other hand, possessed vigour and variety enough to distinguish his tragedies from the ordinary level of Augustan plays; in one of them he seems to challenge comparison in the treatment of his theme with a very different rival,239 but by his main characteristics as a dramatist he belongs to the school of his contemporaries. The endeavour of G. Lillo, in his London Merchant, or George Barnwell (1731), to bring the tragic lessons of terror and pity directly home to his fellow-citizens exercised an extraordinarily widespread as well as enduring effect on the history of the 18th-century drama. At home, they gave birth to the new, or, more properly speaking, to the revived, species of domestic tragedy, which connects itself more or less closely with a notable epoch in the history of English prose-fiction as well as of English painting. Abroad, this play—whose success was of the kind which nothing can kill—supplied the text to the teachings of Diderot, as well as an example to his own dramatic attempts; and through Diderot the impulse communicated itself to Lessing, and long exercised a great effect upon the literature of the German stage. At the same time, it must be allowed that Lillo’s pedestrian muse failed in the end to satisfy higher artistic demands than those met in his most popular play, while in another240 she was less consciously guilty of an aberration towards that “tragedy of destiny,” which, in the modern drama at least, obscures the ethical character of all tragic actions. “Classical” tragedy in the generation of Dr Johnson pursued the even tenor of its way, the dictator himself treading with solemn footfall in the accustomed path,241 and W. Mason making the futile attempt to produce a close imitation of Greek models.242 The best-remembered tragedy of the century, Home’s Douglas (1757), was the production of an author whose famous kinsman, David Hume (though no friend of the contemporary English stage), had advised him “to read Shakespeare, but to get Racine and Voltaire by heart.” The indisputable merits of the play cannot blind us to the fact that Douglas is the offspring of Merope.

While thus no high creative talent arose to revive the poetic genius of English tragedy, comedy, which had to contend against the same rivals, naturally met the demands of the conflict with greater buoyancy. The history of English opera. the most formidable of those rivals, Music, forms no part of this sketch; but the points of contact between its progress and the history of dramatic literature cannot be altogether left out of sight. H. Purcell’s endeavours to unite English music to the words of English poets were now a thing of the past; analogous attempts in the direction of musical dialogue, which have been insufficiently noticed, had likewise proved transitory; and the isolated efforts of Addison243 and others to recover the operatic stage for the native tongue had proved powerless. Italian texts, which had first made their entrance piecemeal, in the end asserted themselves in their entirety; and the marvellously assimilative genius of Handel completed the triumphs of a form of art which no longer had any connexion with the English drama, and which reached the height of its fashionable popularity about the time when Garrick began to adorn the national stage. In one form, however, the English opera was preserved as a pleasing species of the popular drama. The pastoral drama had (in 1725) produced an isolated aftergrowth in Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, which, with genuine freshness and humour, but without a trace of burlesque, transferred to the scenery of the Pentland Hills the lovely tale of Florizel and Perdita. The dramatic form of this poem is only an accident, but it doubtless suggested an experiment of a different kind to the most playful of London wits. Gay’s “Newgate Pastoral” of The Beggar’s Opera (1728), in which the amusing text of a burlesque farce was interspersed with songs set to popular airs, caught the fancy of the town by this novel combination, and became the ancestor of a series of agreeable productions, none of which, however, not even its own continuation, Polly (amazingly successful in book form, after its production was forbidden by the lord chamberlain), have ever rivalled it in success or celebrity. Among these may be mentioned the pieces of I. Bickerstaffe244 and C. Dibdin.245 The opera in England, as elsewhere, thus absorbed what vitality remained to the pastoral drama, while to the ballet and the pantomime (whose glories in England began at Covent Garden in 1733, and to whose popularity even Garrick was obliged to defer) was left (in the 18th century at all events) the inheritance of the external attractions of the mask and the pageant.

In the face of such various rivalries it is not strange that comedy, instead of adhering to the narrow path which Steele and others had marked out for her, should have permitted herself some vagaries of her own. Gay’s Comedy. Burlesque. example pointed the way to a fatally facile form of the comic art; and burlesque began to contribute its influence to the decline of comedy. In an age when party-government was severely straining the capabilities of its system, dramatic satire had not far to look for a source of effective seasonings. The audacity of H. Fielding, whose regular comedies (original or adapted) have secured no enduring remembrance, but whose love of parody was afterwards to suggest to him the theme of the The Licensing Act. first of the novels which have made his name immortal, accordingly ventured in two extravaganzas246 (so we should call them in these days) upon a larger admixture of political with literary and other satire. A third attempt247 (which never reached the stage) furnished the offended minister, Sir Robert Walpole, with the desired occasion for placing a curb upon the licence of the theatre, such as had already been advocated by a representative of its old civic adversaries. The famous act of 1737 asserted no new principle, but converted into legal power the customary authority hither exercised by the lord chamberlain (to whom it had descended from the master of the revels). The regular censorship which this act established has not appreciably affected the literary progress of the English drama, and the objections which have been raised against it seem to have addressed themselves to practice rather than to principle. The liberty of the stage is a question differing in its conditions from that of the liberty of speech in general, or even from that of the liberty of the press; and occasional lapses of official judgment weigh lightly in the balance against the obvious advantages of a system which in a free country needs only the vigilance of public opinion to prevent its abuse. The policy of the restraint which the act of 1737 put upon the number of playhouses is a different, but has long become an obsolete, question.248

Brought back into its accustomed grooves, English comedy seemed inclined to leave to farce the domain of healthy ridicule, and to coalesce with domestic tragedy in the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of homespun didactic Comedy in the latter half of the 18th century. morality. Farce had now become a genuine English species, and has as such retained its vitality through all the subsequent fortunes of the stage; it was actively cultivated by Garrick as both actor and author; and he undoubtedly had more than a hand in the very best farce of this age, which is ascribed to clerical authorship.249 S. Foote, whose comedies250 and farces are distinguished both by wit and by variety of characters (though it was an absurd misapplication of a great name to call him the English Aristophanes), introduced into comic acting the abuse of personal mimicry, for the exhibition of which he ingeniously invented a series of entertainments, the parents of a long progeny of imitations. Meanwhile, the domestic drama of the sentimental kind achieved, though not immediately, a success only inferior to that of The London Merchant, in The Gamester of E. Moore, to which Garrick seems to have directly contributed;251 and sentimental comedy courted sympathetic applause in the works of A. Murphy, the single comedy of W. Whitehead,252 and the earliest of H. Kelly.253 It cannot be said that this species was extinguished, as it is sometimes assumed to have been, by O. Goldsmith; but he certainly published a direct protest against it between the production of his admirable character-comedy of The Good-Natured Man, and his delightfully brisk and fresh She Stoops to Conquer, which, after startling critical propriety from its self-conceit, taught comedy no longer to fear being true to herself. The most successful efforts of the elder G. Colman254 had in them something of the spirit of genuine comedy, besides a finish which, however playwrights may shut their eyes to the fact, is one of the qualities which ensure a long life to a play. And in the masterpieces of R. B. Sheridan some of the happiest features of the comedy of Congreve were revived, together with its too uniform brilliancy of dialogue, but without its indecency of tone. The varnish of the age is indeed upon the style, and the hollowness of its morality in much of the sentiment (even where that sentiment is meant for the audience) of The Rivals and The School for Scandal; but in tact of construction, in distinctness of characters, and in pungency of social satire, they are to be ranked among the glories of English comedy. Something in Sheridan’s style, but quite without his brilliancy, is the most successful play255 of the unfortunate General Burgoyne. R. Cumberland, who too consciously endeavoured to excel both in sentimental morality and in comic characterization, in which he was devoid of depth, closes the list of authors of higher pretensions who wrote for the theatre.256 Like him, Mrs Cowley257 (“Anna Matilda”), T. Holcroft,258 and G. Colman the younger,259 all writers of popular comedies, as well as the prolific J. O’Keefe (1746-1833), who contributed to nearly every species of the comic drama, survived into the 19th century. To an earlier date belong the favourite burlesques of O’Keefe’s countryman K. O’Hara260 (d. 1782), good examples of a species the further history of which may be left aside. In the hands of at least one later writer, J. R. Planché, it proved capable of satisfying a more refined taste than his successors have habitually consulted.

The decline of dramatic composition of the higher class, perceptible in the history of the English theatre about the beginning of the 19th century, was justly attributed by Sir Walter Scott to the wearing out of the French The English drama of the 19th century. model that had been so long wrought upon; but when he asserted that the new impulse which was sought in the dramatic literature of Germany was derived from some of its worst, instead of from its noblest, productions—from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing, Schiller and Goethe—he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape, with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into “the new, the romantic land.” New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful Manfred, partly suggested by Goethe’s Faust, and his powerful Cain, have but the form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of Alfieri; his Sardanapalus, autobiographically interesting, fails to meet the demands of the stage; his Werner (of which the authorship has been ascribed to the duchess of Devonshire) is a hastily dramatized sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772-1834), who gave to English literature a splendidly loose translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein, the same poet’s Robbers (to which Wordsworth’s only dramatic attempt, the Borderers, is likewise indebted) had probably suggested the subject of his tragedy of Osorio, afterwards acted under the title of Remorse. Far superior to this is his later drama of Zapolya, a genuine homage to Shakespeare, out of the themes of two of whose plays it is gracefully woven. Scott, who in his earlier days had translated Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, gained no reputation by his own dramatic compositions. W. S. Landor, apart from those Imaginary Conversations upon which he best loved to expend powers of observation and characterization such as have been given to few playwrights, cast in a formally dramatic mould studies of character of which the value is far from being confined to their wealth in beauties of detail. Of these the magnificent, but in construction altogether undramatic, Count Julian, is the most noteworthy. Shelley’s The Cenci, on the other hand, is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power, abnormally revolting indeed in theme, but singularly pure and delicate in treatment. A humbler niche in the temple of dramatic literature belongs to some of the plays of C. R. Maturin,261 Sir T. N. Talfourd,262 and Dean Milman.263

Divorced, except for passing moments, from the stage, English dramatic literature could during much the greater part of the 19th century hardly be regarded as a connected national growth; though, already in the last decades of the Victorian age, the revival of public interest in the theatre co-operated with a gradual change in poetic taste to awaken the hope of a future living reunion. Among English poets who lived in this period, Sir Henry Taylor probably approached nearest to the objective treatment and the amplitude of style characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.264 R. H. Horne, long an almost solitary survivor of the romantic school, was able in at least one memorable dramatic attempt to revive something of the early Elizabethan spirit.265 Of the chief poets of the age, Tennyson only in his later years addressed himself to a form of composition little suited to his genius, though the very fact of the homage paid by him to the national forms of the historic drama and of romantic comedy could not fail to ennoble the contemporary stage.266 Matthew Arnold’s stately revival of the traditions of classical tragedy proper, on the other hand, deliberately excluded itself from any such contact;267 while Longfellow’s refined literary culture and graceful facility of form made ready use of a quasi-dramatic medieval vesture.268 William Morris’s single “morality,” too, cannot be regarded as a contribution to dramatic literature proper.269 Of very different importance are the excursions into dramatic composition of Robert Browning, whose place in the living inheritance of the English drama has in one instance at least been not unsuccessfully vindicated by a later age, and some of whose greatest gifts are beyond a doubt displayed in his dramatic work;270 and the sustained endeavours of A. C. Swinburne, after adding a flower of exquisite beauty to the wreath which the lovers of the Attic muse have laid at her feet, to enrich the national historic drama by a trilogy instinct with the ardent eloquence of passion.271 Until a date too near the times in which we live to admit of its being fixed with precision, most of the English writers who sought to preserve a connexion between their dramatic productions and the demands of the stage addressed themselves to the theatrical rather than the literary public—for the distinction, in those times at all events, was by no means without a difference. The modestly simple and judiciously concentrated efforts of Joanna Baillie deserve a respectful remembrance in the records of literature as well as of the stage, though the day has passed when the theory which suggested her Plays on the Passions could find acceptance among critics, or her exemplifications of it satisfy the demands of playgoers. Sheridan Knowles, on the other hand, composed his conventional semblances of genuine tragedy and comedy with a thorough knowledge of stage effect, and some of them can hardly yet be said to have vanished from the stage.272 The first Lord Lytton, though his plays were for the most part of a lighter texture, showed even more artificiality of sentiment in their conception and execution; but the romantic touch which he imparted to at least one of them accounts for its long-lived popularity. Among later Victorian playwrights T. W. Robertson brought back a breath of naturalness into the acted comic drama; Tom Taylor, rivalling Lope in fertility, made little pretence to original invention, but adapted with an instinct that rarely failed him, and materially helped to keep the theatrical diversions of his age sound and pure; an endeavour in which he had the co-operation of Charles Reade and that of most of those who competed with them for the favour of generations of playgoers more easily contented than their successors. The one deplorable aspect of this age of the English drama was to be found neither in the sphere of tragedy nor in that of comedy—nor even in that of farce. It was presented in the low depths of contemporary burlesque, which had degenerated from the graceful extravaganza of J. R. Planché into witless and tasteless emptiness.

