Drama

DRAMADRAMA (from δp<iω) signifies action. The term is applied to compositions which imitate action by representing the personages introduced in them as real and as employed in the action itself. The varieties of the drama differ more or less widely, both as to the objects imitated and as to the means used in the imitation. But they all agree as to the method or manner which is essential to the dramatic art, viz., imitation in the way of action.

The desire to give expression to feelings and conceptions is inseparable from human nature. Man expresses his thoughts and emotions by gesture and by speech, or by a combination of both; and. these expressions he soon learns in the society of other men—and more especially on joyous or solemn occasions—to vary or regulate in dance and song. Another way of expression, often combined with the other, is imitation. To imitate, says Aristotle, is instinctive in man from his infancy; and from imitation all men naturally receive pleasure. Gesture and voice are means of imitation common to all human beings; and the aid of some sort of dress and decoration is generally within the reach of children, and of the childhood of nations. The assumption of character, whether real or fictitious, is therefore the earliest step towards the drama. But it is only a preliminary step; nor is the drama itself reached till the imitation extends to action.

Action, which man is not wont to attribute (except figuratively) to any but members of his own species and to the superior Being or beings in whose existence and power he believes, implies an operation of the will and an execution of its resolution, whether or not amounting to a fulfilment of its purpose. It implies a procedure from cause to result. Action must therefore present itself to the human mind as having its source in a human or superhuman will. Every imitation of action by action is in germ a drama. But to this point not all nations have advanced.

After this step has been taken, it only remains for the drama to assume a form regulated by literature, of which art it thus becomes a branch. We may then speak of a dramatic literature; but this only a limited number of nations has come to possess. A nation may, however, have a drama without a dramatic literature; it may even continue in possession of the former after having ceased to cultivate the latter. On the other hand, both before and after the drama of a nation has assumed a literary.form, it may allow one or more of its adventitious elements—music, dancing, decoration—predominantly to assert themselves, and thus eventually to bring about the formation of new, or the revival of disused, dramatic species. But as a branch of literature the drama necessarily includes speech among its means of imitation; and its beginnings as such are accordingly, in the history of all literatures known to us, preceded by the beginnings at least of other forms of poetic composition, the lyric and the epic, or by those of one of these forms at all events. It is in the combination of both that the drama in its literary form takes its origin in the case of all national civilizations in which it has found a place and with which we are more than superficially acquainted.

The art of acting is the indispensable adjunct of the dramatic art, while the aid of all other arts is merely an accident. But though really inseparable from one another, the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not at all times run parallel. The actor is only the temporary interpreter of the dramatist, though he may occasionally be left to supply some of the proper functions of his textgiver. On his side, the dramatist may in practice, though he cannot in theory, dispense with the actor’s interpretation; but though the term literary drama is sometimes used of works kept apart from the stage, it is in truth a misnomer, since, properly speaking, no drama is such till it is acted.

The whole body of the laws and rules of the drama, could it be written down with completeness, would indicate, together with the ends proper to the art, the means by which it is able to accomplish them. But neither the great authorities of dramatic theory—an Aristotle or a Lessing—nor the resolute apologists of more or less transitory fashions—a Corneille or a Dryden—have exhausted the exposition of the means which the drama has proved or may prove capable of employing. The multitude of technical terms and formulae which has gathered round the practice of the art has at no time seriously interfered with the operation of creative power, whose inventive activity the existence of, accepted systems has frequently—in the Greek drama, for instance, and in the Spanish—served to stimulate. On the other hand, it is self-evident that no dramaturgic theory has ever given rise to a single dramatic work of enduring value, unless the creative force was there to animate the form.

The task of this creative force begins with the beginnings of the dramatist’s labours. For it is in the dramatic idea that the germ of the action of a play lies—not in the subject, which is merely its dead material. The story of the Scottish thane as it stood written in the chronicle, is the subject, not the action, of Macbeth. To convert a subject—whatever its kind or source—into the action or fable of a play is the primary task, which in its progressive development becomes the entire task, of the dramatist; and though the conception may expand or modify itself with the execution, yet upon the former the latter depends. The range of subjects open to a dramatist may be wide as the world itself, or it may be limited by usage, by imperious fashion, by the tastes and tendencies of a nation or an age, by the author’s own range of sympathies, by a thousand restrictions of an historical, moral, or aesthetical origin; it may be virtually confined (as with the earlier Greek tragedians) to a body of legend, or (as with the English comedians of the Restoration) to the social experiences of a particular epoch. But in all cases the transformation of the subject into the action is equally indispensable; and an imperfect transformation is (as in the old Chronicle Histories) the work of a rude, or (as in ninety-nine out of a hundred modern plays “founded upon fact ”) that of a careless method of dramatic production.

What, then, are the laws which determine the nature of all actions properly such, however they may vary either in subjects or in form? In the first place, a dramatic action must possess unity— and this requirement at once distinguishes it from the subject which has suggested its idea. The events of real life, the facts of history, the incidents of narrative fiction, are like the waves of a ceaseless flood; that which binds a group or body of them into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea, and this it is which the dramatist has to supply. Within the limits of a dramatic action all its parts claim to be connected together as contributions to a single stream; and upon the degree in which they are true to this purpose their primary dramatic significance depends. The unity of action which a drama should possess, therefore, means that everything in it should form a link in a single chain of cause and effect. This law is incumbent upon every kind of drama—alike upon the tragedy which solves the problems of a life, and upon the farce which sums up the follies of an afternoon.

Such is not, however, the case with certain rules which have at different times been set up for this or that kind of drama, but which have no absolute validity for any kind. The supposed necessity that an action should consist of one event is an erroneous interpretation of the law that it should be, as an action, one. Foran event is but an element in an action, though it may be an element of decisive moment. The assassination of Caesar is not the action of a Caesar tragedy; the loss of his treasure is not the action of The Miser. Again, unity of action does not exclude the introduction of one or even more subsidiary actions as contributing to the progress öf the main action. The sole indispensable law is that these should always be treated as what they are—subsidiary only; and herein lies the difficulty, which Shakespeare so successfully overcame, of solving a combination of subjects into the idea of a single action; herein also lies the danger in the use of that favourite device of the modern drama— bye- or under-plots. Ou the other hand, a really double or multiple action, logically carried out as such, is inconceivable in a single drama, though there is many a play which is palpably only two plays knotted into one. Every one is familiar with the dramatist who towards the drop of the curtain seems to be counting on his fingers whom he has killed or what couples he has to marry. Thirdly, unity of action need not imply unity of hero—for hero (or heroine) is merely a term signifying the principal personage of the action. And inasmuch as an action may consist in the joint contention of more than one will against the same obstacle—as in the instance of The Seven against Thebes, or Romeo and Juliet— it is only when the change in the degree of interest excited by different characters in a play results from a change in the conception of the action itself, that the consequent duality (or multiplicity) of heroes recalls a faulty uncertainty in the conception of the action they carry on. Such is the objection applying to the crucial case of Schiller’s Don Carlos. Lastly, the entirely arbitrary exactions of unity of time and of place are not, like that of unity of action, absolute dramatic laws. Their object is by representing an action as visibly continuous to render its unity more distinctly or easily perceptible; but the effect of their observance cannot be to render it more really one. Thus they may in one sense be regarded as devices to avoid the difficulty experienced by the human mind in regarding an action as one when the eye beholds its different parts occurring in what are supposed to be different places, or when the process of its advance from cause to effect extends over what is supposed to be a considerable period of time. But the imagination is capable of constructing for itself the bridges necessary to preserve to an action, conceived of as such, its character of continuousness. In another sense these rules were convenient usages conducing to a concise and clear treatment as actions of subjects in themselves of a limited nature; for they were a Greek invention, and the repeated resort to the same group of myths made it expedient for a Greek poet to seek the subject of a single tragedy in a part only of one of the myths open to him. Tlιe observance of unity of place, moreover, was suggested to the Greeks by certain outward conditions of their stage—as assuredly as it was adopted by the French in accordance with the construction and usages of theirs, and as the neglect of it by the Elizabethans was in their case encouraged by the established form of the English scene. The palpable artificiality of these laws needs no demonstration, so long as the true meaning of the term action be kept in view. Of the action of Othello part takes place at Venice and part at Cyprus, and yet the whole is one in itself; while the limits of time over which an action extends cannot be restricted by a revolution of the earth round the sun, or of the moon round the earth.

In a drama which presents its action as one, this action must be complete in itself. This law, like the first, distinguishes the dramatic action from its subject. The former may be said to have a real artistic, while the latter has only an imaginary real, completeness. The historian, for instance, aims indeed at a complete exposition of a body of events and transactions, and may even design to show their working to a definite end; but he is aλvare that this aim can never be more than partially accomplished, since he may present only what he knows, and all human knowledge is partial. But art is limited by no such uncertainty. The dramatist, in treating an action as one, comprehends the whole of it in the form of his work, since to him who has conceived it, all its parts, from cause to effect, are equally clear. Accordingly, every drama should represent in organic sequence the several stages of which a complete action consists, and which are essential to it. This law of completeness therefore lies at the foundation of all systems of dramatic construction.

Every action, if conceived of as complete, has its causes, growth, height, consequences, and close. There is no binding law to prescribe the relative length at which these several stages in the action should be treated in a drama, or to enforce a more or less exact correspondence between the successive presentment of each, and technical divisions, such as acts or scenes, which dramatic practice may find it convenient to adopt. Neither is there any law tc assert any obligatory regulation of the treatment of such subsidiary actions as may be introduced in aid of the main plot, or of such more or less directly connected episodes which may at the same time advance and relieve its progress. But experience, as the parent of usage, has necessarily from time to time established certain rules of practice, from which the dramatist, working under customary forms, will find it neither easy, nor in most cases advantageous, to swerve too widely; and from the adoption of particular systems of division for particular species of the drama—such as that into five acts for a regular tragedy or comedy, which Roman example has caused to be so largely followed—has naturally resulted a certain uniformity of relation between the conduct of an action and the outward sections of a play. Essentially, however, there is no difference between the laws regulating the construction of a Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragedy, a comedy of Molière or Congreve, and a ∖vell-built modern farce. And this, because all exhibit an action complete in itself.

The introduction or exposition forms an integral part of the action, and is therefore to be distinguished from the prologue in the more ordinary sense of the term, which, like the epilogtie (or the Greek pardbasifi), stands outside the action, and is a mere address to the public from author or actor occasioned by the play. Prologue and epilogue, greatly as they may have at times contributed to the success of a drama, are mere external adjuncts, and have as little to do with tíie construction of a play as the bill which announces it, or the musical prelude which disposes the mind for its reception. The introduction or exposition belongs to the action itself; it is, as the Hindu critics called it, the seed or circumstance from which the business arises. Clearness being its primary requisite, many expedients have been at various times adopted to secure this feature. Thus, the Euripi dean prologue, though spoken by one of the characters of the play, takes a narrative form, and places itself half without, half within the action of which it properly is part. The same purpose is served by the separate inductions in many of our old English plays, and the preludes or prologues, or by whatever name they may call themselves, in numberless modern dramas of all kinds— from Faust down to the favourites of the Ambigu and the Adelphi. Another such expedient is that of the inductive dumb-shows, which sought to secure rapidity together with impressiveness of exposition by the process of pantomimic summary. Such, again, are - the opening scenes in French tragedy between hero and confidant, and those in French comedy and its derivatives between observant valet and knowing lady’s-maid. But it is clear how all such expedients may be rendered unnecessary by the art of the dramatist, who is able outwardly also to present the introduction of his action as what it is—an organic part of that action itself; who seems to take the spectators in medias res while he is really building the foundations of his plot; who can dramatically account for an Iliad of woes without going back to Leda’s egg; who touches in the opening of his action the chord which is to vibrate throughout its course—“Down with the Capulets I down with the Montagues! ”—“With the Moor, sayest thou 1”

The introduction ends with the opening of the movement of the action, a passage which it may prove highly effective to mark with the utmost distinctness (as in Hamlet, where it is clearly to be sought in the actual meeting between the hero and the ghost), but which in other instances is advantageously marked by the insertion of subsidiary action or episode (as in King Lear, where the opening of the movement of the main action would follow too sharply upon its exposition, were not the beginning of the subsidiary action of Gloster and his sons opportunely introduced between them). From this point the second stage of the action—its growth— progresses to that third stage which is called its height or climax. All that has preceded the reaching of this constitutes that half of the drama—usually its much larger half—which Aristotle terms the 8«ns, or tying of the knot. The varieties in the treatment of the growth or second stage of the action are infinite, and it is here that the masters of the tragic and the comic drama—notably those unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniards—are able most fully to exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the climax will fail of its effect—and it is, therefore, at this stage that subsidiary actions and episodes are most largely used; if it is too slow, the interest will be exhausted before the greatest demand upon it has been made—a fault to which comedy is specially liable; if it is involved or inverted, a vague uncertainty will take the place of an eager or agreeable suspense, the action will seem to halt, or a fall will begin prematurely. In the contrivance of the climax itself lies one of the chief tests of the dramatist’s art; for while in the transactions of real life their climax is often only a matter of assumption, in the action of a drama its climax should present itself as self-evident. In the middle of everything, says the Greek poet, lies the strength; and this strongest or highest point it is the task of the dramatist to make manifest. Much here depends upon the niceties of constructive instinct; much (as in all parts of the action) upon a thorough dramatic transformation of the subject. The historical drama here presents peculiar difficulties, and perhaps the example of Henry VIII., as compared with Shakespeare’s other historical plays, may be held to furnish an instructive example of defective (because hasty) workmanship.

From the climax, or height, the action proceeds through its fall to its close, which in a drama with an unhappy ending we still call its catastrophe, while to terminations in general we apply the term denouement. This latter name would, however, more properly be used in the sense in which Aristotle employs its Greek equivalent Averts—the untying of the knot—of the whole of the second part of the action, from the climax downwards. If, in the management of the climax, everything depended upon making the effect, in the fall everything depends upon not marring it. This may be ensured by a rapid progress to the close; but neither does every action admit of such treatment, nor is it in accordance with the character of those actions which are of a complicated kind. With the latter, therefore, the fall is often a return—i.e., in Aristotle’s phrase, a change into the reverse of what is expected from the circumstances of the action (7r€pt7rereta),—as in Coriolanus, where the Roman story lends itself so admirably to dramatic demands. In any case the art of the dramatist is in this part of his work called upon for the surest exercise of its tact and skill. The effect of the climax has been to concentrate the interest; the fall must therefore, above all, avoid dissipating it. The use of episodes is not even now excluded; but they must be of a more directly significant kind than is necessary in the earlier stages of the drama; even where serving the purpose of relief they must help to keep alive the interest previously raised to its highest pitch. This may be effected by a return or revolution; or again, by the raising of obstacles between the height of the action and its expected consequences, by the suggestion in tragedy of a seemingly possible recovery or escape from them (as in the wonderfully powerful construction of the latter part of MacbetK), by the gradual removal in comedy, or wherever the interest of the action is less intense, of such difficulties as the growth and climax have occasioned. In all kinds of the drama discovery will remain, as it was in the judgment of Aristotle, a most effective expedient; but it should be a discovery which has been foreshadowed by that method of treatment which in its consummate master, Sophocles, has been termed liis irony. Nowhere should the close or catastrophe be other than a consequence of the action itself. Sudden revulsions from the conditions of the action—such as the deus ex machina, or the revising officer of the emperor of China, or the nabob returned from India bring about—condemn themselves as unsatisfactory makeshifts. However sudden, and even, in manner of accomplishment, surprising, may be the catastrophe, it should not be unprepared, but like every other part of the action should preserve its organic connection with the whole. The sudden suicides which terminate so many tragedies, and the paternal blessings which close an equal number of comedies, should be something more than a signal for the fall of the curtain.

The action of a drama, besides being one and complete in itself, ought likewise to be probable. The probability required of a drama is not that of actual or historical experience—it is a conditional probability, or in other words the consistency of the course of the action with the conditions under which, and with the characters by which, the dramatist has chosen to carry it on. As to the former, he is fettered by no restrictions save those which he imposes upon himself, whether or not in deference to the usages of certain accepted species of dramatic composition. Ghosts appear neither in real life nor in dramas of real life; but the introduction of supernatural agency is neither enjoined nor prohibited by any general dramatic law. The use of such expedients is as open to the dramatic as to any other poet; the judiciousness of his use of them depends upon the effect which, consistently with the general conduct of his action, they will exercise upon the spectator, whom other circumstances may or may not predispose to their acceptance. The ghost in Hamlet belongs to the action of the play; the ghost in the Persve is not intrinsically less probable, but the apparition seems to spring, so to speak, less naturally out of the atmosphere around it. Dramatic probability has, however, a far deeper meaning than this. The Eumenides is probable with all its primitive mysteriousness, and Macbeth with all its barbarous witchcraft. The proceedings of the feathered builders of Cloud cuckootown are as true to dramatic probability as are the pranks of Oberon’s fairies. In other words, it is in the consistency of the action with the characters, and of the characters with themselves, that this dramatic probability lies. The dramatist has to represent characters affected by the progress of an action in a particular way, and contributing to it in a particular way, because, if consistent with themselves, they must be so affected, and must so act.

Upon the invention and conduct of his characters the dramatist must therefore expend a great proportion of his labour. His treatment of them will, in at least as high a degree as his choice of subject, conception of action, and method of construction, determine the effect which his work •produces. And while there are aspects of the dramatic art under which its earlier history already exhibits an unsurpassed degree of perfection, there is none under which its advance is more perceptible than this. Many causes have contributed to this result; the chief is to be sought in the multiplication of the opportunities for mankind’s study of man. The theories of the Indian critics on the subject of dramatic character are a scaffolding more elaborate than the edifice it surrounds. Aristotle’s remarks on the subject are scanty; and it may be unhesitatingly asserted that the strength of the dramatic literature from whose examples he abstracted his maxims is not to be sought in the fulness or variety of its characterization. This relative deficiency the outward conditions of the Greek theatre—the remoteness of actor from spectator, and the consequent necessity for the use of masks, and for the raising and therefore conventionalizing of the tones of the voice— undoubtedly helped to occasion. Later Greek and Roman comedy, with a persistency furnishing a remarkable illustration of the force of habit, limited their range of characters to an accepted gallery of types. Nor is it easy to ignore the fact that these examples, and the influence of national tendencies of mind and temperament, have inclined the dramatists of the Romance nations to attach less importance to characterization of a closer and more varied kind than to interest of action and effectiveness of construction. The Italian and the Spanish drama more especially, and the French during a great part of its history, have in general shown a disposition to present their characters, as it were, ready made—whether in the case of tragic heroes and heroines, or in that of comic types, often moulded according to a long-lived system of local or national selection. It is in the Germanic drama, and in its master Shakespeare above all, that the individualization of characters has been carried to its furthest point, and that their significance has been allowed to work itself out in closest connection with the progress of the dramatic action to which they belong.

But, however the method and scope of characterization may vary under the influence of different historical epochs and different tendencies or tastes of races or nations, the laws of this branch of the dramatic art are everywhere based on the same essential requirements. What interests us in a man or woman in real life, or in the impressions we form of historical personages, is that which seems to us to individualize them. A dramatic character must therefore, whatever its part in the action, be sufficiently marked in its distinctive features to interest the imagination; with these its subsequent conduct must be consistent, and to these its participation in the action must correspond. In order that such should be the result, the dramatist must first have distinctly conceived the character, whatever may have suggested it to him. If, for instance, he has taken it, as the phrase is, from history or from contemporary life, he must transform it, just as he must transform the subject of the action into the action itself. His task is not to paint a copy of any particular man, but to conceive a kind of man—of which a particular individual may have occurred to him as a suggestive illustration—under the operation of particular circumstances. His conception, growing and modifying itself with the progress of that of the action, will determine the totality of the character he creates. The likeness which the result bears to an actual or histori cal personage may very probably, from secondary points of view, concern the success of his creation; upon its dramatic effect this likeness can have no influence whatever. In a different sense from that in which Shakespeare used the words, it should be possible to say of every dramatic character which it is sought to identify with an actual personage, “This is not the man.” The mirror of the drama is not a photographic apparatus.

Distinctiveness, as the primary requisite in dramatic characterization, is to be demanded in the case of all personages introduced into a dramatic action, but not in all cases in an equal degree. Schiller, in adding to the dramatis personae of his Fiesco superscriptions of their chief characteristics, labels Sacco as “an ordinary person,” and this suffices for Sacco. Between Bassanio’s two unsuccessful rivals in the trial of the caskets there is difference enough for the dramatic purpose of their existence. But with the great masters of characterization a few touches, of which the true actor’s art knows how to avail itself, distinguish even their lesser characters from one another; and every man is in his humour down to the third citizen. Elaboration is necessarily reserved for characters who are the more important contributors to the action, and the fulness of elaboration for its heroes. Many expedients may lend their aid to the higher degrees of distinctiveness. In characters designed to influence the whole of the action it must be marked early, in others in due relation to their contribution towards the course of the plot. Much is gained by a significant introduction of hero or heroine,—so Antigone is dragged in by the watchman, Gloucester enters alone upon the scene, Volpone is discovered in adoration of his golden saint. Nothing marks character more clearly than the use of contrast—as of Othello with Iago, of Octavio with Max Piccolomini, of Joseph with Charles Surface. Nor is direct antithesis the only effective kind of contrast; Cassius is a foil to Brutus, and Leonora to her namesake the Princess. But besides impressing the imagination as a conception distinct in itself, each character must maintain a consistency between its conduct in the action and the features it has established as its own. This consistency does not imply uniformity; for, as Aristotle observes, there are characters which, to be represented with uniformity, must be presented as uniformly un-uniform. Of such consistently complex characters the great critic cites no instances, nor indeed are they of frequent occurrence in Greek tragedy; in the modern drama Hamlet is their unrivalled exemplar; and Weislingen in Goethe’s Gotz, and Alceste in the Misanthrope, may be mentioned as other illustrations in dramas widely different from one another. Tt should be added that those dramatic literatures which freely admit of a mixture of the serious with the comic element thereby enormously increase the opportunities of varied characterization. The difficulty of the task at the same time enhances the effect resulting from its satisfactory solution; and if the conception of a character is found to bear a variety of tests resembling that which experience shows life to have at hand for every man, its naturalness, as we term it, becomes more obvious to the imagination. Naturalness is only another word for what Aristotle terms propriety; the artificial rules by which usage has at times sought to define particular species of character are in their origin only a convenience of the theatre, though they have largely helped to conventionalize dramatic characterization. Lastly, a character should be directly effective with regard to the dramatic action in which it takes part,—that is to say, the influence it exerts upon the progress of the action should correspond to its distinctive features, the conduct of the play should seem to spring from the nature of its characters. Hence even the minor characters should not idly intervene, and, before they intervene significantly, we should be prepared by some previous notion of them. The chief characters, on the other hand, should predominate over or determine the course of the action; its entire conception should harmonize k ith their distinctive features; it is only a Prometheus whom the gods bind fast to a rock, only a Juliet who will venture into a living death for her Romeo. Thus in a sense chance is excluded from dramatic action, or rather, like every other element in it, bends to the dramatic idea. And in view of this predominance of character over action, we may appropriately use such expressions as a tragedy of love or jealousy or ambition, or a comedy of character—by which is merely meant one whose preponderating interest lies in the effectiveness with which its conduct impresses upon the mind the conception of its chief character or characters.

The term manners (as employed in a narrower sense than the Aristotelian) applies to that which colours both action and characters, but does not determine the essence of either. As exhibiting human agents under certain, conditions of time and place, and of the various relations of community existing or conceivable among men, the action of a drama, together with the characters engaged in it and the incidents and circumstances belonging to it, must be more or less suited to the external conditions assumed. From the assumption of some such conditions not even those dramatic species which indulge in the most sovereign licence, such as Old Attic comedy or burlesque in general, can wholly emancipate themselves; and even supernatural characters and actions must adapt themselves to some antecedents. But it depends altogether on the measure in which the nature of an action and the development of its characters are affected by considerations of time and place, or of temporary social systems and the transitory distinctions they produce, whether the imitation of a particular kind of manners becomes a significant element in a particular play. What is of vanishing importance in one may be an adjunct of inestimable value in another. The Hindu caste-system is an antecedent of every Hindu drama, and the peculiar organization of Chinese society of nearly every Chinese with which we are acquainted. Greek tragedy itself, though treating subjects derived from no historic age, had established a standard of manners from which in its decline it did not depart with impunity. The imitation of manners of a particular age or country may or may not be of moment in a play. The conjuncture of the Crusades is merely a felicitous choice for the time of action of Nathan the IFise; but the dramatic conflict of Minna von Barnhelm derives half its life from the background of the Seven Years’ War. In some dramas, and in some species of drama, time and place are so purely imaginary and so much a matter of indifference that the adoption of a purely conventional standard of manners, or at least the exclusion of any definitely fixed one, is here desirable. The ducal reign of Theseus at Athens (when ascertained) does not date A Midsummer Night's Dream; nor do the coasts of Bohemia localize the manners of the customers of Autolycus. Where, on the other hand, as more especially in the historic drama, or in that kind of comedy which directs its shafts against the ridiculous vices of a particular age or country, the likeness of the manners represented to what is more or less known possesses significance, there the dramatist will use care in his colouring. How admirably is the French court specialized in Henry K., how completely are we transplanted among the burghers of Brussels in the opening scenes of Egmont! What a picture of a clique we have in the Precieuses ridicules of Moli&re; what a reproduction of a class in the pot-house politicians of Holberg 1 Yet even in such instances the dramatist will only use what suits his dramatic purpose; he will select, not transfer in mass, historic features, and discriminate in his use of modern instances. The details of historic fidelity, and the lesser shades distinguishing the varieties of social usage, he will introduce at his choice, or leave to be supplied by the actor. Where the reproduction of manners becomes the primary purpose of a play, its effect can only be of an inferior kind; and a drama purely of manners is a contradiction in terms.

No complete system of dramatic species can be abstracted from any one dramatic literature. They are often the result of particular antecedents, and their growth is often affected by peculiar conditions. Different nations or ages use the same name, and may preserve some of the same rules, for species which in other respects their usage may have materially modified from that of their neighbours or predecessors. Who would undertake to define, except in their successive applications, such terms as tragi-comedy or melodrama? Yet this does not imply that all is confusion in the terminology as to the species of the drama. In so far as they are distinguishable according to the effects which their actions, or those which the preponderating parts of their actions, produce, they may primarily be ranged in accordance with the broad difference established by Aristotle between tragedy and comedy. Tragic and comic effects differ in regard to the emotions of the mind which they excite; and a drama is tragic or comic according as such effects are produced by it. The strong or serious emotions are alone capable of exercising upon us that influence which, employing a bold but marvellously happy figure, Aristotle termed purification, and which a Greek comedian, after a more matter-of-fact fashion, thus expressed:

“For whensoe'er a man observes his fellow Bear wrongs more grievous than himself has known, More easily he bears his own misfortunes;”

i.e., the petty troubles of self which disturb without elevating the mind are driven out by the sympathetic participation in greater griefs, which raises while it excites the mind employed upon contemplating them. It is to these emotions—which are and can be no others than pity and terror—that actions and characters which we call tragic appeal. Those which we term comic address themselves to the sense of the ridiculous, and their subjects are those vices and moral infirmities, the representation of which is capable of touching the springs of laughter. Where, accordingly, a drama excludes all effects except those of the former class, it may be called a pure tragedy; when all except those of the latter, a pure comedy. In those dramas where the effects are mixed, it is the nature of the main action and of the main characters (as determined by their distinctive features) which alone enables us to classify such plays as serious or humorous dramas—or as tragic or comic, if we choose to preserve the terms. But the classification admits of a variety of transitions, from pure tragedy to mixed, from mixed tragedy to mixed comedy, and thence to pure comedy and her slighter sister farce. This method of distinction has no concern with the mere question of the termination of a play, according to which Philostratus and other authorities have sought to distinguish between tragic and comic dramas. The serious drama which ends happily (the German Schauspiet) is not a species co ordinate with tragedy and comedy, but only one subordinate to the former, if, indeed, it be necessary to distinguish it as a species at all. Other distinctions may be almost infinitely varied according to the point of view adopted for the classification.

The historical sketch of the drama attempted in the following pages will best serve to indicate the successive growth of national dramatic species, many of which by asserting their influence in other countries and ages than those which gave birth to them, have acquired a more than national significance.

The art of acting, whose history forms an organic though a distinct part of that of the drama, necessarily possesses a theory and a technical system of its own. But into these it is impossible here to enter. One claim, however, should be vindicated for the art of acting, viz., that though it is a dependent art, and most signally so in its highest forms, yet its true exercise implies a creative process. The conception of a character is determined by antecedents not of the actor’s own making; and the term originality can be applied to it only in a relative sense. Study and reflection enable him, with the aid of experience and of the intuition which genius bestows, but which experience may in a high degree supply, to interpret, to combine, and to supplement given materials. But in the transformation of the conception into the represented character the actor’s functions are really creative; for here he becomes the character by means which belong to his art alone. The distinctiveness he gives to the character by making the principal features recognized by him in it its groundwork;—the consistency which he maintains in it between groundwork and details;—the appropriateness which he preserves in it to the course of the action and the part borne in it by the character:—all these are produced by himself, though suggested by the conception he has derived from his materials. As to the means at his disposal, they are essentially of two kinds only; but not all forms of the drama have admitted of the use of both, or of both in the same completeness. All acting includes the use of gesture, or, as it has been more comprehensively termed, of bodily eloquence. From various points of view its laws regulate the actor’s bearing, walk, and movements of face and limbs. They teach what is aesthetically permitted and what is aesthetically pleasing. They deduce from observation what is appropriate to the expression of particular affections of the mind and of their combinations, of emotions and passions, of physical and mental conditions—joy and grief, health and sickness, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, madness, collapse, and death—of particular ages of life and temperaments, as well as of the distinctive characteristics of race, nationality, or class. While under certain conditions —as in the masked drama—the use of bodily movement as one of the means of expression has at times been partially restricted, there have been, or are, forms of the drama which have altogether excluded the use of speech (such as pantomime), or have restricted the manner of its employment (such as opera). In the spoken drama the laws of rhetoric regulate the actor’s use of speech, but under conditions of a special nature. Like the orator, he has to follow the laws of pronunciation, modulation, accent, and rhythm (the last in certain kinds of prose as well as in such forms of verse as he may be called upon to reproduce). But he has also to give his attention to the special laws of dramatic delivery, which vary in soliloquy and dialogue, and in such narrative or lyrical passages as may occur in his part.

The totality of the effect produced by the actor will in some degree depend upon other aids, among which those of a purely external kind will not be lost sight of. But the significance of costume in the actor, like that of decoration and scenery in an action, is a wholly relative one, and is to a large measure determined by the claims which custom enables the theatre to make, or forbids its making, upon the imagination of the spectators. The actor’s real achievement lies in the transformation which the artist himself effects; nor is there any art more sovereign in the use it can make of its means, or so happy in the directness of the results it can accomplish by them.

The origin of the Indian drama may unhesitatingly be described as purely native. The Mahometans when they overran India brought no drama with them; the Persians, the Arabs, and the Egyptians were without a national theatre. It would be absurd to suppose the Indian drama to have owed anything to the Chinese or its offshoots. On the other hand, there is no real evidence for assuming any influence of Greek examples upon the Indian drama at any stage of its progress. Finally, it had passed into its decline before the dramatic literature of modern Europe had sprung into being.

The Hindu writers ascribe the invention of dramatic entertainments to an inspired sage Bharata, or to the communications made to him by the god Brahma himself concerning an art gathered from the Vedas. As the word Bharata signifies an actor, we have clearly here a mere personification of the invention of the drama. Three kinds of entertainments, of which the ndtya (defined as a dance combined with gesticulation and speech) comes nearest to the drama, were said to have been exhibited before the gods by the spirits and nymphs of Indra’s heaven, and to these the god Siva added two new styles of dancing.

The origin of the Indian drama was thus doubtless religious; it sprang from the union of song and dance in the festivals of the gods, to which w ere afterwards added narrative recitation, and first sung, then spoken, dialogue. Such scenes and stories from the mythology of Vishnu are still occasionally enacted by pantomime or spoken dialogue in India (jdtras of the Bengalis; rasas of the Western Provinces); and the most ancient Indian play was said to have treated an episode from the history of that deity,—the choice of him as a consort by Laxmi,—a favourite kind of subject in the Indian drama. The tradition connecting its earliest themes with the native mythology of Vishnu agrees with that ascribing the origin of a particular kind of dramatic performance—the sangita— to Krishifa and the shepherdesses. The author’s later poem, the Gitagovinda, has been conjectured to be suggestive of the earliest species of Hindu dramas. But while the epic poetry of the Hindus gradually approached the dramatic in the way of dialogue, their drama developed itself independently out of the union of the lyric and the epic forms. Their dramatic poetry arose later than their epos, whose great works, the Mahabharata and the Rdmdyana, had again been long preceded by the hymnody of the Vedas —just as the Greek drama followed upon the Homeric poems, and these had been preceded by the early hymns. The beginnings of the Indian drama may accordingly belong to the 3d century b.c., or to a rather earlier date. But by the time it produced the first specimens with which we are acquainted, it had already reached its zenith; and it was therefore looked upon as having sprung into being as a perfect art. We kuow it only in its glory, in its decline, and in its decay.