Curiously enough, it was at this point that something like real originality—discovering a new sub-species of its own—first began, with the aid of a sister-art, to renovate the English popular comic stage. At the beginning of the 19th century the greatest tragic actress of the English theatre, Mrs Siddons, had passed her prime; and before its second decade had closed, not only she (1812) but her brother John Kemble (1817), the representative of a grand style of acting which later generations might conceivably find overpowering, had withdrawn from the boards. Mrs Siddons was soon followed into retirement by her successor Miss O’Neill (1819); while Kemble’s brilliant later rival, Edmund Kean, an actor the intuitions of whose genius seem to have supplied, so far as intuition ever can supply, the absence of a consecutive self-culture, remained on the stage till his death in 1833. Young, Macready, and others handed down some of the traditions of the older school of acting to the very few artists who remained to suggest its semblance to a later generation. Even these—among them S. Phelps, whose special merit it was to present to a later age, accustomed to elaborate theatrical environments, dramatic masterpieces as dependent upon themselves and adequate interpretation; and the foremost English actress of the earlier Victorian age, Helen Faucit (Lady Martin)—were unable to leave a school of acting behind them. Still less was this possible to Charles Kean the younger, with whom the decorative production of Shakespearian plays really had its beginning; or even to Sir Henry Irving, an actor of genius, but also an irrepressible and almost eccentric theatrical personality, whose great service to the English drama was his faith in its masterpieces. The comic stage was fortunate in an ampler aftergrowth, from generation to generation, of the successors of the old actors who live for us all in the reminiscences of Charles Lamb; nor were the links suddenly snapped which bound the humours of the present to those of the past. In the first decade of the 20th century a generation still survived which could recall, with many other similar joys, the brilliant levity of Charles Mathews the younger; the not less irresistible stolidity of J. B. Buckstone; the solemn fooling of H. Compton (1805-1877); the subtle humours of J. L. Toole, and the frolic charm of Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), the most original comic actress of her time.

Recent English Drama.—In England the whole mechanism of theatrical life had undergone a radical change in the middle decades of the 19th century. At the root of this change lay the immense growth of population and the enormously increased facilities of communication between London and the provinces. Similar causes came into operation, of course, in France, Germany and Austria, but were much less distinctly felt, because the numerous and important subventioned theatres of these countries remained more or less unaffected by economic influences. Free trade in theatricals (subject only to certain licensing regulations and to a court censorship of new plays) was established in England by an act of 1843, which abolished the long moribund monopoly of the “legitimate drama” claimed by the “Patent Theatres” of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The drama was thus formally subjected to the operation of the law of supply and demand, like any other article of commerce, and managers were left, unaided and unhampered by any subvention or privilege, to cater to the tastes of a huge and growing community. Theatres very soon multiplied, competition grew ever keener, and the long run, with its accompaniments of ostentatious decoration and lavish advertisement, became the one object of managerial effort. This process of evolution may be said to have begun in the second quarter of the 19th century and completed itself in the 3rd. The system which obtains to-day, almost unforeseen in 1825, was in full operation in 1875. The repertory theatre, with its constant changes of programme, maintained on the continent partly by subventions, partly by the mere force of artistic tradition, had become in England a faint and far-off memory. There was not a single theatre in London at which plays, old and new, were not selected and mounted solely with a view to their continuous performance for as many nights as possible, anything short of fifty nights constituting an ignominious and probably ruinous failure. It was found, too, that those theatres were most successful which were devoted exclusively to exploiting the talent of an individual actor. Thus when the fourth quarter of the century opened, the long “run” and the actor-manager were in firm possession of the field.

The outlook was in many ways far from encouraging. It was not quite so black, indeed, as it had been in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties, when the “legitimate” enterprises of Phelps at Sadler’s Wells and Charles Kean at the Princess’s had failed to hold their ground, and when modern comedy and drama were represented almost exclusively by adaptations from the French. There had been a slight stirring of originality in the series of comedies produced by T. W. Robertson at the Prince of Wales’s theatre, where, under the management of Bancroft (q.v.) a new school of mounting and acting, minutely faithful (in theory at any rate) to everyday reality, had come into existence. But the hopes of a revival of English comedy seemed to have died with Robertson’s death. One of his followers, James Albery, possessed both imagination and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his talent, and sank into a mere adapter. In the plays of another disciple, H. J. Byron, the Robertsonian or “cup-and-saucer” school declined upon sheer inanity. Of the numerous plays signed by Tom Taylor some were original in substance, but all were cast in the machine-made French mould. Wilkie Collins, in dramatizing some of his novels, produced somewhat crude anticipations of the modern “problem play.” The literary talent of W. S. Gilbert displayed itself in a group of comedies both in verse and prose; but Gilbert saw life from too peculiar an angle to represent it otherwise than fantastically. The Robertsonian impulse seemed to have died utterly away, leaving behind it only five or six very insubstantial comedies and a subdued, unrhetorical method in acting. This method the Bancrofts proceeded to apply, during the ’seventies, to revivals of stage classics, such as The School for Scandal, Money and Masks and Faces, and to adaptations from the French of Sardou.

While the modern drama appeared to have relapsed into a comatose condition, poetic and romantic drama was giving some signs of life. At the Lyceum in 1871 Henry Irving had leapt into fame by means of his performance of Mathias in The Bells, an adaptation from the French of Erckmann-Chatrian. He followed this up by an admirably picturesque performance of the title-part in Charles I. by W. G. Wills. In the autumn of 1874 the great success of Irving’s Hamlet was hailed as the prelude to a revival of tragic acting. As a matter of fact, it was the prelude to a long series of remarkable achievements in romantic drama and melodrama. Irving’s lack of physical and vocal resources prevented him from scaling the heights of tragedy, and his Othello, Macbeth, and Lear could not be ranked among his successes; but he was admirable in such parts as Richard III., Shylock, Iago and Wolsey, while in melodramatic parts, such as Louis XI. and the hero and villain of The Lyons Mail, he was unsurpassed. Mephistopheles in a version of Faust (1885), perhaps the greatest popular success of his career, added nothing to his reputation for artistic intelligence; but on the other hand his Becket in Tennyson’s play of that name (1893) was one of his most masterly efforts. His management of the Lyceum (1878-1899) did so much to raise the status of the actor and to restore the prestige of poetic drama, that the knighthood conferred upon him in 1895 was felt to be no more than an appropriate recognition of his services. But his managerial career had scarcely any significance for the living English drama. He seldom experimented with a new play, and, of the few which he did produce, only The Cup and Becket by Lord Tennyson have the remotest chance of being remembered.

To trace the history of the new English drama, then, we must go back to the Prince of Wales’s theatre. Even while it seemed that French comedy of the school of Scribe was resuming its baneful predominance, the seeds of a new order of things were slowly germinating. Diplomacy, an adaptation of Sardou’s Dora, produced in 1878, brought together on the Prince of Wales’s stage Mr and Mrs Bancroft, Mr and Mrs Kendal, John Clayton and Arthur Cecil—in other words, the future managers of the Haymarket, the St James’s and the Court theatres, which were destined to see the first real stirrings of a literary revival. Mr and Mrs Kendal, who, in conjunction with John Hare, managed the St James’s theatre from 1879 to 1888, produced A. W. Pinero’s first play of any consequence, The Money-Spinner (1881), and afterwards The Squire (1882) and The Hobby Horse (1887). The Bancrofts, who, after entirely rebuilding the Haymarket theatre, managed it from 1880 till their retirement in 1885, produced in 1883 Pinero’s Lords and Commons; and Messrs Clayton and Cecil produced at the Court theatre between 1885 and 1887 his three brilliant farces, The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress and Dandy Dick, which, with the sentimental comedy, Sweet Lavender, produced at Terry’s theatre in 1888, assured his position as an original and fertile dramatic humorist of no small literary power. It is to be noted, however, that Pinero was almost the only original playwright represented under the Bancroft, Hare-Kendal and Clayton-Cecil managements, which relied for the rest upon adaptations and revivals. Adaptations of French vaudevilles were the staple productions of Charles Wyndham’s management at the Criterion from its beginning in 1876 until 1893, when he first produced an original play of any importance. When Herbert Beerbohm Tree went into management at the Haymarket in 1887, he still relied largely on plays of foreign origin. George Alexander’s first managerial ventures (Avenue theatre, 1890) were two adaptations from the French. Until well on in the ’eighties, indeed, adaptation from the French was held the normal occupation of the British playwright, and original composition a mere episode. Robertson, Byron, Albery, Gilbert, Tom Taylor, Charles Reade, Herman Merivale, G. W. Godfrey, all produced numerous adaptations; Sydney Grundy was for twenty years occupied almost exclusively in this class of work; Pinero himself has adapted more than one French play. The ’eighties, then, may on the whole be regarded as showing a very gradual decline in the predominance of France on the English stage, and an equally slow revival of originality, so far as comedy and drama were concerned, manifesting itself mainly in the plays of Pinero.

The reaction against French influence, however, was no less apparent in the domain of melodrama and operetta than in that of comedy and drama. Until well on in the ’seventies, D’Ennery and his disciples, adapted and imitated by Dion Boucicault and others, ruled the melodramatic stage. The reaction asserted itself in two quarters—in the East End at the Grecian theatre, and in the West End at the Princess’s. In The World, produced at Drury Lane in 1880, Paul Meritt (d. 1895) and Henry Pettitt (d. 1893) brought to the West End the “Grecian” type of popular drama; and at Drury Lane it survived in the elaborately spectacular form imparted to it by Sir Augustus Harris, who managed that theatre from 1879 till his death in 1896. The production of G. R. Sims’s Lights o’ London at the Princess’s in 1881, under Wilson Barrett’s management, also marked a new departure. This style of melodrama was chiefly cultivated at the Adelphi theatre, from 1882 until the end of the century, when it died out there as a regular institution, apparently because a host of suburban theatres drew away its audiences. Of all these English melodramas, only one, The Silver King, by Henry Arthur Jones (Princess’s, 1882), could for a moment compare in invention or technical skill with the French dramas they supplanted. The fact remains, however, that even on this lowest level of dramatic art the current of the time set decisively towards home-made pictures of English life, however crude and puerile.

For twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, the English stage was overrun with French operettas of the school of Offenbach. Hastily adapted by slovenly hacks, their librettos (often witty in the original) became incredible farragos of metreless doggrel and punning ineptitude. The great majority of them are now so utterly forgotten that it is hard to realize how, in their heyday, they swarmed on every hand in London and the provinces. The reaction began in 1875 with the performance at the Royalty theatre of Trial by Jury, by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. This was the prelude to that brilliant series of witty and melodious extravaganzas which began with The Sorcerer at the Opera Comique theatre in 1877, but was mainly associated with the Savoy theatre, opened by R. D’Oyly Carte (d. 1901) in 1881. Little by little the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (of which the most famous, perhaps, were H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878, Patience, 1881, and The Mikado, 1885) undermined the popularity of the French opera-bouffes, and at the same time that of the indigenous “burlesques” which, graceful enough in the hands of their inventor J. R. Planché, had become mere incoherent jumbles of buffoonery, devoid alike of dramatic ingenuity and of literary form. When, early in the ’nineties, the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan became intermittent, and the vogue of the Savoy somewhat declined, a new class of extravaganza arose, under the designation of “musical comedy” or “musical farce.” It first took form in a piece called In Town, by Messrs “Adrian Ross” and Osmond Carr (Prince of Wales’s theatre, 1892), and rapidly became very popular. In these plays the scene and costumes are almost always modern though sometimes exotic, and the prose dialogue, setting forth an attenuated and entirely negligible plot, is frequently interrupted by musical numbers. The lyrics are often very clever pieces of rhyming, totally different from the inane doggrel of the old opera-bouffes and burlesques. In other respects there is little to be said for the literary or intellectual quality of “musical farce”; but, being an entirely English (or Anglo-American) product, it falls into line with the other indications we have noted of the general decline—one might almost say extinction—of French influence on the English stage.

To what causes are we to trace this gradual disuse of adaptation? In the domain of modern comedy and drama, to two causes acting simultaneously: the decline in France of the method of Scribe, which produced “well-made,” exportable plays, more or less suited to any climate and environment; and the rise in England of a generation of playwrights more original, thoughtful and able than their predecessors. It is not at all to be taken for granted that the falling off in the supply of exportable plays meant a decline in the absolute merit of French drama. The historian of the future may very possibly regard the movement in France, no less than the movement in England, as a step in advance, and may even see in the two movements co-ordinate manifestations of one tendency. Be this as it may, the fact is certain that as the playwrights of the Second Empire gradually died off, and were succeeded by the authors of the “new comedy,” plays which would bear transplantation became ever fewer and farther between. Of recent years Henri Bernstein, author of Le Voleur and Samson, has been almost the only French dramatist whose works have found a ready and steady market in England. Attempts to acclimatize French poetical drama—Pour la Couronne, Le Chemineau, Cyrano de Bergerac—were all more or less unsuccessful.

Having noted the decline of adaptation, we may now trace a stage farther the development of the English drama. The first stage, already surveyed, ends with the production of Sweet Lavender in 1888. Up to this point its author, Pinero (b. 1855), stood practically alone, and had won his chief successes as a humorist. Henry Arthur Jones (b. 1851) was known as little more than an able melodramatist, though in one play, Saints and Sinners (1884), he had made some attempt at a serious study of provincial life. R. C. Carton (b. 1856) had written, in collaboration, one or two plays of slight account. Sydney Grundy (b. 1848) had produced scarcely any original work. The second stage may be taken as extending from 1889 to 1893. On the 24th of April 1889 John Hare opened the new Garrick theatre with The Profligate, by Pinero—an unripe and superficial piece of work in many ways, but still a great advance, both in ambition and achievement, upon any original work the stage had seen for many a year.

With all its faults, it may be said that The Profligate notably enlarged at one stroke the domain open to the English dramatist. And it did not stand alone. The same year saw the production of two plays by H. A. Jones, Wealth and The Middleman, in which a distinct effort towards a serious criticism of life was observable, and of two plays by Sydney Grundy, A Fool’s Paradise and A White Lie, which, though very French in method, were at least original in substance. Jones during the next two years made a steady advance with Judah (1890), The Dancing Girl and The Crusaders (1891). Pinero in these years was putting forth less than his whole strength in The Cabinet Minister (1890), Lady Bountiful and The Times (1891), and The Amazons (March 1893). But meanwhile new talents were coming forward. The management of George Alexander, which opened at the Avenue theatre in 1890, but was transferred in the following year to the St James’s, brought prominently to the front R. C. Carton, Haddon Chambers and Oscar Wilde. Carton’s two sentimental comedies, Sunlight and Shadow (1890) and Liberty Hall (1892), showed excellent workmanship, but did not yet reveal his true originality as a humorist. Haddon Chambers’s work (notably The Idler, 1891) was as yet sufficiently commonplace; but in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) Oscar Wilde showed himself at his first attempt a brilliant and accomplished dramatist. Wilde’s subsequent plays, A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of being Earnest (1895), though marred by mannerism and insincerity, did much to promote the movement we are here tracing.

As the production of The Profligate marked the opening of the second period in the revival of English drama, so the production of the same author’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray is very clearly the starting-point of the third period. Before attempting to trace its course we may do well to glance at certain conditions which probably influenced it.

In the first place, economic conditions. The Bancroft-Robertson movement at the old Prince of Wales’s, between 1865 and 1870, was of even more importance from an economic than from a literary point of view. By making their little theatre a luxurious place of resort, and faithfully imitating in their productions the accent, costume and furniture of upper and upper-middle class life, the Bancrofts had initiated a reconciliation between society and the stage. Throughout the middle decades of the century it was the constant complaint of the managers that the world of wealth and fashion could not be tempted to the theatre. The Bancroft management changed all that. It was at the Prince of Wales’s that half-guinea stalls were first introduced; and these stalls were always filled. As other theatres adopted the same policy of upholstery, both on and off the stage, fashion extended its complaisance to them as well. In yet another way the reconciliation was promoted—by the ever-increasing tendency of young men and women of good birth and education to seek a career upon the English stage. The theatre, in short, became at this period one of the favourite amusements of fashionable (though scarcely of intellectual) society in London. It is often contended that the influence of the sensual and cynical stall audience is a pernicious one. In some ways, no doubt, it is detrimental; but there is another side to the case. Even the cynicism of society marks an intellectual advance upon the sheer rusticity which prevailed during the middle years of the 19th century and accepted without a murmur plays (original and adapted) which bore no sort of relation to life. In a celebrated essay published in 1879, Matthew Arnold (whose occasional dramatic criticisms were very influential in intellectual circles) dwelt on the sufficiently obvious fact that the result of giving English names and costumes to French characters was to make their sayings and doings utterly unreal and “fantastic.” During the years of French ascendancy, audiences had quite forgotten that it was possible for the stage to be other than “fantastic” in this sense. They no longer thought of comparing the mimic world with the real world, but were content with what may be called abstract humour and pathos, often of the crudest quality. The cultivation of external realism, coinciding with, and in part occasioning, the return of society to the playhouse, gradually led to a demand for some approach to plausibility in character and action as well as in costume and decoration. The stage ceased to be entirely “fantastic,” and began to essay, however imperfectly, the representation, the criticism of life. It cannot be denied that the influence of society tended to narrow the outlook of English dramatists and to trivialize their tone of thought. But this was a passing phase of development; and cleverly trivial representations of reality are, after all, to be preferred to brainless concoctions of sheer emptiness.

Quite as important, from the economic point of view, as the reconciliation of society to the stage, was the reorganization of the mechanism of theatrical life in the provinces which took place between 1865 and 1875. From the Restoration to the middle of the 19th century the system of “stock companies” had been universal. Every great town in the three kingdoms had its established theatre with a resident company, playing the “legitimate” repertory, and competing, often by illegitimate means, for the possession of new London successes. The smaller towns, and even villages, were grouped into local “circuits,” each served by one manager with his troupe of strollers. The “circuits” supplied actors to the resident stock companies, and the stock companies served as nurseries to the patent theatres in London. Metropolitan “stars” travelled from one country theatre to another, generally alone, sometimes with one or two subordinates in their train, and were “supported,” as the phrase went, by the stock company of each theatre. Under this system, scenery, costumes and appointments were often grotesquely inadequate, and performances almost always rough and unfinished. On the other hand, the constant practice in a great number and variety of characters afforded valuable training for actors, and developed many remarkable talents. As a source of revenue to authors, the provinces were practically negligible. Stageright was unprotected by law; and even if it had been protected, it is doubtful whether authors could have got any considerable fees out of country managers, whose precarious ventures usually left them a small enough margin of profit.

The spread of railways throughout the country gradually put an end to this system. The “circuits” disappeared early in the ’fifties, the stock companies survived until about the middle of the ’seventies. As soon as it was found easy to transport whole companies, and even great quantities of scenery, from theatre to theatre throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain, it became apparent that the rough makeshifts of the stock company system were doomed. Here again we can trace to the old Prince of Wales’s theatre the first distinct impulse towards the new order of things. Robertson’s comedies not only encouraged but absolutely required a style of art, in mounting, stage-management and acting, not to be found in the country theatres. To entrust them to the stock companies was well-nigh impossible. On the other hand, to quote Sir Squire Bancroft, “perhaps no play was ever better suited than Caste to a travelling company; the parts being few, the scenery and dresses quite simple, and consequently the expenses very much reduced.” In 1867, then, a company was organized and rehearsed in London to carry round the provincial theatres as exact a reproduction as possible of the London performance of Caste and Robertson’s other comedies. The smoothness of the representation, the delicacy of the interplay among the characters, were new to provincial audiences, and the success was remarkable. About the same time the whole Haymarket company, under Buckstone’s management, began to make frequent rounds of the country theatres; and other “touring combinations” were soon organized. It is manifest that the “combination” system and the stock company system cannot long coexist, for a manager cannot afford to keep a stock company idle while a London combination is occupying his theatre. The stock companies, therefore, soon dwindled away, and were probably quite extinct before the end of the ’seventies. Under the present system, no sooner is a play an established success in London than it is reproduced in one, two or three exact copies and sent round the provincial theatres (and the numerous suburban theatres which have sprung up since 1895), Company A serving first-class towns, Company B the second-class towns, and so forth. The process is very like that of taking plaster casts of a statue, and the provincial companies often stand to their London originals very much in the relation of plaster to marble. Even the London scenery is faithfully reproduced in material of extra strength, to stand the wear-and-tear of constant removal. The result is that, instead of the square pegs in round holes of the old stock company system, provincial audiences now see pegs carefully adjusted to the particular holes they occupy, and often incapable of fitting any other. Instead of the rough performances of old, they are now accustomed to performances of a mechanical and soulless smoothness.

In some ways the gain in this respect is undeniable, in other ways the loss is great. The provinces are no longer, in any effective sense, a nursery of fresh talents for the London theatres, for the art acquired in touring combinations is that of mimicry rather than of acting. Moreover, provincial playgoers have lost all personal interest and pride in their local theatres, which have no longer any individuality of their own, but serve as a mere frame for the presentation of a series of ready-made London pictures. Christmas pantomime is the only theatrical product that has any really local flavour in it, and even this is often only a second-hand London production, touched up with a few topical allusions. Again, the railways which bring London productions to the country take country playgoers by the thousand to London. The wealthier classes, in the Lancashire, Yorkshire and Midland towns at any rate, do almost all their theatre-going in London, or during the autumn months when the leading London companies go on tour. Thus the better class of comedy and drama has a hard fight to maintain itself in the provinces, and the companies devoted to melodrama and musical farce enjoy an ominous preponderance of popularity.