The history of Indian dramatic literature may be roughly divided into the following periods :—

I. From the \st century b.c. to the \Qth century A.D.— This period belongs to the pre-Mahometan age of Indian history, but to that second division of it in which Buddhism had already become a powerful, factor in the social, as well as in the moral and intellectual, life of the land. It is the classical period of the Hindu drama, and includes the works of its two indisputably greatest masters. Of these Kalidisa was by far the earlier, who lived at the court cf King Vikramaditya of Avanti (died 56 b.c.), being accounted the brightest of its “nine gems ’’ of genius. He is the author of Sakuntald,— the work Sir William Jones’s translation of which first revealed to the Western world of letters the existence of an Indian drama. It is a dramatic love-idyll of surpassing beauty, and, in the opinion of the highest authorities, one of the master-pieces of the poetic literature of the world. Kalidasa’s other drama, Vikrama and Urvasi (The Hero and the Nymph), though unequal as a whole to Sakuntald, contains one act of incomparable loveliness; and its enduring effect upon Indian dramatic literature is shown by the imitations of it in later plays. To Kalidasa has likewise been attributed a third play—the Mdlavikdgnimitra; but it is doubtful whether this comedy, though held to be of ancient date, wa3 not composed by a different poet of the same name.

Another work of high merit, the pathetic Mrichchhakati (The Toy-Cart), a domestic drama with a public underplot, may possibly belong to the close of the 2d century a.d., and seems certainly of an earlier date than the 10th. It is attributed (as is not uncommon with Indian plays) to a royal author named Siidraka.

The palm of pre-eminence is disputed with Kalidasa by the great dramatic poet Babhavuti (called Qrikantha, or he in whose throat is fortune), who flourished in the earlier part of the 8th century. While he is considered more artificial in language than his rival, and in general more bound by rules, he can hardly be deemed his inferior in dramatic genius. Of his three extant plays, Mahavara-Charitra and Uttara-Rama-Charitra are heroic dramas concerned with the adventures of Rama (the seventh incarnation of Visluiu); the third, the powerful Maloti and Mddhava, has love for its theme, and has been called (with more aptitude than such comparisons usually possess) the Romeo and Juliet of the Hindus. It is considered by their critical authorities the best example of the prakaraha, or drama of domestic life.

Among the remaining chief works of Indian dramatic literature, the Veni-Samhara is thought probably to date from about the 8th or 9th century. Its author’s name seems doubtful; the play is described as one in which both pathos and horror are exaggerated, and which in the violence of its action recalls the manner of Shakespeare’s predecessors. The next series of plays forms a transition between the first period of Indian dramatic literature and

II. The period of decline, which may be reckoned from about the llth to about the llth century of our era, and of which the beginning roughly coincides with that of a continuous series of Mahometan invasions of India. Ilandman-Nataka, or “the great Nataka” (for this play, the work of several hands, surpasses all other Indian dramas in length, extending over not less than fourteen acts), dates from the 10th or llth century. Its story is taken from the BAma-cycle, and a prominent character in it is the mythical monkey-chief Hanumat, to whom, indeed, tradition ascribed the original authorship of the play. Krishnamicra’s “theosophic mystery,” as it Jias been called, of Prdbodha-Chandrodaya (The Rise of the Moon of Insight, i.e., the victory of true doctrine over error), is ascribed by one authority to the middle of the llth century, by another to about the end of the 12th. The dates of the famous Iiatnavall (The Necklace), a court-comedy of love and intrigue, with a half-Terentian plot, and of the interesting Buddhist drama Ndgananda, which begins as an erotic play but passes into a most impressive exemplification of the supreme virtue of self-sacrifice, depend on the disputed question of their respective authorship. One of them belongs to the first quarter of the 12th century, the other to an earlier time. Finally, Vis'Akhadatta’s interesting drama of political intrigue, Mudrd-Rakshasa (The Signet of the Minister), in which prince Chandragupta, presumably identifiable with Sandrocottus, makes his appearance, was probably composed later than the end of the 12th century. This is the only Indian play known to us with an essentially historical fable—a noteworthy circumstance, if (as is most likely) it was produced at a time when the Mahometan invasions had already begun.

The remaining plays of which it has been possible to conjecture the dates range in the time of their composition from the end of the llth to the 14th century, and belong to the period of decliue. Of this period, as compared with the first, the general characteristics seem to be an undue preponderance of narrative and description, and an affected and over-elaborated style. As a striking instance of this class is mentioned a play on the adventures of Rima, the Anargha-Raghava, which in spite, or by reason, of the commonplace character of its sentiments, the extravagance of its diction, and the obscurity of its mythology, is stated to enjoy a higher reputation with the pandits of the present age than the master-pieces of Kilidasa and Babhavuti. To the close of this period, the 14th century, has likewise (but without any pretension to certainty) been ascribed the only Tamil drama of which we possess an English version. Arichandra (The Martyr of Truth) exemplifies—with a strange likeness in the contrivance of its plot to the Book of Job and Faust— in the trials of a heroically enduring king the maxim “Better die than lie.”

III. Isolated plays remain from centuries later than the 14z/t; but these, which chiefly turn on the legends of Krishna (the last incarnation of Visluiu), may be regarded as a mere aftergrowth, and exhibit the Indian drama in it3 decay. Indeed, the latest of them, Chitra-Yajna, which was composed about the beginning of the present century, and still serves as a model for Bengali dramatic performances, is imperfect in its dialogue, which (after the fashion of Italian improvised comedy) it is left to the actors to supplement. Besides these there are farces or farcical entertainments, more or less indelicate, of uncertain dates.

The number of the plays which have descended to us from so vast an expanse of time is both relatively and absolutely small. Wilson doubts whether all the plays to be found, and those mentioned by Hindu writers on the drama, amount to many more than 60; and it has been seen that not more than three are ascribed to either of the two great masters. To these should be, however, added the plays in Tamil, stated to be about 100 in number, and to have been composed by poets who enjoyed the patronage of the Pandian kings of Madura. On the other hand, there is among the Hindus no dearth of dramatic theory. The sage Bharata, the reputed inventor of dramatic entertainments, was likewise revered as the father of dramatic criticism—a combination of functions to which the latter days of the English theatre might perhaps furnish an occasional parallel. The commentators (possibly under the influence of inspiration rather than as a strict mattei-of memory) constantly cite his sutras, or aphorisms. (From suira, thread, was named the sdtra-dhara, thread-holder, carpenter, a term applied to the architect and general manager of sacrificial solemnities, then to the director of theatrical performances). By the llth century, when the drama was already approaching its decline, dramatic criticism had reached an advanced point; and the Dasa-Rupaka (of which the text belongs to that age) distinctly defines the ten several kinds of dramatic composition. Other critical works followed at later dates, exhibiting a rage for subdivision unsurpassed by the efforts of Western theorists, ancient or modern; the misfortune is that there should not be examples remaining (if they ever existed) to illustrate all the branches of so elaborate a dramatic system.

“What,” inquires the manager of an actor in the induction to one of the most famous of Indian plays, “are those qualities vzhich the virtuous, the wise, the venerable, the learned, and the Brahmans require in a drama ?” “Pro found exposition of the various passions,” is the reply, “pleasing interchange of mutual affection, loftiness of character, delicate expression of desire, a surprising story, and elegant language.” “Then,” says the manager (for the Indian dramatists, though not, like Ben Jonson, wont to “rail” tiie public “into approbation,” are unaffected by mauvaise honte) “I recollect one.” And he proceeds to state that “Babhavuti has given us a drama composed by him, replete with all qualities, to which indeed this sentence is applicable: ‘ How little do they know who speak of us with censure 1 This entertainment is not for them. Possibly some one exists, or will exist, of similar tastes with myself; for time is boundless, and the world is wide.’” This self-possessed disregard of popularity, springing from an imperturbable consciousness of lofty aims, accounts for much that is characteristic of the higher class of Indian plays. It explains both their paucity and their length, renders intelligible the chief peculiarity in their diction, and furnishes the key to their most striking ethical as well as literary qualities. Connected in their origin with religious worship, they were only performed on solemn occasions, chiefly of a public nature, and more especially at seasons sacred to some divinity. Thus, though they might in some instances be reproduced, they were always written with a view to one particular solemn representation. Again, the greater part of every one of the plays of Northern India is written in Sanskrit, which ceased to be a popular language by 300 B.C., but continued the classical, and at the same time the sacred, form of speech of the Brahmans. Sanskrit is spoken by the heroes and principal personages of the plays, while the female and inferior characters use varieties, more or less refined, of the Prakrit languages (as a rule not more than three, that which is employed in the songs of the women being the poetic dialect of the most common Prakrit language, the Qauraseni). Hence, part at least of each play cannot have been understood by the large majority of the audience, except in so far as their general acquaintance with the legends or stories treated enabled them to follow the course of the action. Every audience thus contained an inner audience, which could alone feel the full effect of the drama. It is, then, easy to see why the Hindu critics should make demands upon the art, into which only highly-trained and refined intellects were capable of entering, or called upon to enter. The general public could not be expected to appreciate the sentiments expressed in a drama, and thus (according to the process prescribed by Hindu theory) to receive instruction by means of amusement. These sentiments are termed rasas (tastes or flavours), and said to spring from the bhdvas (conditions of mind and body). A variety of subdivisions is added; but the santa rasa is logically enough excluded from dramatic composition, inasmuch as it implies absolute quiescence.

The Hindu critics know of no distinction directly corresponding to that between tragedy and comedy, still less of any determined by the nature of the close of a play. For, in accordance with the child-like element of their character, the Hindus dislike an unhappy ending to any story, and a positive rule accordingly prohibits a fatal conclusion in their dramas. The general term for all dramatic compositions is rtipaka (from rupa, form), those of an inferior class being distinguished as uparupakas. Of the various subdivisions of the rupaka, in a more limited sense, the naiaka, or play proper, represents the most perfect kind. Its subject should always be celebrated and important—it is virtually either heroism or love, and most frequently the latter—and the hero should be a demigod or divinity (such as Rama in Babhaviiti’s heroic plays) or a king (such as the hero of Sakuntald). But although the earlier drama tists took their plots from the sacred writings or PurdnAs, they held themselves at liberty to vary the incidents,—a licence from which the later poets abstained. Thus, in accordance, perhaps, with the respective developments in the religious life of the two peoples, the Hindu drama in this respect reversed the progressive practice of the Greek. The prakaranas agree in all essentials with the nafakas except that they are less elevated; their stories are mere fictions, taken from 'actual life in a respectable class of society. Among the species of the upardpaka may be mentioned the trofaka, in which the personages are partly human, partly divine, and of which a famous example remains. Of the bhana, a monologue in one act, one literary example is extant—a curious picture of manners in which the speaker describes the different persons he meets at a spring festival in the streets of Kolahalapur. The satire of the farcical prahasanas is usually directed against the hypocrisy of ascetics and Brahmans, and the sensuality of the wealthy and powerful. These trifles represent the lower extreme of the dramatic scale, to which, of course, the principles that follow only partially apply.

Unity of action is strictly enjoined by Hindu theory, though not invariably observed in practice. Episodical or prolix interruptions are forbidden; but, in order to facilitate the connection, the story of the play is sometimes carried on by narratives spoken by actors or “interpreters,” something after the fashion of the Chorus in Henry V., or of Gower in Pericles. “Unity of time” is liberally, if rather arbitrarily, understood by the later critical authorities as limiting the duration of the action of a single year; but even this is exceeded in more than one classical play. The single acts are to confine the events occurring in them to “one course of the sun,” and usually do so. “Unity of place” is unknown to the Hindu drama, by reason of the absence of scenery; for the plays were performed in the open courts of palaces, perhaps at times in large halls set apart for public entertainments, or in the open air. Hence change of scene is usually indicated in the texts; and we find the characters making long journeys on the stage, under the eyes of spectators not trained to demand “real” mileage.

With the solemn character of the higher kind of dramatic performances accord the rules and prohibitions defining what may be called the proprieties cf the Indian drama. Not only should death never be inflicted coram populo, but the various operations of biting, scratching, kissing, eating, sleeping, the bath, and the marriage ceremony should never take place on the stage. Yet such rules are made to be occasionally broken. It is true that the mild humour of the vidushaka is restricted to his “gesticulating eating” instead of perpetrating the obnoxious act. The charming love-scene in the Saknntald (at least in the earlier recension of the play) breaks off just as the hero is about to act the part of the bee to the honey of the heroine’s lips. But later writers are less Squeamish, or less refined. In two dramas the heroine is dragged on the stage by her braid of hair; and this outrage, a worse one than that imputed to Dunstan, is in both instances the motive of the action. In a third, sleeping and the marriage ceremony occur in the course of the representation.

The dramatic construction of the Indian plays presents no very striking peculiarities. They open with a benediction (ndndi), followed by “some account” of the author, and by an introductory scene between the manager and one of the actors, which is more or less skilfully connected with the opening of the play itself. This is divided into acts (ankas) and scenes; of the former a naiaka should have not fewer than 5, or more than 10; 7 appears a common number; “the great nataka ’ reaches 14. Thus the length of the higher class of Indian plays is considerable—about that of an JEscliyleau trilogy; but not more thana single play was ever performed on the same occasion. Comic plays are restricted to two acts (here called sandhis). In theory the scheme of an Indian drama corresponds very closely to the general outline of dramatic construction given above; it is a characteristic merit that the business is rarely concluded before the last act. The piece closes, as it began, with a benediction or prayer. Within this framework room is found for situations as ingeniously devised and highly wrought as those in any modern Western play. What could be more pitiful than the scene in Sdkuntald, where the true wife appears before her husband, whose remembrance of her is fatally overclouded by a charm; what more terrific than that in Mdlati and Madhava, where the lover rescues his beloved from the horrors of the charnel-field? Recognition—especially between parents and children—frequently gives rise to scenes of a pathos which Euripides lias not surpassed. The ingenious device of a “play within the play” (so familiar to the English drama) is employed with the utmost success by Babhavuti. On the other hand, miraculous metamorphosis and, in a later play, vulgar magic lend their aid to the progress of the action. With scenes of strong effectiveness contrast others of the most delicate poetic grace—such as the indescribably lovely little episode of the two damsels of the god of love helping one another to pluck the red and green bud from the mango tree; or of gentle domestic pathos—such as that of the courtesan listening to the prattle of her lover’s child, one of the prettiest scenes of a kind rarely kept free from affectation in the modern drama. For the denouement in the narrower sense of the term the Indian dramatists largely resort to the expedient of the deus ex machina, often in a sufficiently literal sense.

Every species of drama having its appropriate kind of hero or heroine, theory here again amuses itself with an infinitude of subdivisions. Among the heroines are to be noticed the courtesans, whose social position to some extent resembles that of the Greek hetoeroe, and association with whom does not seem in practice, however it may be in theory, to be regarded as a disgrace even to Brahmans. In general, the Indian drama indicates relations between the sexes subject to peculiar restraints of usage, but freer than those which Mahometan example seems to have introduced into higher Indian society. The male characters are frequently drawn with skill, and sometimes with genuine force. Prince Samsthanaka is a type of selfishness born in the purple worthy to rank beside figures of the modern drama, of which this has at times naturally been a favourite class of character; elsewhere the intrigues of ministers are not more fully exposed than their characters and principles of action are judiciously discriminated. Among the lesser personages common in the Indian drama, two are worth noticing, as corresponding though by no means precisely to familiar types of other dramatic literatures. These are the vitd, the accomplished but dependent companion (both of men and women), and the viddshaka, the humble associate (not servant) of the prince, and the buffoon of the action. Strangely enough, he is always a Brahman, or the pupil of a Brahman. His humour is to be ever intent on the pleasures of a quiet life, and on that of eating in particular; his jokes are always devoid of both harm and point.

Thus, clothing itself in a diction always ornate and tropical, in which (as Riickert has happily expressed it) the prose is the warp and the verse the weft; in which (as Goethe says) words become allusions, allusions similes, and similes metaphors, the Indian drama essentially depended upon its literary qualities, and upon the familiar sanctity of its favourite themes, for such effect as it was able to produce. Of scenic apparatus it knew but little; the simple devices by which exits and entrances were facilitated it is unnecessary to describe, and on the contrivances it resorted to for such “properties” as were required (above all, the cars of the gods and of their emissaries) it is useless to speculate. Propriety of costume, on the other hand, seems always to have been observed, agreeably both to the peculiarities of the Indian drama and to the habits of the Indian people.

The ministers of an art practised under such conditions could not but be regarded with respect, and spared the contempt or worse, which, except among one other great civilized people, the Greeks, has everywhere at one time or another been the actor’s lot. Companies of actors seem to have been common in India at an early date, and the inductions show the players to have been regarded as respectable members of society. In later if not in earlier times individual actors enjoyed a widespread reputation,—“all the world” is acquainted with the talents of Kalaha-Kandala. The directors, as already stated, were usually Brahmans. Female parts were in general, though not invariably, represented by females. One would like to know whether such was the case in a piece where—after the fashion of more than one Western play—a crafty minister passes off his daughter as a boy, on which assumption she is all but married to a person of her own sex.

The Indian drama would, if only for purposes of comparison, be invaluable to the student of this branch of literature. But from the point of view of purely literary excellence it holds its own against all except the very foremost dramas of the world. It is, indeed, a mere phrase to call Kdlid&sa the Indian Shakespeare—a title which, moreover, if intended as anything more than a synonym for poetic pre-eminence, might fairly be disputed in favour of Babhavuti; while it would be absolutely misleading to place a dramatic literature, which, like the Indian, is the mere quintessence of the culture of a caste, by the side of one which represents the fullest development of the artistic consciousness of a people such as the Hellenes. The Indian drama cannot be described as national in the broadest and highest sense of the word; it is, in short, the drama of a literary class, though as such it exhibits many of the noblest and most refined, as well as of the most characteristic, features of Hindu religion and civilization. The ethics of the Indian drama are of a lofty character, but they are those of a scholastic system of religious philosophy, self-conscious of its completeness. To the power of Fate is occasionally ascribed a supremacy, to which gods as well as mortals must bow; but if man’s present life is merely a phase in the cycle of his destinies, the highest of moral efforts at the same time points to the summit of possibilities, and self-sacrifice is the supreme condition both of individual perfection and of the progress of the world. Such conceptions as these seem at once to enfold and to overshad or the moral life of the Indian drama. The affections and passions forming part of self it delineates with a fidelity to nature which no art can neglect; but the freedom of the picture is restricted by conditions which to us are unfamiliar and at times seem intolerable, but which it was impossible for the Indian poet’s imagination to neglect. The sheer self-absorption of ambition or love appears inconceivable by the minds of any of these poets; and their social philosophy is always based on the system of caste. On the other hand, they are masters of many of the truest forms of pathos, above all of that which blends with resignation. In humour of a delicate kind they are by no means deficient; to its lower forms they are generally strangers, even in productions of a professedly comic intention. Of wit, Indian dramatL literature—though a play on words is as the breath of its nostrils—furnishes hardly any examples intelligible to Western notions.

The distinctive excellence of the Indian drama is to be sought in the poetic robe which envelops it as flowers overspread the bosom of the earth in the season of spring. In its nobler productions, at least, it is never untrue to its half religious, half rural origin; it weaves the wreaths of idyllic fancies in an unbroken chain, adding to its favourite aud familiar blossoms ever fresh beauties from an inexhaustible garden. Nor is it unequal to depicting the grander aspects of nature in her mighty forests and on the shores of the ocean. A profound familiarity with its native literature can here alone follow its diction through a ceaseless flow of phrase and figure, listen with understanding to the hum of the bee as it hangs over the lotus, and contemplate with S^kuntalVs pious sympathy the creeper as it winds round the mango tree. But the poetic beauty of the Indian drama reveals itself in the mysterious charm of its outline, if not in its full glow, even to the untrained; nor should the study of it—for which the materials may yet increase— be left aside by any lover of literature.

Like the Indian drama, the Chinese arose from the union of the arts of dance and song. To the ballets and pantomimes out of which it developed itself, and which have continued to flourish by the side of its more advanced forms, the Chinese ascribe a primitive antiquity of origin; many of them originally had a symbolical reference to such subjects as the harvest, and war and peace. A. very ancient pantomime is said to have symbolized the conquest of China by Wou-Wang; others were of a humbler, and often of a very obscure, character. To their music the Chinese likewise attribute a great antiquity of origin.

Though some traditions declare the emperor Wan-Te (fl. about 580 a.d.) to have invented the drama, this honour is more usually given to the emperor Heun-Tsung (720 a.d.), who is likewise remembered as a radical musical reformer. Pantomimes henceforth fell into disrepute; and the history of the Chinese drama from this date is divided, with an accuracy we cannot profess to control, into four distinct periods, of each of which the plays composed in it are stated to bear the manifest impress. These are

I. That of the dramas composed under the Tang dynasty, from 720 to 907 a.d. These pieces, called Tchhouen-Khi, were limited to the representation of extraordinary events, and were therefore, in design at least, a species of heroic drama. The ensuing times of civil war interrupted the “pleasures of peace and prosperity” (a Chinese phrase for dramatic performances)—which, however, revived

II. Under the Sung Dynasty, from 960 to 1119.— The plays of this period are called lli-Kliio, and presented what became a standing peculiarity of the Chinese drama, viz., that in them figures a principal personage who sings.

III. The best known age of the Chinese drama was under the Kin and Yuen dynasties, from 1125 to 1367. The plays of this period are called Yuen-Pen and Tsa-Ki; the latter seem to have resembled the Hi-Khio, and to have treated very various subjects. The Yuen-Pen are the plays from which our literary knowledge of the Chinese drama is mainly derived; the short pieces called Yen-Kia were in the same style, but briefer. The list of dramatic authors under the Yuen dynasty is tolerably extensive, comprising 85, among whom four are designated as courtesans; the number of plays composed by these and by anonymous authors is reckoned at not less than 564. In 1735 the Jesuit missionary Prdmare first revealed to Europe the existence of the tragedy Tchao-Chi-Cu-Etil (The Little Orphan of the House of Tchad), which was founded upon an earlier piece treating of the fortunes of an heir to the imperial throne, who was preserved in a mysterious box like another Cypselus or Moses. Voltaire seized the theme of the earlier play for a rhetorical tragedy, in which he coolly professes it was his intention “to paint the manners of the Chinese and the Tartars.” The later play, which is something less elevated in the rauk of its characters, and very decidedly less refined in treatment, was afterwards retranslated by Stanislas Julien; and to the labours of this scholar, of Sir J. F. Davis, and of Bazin the elder, we owe a series of translated Chinese dramas, among which there cau be no hesitation whatever in designating the master-piece. The justly famous Pi-Pa-Ki (The Story of the Lute) belongs to a period rather later than that of the Yuen plays, having been composed towards the close of the 14th century by Kao-Tong-Kia, and reproduced in 1404, under the Ming dynasty, with the alterations of Mao-Tseu, a commentator of learning and taste. Pi-Pa-Ki, which as a domestic drama of sentiment possesses very high merit, long enjoyed a quite exceptional popularity in China; it was repeatedly republished with laudatory prefaces, and so late as the 18th century was regarded as a monument of morality, and as the master-piece of the Chinese theatre. It would seem to have remained without any worthy competitors, for although it had been originally designed to produce a reaction against the immorality of the drama then in fashion, especially of Wang-Chi-Fou’s celebrated Si-Siang-Ki (The Story of the Western Pavilion), yet

IV. The period of the Chinese drama tinder the Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, exhibited no improvement “What” (says the preface to the 1704 edition of Pi-Pa-Ki) “do you find there? Farcical dialogue, a mass of scenes in which one fancies one hears the hubbub of the streets or the ignoble language of the highways, the extravagances of demons and spirits, in addition to loveintrigues repugnant to delicacy of manners.” Nor would it appear that the Chinese theatre has ever recovered from its decay.

In theory, no drama could be more consistently elevated in purpose and in tone than the Chinese. Every play, we learn, should have both a moral and a meaning. A virtuous aim is imposed upon Chinese dramatists by an article of the penal code of the empire; and those who write immoral plays are to expect after death a purgatory which will last so long as these plays continue to be performed. In practice, however, the Chinese drama falls far short of its ideal; indeed, according to the native critic already cited, among ten thousand playwrights not one is to be found intent upon perfecting the education of mankind by means of precepts and examples.

The Chinese are, like the Hindus, unacquainted with the distinction between tragedy and comedy; they classify their plays according to subjects in twelve categories. It may be doubted whether what seems the highest of these is actually such; for the religious element in the Chinese drama is often sheer buffoonery. Moreover, Chinese religious life as reflected in the drama seems one in which creed elbows creed, and superstitions are welcome whatever their origin. Of all religious traditions and doctrines, however, those of Buddhism (which had reached China long before the known beginnings of its drama) are the most perceptible; thus, the theme of absolute self-sacrifice is treated in one play, that of entire absorption in the religious life in another. The historical drama is not unknown to the Chinese; and although a law prohibits the bringing on the stage of “emperors, empresses, and the famous princes, ministers, and generals of former ages,” no such restriction is observed in practice. Tn Han-Kong-Tseu (The Sorrows of Han), for instance, which treats a national historic legend strangely recalling in parts the story of Esther and the myth of the daughter of Erechtheus, the Emperor Yuen-Ti (the representative, to be sure, of a fallen dynasty) plays a part, and a sufficiently sorry one. By far the greater number, however, of the Chinese plays accessible in translations belong to the domestic species, and t-o that sub-species which may be called the criminal drama. Their favourite virtue is piety, of a formal or a practical kind, to parents or parents-in-law; their favourite interest lies in the discovery of long-hidden guilt, and in the vindication of persecuted innocence. In the choice and elaboration of such subjects they leave little to be desired by the most ardent devotees of the literature of agony. Besides this description of plays, we have at least one love-comedy pure and simple—a piece of a nature not “tolerably mild,” but ineffably harmless.

Free in its choice of themes, the Chinese drama is likewise remarkably unrestricted in its range of characters. Chinese society, it is well known, is not based, like Indian, upon the principle of caste; rank is in China determined by office, and this again depends on the results of examination. These familiar facts are constantly brought home to the reader of Chinese plays. The Tchoang-Yuen, or senior classman on the list of licentiates, is the flower of Chinese society, and the hero of many a drama; and it is a proud boast that for years one’s ancestors have held high posts, which they owed to their literary successes.” On the other hand, a person who has failed in his military examination, becomes, as if by a natural transition, a man-eating monster. But of mere class the Chinese drama is no respecter, painting with noteworthy freedom the virtues and the vices of nearly every phase of society. The same liberty is taken with regard to the female sex; it is clear that in earlier times there were few vexatious restrictions in Chinese life upon the social intercourse between men and women. The variety of female characters in the Chinese drama is great, ranging from the heroine who sacrifices herself for the sake of an empire to the well brought-up young lady who avers that “woman came into the world to be obedient, to unravel skeins of silk, and to work with her needle” —from the chambermaid who contrives the most gently sentimental of rendezvous, to the reckless courtesan who, like another Millwood, upbraids the partner of her guilt on his sueing for mercy, and bids him die with her in hopes of a re-union after death. In marriage the first or legitimate wife is distinguished from the second, who is at times a ci-devant courtesan, and towards whom the feelings of the former vary between bitter jealousy and sisterly kindness.

The conduct of the plays exhibits much ingenuity, and an aversion from restrictions of time and place; in fact, the nature of the plot constantly covers a long series of years, and spans wide intervals of local distance. The plays are divided into acts and scenes—the former being usually four in number, at times with an induction or narrative prologue spoken by some of the characters (Sie-Tsen). Favourite plays were, however, allowed to extend to great length; the Pi-Pa-Ki is divided into 24 sections, and in another recension apparently comprised 42. “I do not wish,” says the manager in the prologue, “that this performance should last too long; finish it to-day, but cut out nothing,”—whence it appears that the performance of some plays occupied more than a single day. The rule was always observed that a separate act should be given up to the denouement; while, according to a theory of which it is not always easy to trace the operation, the perfection of construction was sought in the dualism or contrast of scene and scene, just as the perfection of diction was placed in the parallelism or antithesis of phrase and phrase. Being subject to no restrictions as to what might, or might not, be represented on the stage, the conduct of the plots allowed of the introduction of almost every variety of incidents. Death takes place, in sight of the audience, by starvation, by drowning, by poison, by execution; flogging and torture are inflicted on the stage; wonders are wrought; and magic is brought into play; the ghost of an innocently-executed daughter calls upon her father to revenge her foul murder, and assists in person at the subsequent judicial enquiry. Certain peculiarities in the conduct of the business are due to the usages of society rather than to dramaturgic laws. Marriages are generally managed—at least in the higher spheres of society—by ladies professionally employed as matrimonial agents. The happy resolution of the nodus of the action is usually brought about by the direct interposition of superior official authority —a tribute to the paternal system of government, which is the characteristic Chinese variety of the deus ex machina. This naturally tends to the favourite close of a glorification of the emperor, resembling that of Louis XIV. at the'end of Tartuffe, or in spirit, at all events, those of the Virgin Queen in more than one Elizabethan play. It should be added that the characters save the necessity for a bill of the play by persistently? announcing and re-announcing their names and genealogies, and the necessity for a book by frequently recapitulating the previous course of the plot.

One peculiarity of the Chinese drama remains to be noticed. The chief character of a play represents the author as well as the personage; he or she is hero or heroine and chorus in one. This is brought about by the hero’s (or heroine’s) singing the poetical passages, or those containing maxims of wisdom and morality, or reminiscences and examples drawn from legend or history. Arising out of the dialogue, these passages at the same time diversify it, and give to it such elevation and brilliancy as it can boast. The singing character must be the principal personage in the action, but may be taken from any class of society. If this personage dies in the course of the play, another sings in his place. From the mention of this distinctive feature of the Chinese drama it will be obvious how unfair it would ' be to judge of any of its productions without a due appreciation of the lyric passages, which do not appear to be altogether restricted to the singing of the principal personage, for other characters frequently “recite verses.” In these lyrical or didactic passages are to be sought those flowers of diction which, as Julien has shown, consist partly in the use of a metaphorical phraseology of infinite nicety in its variations—such as a long series of phrases compounded with the word signifying jet and expressing severally the ideas of rarity, distinction, beauty, &c., or as others derived from the names of colours, birds, beasts, precious metals, elements, constellations, &c., or alluding to favourite legends or anecdotes. These features constitute the literary element par excellence of Chinese dramatic composition. At the same time, though it is impossible for the untrained reader to be alive to the charms of so unfamiliar a phraseology, it may be questioned whether even in its diction the Chinese drama can claim to be regarded as really poetic. It may abound in poetic ornament; it is not, like the Indian, bathed in poetry.

On the other hand, the merits of this dramatic literature are by no means restricted to ingenuity of construction and variety of character—merits, in themselves important, which no candid criticism will deny to it. Its master-piece is not only truly pathetic in the conception and the main situations of its action, but includes scenes of singular grace and delicacy of treatment—such as that where the re married husband of the deserted heroine in vain essays in the presence of his second wife to sing to his new lute, now that he has cast aside the old. In the last act of a tragedy appealing at once to patriotism and to pity, there is true imaginative power in the picture of the emperor, when aware of the departure but not of the death of his beloved, sitting in solitude broken only by the ominous shriek of the wild fowl. Nor is the Chineso drama devoid of humour. The lively abigail who has to persuade her mistress into confessing herself in love by arguing (almost like Beatrice) that “humanity bids us love men;” the corrupt judge (a standing type of the Chinese plays) who falls on his knees before the prosecuting parties to a suit as before “the father and mother who give him sustenance,” may serve as examples; and in Pi-Pa-Ki there is a scene of admirable burlesque on the still more characteristic theme of the humours of a competitive examination. If such illustrations could not easily be multiplied, they are at least worth citing in order to deprecate a perfunctory criticism on the qualities of a dramatic literature as to which our materials for judgment are still scanty.

I While in the north of China houses are temporarily set apart for dramatic performances, in the south these are usually confined to theatres erected in the streets (Hi-Thai). Thus scenic decorations of any importance must always have been out of question in the Chinese theatre. The costumes, on the other hand, are described as magnificent; they are traditionally those worn before the 17th century, in accordance with the historical colouring of most of the plays. The actor’s profession is not a respectable one in China, the managers being in the habit of buying children of slaves and bringing them up as slaves of their own. Women may not appear on the stage, since the emperor Khien-Long admitted an actress among his concubines; female parts are therefore played by lads, occasionally by eunuchs.

The Japanese drama, as all evidence seems to agree in showing, still remains what in substance it has always been—an amusement passionately loved by the lower orders, but dignified by no literature deserving the name. Apart from its native elements of music, dance, and song, and legendary or historical narrative and pantomime, it is clearly to be regarded as a Chinese importation; nor has it in its more advanced forms apparently even attempted to emancipate itself from the reproduction of the conventional Chinese types. As early as the close of the 6th century Hada Kawatsu, a man of Chinese extraction, but born in Japan, is said to have been ordered to arrange entertainments for the benefit of the country, and to have written as many as thirty-three plays. The Japanese, however, ascribe the origin of their drama to the introduction of the dance called Sambdso as a charm against a volcanic depression of the earth which occurred in 805; and this dance appears still to be used as a prelude to theatrical exhibitions. In 1108 lived a woman called Iso no Zenji, who is looked upon a3 “the mother of the Japanese drama.” But her performances seem to have been confined to dancing or posturing in male attire (otoko-mai); and the introduction of the drama proper is universally attributed to Saruwaka Kanzaburo, who in 1624 opened the first theatre (sibaia) at Yeddo. Not long afterwards (1651) the play-houses were removed to their present site in the capital; and both here and in the provincial towns, especially of the north, the drama has since continued to flourish. Persons of rank are never seen at these theatres; but actors are occasionally engaged to play in private at the houses of the nobles, who appear formerly themselves to have taken part in performances of a species of opera affected by them, always treating patriotic legends and called no. The Mikado only has a court theatre.