On the whole, however—and this is the main point to be observed with regard to the literary development of the drama—the economic movement of the five- and twenty years between 1865 and 1890 was enormously to the advantage of the dramatic author. A London success meant a long series of full houses at high prices, on which he took a handsome percentage. The provinces, in which a popular playwright would often have three or four plays going the rounds simultaneously, became a steady source of income. And, finally, it was found possible, even before international copyright came into force, to protect stageright in the United States, so that about the beginning of the ’eighties large receipts began to pour in from America. Thus successful dramatists, instead of living from hand to mouth, like their predecessors of the previous generation, found themselves in comfortable and even opulent circumstances. They had leisure for reading, thought and careful composition, and they could afford to gratify their ambition with an occasional artistic experiment. Failure might mean a momentary loss of prestige, but it would not spell ruin. A distinctly progressive spirit, then, began to animate the leading English dramatists—a spirit which found intelligent sympathy in such managers as John Hare, George Alexander, Beerbohm Tree and Charles Wyndham. Nor must it be forgotten that, though the laws of literary property, internal and international, remained far from perfect, it was found possible to print and publish plays without incurring loss of stageright either at home or in America. The playwrights of the present generation have accordingly a motive for giving literary form and polish to their work which was quite inoperative with their predecessors, whose productions were either kept jealously in manuscript or printed only in miserable and totally unreadable stage editions. It is no small stimulus to ambition to know that even if a play prove to be in advance of the standards of taste or thought among the public to which it is originally presented, it will not perish utterly, but will, if it have any inherent vitality, continue to live as literature.

Having now summed up the economic conditions which made for progress, let us glance at certain intellectual influences which tended in the same direction. The establishment of the Théâtre Libre in Paris, towards the close of 1887, Influence of foreign drama. unquestionably marked the beginning of a period of restless experiment throughout the theatrical world of Europe. A. Antoine and his supporters were in open rebellion against the artificial methods of Scribe and the Second Empire playwrights. Their effort was to transfer to the stage the realism, the so-called “naturalism,” which had been dominant in French fiction since 1870 or earlier; and this naturalism was doubtless, in its turn, the outcome of the scientific movement of the century. New methods (or ideals) of observation, and new views as to the history and destiny of the race, could not fail to produce a profound effect upon art; and though the modern theatre is a cumbrous contrivance, slow to adjust its orientation to the winds of the spirit, even it at last began to revolve, like a rusty windmill, so as to fill its sails in the main current of the intellectual atmosphere. Within three or four years of its inception, Antoine’s experiment had been imitated in Germany, England and America. The “Freie Bühne” of Berlin came into existence in 1889, the Independent Theatre of London in 1891. Similar enterprises were set on foot in Munich and other cities. In America several less formal experiments of a like nature were attempted, chiefly in Boston and New York. Nor must it be forgotten that in Paris itself the Théâtre Libre did not stand alone. Many other théâtres à côté sprang up, under such titles as “Théâtre d’Art,” “Théâtre Moderne,” “Théâtre de l’Avenir Dramatique.” The most important and least ephemeral was the “Théâtre de l’Œuvre,” founded in 1893 by Alex. Lugné-Poë, which represented mainly, though not exclusively, the symbolist reaction against naturalism.

The impulse which led to the establishment of the Théâtre Libre was, in the first instance, entirely French. If any foreign influence helped to shape its course, it was that of the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi’s Puissance des ténèbres was the only “exotic” play announced in Antoine’s opening manifesto. But the whole movement was soon to receive a potent stimulus from the Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen.

Ibsen’s early romantic plays had been known in Germany since 1875. In 1878 Pillars of Society and in 1880 A Doll’s House achieved wide popularity, and held the German stage side by side with A Bankruptcy, by Björnstjerne Björnson. But these plays had little influence on the German drama. Their methods were, indeed, not essentially different from those of the French school of the Second Empire, which were then dominant in Germany as well as everywhere else. It was Ghosts (acted in Augsburg and Meiningen 1886, in Berlin 1887) that gave the impulse which, coalescing with the kindred impulse from the French Théâtre Libre, was destined in the course of a few years to create a new dramatic literature in Germany. During the middle decades of the century Germany had produced some dramatists of solid and even remarkable talent, such as Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Laube, Karl Gutzkow and Gustav Freytag. Even the generation which held the stage after 1870, and included Paul Heyse, Paul Lindau and Adolf Wilbrandt, with numerous writers of light comedy and farce, such as E. Wichert, O. Blumenthal, G. von Moser, A. L’Arronge and F. von Schönthan, had produced a good many works of some merit. But, in the main, French artificiality and frivolity predominated on the German stage. In point of native talent and originality, the Austrian popular playwright Ludwig Anzengruber was well ahead of his North German contemporaries. It was in 1889, with the establishment of the Berlin Freie Bühne, that the reaction definitely set in. In Berlin, as afterwards in London, Ghosts was the first play produced on the outpost stage, but it was followed in Berlin by a very rapid development of native talent. Less than a month after the performance of Ibsen’s play, Gerhart Hauptmann came to the front with Vor Sonnenaufgang, an immature piece of almost unrelieved Zolaism, which he soon followed up, however, with much more important works. In Das Friedensfest (1890) and Einsame Menschen (1891) he transferred his allegiance from Zola to Ibsen. His true originality first manifested itself in Die Weber (1892); and subsequently he produced plays in several different styles, all bearing the stamp of a potent individuality. His most popular productions have been the dramatic poems Hannele and Die versunkene Glocke, the low-life comedy Der Biberpelz, and the low-life tragedy Fuhrmann Henschel. Other remarkable playwrights belonging to the Freie Bühne group are Max Halbe (b. 1865), author of Jugend and Mutter Erde, and Otto Erich Hartleben (b. 1864), author of Hanna Jagert and Rosenmontag. These young men, however, so quickly gained the ear of the general public, that the need for a special “free stage” was no longer felt, and the Freie Bühne, having done its work, ceased to exist. Unlike the French Théâtre Libre and the English Independent theatre, it had been supported from the outset by the most influential critics, and had won the day almost without a battle. The productions of the new school soon made their way even into some of the subventioned theatres; but it was the unsubventioned Deutsches Theater of Berlin that most vigorously continued the tradition of the Freie Bühne. One or two playwrights of the new generation, however, did not actually belong to the Freie Bühne group. Hermann Sudermann produced his first play, Die Ehre, in 1888, and his most famous work, Heimat, in 1892. In him the influence of Ibsen is very clearly perceptible; while Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna, author of Liebelei, may rather be said to derive his inspiration from the Parisian “new comedy.” Originality, verging sometimes on abnormality, distinguishes the work of Frank Wedekind (b. 1864), author of Erdgeist and Frühlingserwachen. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (b. 1874), in his Elektra and Ödipus, rehandles classic themes in the light of modern anthropology and psychology.

The promoters of the Théâtre Libre had probably never heard of Ibsen when they established that institution, but three years later his fame had reached France, and Les Revenants was produced by the Théâtre Libre (29th May 1890). Within the next two or three years almost all his modern plays were acted in Paris, most of them either by the Théâtre Libre or by L’Œuvre. Close upon the heels of the Ibsen influence followed another, less potent, but by no means negligible. The exquisite tragic symbolism of Maurice Maeterlinck began to find numerous admirers about 1890. In 1891 his one-act play L’Intruse was acted; in 1893, Pelléas et Mélisande. By this time, too, the reverberation of the impulse which the Théâtre Libre had given to the Freie Bühne began to be felt in France. In 1893 Hauptmann’s Die Weber was acted in Paris, and, being frequently repeated, made a deep and lasting impression.

The English analogue to the Théâtre Libre, the Independent theatre, opened its first season (March 13, 1891) with a performance of Ghosts. This was not, however, the first introduction of Ibsen to the English stage. On the 7th of June 1889 (six weeks after the production of The Profligate) A Doll’s House was acted at the Novelty theatre, and ran for three weeks, amid a storm of critical controversy. In the same year Pillars of Society was presented in London. In 1891 and 1892 A Doll’s House was frequently acted; Rosmersholm was produced in 1891, and again in 1893; in May and June 1891 Hedda Gabler had a run of several weeks; and early in 1893 The Master Builder enjoyed a similar passing vogue. During these years, then, Ibsen was very much “in the air” in England, as well as in France and Germany. The Independent theatre, in the meantime, under the management of J. T. Grein, found but scanty material to deal with. It presented translations of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, and of A Visit, by the Danish dramatist Edward Brandes; but it brought to the front only one English author of any note, in the person of George Bernard Shaw, whose “didactic realistic play,” Widowers’ Houses, it produced in December 1892.

None the less is it true that the ferment of fresh energy, which between 1887 and 1893 had created a new dramatic literature both in France and in Germany, was distinctly felt in England as well. England did not take at all kindly to it. The productions of Ibsen’s plays, in particular, were received with an outcry of reprobation. A great part of this clamour was due to sheer misunderstanding; but some of it, no doubt, arose from genuine and deep-seated distaste. As for the dramatists of recognized standing, they one and all, both from policy and from conviction, adopted a hostile attitude towards Ibsen, expressing at most a theoretical respect overborne by practical dislike. Yet his influence permeated the atmosphere. He had revealed possibilities of technical stagecraft and psychological delineation that, once realized, were not to be banished from the mind of the thoughtful playwright. They haunted him in spite of himself. Still subtler was the influence exerted over the critics and the more intelligent public. Deeply and genuinely as many of them disliked Ibsen’s works, they found, when they returned to the old-fashioned play, the adapted frivolity or the homegrown sentimentalism, that they disliked this still more. On every side, then, there was an instinctive or deliberate reaching forward towards something new; and once again it was Pinero who ventured the decisive step.

On the 27th of May 1893 The Second Mrs Tanqueray was produced at the St James’s theatre. With The Second Mrs Tanqueray the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was obviously comparable with the plays of Dumas, of Sudermann, of Björnson, of Echegaray. It might be better than some of these plays, worse than others; but it stood on the same artistic level. The fact that such a play could not only be produced, but could brilliantly succeed, on the London stage gave a potent stimulus to progress. It encouraged ambition in authors, enterprise in managers. What Hernani was to the romantic movement of the ’thirties, and La Dame aux camélias to the realistic movement of the ’fifties, The Second Mrs Tanqueray was to the movement of the ’nineties towards the serious stage-portraiture of English social life. All the forces which we have been tracing—Robertsonian realism of externals, the leisure for thought and experiment involved in vastly improved financial conditions, the substitution in France of a simpler, subtler technique for the outworn artifices of the Scribe school, and the electric thrill communicated to the whole theatrical life of Europe by contact with the genius of Ibsen—all these slowly converging forces coalesced to produce, in The Second Mrs Tanqueray, an epoch-marking play.

Pinero followed up Mrs Tanqueray with a remarkable series of plays—The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Benefit of the Doubt, The Princess and the Butterfly, Trelawny of the “Wells,” The Gay Lord Quex, Iris, Letty, His House in Order and The Thunderbolt—all of which show marked originality of conception and intellectual force. In January 1893 Charles Wyndham initiated a new policy at the Criterion theatre, and produced an original play, The Bauble-Shop, by Henry Arthur Jones. It belonged very distinctly to the pre-Tanqueray order of things; but the same author’s The Case of Rebellious Susan, in the following year, showed an almost startlingly sudden access of talent, which was well maintained in such later works as Michael and his Lost Angel (1896), that admirable comedy The Liars (1897), and Mrs Dane’s Defence (1900). Sydney Grundy produced after 1893 by far his most important original works, The Greatest of These (1896) and The Debt of Honour (1900). R. C. Carton, breaking away from the somewhat laboured sentimentalism of his earlier manner, produced several light comedies of thoroughly original humour and of excellent literary workmanship—Lord and Lady Algy, Wheels within Wheels, Lady Huntworth’s Experiment, Mr Hopkinson and Mr Preedy and the Countess. Haddon Chambers, in The Tyranny of Tears (1899) and The Awakening (1901), produced two plays of a merit scarcely foreshadowed in his earlier efforts.

What was of more importance, a new generation of playwrights came to the front. Its most notable representatives were J. M. Barrie, who displayed his inexhaustible gift of humorous observation and invention in Quality Street (1902), The Admirable Crichton (1903), Little Mary (1903), Peter Pan (1904), Alice Sit-by-the-Fire (1905) and What Every Woman Knows (1908); Mrs Craigie (“John Oliver Hobbes”), who produced in The Ambassador (1898) a comedy of fine accomplishment; and H. V. Esmond, Alfred Sutro, Hubert Henry Davies, W. S. Maugham, Rudolf Besier, Roy Horniman and J. B. Fagan.

Meanwhile, the efforts to relieve the drama from the pressure of the long-run system had not been confined to the Independent theatre. Several other enterprises of a like nature had proved more or less short-lived; but the Stage Society, founded in 1900, was conducted with more energy and perseverance, and became a real force in the dramatic world. After two seasons devoted mainly to Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann, it produced in its third season The Marrying of Ann Leete, by Granville Barker (b. 1877), who had developed in its service his remarkable gifts as a producer of plays. A year or two later, Barker staged for another organization, the New Century theatre, Professor Gilbert Murray’s rendering of the Hippolytus of Euripides; and it was partly the success of this production that suggested the Vedrenne-Barker partnership at the Court theatre, which, between 1904 and 1907, gave an extraordinary impulse to the intellectual life of the theatre. Adopting the “short-run” system, as a compromise between the long-run and the repertory systems, the Vedrenne-Barker management made the plays of Bernard Shaw (both old and new) for the first time really popular. Of the plays already published You Never Can Tell and Man and Superman were the most successful; of the new plays, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma. But though Shaw was the mainstay of the enterprise, it gave opportunities to several other writers, the most notable being John Galsworthy (b. 1867), author of The Silver Box and Strife, St John Hankin (1869-1909), author of The Return of the Prodigal and The Charity that began at Home, and Granville Barker himself, whose plays The Voysey Inheritance and Waste (1907) were among the most important products of this movement. It should also be noted that the production of the Hippolytus was followed up by the production of the Trojan Women, the Electra and the Medea of Euripides, all translated by Gilbert Murray.

The impulse to which were due the Independent theatre, the Stage Society and the Vedrenne-Barker management, combined with local influences to bring about the foundation in Dublin of the Irish National theatre. Its moving spirit was the poet W. B. Yeats (b. 1865), who wrote for it Cathleen-ni-Hoolihan, The Hour-Glass, The King’s Threshold and one or two other plays. Lady Gregory, Padraic Collum, Boyle and other authors also contributed to the repertory of this admirable little theatre; but its most notable products were the plays of J. M. Synge (1871-1909), whose Riders to the Sea, Well of the Saints and Playboy of the Western World showed a fine and original dramatic faculty combined with extraordinary beauty of style.

Both in Manchester and in Glasgow endeavours have been made, with considerable success, to counteract the evils of the touring system, by the establishment of resident companies acting the better class of modern plays on a “short-run” plan, similar to that of the Vedrenne-Barker management. The Manchester enterprise was to some extent subsidized by Miss E. Horniman, and may therefore claim to be the first endowed theatre in England. The need for endowment on a much larger scale was, however, strongly advocated in the early years of the 20th century by the more progressive supporters of English drama, and in 1908 found a place in the scheme for a Shakespeare National theatre, which was then superimposed on the earlier proposal for a memorial commemorating the Shakespeare tercentenary, organized by an influential committee under the chairmanship of the Lord Mayor of London. The scheme involved the raising of £500,000, half to be devoted to the requisite site and building, while the remainder would be invested so as to furnish an annual subvention.

It remains to say a few words of the English literary drama, as opposed to the acted drama. The two classes are not nearly so distinct as they once were; but plays continue to be produced from time to time which are wholly unfitted for the theatre, and others which, though they may be experimentally placed on the stage, make their appeal rather to the reading public. Tennyson had essayed in his old age an art which is scarcely to be mastered after the energy of youth has passed. He continued to the last to occupy himself more or less with drama, and all his plays, except Harold, found their way to the stage. The Cup and Becket, as we have seen, met with a certain success, but The Promise of May (1882), an essay in contemporary drama, was a disastrous failure, while The Falcon (1879) and The Foresters (acted by an American company in 1893) made little impression. Lord Tennyson was certainly not lacking in dramatic faculty, but he worked in an outworn form which he had no longer the strength to renovate. Swinburne continued now and then to cast his creations in the dramatic mould, but it cannot be said that his dramas attained either the vitality or the popularity of his lyrical poems. Mary Stuart (1881) brought his Marian trilogy to a close. In Locrine he produced a tragedy in heroic couplets—a thing probably unattempted since the age of Dryden. The Sisters is a tragedy of modern date with a medieval drama inserted by way of interlude. Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899), perhaps approached more nearly than any of his former works to the concentration essential to drama. It may be doubted, however, whether his copious and ebullient style could ever really subject itself to the trammels of dramatic form. Of other dramas on the Elizabethan model, the most notable, perhaps, were the works of two ladies who adopt the pseudonym of “Michael Field”; Callirrhoë (1884), Brutus Ultor (1887), and many other dramas, show considerable power of imagination and expression, but are burdened by a deliberate artificiality both of technique and style. Alfred Austin put forth several volumes in dramatic form, such as Savonarola (1881), Prince Lucifer (1887), England’s Darling (1896), Flodden Field (1905). They are laudable in intention and fluent in utterance. Notable additions to the purely literary drama were made by Robert Bridges in his Prometheus (1883), Nero (1885), The Feast of Bacchus (1889), and other solid plays in verse, full of science and skill, but less charming than his lyrical poems. Sir Lewis Morris made a dramatic experiment in Gycia, but was not encouraged to repeat it.

From the outset of his career, John Davidson (1857-1909) was haunted by the conviction that he was a born dramatist; but his earlier plays, such as Smith: a Tragedy (1886), Bruce: a Chronicle Play (1884) and Scaramouch in Naxos (1888), contained more poetry than drama; and his later pieces, such as Self’s the Man (1901), The Theatrocrat (1905) and the Triumph of Mammon (1907), showed a species of turbulent imagination, but became more and more fantastic and impracticable. Stephen Phillips (b. 1867), on the other hand, having had some experience as an actor, wrote always with the stage in view. In his first play, Paolo and Francesca (1899; produced in 1902), he succeeded in combining great beauty of diction with intense dramatic power and vitality. The same may be said of Herod (1900); but in Ulysses (1902) and Nero (1906) a great falling-off in constructive power was only partially redeemed by the fine inspiration of individual passages.

The collaboration of Robert Louis Stevenson with William Ernest Henley produced a short series of interesting experiments in drama, two of which, Beau Austin (1883) and Admiral Guinea (1884), had more than a merely experimental value. The former was an emotional comedy, treating with rare distinction of touch a difficult, almost an impossible, subject; the latter was a nautical melodrama, raised by force of imagination and diction into the region of literature. Incomparably the most important of recent additions to the literary drama is Thomas Hardy’s vast panorama of the Napoleonic wars, entitled The Dynasts (1904-1908). It is rather an epic in dialogue than a play; but however we may classify it we cannot but recognize its extraordinary intellectual and imaginative powers.

United States.—American dramatists have shown on their own account a progressive tendency, quite as marked as that which we have been tracing in England. Down to about 1890 the influence of France had been even more predominant in America than in England. The only American dramatist of eminence, Bronson Howard (1842-1908), was a disciple, though a very able one, of the French school. A certain stirring of native originality manifested itself during the ’eighties, when a series of semi-improvised farces, associated with the names of two actor-managers, Harrigan and Hart, depicted low life in New York with real observation, though in a crude and formless manner. About the same time a native style of popular melodrama began to make its appearance—a play of conventional and negligible plot, which attracted by reason of one or more faithfully observed character-types, generally taken from country life. The Old Homestead, written by Denman Thompson, who himself acted in it, was the most popular play of this class. Rude as it was, it distinctly foreshadowed that faithfulness to the external aspects, at any rate, of everyday life, in which lies the strength of the native American drama. It was at a sort of free theatre in Boston that James A. Herne (1840-1901) produced in 1891 his realistic drama of modern life, Margaret Fleming, which did a great deal to awaken the interest of literary America in the theatrical movement. Herne, an actor and a most accomplished stage-manager, next produced a drama of rural life in New England, Shore Acres (1892), which made an immense popular success. It was a play of the Old Homestead type, but very much more coherent and artistic. His next play, Griffith Davenport (1898), founded on a novel, was a drama of life in Virginia during the Civil War, admirable in its strength and quiet sincerity; while in his last work, Sag Harbour (1900), Herne returned to the study of rustic character, this time in Long Island. Herne showed human nature in its more obvious and straightforward aspects, making no attempt at psychological subtlety; but within his own limits he was an admirable craftsman. The same preoccupation with local colour is manifest in the plays of Augustus M. Thomas, a writer of genuine humour and originality. His localism announces itself in the very titles of his most popular plays—Alabama, In Mizzoura, Arizona. He also made a striking success in The Witching Hour, a play dealing with the phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion. Clyde Fitch (1865-1909), an immensely prolific playwright of indubitable ability, after becoming known by some experiments in quasi-historic drama (notably Nathan Hale, 1898; Barbara Frietchie, 1899), devoted himself mainly to social drama on the French model, in which his most notable efforts have been The Climbers (1900), The Truth (1906), and The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902). In popular drama, with elaborate scenic illustration, William Gillette (b. 1856), David Belasco (b. 1859) and Charles Klein (b. 1867) have done notable work. William Vaughn Moody (b. 1869) produced in The Great Divide (1907) a play of somewhat higher artistic pretensions; Eugene Walter in Paid in Full (1908) and The Easiest Way (1909) dealt vigorously with characteristic themes of modern life; and Edward Sheldon produced in Salvation Nell a slum drama of very striking realism. The poetic side of drama was mainly represented by Percy Mackaye (b. 1875), whose Jeanne d’Arc (1906) and Sappho and Phaon showed a high ambition and no small literary power. On the whole it may be said that, though the financial conditions of the American stage are even more unfortunate than those which prevail in England, they have failed to check a very strong movement towards nationalism in drama. Season by season, America writes more of her own plays, good or bad, and becomes less dependent on imported work, whether French or English.

(g) German Drama.

The history of the German drama differs widely from that of the English, though a close contact is observable between them at an early point, and again at relatively recent points, in their annals. The dramatic literature of Germany, though in its beginnings intimately connected with the great national movement of the Reformation, soon devoted its efforts to a sterile imitation of foreign models; while the popular stage, persistently suiting itself to a robust but gross taste, likewise largely due to the influence of foreign examples, seemed destined to a hopeless decay. The literary and the acted drama were thus estranged from one another during a period of extraordinary length; nor was it till the middle of the 18th century that, with the opening of a more hopeful era for the life and literature of the nation, the reunion of dramatic literature and the stage began to accomplish itself. Before the end of the same century the progress of the German drama in its turn began to influence that of other nations, and by the widely comprehensive character of its literature, as well as by the activity of its stage, to invite a steadily increasing interest.