Tho subjects of the popular plays are to a large extent historical, though the names of the characters are changed. An example is to be found in the jdturi, or musical romance, in which the universally popular tale of Chiushingura (The Loyal League} has been amplified and adapted for theatrical representation. This famous narrative of the feudal fidelity of the forty-seven ronins, who about the year 1699 revenged their chief’s judicial suicide upon the arrogant official to whom it was due, is stirring rather than touching in its incidents, and contains much bloodshed, together with a tea-house scene which suffices as a specimen of the Japanese comedy of manners. One of the books of this dramatic romance consists of a metrical description, mainly in dialogue, of a journey which (after the fashion of Indian plays) has to be performed on the stage. Other popular plays are mentioned dealing with similar themes, besides which there are domestic dramas of a very realistic kind, and often highly improper, though all intrigues against married women are excluded. Fairy— and demon—operas and ballets, and farces and intermezzos form an easy transition to the interludes of tumblers and jugglers. As a specimen of nearly every class is required to make up a Japanese theatrical entertainment—which lasts from sunrise to sunset—and as the lower houses appropriate and mutilate the plays of the higher, it is clear that the condition of the Japanese theatre cannot be regarded as promising. In respect, however, of its movable scenery and properties, it is stated to be in advance of its Chinese prototype. The performers are, except in the ballet, males only. Though the leading actors enjoy great popularity and very respectable salaries, the class is held in contempt, and the companies were formerly recruited from the lowest sources. The disabilities under which they lay have, however, been removed; nor is it impossible that the reign of progress in Japan may revolutionize an agency of civilization which it seems for the present to have regarded as beneath its notice.

No traces of a drama exist in any of the other civilized peoples of Asia—for that in Siam may probably be regarded as a branch of the Indian. Among the Hebrews and other Semitic peoples, as well as in at least one originally Aryan people of Asia which has cultivated letters with assiduity and success—the Persians —the dramatic art is either wanting, or only appears as an occasional and exotic growth. It is unnecessary to dwell on the dramatic element apparent in two of the books of the Hebrew Scripture—the Book of Ruth and the Book of Job. Qi the dramatic element in the religious rites of the Egyptians a word will be said immediately; meanwhile it may be convenient at once to state that traces of dramatic entertainments have been found in various parts of the New World, which it cannot be part of the present sketch to pursue. Among these are the performances, accompanied by dancing and intermixed with recitation and singing, of the South-Sea Islanders, first described by Captain Cook, and lately reintroduced to the notice of students of comparative mythology by Mr W. Wyatt Gill. Of the so-called Inca drama of the Peruvians, the unique relic, Apu Olio nt ay, said to have been written down in the Quichua tongue from native dictation by Spanish priests shortly after the conquest of Peru, has been partly translated by Mr Clements Markham, and recently twice rendered into German verse. It appears to be an historic play of the heroic type, combining stirring incidents with a pathos finding expression in at least one lyric of some sweetness—the lament for the lost Collyar. With it may be contrasted the ferocious Aztek dramatic ballet, Rabinal-Acld (translated by the Abb6 de Bourbourg), of which the text seems rather a succession of warlike harangues than an attempt at dramatic treatment of character. But these are mere isolated curiosities.

The civilization and religious ideas of the Egyptians so vitally influenced the people of whose drama we are about to speak that a reference to them cannot be altogether omitted. The influence of Egyptian upon Greek civilization has probably been over-estimated by Herodotus; but while it will never be clearly known how much the Greeks owed to the Egyptians in divers branches of knowledge, it is certain that the former confessed themselves the scholars of Egypt in the cardinal doctrine of its natural theology. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul there found its most solemn expression in mysterious recitations connected with the rites of sepulture, and treatiug of the migration of the soul from its earthly to its eternal abode. These solemnities, whose transition into the Hellenic mysteries has usually been attributed to the agency of the Thracian worship of Dionysus, undoubtedly contained a dramatic element, upon the extent of which it is, however, useless to speculate. The ideas to which they sought to give utterance centred in that of Osiris, the vivifying power or universal soul of nature, whom Herodotus simply identifies with the Dionysus of the Greeks. The same deity was likewise honoured by processions among the rural Egyptian population, which, according to the same authority, in nearly all respects except the absence of choruses resembled the Greek phallic processions in honour of the wine-god.

That the Egyptians looked upon music as an important science seems fully established; it was diligently studied by their priests, though not, as among the Greeks, forming a part of general education, and in the. sacred rites of their gods they as a rule permitted the use of flute and harp, as well as of vocal music. Dancing was as an art confined to professional persons; but though the higher orders abstained from its practice, the lower indulged in it on festive occasions, when a tendency to pantomime naturally asserted itself, and licence and wanton buffoonery prevailed, as in the early rustic festivals of the Greek and Italian peoples. Of a dance of armed men, on the other hand, there seems no satisfactory trace in the representations of the Egyptian monuments.

But whatever elements the Greek drama may, in the sources from which it sprang, have owed to Egyptian, or Phrygian, or other Asiatic influences, its development was independent and self-sustained. Not only in its beginnings, but so long as the stage existed in Greece, the drama was in intimate connection with the national religion. This is the most signal feature of its history, and one which cannot in the same degree and to the same extent be ascribed to the drama of any other people, ancient or modern. Not only did both the great branches of the Greek drama alike originate in the usages of religious worship, but they never lost their formal union with it, though one of them (comedy) in its later growth abandoned all direct reference to its origin. Hellenic polytheism was at once so active and so fluid or flexible in its anthropomorphic formations, that no other religious system has ever so victoriously assimilated to itself foreign elements, or so vivaciously and variously developed its own. Thus, the worship of Dionysus, introduced into Greece by the Phoenicians as that of the tauriform sun-god whom his worshippers adored with loud cries (whence Bacchus or Iacchus), and the god of generation (whence his phaUic emblem) and production, was brought into connection with the Dorian religion of the sun-god Apollo. Apollo and his sister, again, corresponded to the Pelasgian and Achaean divinities of sun and moon, whom the Phoenician Dionysus and Demeter superseded, or with whose worship theirs was blended. Dionysus, whose rites were specifically conducted with reference to his attributes as the wine-god, was attended by deified representations of his original worshippers, who wore the skin of the goat sacrificed to him. These were the satyrs. Out of the connected worships of Dionysus, Bacchus, Apollo, and Demeter sprang the beginnings of the Greek drama.

“Both tragedy and comedy,” says Aristotle, “originated in a rude and unpremeditated manner,—the first from the leaders of the dithyramb, and the second from those who led off the phallic songs.” This diversity of origin, and the distinction jealously maintained down to the latest times between the two branches of the dramatic art, even where they might seem to come into actual contact with one another, necessitate a separate statement as to the origin and history of either.

The custom of offering thanks to the gods by hymns and dances in the places of public resort was first practised by the Greeks in the Dorian states, whose whole system of life was organized on a military basis. Hence the dances of the Dorians originally taught or imitated the movements of soldiers, and their hymns were warlike chants. Such were the beginnings of the chorus, and of its songs (called paeans, from an epithet of Apollo), accompanied first by the phorminx and then by the flute. A step in advance was taken when the poet with his trained singers and dancers, like the Indian sutra-dhara, performed these religious functions as the representative of the population. From the Doric paean at a very early period several styles of choral dancing formed themselves, to which the three styles of dance in scenic productions—the tragic, the comic, and the satyric—are stated afterwards to have corresponded. But none of these could have led to a literary growth. This was due to the introduction among the Dorians of the dithyramb, —originally a song of revellers, probably led by a flute-player and accompanied by the music of other Eastern instruments, in which it was customary in Crete to celebrate the birth of Bacchus (the doubly-born) and possibly also his later adventures. The leader of the band (coryphaeus) may. be supposed to have at times assumed the character of the wine-god, whose worshippers bore aloft the vine-clad thyrsus. The dithyramb was reduced to a definite form by the Lesbiau Arion (fl. 610), who composed regular poems, turned the moving band of worshippers into a standing or cyclic chorus, invented a style of music adapted to the character of the chorus—the tragic or goat style—and called these songs goat-songs, or tragedies. Arion thus became the inventor of lyrical tragedy— a transition stage between the dithyramb and the regular drama. His invention, or the chorus with which it dealt, was established according to fixed rules by his contemporary Stesichorus. About the same time that Arion introduced these improvements into the Dorian city of Corinth, the (likewise Dorian) Families at Sicyon honoured the hero-king Adrastus by tragic choruses. Hence the invention of tragedy was ascribed by the Sicyonians to their poet Epigenes; but this step, significant for the future history of the Greek drama, of employing the Bacchic chorus for the celebration of other than Bacchic themes, was soon annulled by the tyrant Clisthenes.

The element which transformed lyrical tragedy into the tragic drama was added by the Ionians. The custom of the recitation of poetry by wandering minstrels called rhaptsodes (from paftSos, staff, or from pa7rra>, to piece together) first sprang up in the Ionia beyond the sea; to such minstrels was due the spread of the Homeric poems and of subsequent epic cycles. These recitations, with or without musical accompaniment, soon included gnomic or didactic, as well as epic, verse; if Homer was a rhapsode, so was the sententious or “moral” Hesiod. The popular effect of these recitations was enormously increased by the metrical innovations of Archilochus (from 708), who invented the trochee and the iambus, the latter the arrowy metre which is the native form of satirical invective—the species of composition in which Archilochus excelled—though it was soon used for other purposes also. The recitation of these iambics may already have nearly approached to theatrical declamation. The rhapsodes were welcome guests at popular festivals, where they exercised their art in mutual emulation, or ultimately recited parts, perhaps the whole, of longer poems. The recitation of a long epic may thus have resembled theatrical dialogue; that of alternating iambic poems, the form being frequently an address in the second person, even more so. The rhapsode was in some sense an actor; and when these recitations reached Attica, they thus brought with them the germs of theatrical dialogue.

The rhapsodes were actually introduced into Attica at a very early period; the Iliad, we know, was chanted at the Brauronia, a rural festival of Bacchus, whose worship had early entered Attica, and was cherished among its rustic population. Meanwhile the cyclic chorus of the Dorians had found its way into Attica and Athens, ever since the Athenians had recognized the authority of the great centre of the Apolline religion at Delphi. It therefore only remained for the rhapsodic and the cyclic—in other words, for the epic and the choral—elements to coalesce; and this must have been brought about by a union of the two accompaniments of religious worship in the festive rites of Bacchus, and by the domestication of these rites in the ruling city. This occurred in the time of Pisistratus, perhaps after his restoration in 554. To Thespis (535), said to have been a contemporary of the tyrant and a native of a Diacrian deme (Icaria), the invention of tragedy is accordingly ascribed. Whether his name be that of an actual person or not, his claim to be regarded as the inventor of tragedy is founded on the statement that he introduced an actor for the sake of relieving the Dionysian chorus. This actor, the representative of the rhapsodes, and doubtless, at first, generally the poet himself, instead of merely alternating his recitations with the songs of the chorus, addressed his speech to its leader—the coryphaeus— with whom he thus carried on a species of dialogue. The chorus stood round its leader upon the steps of the Bacchic altar (thymele), the actor was placed upon a table. This table is the predecessor of the stage, for the waggon of Thespis is a fiction, probably due to a confusion between his table and the waggon of Susarion. It is a significant minor invention ascribed to Thespis, that he disguised the actor’s face first by means of a pigment, afterwards by a mask. In the dialogue was treated a myth relating to Bacchus or some other deity or hero. Whether or not Thespis actually wrote tragedies (and there seems no reason to doubt it), and although both the cyclic chorus atid rhapsodic recitation continued in separate use, tragedy was now in existence. The essential additions afterwards made to its simple framework were remarkably few. JEschylus added a second actor, and by reducing the functions of the chorus further established the dialogue as the principal part of the action. Sophocles added a third actor, by which change the preponderance of the dialogue was’ made complete.

If the origin of Greek comedy is simpler in its nature than that of Greek tragedy, the beginnings of its progress are involved in more obscurity. It is said to have been invented by Susarion, a native of Megaris, whose inhabitants were famed for their coarse humour, which they communicated to their colonies in Sicily. In this island, to this day the home of spontaneous mimicry, comedy was said to have arisen. In the rural Bacchic vintage-festivals bands of jolly companions (kw/zos, properly a revel continued after supper) went about in carts or afoot, carrying the phallic emblem, and indulging in the ribald licence of wanton mirth. From the song sung in these processions or at the Bacchic feasts, which combined the praise of the god with gross personal ridicule, and was called comus in a secondary sense, the Bacchic reveller taking part in it was called a comws-singer or comoedus. These phallic processions, which were afterwards held at Athens as in all Greek cities, imparted their character to Old Attic comedy, whose essence was personal vilification.

Thus independent of one another in their origin, Greek tragedy and comedy never actually coalesced. The satyrdrama, though in some sense it partook of the nature of both, was in its origin as in its history connected with tragedy alone. Pratinas of Phlius, a contemporary of .zEschylus in his earlier days, is said to have restored the tragic chorus to the satyrs, i.e., he first produced dramas the same in form and theme as the tragedies, but in which the dances were different and entirely carried on by satyrs. The tragic poets, while never writing comedies, henceforth also composed satyr-dramas; but neither tragedies nor satyrdramas were ever written by the comic poets, and it was in conjunction with tragedies only that the satyr-dramas were performed. The theory of the Platonic Socrates, that the same man ought to be the best tragic and the best comic poet, was never exemplified in practice. The so-called hilaro-tragedy or tragi-comedy of later writers, thought in some of its features to have been anticipated by Euripides, in form nowise differed from tragedy; it merely contained a comic element in its characters, and invariably had a happy ending. The serious and sentimental element in the comedy of Menander and his contemporaries did far more to destroy the essential difference between the two great branches of the Greek dramatic art.

The history of Greek—which virtually always remained Attic—tragedy divides itself into three periods.

I. The period before jEschylus (535-499).—From this we have but a few names of authors and plays—those of the former being (besides Thespis) Choerilus, Phrynichus, and Prdtinas, all of whom lived to contend with Aeschylus for the tragic prize. To each of them certain innovations are ascribed—among the rest the introduction of female characters to Phrynichus.

II The classical period of Attic tragedy— that of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and their contemporaries (499-405).—To this belong all the really important phases in the progress of Greek tragedy, which severally connect themselves with the names of its three great masters. They may be regarded as the representatives of different generations of Attic history and life, though of course in these, as in the progress of their art itself, there is an unbroken continuity. AEschylus (525-456) had not only fought both at Marathon and at Salamis against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic pride, but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and was a passionate upholder of the institution most intimately associated with the primitive political traditions of the past—the Areopagus. He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung; he must have belonged to that antidemocratical party which favoured the Spartan alliance, and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which succeeded him the chivalrous spirit and diction of his poetry, and the unapproached sublimity of hi3 dramatic imagination, fell, as it falls upon later posterity, like the note of a mightier age. Sophocles (495-405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of hi3 authority rather than a consistent pupil of his political ideas; but his manhood and perhaps the maturity of his genius coincided with the great days when he could stand, like his mighty friend and the community they both so gloriously represented, on the sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious, he yet treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. His art (which he described as having passed through three successive stages) may in its perfection be said to typify the watchful and creative calm of his city’s imperial epoch. Euripides (480-406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind, has been more variously and antithetically judged than either of his great fellow-tragedians. His art has been called thinner and tamer than theirs, his genius rhetorical rather than poetical, his morality that of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, lie has been recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his social philosophy and the most various in his psychological insight. At least though far removed from the naiver age of the national life, he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely Attic; and if he was “haunted on the stage by the daemon of Socrates,” he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a seed-time as well as a season of decay. To Euripides the general progress of dramatic literature owes more than to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and at Rome; comedy owed him something in the style of the very Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the sentiments of Menander; and when the modern drama came to engraft the aucient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connection between them.

The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic poets was acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing no tragedies but theirs to be more than once performed, and by the law of Lycurgus (c. 330) which obliged the actors to use, in the case of works of the great masters, authentic copies preserved in the public archives. It is thus not impossible that the value of later Attic tragedy, of which the fertility continued considerable, has been under-rated. In all the names of 1400 tragedies and satyr-dramas are preserved; and tragic poets are mentioned of whose plays no names are known. Among the more celebrated Attic tragedians contemporary with the great writers, Ion of Chios (d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier traditions of style than Euripides; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand, introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind into the art of tragic composition.

III. Of the third period of Greek tragedy the concluding limit cannot be precisely fixed. Down to the days of Alexander the Great, Athens remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to be acted at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since Aeschylus, Euripides, and Agathon had sojourned there,—though the practice of producing plays at the Dionysia before the allies of Athens must have led to their holding similar exhibitions at home,—yet before the death of Alexander we meet with no instance of a tragic poet writing or a tragedy written outside Athens. An exception should indeed be made in favour of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who (like Critias in his earlier days at Athens) was “addicted to” tragic composition. Not all the tragedians of this period, however, were Athenians born; though the names of Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, Iophon, the son of Sophocles, and Euripides and Sophocles, the nephew and the grandson respectively of their great namesakes, illustrate the descent of the tragic art as an hereditary family possession. Chaeremon (fl. 380) already exhibits tragedy on the road to certain decay, for we learn that his plays were written for reading.