It should be premised that in its beginnings the modern German drama might have seemed likely to be influenced even more largely than the English or the French by the copious imitation of classical models which marked The Latin drama in Germany. the periods of the Renaissance and the Reformation; but here the impulse of originality was wanting to bring about a speedy and gradually a complete emancipation, and imitative reproduction continued in an all but endless series. The first German (and indeed the earliest transalpine) writer to follow in the footsteps of the modern Latin drama of the Italians was the famous Strassburg humanist Jacob Wimpheling (1450-1528), whose comedy of Stylpho (1480), an attack upon the ignorance of the pluralist beneficed clergy, marks a kind of epoch in the history of German dramatic effort. It was succeeded by many other Latin plays of various kinds, among which may be mentioned J. Kerckmeister’s Codrus (1485), satirizing pedantic schoolmasters; a series of historical dramas in a moralizing vein, partly on the Turkish peril, as well as of comedies, by Jacob Locher (1471-1528); two plays by the great Johann Reuchlin, of which the so-called Henno went through more than thirty editions; and the Ludus Dianae, with another play likewise in honour of the emperor Maximilian I., by the celebrated Viennese scholar Conrad Celtes (1459-1508). Sebastian Brant’s Hercules in Bivio (1512) is lost; but Wilibald Pirckheimer’s Eckius dedolatus (1520) survives as a dramatic contribution to Luther’s controversy with one of his most active opponents. The Acolastus (1525) of W. Gnaphaeus (alias Fullonius, his native name was de Volder) should also be mentioned in the present connexion, as, though a Dutchman by birth, he spent most of his literary life in Germany. This Terentian version of the parable of the Prodigal Son was printed in an almost endless number of editions, as well as in various versions in modern tongues, among which reference has already been made to the English, for the use of schools, by J. Palsgrave (1540). Macropedius (Langhveldt) belongs wholly to the Low Countries. In Germany the stream of these compositions continued to flow almost without abatement throughout the earlier half of the 16th century; but in the days of the Reformation it takes a turn to scriptural subjects, and during the latter part of the century remains on the whole faithful to this preference.273 These Latin plays may be called school-dramas in the most precise sense; for they were both performed in the schools and read in class with commentaries specially composed for them; nor was it except very reluctantly that in this age the vernacular drama was allowed to intrude into scholastic circles. It should be noticed that the Jesuit order, which afterwards proved so The Jesuit drama. keenly alive to the influence which dramatic performances exercise over the youthful mind, only very gradually abandoned the principle, formally sanctioned in their Ratio studiorum, that the acting of plays (these being always in the Latin tongue) should only rarely be permitted in their seminaries. The flourishing period of the Jesuit drama begins with the spread of the order in the west and south-west of the Empire in the last decade of the 16th century, and then continues, through the vicissitudes of good and evil, with a curious intermixture of Latin and German plays, during the whole of the 17th and the better part of the 18th. These productions, which ranged in their subjects from biblical and classical story to themes of contemporary history (such as the relief of Vienna by Sobiesky and the peace of Ryswick), seem generally to bear the mark of their authorship—that of teachers appointed by their superiors to execute this among other tasks allotted to them; but, as it seems unnecessary to return to this special growth, it may be added that the extraordinary productiveness of the Jesuit dramatists, and the steadiness of self-repetition which is equally characteristic of them, should warn us against underrating its influence upon a considerable proportion of the nation’s educational life during a long succession of generations.

While the scholars of the German Renaissance, who became so largely the agents of the Reformation, eagerly dramatized scriptural subjects in the Latin, and sometimes (as in the case of Luther’s protégé P. Rebhun274) in the native Beginnings of the vernacular German drama. tongue, the same influence made itself felt in another sphere of dramatic activity. Towards the close of the middle ages, as has been seen, dramatic performances had in Germany, as in England, largely fallen into the hands of the civic gilds, and the composition of plays was more especially cultivated by the master-singers of Nuremberg and other towns. It was thus that, under the influence of the Reformation, and of the impulse given by Luther and others to the use of High German as the popular literary tongue, Hans Sachs, the immortal Hans Sachs. shoemaker of Nuremberg, seemed destined to become the father of the popular German drama. In his plays, “spiritual,” “secular,” and Fastnachtsspiele alike, the interest indeed lies in the dialogue rather than in the action, nor do they display any attempt at development of character. In their subjects, whether derived from Scripture or from popular legend and fiction,275 there is no novelty, and in their treatment no originality. But the healthy vigour and fresh humour of this marvellously fertile author, and his innate sympathy with the views and sentiments of the burgher class to which he belonged, were elements of genuine promise—a promise which the event was signally to disappoint. Though the manner of Hans Sachs found a few followers, and is recognizable in the German popular drama even of the beginning of the 17th century, the literature of the Reformation, of which his works may claim to form part, was soon absorbed in labours of a very different kind. The stage, after admitting novelties introduced from Italy or (under Jesuit supervision) from Spain, was subjected to another and enduring influence. Among the foreign actors of various nations who flitted through the innumerable The English comedians. courts of the empire, or found a temporary home there, special prominence was acquired, towards the close of the 16th and in the early years of the 17th century, by the “English comedians,” who appeared at Cassel, Wolfenbuttel, Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, &c. Through these players a number of early English dramas found their way into Germany, where they were performed in more or less imperfect versions, and called forth imitations by native authors. Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick-Luneburg276 (1564-1613) and Jacob Ayrer (a citizen of Nuremberg, where he died, 1605) represent the endeavours of the early German drama to suit its still uncouth forms to themes suggested by English examples; and in their works, and in those of contemporary playwrights, there reappears no small part of what we may conclude to have been the “English comedians’” répertoire.277 (The converse influence of German themes brought home with them by the English actors, or set in motion by their strolling ubiquity, cannot have been equal in extent, though Shakespeare himself may have derived the idea of one of his plots278 from such a source). But, though welcome to both princes and people, the exertions of these foreign comedians, and of the native imitators who soon arose in the earliest professional companies of actors known in Germany, instead of bringing about a union between the stage and literature, led to a directly opposite result. The popularity of these strollers was owing partly to the (very real) blood and other horrors with which their plays were deluged, partly to the buffoonery with which they seasoned, and the various tricks and feats with which they diversified, their performances. The representatives of the English clowns had learnt much on their way from their brethren in the Netherlands, where in this period the art of grotesque acting greatly flourished. Nor were the aids of other arts neglected,—to this day in Germany professors of the “equestrian drama” are known by the popular appellation of “English riders.” From these true descendants of the mimes, then, the professional actors in Germany inherited a variety of tricks and traditions; and soon the favourite figures of the popular comic stage became conventional, and were stereotyped by the use of masks. Among these an acknowledged supremacy was acquired by the native Hans Wurst (Jack Pudding)—of whose name Luther disavowed the invention, and who is known already to Hans Sachs—the privileged buffoon, and for a long series of generations the real lord and master, of the German stage. If that stage, with its grossness and ribaldry, Separation between the stage and literature. seemed likely to become permanently estranged from the tastes and sympathies of the educated classes, the fault was by no means entirely its own and that of its patron the populace. The times were evil times for a national effort of any kind; and poetic literature was in all its branches passing into the hands of scholars who were often pedants, and whose language was a jargon of learned affectations. Thus things continued, till the awful visitation of the Thirty Years’ War cast a general blight upon the national life, and the traditions of the popular theatre were left to the guardianship of the marionettes (Puppenspiele)!

When, in the midst of that war, German poets once more began to essay the dramatic form, the national drama was left outside their range of vision. M. Opitz, who holds an honoured place in the history of the German language The literary drama of the 17th century. and literature, in this branch of his labours contented himself with translations of classical dramas and of Italian pastorals—among the latter one of Rinuccini’s Daphne, with which the history of the opera in Germany begins. A. Gryphius, though as a comic dramatist lacking neither vigour nor variety, and acquainted with Shakespearian279 as well as Latin and Italian examples, chiefly devoted himself to the imitation of Latin, earlier French, and Dutch tragedy, the rhetorical dialogue of which he effectively reproduced in the Alexandrine metre.280 Neither the turgid dramas of D. C. von Lohenstein (1665-1684), for whose Cleopatra the honour of having been the first German tragedy has been claimed, nor even the much healthier comedies of Chr. Weise (1642-1708) were brought upon the stage; while the religious plays of J. Klay (1616-1656) are mere recitations connected with the Italian growth of the oratorio. The frigid allegories commemorative of contemporary events, with which the learned from time to time supplied the theatre, and the pastoral dramas with which the idyllic poets of Nuremberg—“the shepherds of the Pegnitz”—after the close of the war gratified the peaceful longings of their fellow-citizens, were alike mere scholastic efforts. These indeed continued in the universities and gymnasia to keep alive the love of both dramatic composition and dramatic representation, and to encourage the theatrical taste which led so many students into the professional companies. But neither these dramatic exercises nor the ludi Caesarei in which the Jesuits at Vienna revived the pomp and pageantry, and the mixture of classical and Christian symbolism, of the Italian Renaissance, had any influence upon the progress of the popular drama.

The history of the German stage remains to about the second decennium of the 18th century one of the most melancholy, as it is in its way one of the most instructive, chapters of theatrical history. Ignored by the world of letters, The stage before its reform. the actors in return deliberately sought to emancipate their art from all dependence upon literary material. Improvisation reigned supreme, not only in farce, where Hans Wurst, with the aid of Italian examples, never ceased to charm his public, but in the serious drama likewise (in which, however, he also played his part) in those Haupt- und Staatsactionen (high-matter-of-state-dramas), the plots of which were taken from the old stores of the English comedians, from the religious drama and its sources, and from the profane history of all times. The hero of this period is “Magister” J. Velthen (or Veltheim), who at the head of a company of players for a time entered the service of the Saxon court, and, by reproducing comedies of Molière and other writers, sought to restrain the licence which he had himself carried beyond all earlier precedent, but who had to fall back into the old ways and the old life. His career exhibits the climax of the efforts of the art of acting to stand alone; after his death (c. 1693) chaos ensues. The strolling companies, which now included actresses, continued to foster the popular love of the stage, and even under its most degraded form to uphold its national character against the rivalry of the opera, and that of the Italian commedia dell’ arte. From the latter was borrowed Harlequin, with whom Hans Wurst was blended, and who became a standing figure in every kind of popular play.281 He established his sway more especially at Vienna, where from about 1712 the first permanent German theatre was maintained. But for the actors in general there was little permanence, and amidst miseries of all sorts, and under the growing ban of clerical intolerance, the popular stage seemed destined to hopeless decay. A certain vitality of growth seems, under clerical guidance, to have characterized the plays of the people in Bavaria and parts of Austria.

The first endeavours to reform what had thus apparently passed beyond all reach of recovery were neither wholly nor generally successful; but this does not diminish the honour due to two names which should never be F. K. Neuber, Gottsched, and the Leipzig school. mentioned without respect in connexion with the history of the drama. Friederike Karoline Neuber’s (1697-1760) biography is the story of a long-continued effort which, notwithstanding errors and weaknesses, and though, so far as her personal fortunes were concerned, it ended in failure, may almost be described as heroic. As directress of a company of actors which from 1727 had its headquarters at Leipzig (hence the new school of acting is called the Leipzig school), she resolved to put an end to the formlessness of the existing stage, to separate tragedy and comedy, and to extinguish Harlequin. In this endeavour she was supported by the Leipzig professor J. Chr. Gottsched, who induced her to establish French tragedy and comedy as the sole models of the regular drama. Literature and the stage thus for the first time joined hands, and no temporary mischance or personal misunderstanding can obscure the enduring significance of the union. Not only were the abuses of a century swept away from a representative theatre, but a large number of literary works, designed for the stage, were produced on it. It is true that they were but versions or imitations from the French (or in the case of Gottsched’s Dying Cato from the French and English),282 and that at the moment of the regeneration of the German drama new fetters were thus imposed upon it, and upon the art of acting at the same time. But the impulse had been given, and the beginning made. On the one hand, men of letters began to subject their dramatic compositions to the test of performance; the tragedies and comedies of J. E. Schlegel, the artificial and sentimental comedies of Chr. F. Gellert and others, together with the vigorous popular comedies of the Danish dramatist Holberg, were brought into competition with translations from the French. On the other hand, the Ekhof Leipzig school exercised a continuous effect upon the progress of the art of acting, and before long K. Ekhof began a career which made his art a fit subject for the critical study of scholars, and his profession one to be esteemed by honourable men.

Among the authors contributing to Mme. Neuber’s Leipzig enterprise had been a young student destined to complete, after a very different fashion and with very different aims, the work which she and Gottsched had begun. The critical genius of G. Lessing. E. Lessing is peerless in its comprehensiveness, as in its keenness and depth; but if there was any branch of literature and art which by study and practice he made pre-eminently his own, it was that of the drama. As bearing upon the progress of the German theatre, his services to its literature, both critical and creative, can only be described as inestimable. The Hamburgische Dramaturgie, a series of criticisms of plays and (in its earlier numbers) of actors, was undertaken in furtherance of the attempt to establish at Hamburg the first national German theatre (1767-1769). This fact alone would invest these papers with a high significance; for, though the theatrical enterprise proved abortive, it established the principle upon which the progress of the theatre in all countries depends—that for the dramatic art the immediate theatrical public is no sufficient court of appeal. But the direct effect of the Dramaturgie was to complete the task which Lessing had in previous writings begun, and to overthrow the dominion of the arbitrary French rules and the French models established by Gottsched. Lessing vindicated its real laws to the drama, made clear the difference between the Greeks and their would-be representatives, and established the claims of Shakespeare as the modern master of both tragedy and comedy. His own dramatic productivity was cautious, tentative, progressive. His first step was, by his Miss Sara Sampson (1755), to oppose the realism of the English domestic drama to the artificiality of the accepted French models, in the forms of which Chr. F. Weisse (1726-1804) was seeking to treat the subjects of Shakespearian plays.283 Then, in his Minna von Barnhelm (1767), which owed something to Farquhar, he essayed a national comedy drawn from real life, and appealing to patriotic sentiments as well as to broad human sympathies. It was written in prose (like Miss Sara Sampson), but in form held a judicious mean between French and English examples.

The note sounded by the criticisms of Lessing met with a ready response, and the productivity displayed by the nascent dramatic literature of Germany is astonishing, both in the efforts inspired by his teachings and in those Efforts of the theatre and of literature. which continued to controvert or which aspired to transcend them. On the stage, Harlequin and his surroundings proved by no means easy to suppress, more especially at Vienna, the favourite home of frivolous amusement; but even here a reform was gradually effected, and, under the intelligent rule of the emperor Joseph II., a national stage grew into being. The mantle of Ekhof fell upon the shoulders of his eager younger rival, F. L. Schröder, who was the first to domesticate Shakespeare upon the German stage. In dramatic literature few of Lessing’s earlier contemporaries produced any works of permanent value, unless the religious dramas of F. G. Klopstock—a species in which he had been preceded by J. J. Bodmer—and the patriotic Bardietten of the same author be excepted. S. Gessner, J. W. L. Gleim, and G. K. Pfeffel (1736-1809) composed pastoral plays. But a far more potent stimulus prompted the efforts of the younger generation. The translation of Shakespeare, begun in 1762 by C. M. Wieland, whose own plays possess no special significance, and completed in 1775 by Eschenburg, which furnished the text for many of Lessing’s criticisms, helps to mark an epoch in German literature. Under the influence of Shakespeare, or of their conceptions of his genius, arose a youthful group of writers who, while worshipping their idol as the representative of nature, displayed but slight anxiety to harmonize their imitations of him with the demands of art. The notorious Ugolino of H. W. von Gerstenberg seemed a premonitory sign that the coming flood might merely rush back to the extravagances and horrors of the old popular stage; and it was with a sense of this danger in prospect that Lessing in his third important drama, the prose tragedy Emilia Galotti (1772), set the example of a work of incomparable nicety in its adaptation of means to end. But successful as it proved, it could not stay the excesses of the Sturm und Drang period which now set in. Lessing’s last drama, Nathan der Weise (1779), was not measured to the standard of the contemporary stage; but it was to exercise its influence in the progress of time—not only by causing a reaction in tragedy from prose to blank verse (first essayed in J. W. von Brawe’s Brutus, 1770), but by ennobling and elevating by its moral and intellectual grandeur the branch of literature to which in form it belongs.

Meanwhile the young geniuses of the Sturm und Drang had gone forth, as worshippers rather than followers of Shakespeare, to conquer new worlds. The name of this group of writers, more remarkable for their collective significance The Sturm und Drang. than for their individual achievements, was derived from a drama by one of the most prolific of their number, M. F. von Klinger;284 other members of the fraternity were J. A. Leisewitz285 (1752-1806), M. R. Lenz286 and F. Müller287 the “painter.” The youthful genius of the greatest of German poets was itself under the influences of this period, when it produced the first of its masterpieces. But Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), both by the choice and treatment of its national theme, and by the incomparable freshness and originality of its style, holds a position of its own in German dramatic literature. Though its defiant irregularity of form prevented its complete success upon the stage, yet its influence is far from being represented by the series of mostly feeble imitations to which it gave rise. The Ritterdramen (plays of chivalry) had their day like similar fashions in drama or romance; but the permanent effect of Götz was, that it crushed as with an iron hand the last remnants of theatrical conventionality (those of costume and scenery included), and extinguished with them the lingering respect for rules and traditions of dramatic composition which even Lessing had treated with consideration. Its highest significance, however, lies in its having been the first great dramatic work of a great national poet, and having definitively associated the national drama with the poetic glories of the national literature.

Thus, in the classical period of that literature, of which Goethe and Schiller were the ruling stars, the drama had a full share of the loftiest of its achievements. Of these, the dramatic works of Goethe vary so widely in form and Goethe. character, and connect themselves so intimately with the different phases of the development of his own self-directed poetic genius, that it was impossible for any of them to become the starting-points of any general growths in the history of the German drama. His way of composition was, moreover, so peculiar to himself—conception often preceding execution by many years, part being added to part under the influence of new sentiments and ideas and views of art, flexibly followed by changes of form—that the history of his dramas cannot be severed from his general poetic and personal biography. His Clavigo and Stella, which succeeded Götz, are domestic dramas in prose; but neither by these, nor by the series of charming pastorals and operas which he composed for the Weimar court, could any influence be exercised upon the progress of the national drama. In the first conception of his Faust, he had indeed sought the suggestion of his theme partly in popular legend, partly in a domestic motive familiar to the authors of the Sturm und Drang (the story of Gretchen); the later additions to the First Part, and the Second Part generally, are the results of metaphysical and critical studies and meditations belonging to wholly different spheres of thought and experience. The dramatic unity of the whole is thus, at the most, external only; and the standard of judgment to be applied to this wondrous poem is not one of dramatic criticism. Egmont, originally designed as a companion to Götz, was not completed till many years later; there are few dramas more effective in parts, but the idea of a historic play is lost in the elaboration of the most graceful of love episodes. In Iphigenia and Tasso, Goethe exhibited the perfection of form of which his classical period had enabled him to acquire the mastery; but the sphere of the action of the former (perfect though it is as a dramatic action), and the nature of that of the latter, are equally remote from Schiller. the demands of the popular stage. Schiller’s genius, unlike Goethe’s, was naturally and consistently suited to the claims of the theatre. His juvenile works, The Robbers, Fiesco, Kabale und Liebe, vibrating under the influence of an age of social revolution, combined in their prose form the truthful expression of passion with a considerable admixture of extravagance. But, with true insight into the demands of his art, and with unequalled single-mindedness and self-devotion to it, Schiller gradually emancipated himself from his earlier style; and with his earliest tragedy in verse, Don Carlos, the first period of his dramatic authorship ends, and the promise of the second announces itself. The works which belong to this—from the Wallenstein trilogy to Tell—are the acknowledged masterpieces of the German poetic drama, treating historic themes reconstructed by conscious dramatic workmanship, and clothing their dialogue in a noble vestment of rhetorical verse. The plays of Schiller are the living embodiment of the theory of tragedy elaborated by Hegel, according to which its proper theme is the divine, or, in other words, the moving ethical, element in human action. In one of his later plays, The Bride of Messina, Schiller attempted a new use of the chorus of Greek tragedy; but the endeavour was a splendid error, and destined to exercise no lasting effect. The reaction against Schiller’s ascendancy began with writers who could not reconcile themselves with the cosmopolitan and non-national elements in his genius, and is still represented by eminent critics; but the future must be left to settle the contention.

Schiller’s later dramas had gradually conquered the stage, over which his juvenile works had in this time triumphantly passed, but on which his Don Carlos had met with a cold welcome. For a long time, however, its favourites The popular stage. were authors of a very different order, who suited themselves to the demands of a public tolerably indifferent to the literary progress of the drama. After popular tastes had oscillated between the imitators of Gotz and those of Emilia Galotti, they entered into a more settled phase, as the establishment of standing theatres at the courts and in the large towns increased the demand for good “acting” plays. Famous actors, such as Schröder and A. W. Iffland, sought by translations or compositions of their own to meet the popular likings, which largely took the direction of that irrepressible favourite of theatrical audiences, the sentimental domestic drama.288 But the most successful purveyor of such wares was an author who, though not himself an actor, understood the theatre with a professional instinct—August von Kotzebue. His productivity ranged from the domestic drama and comedy of all kinds to attempts to rival Schiller and Shakespeare in verse; and though his popularity (which ultimately proved his doom) brought upon him the bitterest attacks of the romantic school and other literary authorities, his self-conceit is not astonishing, and the time has come for saying that there is some exaggeration in the contempt which has been lavished upon him by posterity.289 Nor should it be forgotten that German literature had so far failed to furnish the comic stage with any successors to Minna von Barnhelm; for Goethe’s efforts to dramatize characteristic events or figures of the Revolutionary age290 must be dismissed as failures, not from a theatrical point of view only. The joint efforts of Goethe and Schiller for the Weimar stage, important in many respects for the history of the German drama, at the same time reveal the want of a national dramatic literature sufficient to supply the needs of a theatre endeavouring to satisfy the demands of art.

Meanwhile the so-called romantic school of German literature was likewise beginning to extend its labours to original dramatic composition. From the universality of sympathies proclaimed by this school, to whose leaders Germany The romantic school. owed its classical translation of Shakespeare,291 and an introduction to the dramatic literatures of so many ages and nations,292 a variety of new dramatic impulses might be expected; while much might be hoped for the future of the national drama (especially in its mixed and comic species) from the alliance between poetry and real life which they preached, and which some of them sought personally to exemplify. But in practice universality presented itself as peculiarity or even as eccentricity; and in the end the divorce between poetry and real life was announced as authoritatively as their union had been. Outside this school, the youthful talent of Th. Körner, whose early promise as a dramatist293 might perhaps have ripened into a fulness enabling him not unworthily to occupy the seat left vacant by his father’s friend Schiller, was extinguished by a patriotic death. The efforts of M. von Collin (1779-1824) in the direction of the historical drama remained isolated attempts. But of the leaders of the romantic school, A. W.294 and F. von Schlegel295 contented themselves with frigid classicalities; and L. Tieck, in the strange alembic of his Phantasus, melted legend and fairy-tale, novel and drama,296 poetry and satire, into a compound, enjoyable indeed, but hardly so in its entirety, or in many of its parts, to any but the literary mind.

F. de La Motte Fouqué infused a spirit of poetry into the chivalry drama. Klemens Brentano was a fantastic dramatist unsuited to the stage. Here a feeble outgrowth of the romanticists, the “destiny dramatists” Z. Werner297—the Later dramatists. most original of the group—A. Müllner,298 and Baron C. E. v. Houwald,299 achieved a temporary furore; and it was with an attempt in the same direction300 that the Austrian dramatist F. Grillparzer began his long career. He is assuredly, what he pronounced himself to be, the foremost of the later dramatic poets of Germany, unless that tribute be thought due to the genius of H. von Kleist, who in his short life produced, besides other works, a romantic drama301 and a rustic comedy302 of genuine merit, and an historical tragedy of singular originality and power.303 Grillparzer’s long series of plays includes poetic dramas on classical themes304 and historical subjects from Austrian history,305 or treated from an Austrian point of view. The romantic school, which through Tieck had satirized the drama of the bourgeoisie and its offshoots, was in its turn satirized by Count A. von Platen-Hallermund’s admirable imitations of Aristophanic comedy.306 Among the objects of his banter were the popular playwright E. Raupach, and K. Immermann, a true poet, who is, however, less generally remembered as a dramatist. F. Hebbel307 is justly ranked high among the foremost later dramatic poets of his country, few of whom equal him in intensity. The eminent lyrical (especially ballad) poet L. Uhland left behind him a large number of dramatic fragments, but little or nothing really complete. Other names of literary mark are those of C. D. Grabbe, J. Mosen, O. Ludwig308 (1813-1865), a dramatist of great power, and “F. Halm” (Baron von Münch-Bellinghausen) (1806-1871), and, among writers of a more modern school, K. Gutzkow,309 G. Freytag,310 and H. Laube.311 L. Anzengruber, a writer of real genius though restricted range, imparted a new significance to the Austrian popular drama,312 formerly so commonplace in the hands of F. Raimund and J. Nestroy.