Soon after the death of Alexander theatres are found spread over the whole Hellenic world of Europe and Asia— a result to which the practice of the conqueror and his father of celebrating their victories by scenic performances had doubtless contributed. Alexandria having now become a literary centre with which even Athens was in some respects unable to compete, while the latter still remained the home of comedy, the tragic poets flocked to the capital of the Ptolemies; and here, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283-247) flourished the seven tragic poets famed as the “Pleias,” who still wrote in the style and followed the rules observed by the Attic masters. Tragedy and the dramatic art continued to be favoured by the later Ptolemies; and about 100 b.c. we meet with the curious phenomenon of a Jewish poet, Ezechiel, composing Greek tragedies, of one of which (the Exodus from Egypt) fragments have come down to us. Tragedy, with the satyrdrama and comedy, survived in Alexandria beyond the days of Cicero and Varro, nor was their doom finally sealed till the Emperor Caracalla abolished theatrical performances in the Egyptian capital in 217 a.d.

During the whole of its productive age Greek tragedy seems to have adhered to the lines laid down by its great Attic masters; nor were these in most respects departed from by the Roman imitators of these poets and of their successors.

Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the noblest life. Its proper themes—the deeds and sufferings of heroes—were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself; and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these myths of the tragedians. They only very exceptionally treated historic themes, though one great national calamity, and a yet greater national victory, and in later times a few other historical subjects, were brought upon the stage. Such veiled historical allusions as critical ingenuity has sought not only in passages but in the entire themes of other Attic tragedies cannot, of course, even if accepted as such, stamp the plays in which they occur as historic dramas. No doubt Attic tragedy, though after a different and more decorous fashion, shared the tendency of her comic sister to introduce allusions to contemporary events and persons; and the indulgence of this tendency was facilitated by the revision (διaσκeυη) to which the works of the great poets were subjected by them, or by those who produced their works after them. So far as we know, the subjects of the tragedies before Aeschylus were derived from the epos; and it was a famous saying of this poet that his dramas were “but dry scraps from the great banquets of Homer ”—an expression which may be understood as including the poems which belong to the so-called Homeric cycles. Sophocles, Euripides, and their successors likewise resorted to the Trojan, and also to the Heracleau and the Thesean myths, and to Attic legend in general, as well as to Theban, to which already Aeschylus had had recourse, and to the side or subsidiary myths connected with these several groups. These substantially remained to the last the themes of Greek tragedy, the Trojan myths always retaining so prominent a place that Lucian could jest on the universality of their dominion. Purely invented subjects were occasionally treated by the later tragedians; of this innovation Agathon was the originator.

Thespis is said to have introduced the use of a prologue and a rhesis (speech)—the former being probably the opening speech recited by this solitary actor, the latter the dialogue between actor and chorus. It was a natural result of the introduction of the second actor that a second rhesis should likewise be added; and this tripartite division would be the earliest form of the trilogy,— three sections of the same myth forming the beginning, middle, and end of a single drama, marked off from one another by the choral songs. From this Aeschylus proceeded to the treatment of these several portions of a myth in three separate plays, connected together by their subject and by being performed in sequence on a single occasion. This is the Aeschylean trilogy, of which we have only one extant example, the Orestea, — as to which critics may differ whether Aeschylus adhered in it to his principle that the strength should lie in the middle—in other words, that the interest should centre in the second play. In any case, the symmetry of the trilogy was destroyed by the practice of performing after it a satyr-drama, probably, as a rule, if not always, connected in subject with the trilogy, which thus became a tetralogy, though this term, unlike the other, seems to be a purely technical expression invented by the learned.

Sophocles, a more conscious and probably a more self-critical artist than Aeschylus, may be assumed from the first to have elaborated his tragedies with greater care; and to this, as well as to his innovation of the third actor, which materially added to the fulness of the action, we may attribute his introduction of the custom of contending for the prize with single plays. It does not follow that he never produced connected trilogies, though we have no example of such by him or any later author; on the other hand, there is no proof that either he or any of his successors ever departed from the Aeschylean rule of producing three tragedies, followed by a satyr-drama, on the same day. This remained the third and last stage in the history of the construction of Attic tragedy. The tendency of its action towards complication was a natural progress, and is approved by Aristotle. This complication, in which Euripides excelled, led to his use of prologues, in which one of the characters opens the play by an exposition of the circumstances under which its action begins. This practice, though ridiculed by Aristophanes, was too convenient not to be adopted by the successors of Euripides, and Menander transferred it to comedy. As the dialogue increased in importance, so the dramatic significance of the chorus diminished. While in Aeschylus it mostly, and in Sophocles occasionally, takes part in the action, its songs could not but more and more approach the character of lyrical intermezzos; and this they openly assumed when Agathon began the practice of inserting choral songs (embolima) which had nothing to do with the action of the play. In the general contrivance of their actions it was only natural that, as compared with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should exhibit an advance in both freedom and ingenuity; but the palm due to a treatment at once piously adhering to the substance of the ancient legends and original in an effective dramatic treatment of them must be given to Sophocles. Euripides was, moreover, less skilful in untying complicated actions than in weaving them; hence his frequent resort to the expedient of the deus ex machina, which Sophocles employs only in his latest, play.

The other distinctions to be drawn between the dramatic qualities of the three great tragic masters must be mainly based upon a critical estimate of the individual genius of each. In the characters of their tragedies, AEschylus and Sophocles avoided those lapses of dignity with which from one point of view Euripides has been charged by Aristophanes and other critics, but which from another connect themselves with his humanity. If his men and women are less heroic and statuesque, they are more like men and women. Aristotle objected to the later tragedians that, compared with the great masters, they were deficient in the drawing of character—by which he meant the lofty drawing of lofty character. In diction, the transition is even more perceptible from the “helmeted phrases” of Aeschylus, who had Milton’s love of long words and sonorous proper names, to the play of Euripides’s “smooth and diligent tongue;” but to a sustained style even he remained essentially true, and it was reserved for his successors to introduce into tragedy the “low speech ”— i.e., the con-, versational language—of comedy. Upon the whole, however, the Euripidean diction seems to have remained the standard of later tragedy, the flowery style of speech introduced by Agathon finding no permanent favour.

Finally, AEschylus is said to have made certain reforms in tragic costume of which the object is self-evident,—to have improved the mask, and to have invented the cothurnus or buskin, upon which the actor was raised to loftier stature. Euripides was not afraid of rags and tatters; but the sarcasms of Aristophanes on this head seem feeble to those who are aware that they would apply to King Lear as well as to Telephus.

The history of Greek comedy is likewise that of an essentially Attic growth, although Sicilian comedy was earlier in date than her Attic sister or descendant. The former is represented by Epicharmus (fl. 500), and by the names of one or two other poets. It probably had a chorus, and, dealing as it did in a mixture of philosophical discourse, antithetical rhetoric, and wild buffoonery, necessarily varied in style. Though in-some respects it seems to have resembled the Middle rather than the Old Attic comedy, its subjects sometimes, like those of the latter, coincided with the myths of tragedy, of which they were doubtless parodies. The so-called mimes of Sophron (fl. 430) were dramatic scenes from Sicilian life, intended, not for the stage, but for recitation.

Attic comedy is usually divided into three periods or species, viz. :—

I. Old Comedy, which dates from the complete establishment of democracy by Pericles, though a comedy directed against Themistocles is mentioned. The Megarean farcical entertainments had long spread in the rural districts of Attica, and were now introduced into the city, where Cratinus and Crates (fl. 450) first moulded them into the forms of Attic art. The final victory of Pericles and the democratic party may be reckoned from the ostracism of Thucydides (444); and so eagerly was the season of freedom employed by the comic poets that already four years afterwards a law—which was, however, only a short time in force—limited their licence. Cratinus, an exceedingly bold and broad satirist, apparently of conservative tendencies, was followed by Eupolis (446-after 415), every one of whose plays appears to have attacked some individual, by Phrynichus, and others; but the representative of old comedy in its fullest development is Aristophanes (c. 444-c. 380), a comic poet of unique and unsurpassed genius. Dignified by the acquisition of a chorus (though of a less costly kind than the tragic) of masked actors, and of scenery and machinery, and by a corresponding literary elaboration and elegance of style, Old Attic comedy nevertheless remained true both to its origin and to the purposes of its introduction into the free imperial city. It borrowed much from tragedy, but it retained the phallic abandonment of the old rural festivals, the licence of word and gesture, and the audacious directness of personal invective. These characteristics are not features peculiar to Aristophanes. He was twitted by some of the older comic poets with having degenerated from the full freedom of the art by a tendency to refinement, aud he took credit to himself for having superseded the time-honoured cancan and the stale practical joking of his predecessors by a nobler kind of mirth. But in boldness, as he likewise boasted, he had no peer; and the shafts of his wit, though dipped in wine-lees and at times feathered from very obscene fowl, flew at high game. He has been accused of seeking to degrade what he ought to have recognized as good; and it has been shown with complete success that he is not to be taken as an impartial or accurate authority on Athenian history. But partisan as he was, he was also a genuine patriot; and his very political sympathies—which were conservative—were such as have often stimulated the most effective political satire, because they imply au antipathy to every species of excess. Of the conservative quality of reverence he was, however, altogether devoid; and his love for Athens was that of the most free-spoken of sons. Flexible even in his religious notions, he was in this as in other respects ready to be educated by his times; and, like a true comic poet, he could be witty at the expense even of his friends, and, it might almost be said, of himself. In wealth of fancy, and in beauty of lyric melody, he ranks high among the great poets of all times.

The distinctive feature of Old, as compared with Middle Comedy, is the parabasis, the speech in which the chorus, moving towards and facing the audience, addressed it in the name of the poet, often abandoning all reference to the action of the play. The loss of the parabasis was involved in the loss of the chorus, of which comedy was deprived in consequence of the general reduction of expenditure upon the comic drama, culminating in the law of Cinesias (396). But with the downfall of the independence of Athenian public life, the ground had been cut from under the feet of its most characteristic representative. The catastrophe of the city (405) had been preceded by the temporary overthrow of the democracy (411), and was followed by the establishment of an oligarchical “tyranny” under Spartan protection; and when liberty was restored (404), the citizens for a time addressed themselves to their new life in a soberer spirit and continued (or passed) the law prohibiting the introduction by name of any individual as one of the personages of a play. The change to which comedy had to accommodate itself was one which cannot be defined by precise dates, yet it was not the less inevitable in its progress aud results. Comedy, in her struggle for existence, now chiefly devoted herself to literary and social themes— such as the criticism of tragic poets, and the literary craze of women’s rights —and the transition to Middle Comedy accomplished itself. Of the later plays of Aristophanes, three are without a parabasis, and in the last of those preserved to us ° the chorus is quite insignificant.

II. Middle Comedy, whose period extends over the remaining years of Athenian freedom, thus differed in substance as well as in form from its predecessor. It is represented by the names of thirty-seven writers (more than double the number of poets attributed to Old Comedy) among whom Eubulus, Antiphanes, and Alexis are stated to have been pre-eminently fertile and successful. It was a comedy of manners as well as character, although its ridicule of particular classes of men tended to the creation of standing types, such as parasites, courtesans, revellers, and—a favourite figure already drawn by Aristophanes —the self-conceited cook. In style it necessarily inclined to become more easy and conversational; while in that branch which was devoted to the parodying of tragic myths, its purpose may have been to criticise, but its effect must have been to degrade. This species of the comic art had found favour at Athens already before the close of the great civil war; its inventor was the Thasian Hegemon, at whose Gigantomachia the Athenians were laughing on the day when the news arrived of the Sicilian disaster.

III. New Comedy, which is dated from the establishment of the Macedonian supremacy (338) is merely a further development of Middle. If its favourite types were more numerous, including the captain (of mercenaries)—the original of a long line of comic favourites—the cunning slave, &c., they were probably also more conventional. New Comedy appears to have first constituted love intrigues the main subject of dramatic actions. The most famous of the 64 writers said to have belonged to this period of comedy were Philemon (fl. from 330), Menander (342-29), and his contemporary Diphilus. Of these authors we know something from fragments, but more from their Latin adapters Plautus and Terence. As comedians of character, they were limited by a range of types which left little room for originality of treatment; in the construction of their plots they were skilful rather than varied. In style, as well as to some extent in construction, Menander took Euripides as his model, infusing into his comedy an element of moral and sentimental reflection, which refined if it did not enliven it. Yet it may be doubted whether either a high moral or a high artistic purpose animated this school of writers, and whether Epicurus in Lan dor’s dialogue does injustice to Menander in suspecting him of “enjoying the follies of men in our rotten state as flies enjoy fruit in its decay.” Fate or chance were the directing powers of his dramatic actions.

New Comedy, and with it Greek comedy proper, is regarded as having come to an end with Posidippus (fl. c 280). Other comic writers of a later date are, however, m'entioned, among them Rhinthon of Tarentum (fl. c. 300), whose mixed compositions have been called by various names, among them by that of phlyacographies (from phlyax, useless chatter). But Greek comedy ceased to be productive after it had been transplanted from Athens to Alexandria; and though even in its original form it long continued to be acted in imperial Rome, these are phases of its history which may here be passed by.

The religious origin of the Attic drama impresses itself upon all its most peculiar features. Theatrical performances were held at Athens only at fixed seasons in the early part of the year—at the Bacchic festivals of the country Dionysia (vintage), the Lenaea (wine-press), probably at the Anthesteria, and above all, at the Great Dionysia, or the Dionysia par excellence, at the end of March and beginning of April, when in her most glorious age Athens was crowded with visitors from the islands and cities of her federal empire. As a part of religious worship, the performances took place in a sacred locality— the Lenaeum on the south-eastern declivity of the Acropolis, where the first wine-press lleηos) was said to have been set up, and where now an altar of Bacchus (jthymele) formed the centre of the theatre. For the same reason, the exhibitions claimed the attendance of the whole population, and room was therefore provided on a grand scale— according to the Platonic Socrates, for “more than 30,000” spectators. The performances lasted all day, or were at least, in accordance with their festive character, extended to as great a length as possible. To their religious origin is likewise to be attributed the fact that they were treated as a matter of state concern. The expenses of the chorus, which in theory represented the people at large, were defrayed on behalf of the state by the liturgies (public services) of wealthy citzens, chosen in turn by the tribes to be choragi (leaders, i.e., providers of the chorus), the duty of training being, of course, deputed by them to professional persons (chorodidascali). Publicly appointed and sworn judges decided between the merits of the dramas produced in competition with one another; the successful poet, performers, and choragus were crowned with ivy, and the last-named was allowed at his own expense to consecrate a tripod in memory of his victory in the neighbourhood of the sacred Bacchic enclosure. Such a monument—one of the moβt graceful relics of ancient Athens—still stands in the place where it was erected, aud recalls to posterity the victory of Lysicrates, achieved in the same year as that of Alexander on the Granicus. The dramatic exhibitions being a matter of religion and state, the entrance money, {theoricum) which had been introduced to prevent overcrowding, was from the time of Pericles provided out of the public treasury. The whole υopulation had a right to its Bacchic holiday; neither women, nor boys, nor slaves were excluded from theatrical spectacles at Athens.

The religious character of dramatic performances at Athens, and the circumstances under which they accordingly took place, likewise determined their externals of costume and scenery. The actor’s dress was originally the festive Dionysian attire, of which it always retained the gay and variegated hues. The use of the mask was due to the actor’s appearing in the open air and at a distance from most of the spectators; its several species were elaborated with great care, and adapted to the different types of theatrical character. The cothurnus, or thick-soled boot, which further raised the height of the tragic actor (while the comedian wore a thin-soled boot), was likewise a relic of Bacchic costume. The scenery was, in the simplicity of its original conception, suited to open-air performances; but in course of time the art of scene-painting came to be highly cultivated, and movable scenes were contrived, together with machinery of the ambitious kind required by the Attic drama, whether for bringing gods down from heaven, or for raising mortals aloft.

On a stage and among surroundings thus conventional, it might seem as if little scope could have been left for the actor’s art. But though the demands made upon the Attic actor differed in kind even from those made upon his Roman successor, aud still more from those which the histrionic art has to meet in modern times, they were not the less rigorous. Mask and buskin might increase his stature, and the former might at once lend the appropriate expression to his appearance and the necessary resonance to his voice. But in declamation, dialogue, and lyric passage, in gesticulation and movement, he had to avoid the least violation of the general harmony of the performance. At the same time, the refinements of bye-play must, from the nature of the case, have been impossible on the Attic stage; the gesticulation must have been broad and massive; the movement slow and the grouping hard in tragedy; and the recitation must have surpassed in its weighty sameness that half-chant of which the echoes have never wholly died out from the stage. Not more than three actors, as has been seen, appeared in any Attic tragedy. The actors were provided by the poet; perhaps the performer of the first parts {protagonist') was paid by the state. It was again a result of the religious origin of Attic dramatic performances, and of the public importance attached to them, that the actor’s profession was held in high esteem. These artists were as a matter of course free Athenian citizens, often the dramatists themselves, and at times were employed in other branches of the public service. In later days, when tragedy had migrated to Alexandria, and when theatrical entertainments had spread over all the Hellenic world, the art of acting seems to have reached an unprecedented height, and to have taken an extraordinary hold of the public mind. Synods or companies of Dionysian artists abounded, who were in possession of various privileges, and in one instance at least (at Pergamus) of rich endowments. The most important of these was the Ionic company, established first in .Teos, and afterwards in Lebedos, near Colophon, which is said to have lasted longer than many a famous state. We likewise hear of strolling companies performing in partibus. Thus it came to pass that the vitality of some of the master-pieces of the Greek drama is without a parallel in theatrical history; while Greek actors were undoubtedly among the principal and most effective agents of the spread of literary culture through a great part of the known world.

The theory and technical system of the drama exercised the critical powers both of dramatists, such as Sophocles, aud of the greatest among Greek philosophers: If Plato touched the subject incidentally, Aristotle has in his Poetics (after 334) included an exposition of it, which, mutilated as it is, has formed the basis of all later systematic enquiries. The specialities of Greek tragic dramaturgy refer above all to the chorus; its general lawβ are those of the regular drama of all times. The theories of Aristotle and other earlier writers were elaborated by the Alexandrians, many of whom doubtless combined example with precept; they also devoted themselves to commentaries on the old masters, such as those in which Didymus (c. 30 b.c.) abundantly excelled, and collected a vast amount of learning on dramatic composition in general, which was doomed to perish, with so many other treasures, in the flames kindled by religious fanaticism.

“The history of the Greek stage,” says Sir Walter Scott, “is that of the dramatic art in general;” and herein no doubt lies the broad distinction to be drawn between the drama of the Greeks and the isolated growths previously treated in this sketch. Yet though such is the case,—though iu the Roman drama the native elements sink into insignificance when compared with those borrowed from the Greeks, and though the literary element in the modern drama of the West is directly or indirectly derived from the same source,—the Greek drama, both tragic and comic, had features of its own which it has been the principal aim of the foregoing brief account of it to mark. Tragedy never lost the traces of its religious origin; and the festive purposes of comedy are most signally apparent in precisely that period of its productivity whose works are least congenial to modern feeling and taste. But such is the wonderful power of the highest kind of art, that the tragedy of the three great masters, though its themes are so peculiar to itself that they have never been treated with the same effect by the numberless writers of other peoples who have essayed them, “hath ever been held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems;” and such is the commanding claim of genius, that Aristophanes, who cultivated a species of comedy of an altogether eccentric kind, occupies an eminence in his branch of the drama hardly more contestable than that of the great tragic triad in theirs. What is Hecuba to us that we should weep for her,—or Antigone that our sympathy should accompany her on her holy errand, forbidden by human laws, but enjoined upon her by the behest of Zeus and of Justice dwelling with the gods below,—or Agamemnon that we should thrill with horror when his cries announce the wreaking of his doom? Why can we laugh at the ribald repartees of hide-seller and sausage-seller, careless of the merits of the former of these advanced politicians, and catch something of the dew of the rain-bringing maidens as it falls upon their beloved land, where the Bromian joy greets the advent of spring 1 Because in all these instances, and in every other, the art of the Greek drama, while winged by the individual power of genius, is at the same time true to its purposes as an art, and in harmony with Nature, who will not teach her laws or surrender her secrets of a sudden or to all.

In its most productive age, as well as in the times of its decline and decay, the Roman drama exhibits the continued coexistence of native forms by the side of those imported from Greece—either kind being necessarily often subject to the influence of the other. Italy has ever been the native land of actmg and of scenic representation; and though Roman dramatic literature is in the main but a faint reflex of Greek examples, yet there is perhaps no branch of Roman literary art more congenial than this to the soil whence it sprang.

The beginnings of dramatic performances in Italy are to be sought in the rural festivities which doubtless from a very early period developed in lively intermixture the elements of the dance, of jocular and abusive improvisations of song, speech, and dialogue, and of an assumption of character such a3 may be witnessed in any ordinary conversation among southern Italians at the present day. The occasions of these festivities were religious celebrations, public or private—among the latter more especially weddings, which have in all ages been provocative of mirth ful demonstrations. The so-called Fescennine verses (from fascinum, or from Fescennium in southern Etruria), which were afterwards confined to weddings, and ultimately gave rise to an elaborate species of artistic poetry, never merged into actual dramatic performances. In the saturas, on the other hand—a name originally due to the goatskins of the shepherds, but from primitive times connected with the fullness of both performers and performance—there seems from the first to have been a dramatic element; they were probably comic songs or stories recited with gesticulation and flute accompaniment. Introduced into the city, these entertainments received a new impulse from the performances of the Etruscan players (ludiones), who had been brought into Rome when scenic games (ludi scenici) were, in 364 b.c., for purposes of religious propitiation, first held there. These istriones, as they were called at Rome (istri had been their native name), who have had the honour of transmitting their appellation to the entire histrionic art and its professors, were at first only dancers and pantomimists in a city where their speech was unintelligible. But their performances encouraged and developed those of other players and mountebanks, so that after the establishment of the regular drama at Rome on the Greek model, the saturoe came to be performed as farcical after-pieces (exοdia), until they gave way to other species. Of these the mimi were at Rome probably coeval in their beginnings with the stage itself, where those who performed them were afterwards known under the same name, possibly in the place of an older appellation (planipedes, bare-footed) These loose farces, after being probably at first performed independently, were then played as after-pieces, till in the imperial period, when they reasserted their predominance, they were again produced by themselves. At the close of the republican period the mirnus had found its way into literature (through D. Laberius and others), and had been assimilated in both form and subjects to other varieties of the comic drama—preserving, however, as its distinctive feature, a preponderance of the mimic or gesticulatory element. Together with the pantomimus (v. infra) the mimus continued to prevail in the days of the empire, having transferred its innate grossness (for it was originally a representation of low life) to its treatment of mythological subjects, with which it dealt in accordance with the demands of a “lubrique and adulterate age.” As a matteι of course, the mimus freely borrowed from other species, among which, so far as they were of native Italian origin, the Atellane fables (from Atelia in Campania) call for special mention. Usually supposed to be of Oscan birth, they originally consisted in delineations of the life of small towns, in which dramatic and other satire has never ceased to find a favourite butt. The principal personages in these living sketches gradually assumed a fixed and conventional character, which they retained even when, after the final overthrow of Campanian independence (210), the Atellanae had been transplanted to Rome. Here the heavy father or husband (pappus), the ass-eared glutton (maccus), the full-cheeked, voracious chatterbox {ouccd), and the wily sharper (dorsenus) became accepted comic types, and with others of a similar kind were handed down, to reappear in the modern Italian drama. In these characters lay the essence of the Atellanas; their plots were extremely simple; the dialogue (perhaps interspersed with songs in the Saturnian metre) it was left to the performers to improvise, In course of time these plays also assumed a literary form, being written out at length by their authors; but under the empire they were gradually absorbed in the pantomimes.

The regular Roman drama, on the other hand, was of foreign (i.e., Greek) origin; and its early history, at all events, attaches itself to more or less fixed dates. It begins with the year 240 b.c., when at the ludi Romani, held with unusual splendour after the first Punic war, the victory was, according to Macedonian precedent, celebrated by the first production of a tragedy and a comedy on the Roman stage. The author of both, who appeared in person as an actor, was Livius Andronicus (b. 278 or earlier), a native of the Greek city of Tarentum, where the Dionysiae festivals enjoyed high popularity. His models were in tragedy the later Greek tragedians and their revisions of the three great Attic masters, in comedy no doubt Menander aud his school. These continued the examples of the regular Roman drama during the whole of its course, even when it resorted to native themes.

The nature of Roman tragedy admits of no doubt, although our conclusions respecting its earlier progress are only derived from analogy, from scattered notices especially of the titles of plays, and from such fragments—mostly very brief—as have come down to us. Of the known titles of the tragedies of Livius Andronicus, six belong to the Trojan cycle, and this preference consistently maintained itself among the tragedians of the “Trojugenae;” next in popularity seem to have been the myths of the house of Tantalus, of the Pelopidae, and of the Argonauts. The distinctions drawn by later Roman writers between the styles of the tragic poets of the republican period must in general be taken on trust. The Campanian Cn. Naevius (fl. from 236) wrote comedies as well as tragedies, so that the rigorous separation observed among the Greeks in the cultivation of the two dramatic species was at first neglected at Rome. His realistic tendency, displayed in that fondness for political allusions which brought upon him the vengeance of a noble family (the Metelli) incapable of understanding a joke of this description, might perhaps under more favourable circumstances have led him more fully to develop a new tragic species invented by him. But the fabula praetexta or praetextata (from the purple-bordered robe worn by higher magistrates) was not destined to become the means of emancipating the Roman serious drama from the control of Greek examples. In design, it was national tragedy on historic subjects of patriotic interest—which the Greeks had only treated in isolated instances; and one might at first sight marvel why, after Naevius and his successors had produced skilful examples of the species, it should have failed to overshadow and outlast in popularity a tragedy telling the oft-told foreign tales of Thebes and Mycenae, or even the pseudo-ancestral story of Troy. But it should not be forgotten to how great an extent so-called early Roman history consisted of the traditions of the gentes, and how little the party-life of later republican Rome lent itself to a dramatic treatment likely to be acceptable both to the nobility and to the multitude. As for the emperors, the last licence they would have permitted to the theatre was a free popular treatment of the national history; if Augustus prohibited the publication of a tragedy by his adoptive father on the subject of Oedipus, it was improbable that he or his successors should have sanctioned the performance of plays dealing with the earthly fortunes of Divus Julius himself, or with the story of Marius, or that of the Gracchi, or any of the other tragic themes of later republican or imperial history. The historic drama at Rome thus had no opportunity for a vigorous life, even could tragedy have severed its main course from the Greek literature of which it has been well called a “free-hand copy.” The proetextoe of which we know .chiefly treat—possibly here and there helped to form —legends of a hoary antiquity, or celebrate battles chronicled in family or public records; and in the end the species died a natural death.

Q. Ennius (239-168), the favourite poet of the great families, was qualified by his Tarentine education, which taught the Oscan youth the Greek as well as the Latin tongue (so that he boasted “three souls ”), to become the literary exponent of the Hellenizing tendencies of his age of Roman society. Nearly half of the extant names of his tragedies belong to the Trojan cycle; and Euripides was clearly his favourite source and model. M. Pacuvius (b. c. 229), like Ennius subject from his youth up to the influences of Greek civilization, and the first Roman dramatist who devoted himself exclusively to the tragic drama, was the least fertile of the chief Roman tragedians, but was regarded by the ancients as indisputably superior to Ennius. He again was generally (though not uniformly) held to have been surpassed by L. Accius (b. 170), a learned scholar and prolific dramatist, of whose plays 50 titles and a very large number of fragments have been preserved. The plays of the three last-named poets maintained themselves on the stage till the close of the republic; and Accius was quoted by the emperor Tiberius. Of the other tragic writers of the republic several were dilettanti —such as the great orator and eminent politician C. Julius Strabo; the cultivated officer Q. Tullius Cicero, who made an attempt, disapproved by his illustrious brother, to introduce the satyr-drama into the Roman theatre; L. Cornelius Balbus, a Caesarean partisan; and finally C. Julius Caesar himself. Tragedy continued to be cultivated under the earlier emperors; and of one author, the famous and ill-fated L. Annaeus Seneca (4 b.c.-65 a.d.), a series of works has come down to us. In accordance with the character of their author’s prose-work, they exhibit a strong predominance of the rhetorical element, and a pomposity of style far removed from that of the poets Sophocles and Euripides, from whom Seneca derived his themes. The metrification of his plays is very strict, and they were doubtless intended for recitation, whether or not also designed for the stage. A few tragic poets are mentioned after Seneca, till about the reign of Domitian (81-96) the list comes to an end. The close of Roman tragic literature is obscurer than its beginning; and, w hile there are traces of tragic performances at Rome as late as even the 6th century, we are ignorant how long the works of the old masters of Roman tragedy maintained themselves on the stage.

It would obviously be an error to draw from the plays of Seneca—unfortunately the only examples of Roman tragedy we possess—conclusions as to the method and style of the earlier writers. In general, however, no important changes seem to have occurred in the progress of Roman tragic composition. The later Greek plays remained, so far as can be gathered, the models in treatment; and inasmuch as at Rome the single plays were performed by themselves, there was every inducement to make their action as full and complicated as possible. The dialogue-scenes (deverbid) appear to have been largely interspersed with musical passages (cantica); but the effect of the latter must have suffered from the barbaj∙∩us custom of having the songs sung by a boy placed in front of the flute-player (cantor), while the actor accompanied them with gesticulations. The chorus (unlike the Greek) stood on the stage itself and seems occasionally at least to have taken part in the action. But the whole of the musical element can hardly have attained to so full a development as among the Greeks. The divisions of the action appear at first to have been three; from the addition of prologue and epilogue may have arisen the invention (probably due in tragedy to Varro) of the fixed number of five acts. In style, such influence as the genius of Roman literature could exercise must have been in the direction of the rhetorical and the pathetic; a surplus of energy on the one hand, and a defect of poetic richness on the other, can hardly have failed to characterize these, as they did all the other productions of earlier Roman poetry.

In Roman comedy two different kinds—respectively called palliata and togata from the names of dress—were distinguished,—the former treating Greek subjects and imitating Greek originals, the latter professing a native character. The palliata sought its originals especially in New Attic comedy; and its authors, as they advanced in refinement of style, became more and more dependent upon their models, and unwilling to gratify the coarser tastes of the public by local allusions or gross seasonings. But that kind of comedy which shrinks from the rude breath of popular applause usually has in the end to give way to less squeamish rivals; and thus, after the species had been cultivated for about a century (c. 250-150 b.c. ), palliatae ceased to be composed except for the amusement of small circles, though the works of the most successful authors, Plautus and Terence, kept the stage even after the establishment of the empire. Among the earlier writers of palliatae were the tragic poets Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius, but they were alike surpassed by T. Maccius Plautus (254-184), nearly all of whose comedies esteemed genuine by Varro—not less than 20 in number—have been preserved. He was exclusively a comic poet, and though he borrowed his plots from the Greeks—from Diphilus and Philemon apparently in preference to the more refined Menander—there was in him a genuinely national as well as a genuinely popular element. Of the extent of his originality it is impossible to judge; probably it lies in his elaboration of character and the comic details of his dialogue rather than in his plots. Modern comedy is indebted to him in all these points; and in consequence of this fact, as well as of the attention his text has for linguistic reasons received from scholarship both ancient and modern, his merits have met with their full share of recognition. Statius Caecilius (an Insubrian brought to Rome as a captive c. 200) stands midway between Plautus and Terence, but no plays of his remain. P. Terentius Afer (c. 185-159) was, as his cognomen implies, a native of Carthage, of whose conqueror he enjoyed the patronage. His six extant comedies seem to be tolerably close renderings of their Greek originals, nearly all of which were plays of Menander. It was the good fortune of the works of Terence to be preserved in an exceptionally large number of MSS. in the monastic libraries of the Middle Ages, and thu3 (as will be seen) to become a main link between the ancient and the Christian drama. As a dramatist he is distinguished by correctness of style rather than by variety in his plots or vivacity in his characters; his chief merit— and at the same time the quality which has rendered him so suitable for modern imitation—is to be sought in the polite ease of his dialogue. In general, the characteristics of the palliatae, which were divided into five acts, are those of the New Comedy of Athens, like which they had no chorus; for purposes of explanation from author to audience the prologue sufficed; the Roman versions were probably terser than their originals, which they often altered by the process called contamination.

The togatae, in the wider sense of the term, included all Roman plays of native origin—among the rest the praetextoe, in contradistinction to which and to the transient species of the trabeatae (from the dress of the knights) the comedies dealing with the life of the lower classes were afterwards called tabernariae (from taberna, a shop), a name suited by some of their extant titles,.while others point to the treatment of provincial scenes. The togata, which was necessarily more realistic than the palliata, and doubtless fresher as well as coarser in tone, flourished in Roman literature between 170 and 80 b.c. In this species Titinius, all whose plays bear Latin titles and were tabernariae, was succeeded by the more refined L. Afranius, who, though still choosing national subjects, seems to have treated them in the spirit of Menander. His plays continued to be performed under the empire, though with an admixture of elements derived from that lower species, the pantomime, to which they also were in the end to succumb. The Romans likewise adopted the burlesque kind of comedy called from its inventor Phinthonica, and by other names (cf. ante).

The end of Roman dramatic literature was dilettantism and criticism; the end of the Roman drama was spectacle and show, buffoonery and sensual allurement. It was for this that the theatre had passed through all its early troubles, when the political puritanism of the old school had upheld the martial games of the circus against the enervating influence of the stage. In those days the guardians of Roman virtue had sought to diminish the attractions of the theatre by insisting upon its remaining as uncomfortable as possible; but as was usual at Rome, the privileges of the upper orders were at last extended to the population at large, though a separation of classes continued to be characteristic of a Roman audience. The first permanent theatre erected at Rome was that of Gn. Pompeius (55 b.c.), which contained nearly 18,000 seats; but even of this the portion allotted to the performers (scoena) was of wood; nor was it till the reign of Tiberius (22 a.d.) that, after being burnt down, the edifice was rebuilt in stone. See Theatre.