During the long period of transition which may be said to have ended with the establishment of the new German empire, the German stage in some measure anticipated the developments which more spacious times were to witness in The German stage of the latter half of the 19th century. the German drama. The traditions of the national theatre contemporary with the great epoch of the national literature were kept alive by a succession of eminent actors—such as the nephews of Ludwig Devrient, himself an artist of the greatest originality, whose most conspicuous success, though nature had fitted him for Shakespeare, was achieved in Schiller’s earliest play.313 Among the younger generation of Devrients the most striking personality was that of Emil; his elder brother Karl August, husband of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, the brilliant star of the operatic stage, and their son Friedrich, were also popular actors; yet another brother, Eduard, is more widely remembered as the historian of the German stage. Partly by reason of the number and variety of its centres of intellectual and artistic life, Germany was long enabled both to cherish the few masterpieces of its own drama, and, with the aid of a language well adapted for translation, to give admittance to the dramatic masterpieces of other nations also, and to Shakespeare in particular, without going far in the search for theatrical novelty or effect. But a change came over the spirit of German theatrical management with the endeavours of H. Laube, from about the middle of the century onwards, at Vienna (and Leipzig), which avowedly placed the demands of the theatre as such above those of literary merit or even of national sentiment. In a less combative spirit, F. Dingelstedt, both at Munich, which under King Maximilian he had made a kindly nurse of German culture, and, after his efforts there had come to an untimely end,314 at Weimar and at Vienna, raised the theatre to a very high level of artistic achievement. The most memorable event in the annals of his managements was the production on the Weimar stage of the series of Shakespeare’s histories. At a rather later period, of which the height extended from 1874 to 1890, the company of actors in the service, and under the personal direction, of Duke George of Saxe-Meiningen, created a great effect by their performances both in and outside Germany—not so much by their artistic improvements in scenery and decoration, as by the extraordinary perfection of their ensemble. But no dramaturgic achievement in the century could compare in grandeur either of conception or of execution with Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth performances, where, for the first time in the history of the modern stage, the artistic instinct ruled supreme in all the conditions of the work and its presentment. Though the Ring of the Nibelungs and its successors belong to opera rather than drama proper, the importance of their production (1876) should be overlooked by no student of the dramatic art. Potent as has been the influence of foreign dramatic literatures—whether French or Scandinavian—and that of a movement which has been common to them all, and from which the German was perhaps the least likely to exclude itself, the most notable feature in the recent history of the German drama has been its quick response to wholly new demands, which, though the attempt was made with some persistence, could no longer be met without an effort to span the widths and sound the depths of a more spacious and more self-conscious era.315

(h) Dutch Drama.

Among other modern European dramas the Dutch is interesting both in its beginnings, which to all intents and purposes form part of those of the German, and because of the special influence of the so-called chambers of the rederykers (rhetoricians), from the early years of the 15th century onwards, which bear some resemblance to the associations of the master-singers in contemporary higher Germany. The earliest of their efforts, which so effectively tempered the despotism of both church and state, seem to have been of a dramatic kind; and a manifold variety of allegories, moralities and comic entertainments (esbatementen or comedies, kluiten and factien or farces) enhanced the attractions of those popular pageants in which the Netherlands surpassed all other countries of the North. The Low Countries responded more largely to the impulse of the Renaissance than, with some local exceptions, any other of the Germanic lands. They necessarily had a considerable share in the cultivation of the modern Latin drama; and, while the author of Acolastus may be claimed as its own by the country of his adoption as well as by that of his birth, G. M. Macropedius (Langhveldt) (c. 1475-1508), who may be regarded as the foremost Latin dramatist of his age, was born and died at Hertogenbosch or in its immediate vicinity. Macropedius, who belonged to the fraternity of the Common Life, was a writer of great realistic power as well as of remarkable literary versatility.316 The art of acting flourished in the Low Countries even during the troubles of the great revolt; but the birth of the regular drama was delayed till the advent of quieter times. Dutch dramatic literature begins, under the influence of the classical studies cherished in the seats of learning founded before and after the close of the war, with the classical tragedies of S. Koster (c. 1585-c. 1650). The romantic dramas and farces of Gerbrand Bredero (1585-1618) and the tragedies of P. Hooft (1581-1647) belong to the same period; but its foremost dramatic poet was J. van den Vondel, who from an imitation of classical models passed to more original forms of dramatic composition, including a patriotic play and a dramatic treatment of part of what was to form the theme of Paradise Lost.317 But Vondel had no successor of equal mark. The older form of Dutch tragedy—in which the chorus still appeared—was, especially under the influence of the critic A. Pels, exchanged for a close imitation of the French models, Corneille and Racine; nor was the attempt to create a national comedy successful. Thus no national Dutch drama was permanently called into life.

(i) Scandinavian Drama.

Still more distinctly, the dramatic literature of the Scandinavian peoples springs from foreign growths. In Denmark, where the beginnings of the drama in the plays of the schoolmaster Chr. Hansen recall the mixture of Denmark. religious and farcical elements in contemporary German efforts, the drama in the latter half of the 16th century remained essentially scholastic, and treated scriptural or classical subjects, chiefly in the Latin tongue. J. Ranch (1539-1607) and H. S. Sthen were authors of this type. But often in the course of the 17th century, German and French had become the tongues of Danish literature and of the Danish theatre; in the 18th Denmark could boast a comic dramatist of thorough originality and of a wholly national cast. L. Holberg, one of the most noteworthy comic poets of modern literature, not only marks an epoch in the dramatic literature of his native land, but he contributed to overthrow the trivialities of the German stage in its worst period, which he satirized with merciless humour,318 and set an example, never surpassed, of a series of comedies319 deriving their types from popular life and ridiculing with healthy directness those vices and follies which are the proper theme of the most widely effective species of the comic drama. Among his followers, P. A. Heiberg is specially noted. Under the influence of the Romantic school, whose influence has nowhere proved so long-lived as in the Scandinavian north, A. Ohlenschläger began a new era of Danish literature. His productivity, which belongs partly to his native and partly to German literary history, turned from foreign320 to native themes; and other writers followed him in his endeavours to revive the figures of The modern Norwegian drama. Northern heroic legend. But these themes have in their turn given way in the Scandinavian theatre to subjects coming nearer home to the popular consciousness, and treated with a direct appeal to the common experience of human life, and with a searching insight into the actual motives of human action. The most remarkable movement to be noted in the history of the Scandinavian drama, and one of the most widely effective of those which mark the more recent history of the Western drama in general, had its origin in Norway. Two Norwegian dramatists, H. Ibsen and Björnsterne Björnson, standing as it were side by side, though by no means always judging eye to eye, have vitally influenced the whole course of modern dramatic literature in the direction of a fearlessly candid and close delineation of human nature. The lesser of the pair in inventive genius, and in the power of exhibiting with scornful defiance the conflict between soul and circumstance, but the stronger by virtue of the conviction of hope which lies at the root of achievement, is Björnson.321 Ibsen’s long career as a dramatist exhibits a succession of many changes, but at no point any failure in the self-trust of his genius. His early masterpieces were dramatic only in form.322 His world-drama of Emperor and Galilean was still unsuited to a stage rarely trodden to much purpose by idealists of Julian’s type. The beginnings of his real and revolutionary significance as a dramatist date from the production of his first plays of contemporary life, the admirable satirical comedy The Pillars of Society (1877), the subtle domestic drama A Doll’s House (1879), and the powerful but repellent Ghosts (1881),323 which last, with the effects of its appearance, modern dramatic literature may even to this day be said to have failed altogether to assimilate. Ibsen’s later prose comedies—(verse, he writes, has immensely damaged the art of acting, and a tragedy in iambics belongs to the species Dodo)—for the most part written during an exile which accounts for the note of isolation so audible in many of them, succeeded one another at regular biennial intervals, growing more and more abrupt in form, cruel in method, and intense in elemental dramatic force. The prophet at last spoke to a listening world, but without the amplitude, the grace and the wholeheartedness which are necessary for subduing it. But it may be long before the art which he had chosen as the vehicle of his comments on human life and society altogether ceases to show the impress of his genius.

(j) Drama of the Slav Peoples.

As to the history of the Slav drama, only a few hints can be here given. Its origins have not yet—at least in works accessible to Western students—been authoritatively traced. The Russian drama in its earliest or religious beginnings is stated to have been introduced from Poland early in the 12th century; and, again, it would seem that, when the influence of the Renaissance touched the east of Europe, the religious drama was cultivated in Poland in the 16th, but did not find its way into Russia till the 17th century. It is probable that the species was, like so many other elements of culture, imported into the Carpathian lands in the 15th or 16th century from Germany. How far indigenous growths, such as the Russian popular puppet-show called vertep, which about the middle of the 17th century began to treat secular and popular themes, helped to foster dramatic tendencies and tastes, cannot here be estimated. The regular drama of eastern Europe is to all intents and purposes of Western origin. Thus, the history of the Polish drama may be fairly dated as beginning with the reign of the last king of Poland, Stanislaus II. Augustus, who in 1765 solemnly opened a national Polish. theatre at Warsaw. This institution was carried on till the fatal year 1794, and saw the production of a considerable number of Polish plays, mostly translated or adapted, but in part original—as in the case of one or two of those from the active pen of the secretary to the educational commission, Zablonski. But it was not till after the last partition that, paradoxically though not wholly out of accordance with the history of the relations between political and literary history, the attempts of W. Bogulawski and J. N. Kaminski to establish and carry on a Polish national theatre were crowned with success. Its literary mainstay was a gifted Franco-Pole, Count Alexander Fredro (1793-1876), who in the period between the Napoleonic revival and the long exodus fathered a long-lived species of modern Polish comedy, French in origin (for Fredro was a true disciple of Molière), and wholly out of contact with the sentiment that survived in the ashes of a doomed nation.324 His complaint as to the exiguity of the Polish literary public—a brace of theatres and a bookseller’s handcart—may have been premature; but a national drama was most certainly impossible in a denationalised and dismembered land, in whose historic capital the theatre in which Polish plays continued to be produced seemed garrisoned by Cossack officers.

Much in the same way, though with a characteristic difference, the Russian regular drama had its origin in the cadet corps at St Petersburg, a pupil of which, A. Sumarokov (1718-1777), has been regarded as the founder of the modern Russian. Russian theatre. As a tragic poet he seems to have imitated Racine and Voltaire, though treating themes from the national history, among others the famous dramatic subject of the False Demetrius. He also translated Hamlet. As a comic dramatist he is stated to have been less popular than as a tragedian; yet it is in comedy that he would seem to have had the most noteworthy successors. Among these it is impossible to pass by the empress Catherine II., whose comedies seem to have been satirical sketches of the follies and foibles of her subjects, and who in one comedy as well as in a tragedy had the courage to imitate Shakespeare. Comedy aiming at social satire long continued to temper the conditions of Russian society, and had representatives of mark in such writers as A. N. Ostrovsky of Moscow and Griboyedov, the author of Gore et uma.

In any survey of the Slav drama that of the Czech peoples, whose national consciousness has so fully reawakened, must not be overlooked. A Czech theatre was called into life at Prague as early as the 18th century; and in the 19th its demands, centring in a sense of nationality, were met by J. N. Stepinek (1783-1844), W. C. Klicpera (1792-1859) and J. C. Tyl (1808-1856); and later writers continued to make use of the stage for a propaganda of historical as well as political significance.