Though a species of amateur literary censorship, introduced by Pompeius, became customary in the Augustan age, in general the drama’s laws at Rome were given by the drama’s patrons—in other words, the production of plays was a matter of private speculation. The exhibitions were contracted for with the officials charged with the superintendence of public amusements (curatores ludorum) ; the actors were slaves trained for the art, mostly natives of Southern Italy or Greece. Many of them rose to reputation and wealth, purchased their freedom, and themselves became directors of companies; but though Sulla might make a knight of Roscius, and Caesar and his friends defy ancient prejudice, the stigma of civil disability (infamia) continued to adhere to the profession. The actor’s art was carried on at Rome under conditions differing in other respects from those of the Greek theatre. The Romans loved a full stage, and from the later period of the republic liked to see it crowded with supernumeraries. This accorded with their military instincts, and with the general grossness of their tastes, which led them in the theatre as well as in the circus to delight in spectacle and tumult, and to applaud Pompeius when he furnished forth the return of Agamemnon in the Clytaemnestra with a grand total of 600 heavily-laden mules. On the other hand, the actors were nearer to the spectators in the Roman theatre than in the Greek, the stage (pulpitum) not being separated from the first rows of the audience by an orchestra occupied by the chorus; and this led in earlier time3 to the absence of masks, variously-coloured wigs serving to distinguish the age of the characters. Roscius, however, is said (in consequence of an obliquity of vision disfiguring his countenance) to have introduced the use of masks; and the innovation, though disapproved of, afterwards maintained itself. The tragic ⅛ctors wore the crepida, corresponding to the cothurnus, and a heavy toga, which in the p>rcetexta had the purple border giving its name to the species. The conventional costumes of the various kinds of comedy are likewise indicated by their names. The comparative nearness of the actors to the spectators encouraged the growth of that close criticism of acting for which Italy has always been famous, and which manifested itself in all the ways familiar to modern audiences. Where there is criticism, devices are apt to spring up for anticipating or directing it; and the evil institution of the claque is modelled on Roman precedent. In fine, though the art of acting at Rome must have originally formed itself on Greek example and precept, it was doubtless elaborated with a care unknown to the greatest Attic artists. Its most famous representatives were Gallus, called after his emancipation Q. Roscius Gallus (d. c. 62 b.c.), who, like the great “English Roscius,” excelled equally in tragedy and comedy, and his younger contemporary Clodius Aesopus, a Greek by birth, likewise eminent in both branches of his art, though in tragedy more particularly. Both these great actors are said to have been constant hearers of the great orator Hortensius; and Roscius wrote a treatise on the relations between oratory and acting. In the influence of oratory upon the drama are perhaps to be sought the chief among the nobler features of Roman tragedy to which a native origin may be fairly ascribed.

The ignoble end of the Roman—and with it of the ancient classical—drama has been already foreshadowed. The elements of dance and song, never integrally united with the dialogue in Roman tragedy, were now altogether separated from it. While it became customary simply to recite tragedies to the small audiences who continued (or, as a matter of courtesy, affected) to appreciate them, the Pantomimus commended itself to the heterogeneous multitudes of the Roman theatre by confining the performance of the actor to gesticulation and dancing, a chorus singing the accompanying text. The species was developed with extraordinary success already under Augustus by Pylades and Bathyllus; and so popular were these entertainments, that even eminent poets, such as Lucan (d. 65 a.d.), wrote the librettos for them, of which the subjects were generally mythological, only now and then historical, and chiefly of an amorous kind. A single masked performer was able to enchant admiring crowds by the art of gesticulation and movement only. In what direction this art tended, when suiting itself to the demands of a recklessly sensual age, may be gathered from the remark of one of the last pagan historians of the empire, that the introduction of pantomimes was a sign of the general moral decay of the world which began with the beginning of the monarchy. Comedy more easily lost itself in the cognate form of the mimus, which survived all other kinds of comic entertainments because of its more audacious immorality and open obscenity. Women took part in these performances, by means of which, as late as the 6th century, a mima acquired a celebrity which ultimately raised her to the imperial throne. Meanwhile the regular drama had lingered on, enjoyiug in all its forms imperial patronage in the days of the literary revival under Hadrian (117-138); but the perennial taste for the spectacles of the amphitheatre, which reached its climax in the days of Constantine the Great (306-337), hastened the downfall of the dramatic art in general. It was not absolutely extinguished even by the irruptions of the northern barbarians; but a bitter adversary had by this time risen into power. The whole authority of the Christian church had, without usually caring to distinguish between the nobler and the looser elements in the drama, involved all its manifestations in a consistent condemnation; and when the faith of that church was acknowledged as the religion of the Roman empire, the doom of the theatre was sealed. This doom was not undeserved; for the remnants of the literary drama had long been overshadowed by entertainments such as both earlier and later Roman emperors—Domitian and Trajan as well as Galerius and Constantine—had found themselves obliged to prohibit in the interests of public morality and order, by the bloody spectacles of the amphitheatre, and by the maddening excitement of the circus; the art of acting had become the pauder of the lewd or frivolous itch of eye and ear; and the theatre had contributed its utmost to the demoralization of a world. The attitude taken up by the Christian church towards the stage was in general as unavoidable as its particular expressions were at .times heated by fanaticism or distorted by ignorance. Had she not visited with her anathema a wilderness of decay, she could not herself have become—what she little dreamt of becoming—the nursing mother of the new birth of an art which seemed incapable of regeneration.

Though already in the 4th century actors and mountebanks had been excluded from the benefit of Christian sacraments, and excommunication had been extended to those who visited theatres instead of churches on Sundays and holidays, and though similar enactments had followed at later dates, yet the entertainments of the condemned profession had never been entirely suppressed, and had even occasionally received imperial patronage. Gradually, however, the mimes and their fellows became a wandering fraternity, who doubtless appeared at festivals when they were wanted and vanished again into the deepest obscurity which has ever covered that mysterious existence —a stroller’s life. It was thus that these strange intermediaries of civilization carried down such traditions as survived of the acting drama of pagan antiquity into the succeeding ages.

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 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 (in the latter part of the 4th century) the Passion of Christ, usually attributed to St Gregory Nazianzen, 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 the design of the famous “comedies” of Hrotsvitha, 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, and miraculous or otherwise startling conversions —

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 of 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 Christian drama. To what extent the mimes, or joculatores (as in the early Middle Ages they came to be more generally called), kept alive the usage of entertainments more essentially dramatic than the minor varieties of their performances, we cannot say; but we know that in Northern France they at a very early date appropriated the beginnings of the religious drama to secular uses. Doubtless in both Celtic and Teutonic populations there survived the remnants of religious rites containing dramatic elements, and the heathen festivals, of Roman or other origin, communicated something of their character to the Christian, at which the joculatores were apt to appear. 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 Ü\q jongleurs, as the joculatores were now called, were confounded with the trouvères, who sang the chansons de geste commemorative of deeds of war. As appointed servants of particular households they were here, and afterwards in England, called ménestrels (from ministeriales) and 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 Charlemague, 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; while here as elsewhere the humbler members of the craft strolled from castle to convent, to village-green and city-street, exhibiting as jugglers their pantomimic and other tricks.

Both the literary and the professional element had thus survived to become tributaries to the main stream of the early Christian drama, which had its source in the liturgy of the church 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 one in the anthems and responses of the congregation. At a very early period—certainly already in the 5th century—it was usual to increase the attractions of public worship on special occasions by living pictures illustrating the Gospel narrative and accompanied by songs; and thus a certain amount of action gradually introduced itself into the service. When the epical part of the liturgy was connected with its spectacular and to some degree mimical adjuncts, the lyrical accompaniment being of course retained, the liturgical mystery— the earliest form of the Christian drama—was in 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 the offices (as they were called) of the Shepherds, the Innocents, the Holy Sepulchre, tfcc., in connection with the gospel of the day. In France in the 12th, or perhaps already in the 11th century, short Latin texts were written for these liturgical mysteries; these included passages from the popular legend of St Nicholas as well as from scriptural story. In the same century the further 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— a mere scholars’ term of course, but one to which the principal examples of the English mystery-drama correspond.

The productions of the mediaeval 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 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 which soon admitted elements from other sources, was not, and could not be, uniform. As the plays grew longer, their paraphernalia more extensive, and their spectators more numerous, they began to be represented outside as well as inside the churches, and the use of the vulgar tongue came to be gradually preferred. Miracles were less dependent on this connection with the church services than mysteries proper; and lay associations, guilds, 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.

At times favoured, at times denounced by the clergy, dramatic entertainments thus lustily flourished for a series of centuries, in some countries -more, in others less, religious in their character, and variously reinforced by the efforts of the craftsmen of the acting profession. In France, where they had always preserved a secular side, they soonest advanced into forms connecting themselves with later growths of the drama. At Paris the fraternity of the Bazoche (clerks of the Parliament and the Châtelet) in 1303 acquired the right of conducting the popular festivals; but after the Confrérie de la Passion, who devoted themselves originally to the performance of passion-plays, had obtained a royal privilege for this purpose in 1402, the Bazoche gave itself up to the production of moralities. A third association, calling itself the ∑nfans sans souci (the Devilmay-cares), having about the same time acquired the right of acting sοtties— short comic plays with allegorical figures— the other companies took a leaf out of their book, interwove their mysteries and moralities with comic scenes from popular life, and gradually began to confine themselves to secular themes. Thus the transition to the regular drama here easily prepared itself; already in 1395 we find the brethren of the Passion performing a serious play on the story of Griseldis ; and among the abundant literature of sotties and farces (from Italian farsa, Latin ∕αmiα), which after mingling real types with allegorical personages had come to exclude the latter, the immortal Maistre Pierre Patelin (acted in 1480 by the Bazoche) is, however slight in plot, in all essentials a comedy. No Italian mystery has been preserved from an earlier date than 1243, about which time associations were in this country also founded for the production of religious plays. These seem to have differed little from those of Northern Europe except by a less degree of coarseness in their comic characters. Plays on Old Testament subjects were called figure, on New vangeli; in the 15th and 16th centuries they were elaborated and produced with great care, and bore various names, of which rappresentazioηi was the most common. The spectacular magnificence of theatrical displays accorded with that of the processions, both ecclesiastical and lay,—the trionfi as they were called in the days of Dante,—and the religious drama gradually acquired an academical character assimilating it to the classical attempts 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 perhaps suggested his early experiments in this to Petrarch, the father of the Italian Renaissance. After his death there are traces of similar literary efforts in the volgare Provenzale dialect. Meanwhile remnants of the ancient popular entertainments had survived in the improvised farces acted at the courts, in the churches (farsa spirituale), and among the people; the Roman carnival had preserved its waggon plays (caτri); and numerous links remained to connect the popular modern comedy of the Italians with the Atellanes and mimes of their ancestors. In Spain, where all traces of the ancient Roman theatre (except its architectural remains) had disappeared after the Moorish conquest, the extant remains of the religious drama date from a still later period than the Italian—the 13th or 14th century. Its beginnings presented themselves in an advanced form, which aroused the opposition of the clergy, who sought to take the plays under their own control. In the secular literature of Spain nothiug dramatic can be proved to have existed till the latter part of the 15th century. It had probably been customary from early times to insert in the mysteries so-called entremeses or interludes; but it is not till 1472 that in the couplets of Mingo B,evulgo (i.e., Domingo Vulgus, the common people), and about the same time, in another dialogue by the same author, we have attempts of a kind resembling the Italian contrasti (v. infra). In Germany, on the other hand (the history of whose drama so widely differs from that of the Spanish), religious plays were performed probably as early as the 12th century at the Christmas and Easter festivals. Other festivals were afterwards celebrated in the same way, but up to the Reformation Easter enjoyed the preference. About the 14th century miracle-plays began to be frequently performed; and as these often treated subjects of historical interest, local or other, the transition to the barren beginnings of the German historical drama was afterwards easy. Though these early German plays often have an element of the moralities, they were not as in France blended with the drolleries of the professional strollers (fahrende Leute), which, carried on chiefly in carnival time, gave rise to the Shrove-Tuesday plays (Fastnachtsspiele), scenes from common life largely interspersed with practical fun. To these last a more enduring literary form was first given in the 15th century by Hans Rosenplüt, called Schnepperer—or Hans Schnepperer, called Rosenblüt—the predecessor of Hans Sachs. By this time a connection was establishing itself in Germany between the dramatic amusements of the people and the literary labours of the master-singers; but the religious drama proper survived in Catholic Germany far beyond the times of the Reformatioü, and was not suppressed in Bavaria and Tyrol till the end of the 18th century.

Omitting any notice of traces remaining of the religious drama in other European countries, we come to our own, from whose literature a fair idea may be derived of the general character of these mediaeval productions. The miracle-plays, miracles, or plays (these being the terms used in 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 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.

The flourishing period of English miracle-plays begins with the practice of their performance by trading-companies in the towns. Of this practice 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, including Wakefield, Coventry, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Leeds, Lancaster, Preston, Kendal, Wymondham, Dublin, and London, in which last the performers were the parish clerks. Three collections, in addition to some single examples, of such plays have come down to us—viz., the Towneley plays, which were probably acted at the fairs of Woodkirk, 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 Towneley may be even earlier than 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 combinar tion 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.

“The manner of these plays,” we read in a description of those at Chester, dating from the close of the 16th century, “were :— Every 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 bo devoid of fun. But many of these features are in truth only homely and naif, and the simplicity of feeling they exhibit is at times not without its pathos. The occasional excessive grossness is due to an absence of refinement of taste rather than to an obliquity of moral sentiment. In this, as in other respects, the Coventry Plays, which were possibly written by clerical hands, show an advance upon the others. In the same plays is already to be observed an element of abstract figures, which connects them with a different species of the mediaeval drama.

The moralities corresponded to the love for moral allegory which manifests itself in so many periods of our literature, and which, while dominating the whole field of mediaeval literature, was nowhere more assiduously and effectively cultivated than in England. It is necessary to bear this in mind, in order to understand what to us seems r>o 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 connection 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 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 teaze 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.

The earlier English moralities —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 is still essentially the purpose of the morality we possess by Henry VIII.’s poet,· the witty Skelton, and even of another, perhaps the most perfect example of its class, which in date is already later than the Reformation. But if such theology as Eνery-Man teaches is the orthodox doctrine of Rome, its successor, R. We ver’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, and connects itself with political feeling in a famous morality, Sir Dâvid Lyndsay’s Satire of. the Three Estaitis, written 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. Yet another series connects itself with the ideas of the Renaissance rather than the Reformation, treating of intellectual progress rather than of moral conduct; this extends from the reign of Henry VIII. to that of his younger daughter.

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 oveι to 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; e but before most of these were written, a further step in advance had been taken by a man of genius, John Heywood (d. 1565), whose interludes were short farces in the French manner, dealing 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 folies of his age, and not the least for those of the clerical profession. Other writers, such as T. Ingeland, 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— a name which had been used for the moralities themselves from an early date—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, w as 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 distinctly asserted itself. It must not, however, be forgotten that from an early period iu 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 our dramatists were the ministers of pageantry; and perhape it would have been an advantage for the the future of the theatre, if the legitimate drama and the Triumphs of Old Drapery had been more jealously kept apart.

The literary influence which finally transformed the growths noticed above into the national dramas of the several countries of Europe, was in a word the influence of the Renaissance. Among the remains of classical antiquity which were studied, 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 careful copies, first in one of their own, then in modern, tongues; and these essentially literary endeavours came into more or less direct contact with, and acquired more or less control over, the already existing entertainments of the stage. Thus the stream of the modern drama, whose source and contributories have been described, was brought back into the ancient bed, from which its flow diverged into a number of national courses, unequal in impetus and strength, and varying in accordance with the manifold conditions of their progress. Of these it remains to pursue the most productive or important.

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 considered, not only that the Italian language had the vantage-ground of closest relationship to the Latin, but tħat the genius of the Italian people has at all times inspired it with a predilection for the drama. The cause is doubtless to be sought in the absence from Italian national life during a long period, and more especially during that contemporary 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 absence was due partly to the peculiarities of the Italian character, partly to the political and ecclesiastical experiences Italy was fated to undergo. The Italians were strangers to the enthusiasm of patriotism, which was as the breath in the nostrils of our Elizabethan age, as well as to the single-minded religiosity which identified Spain with the spirit of the Catholic Revival· The clear-sightedness of the Italians had something to de 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. 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, did the rest, and for many generations rendered impotent 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, the 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 dςama, in both its tragic and its comic branches, began with a reproduction, in the Latin language, of classical models; but tragedy in its beginnings showed a tendency which it was before long to treat themes of national historical interest. Two earliest tragedies of which we hear, written by the Paduan historian Mussato about 1300, were both copies of Seneca; but while the one (Achilleis) treated a classical theme, the other dealt with the history of a famous tyrant of the author’s native city (Eccerinis). In the next century events of recent or contemporary history were similarly dealt with ∙} but the majority of its Latin dramas were doubtless written to suit the tastes of the friends and patrons of the Italian Renaissance, who, like Lorenzo the Magnificent, wished to domesticate the heathen gods and goddesses on a stage hitherto occupied by the sacred figures of Christian belief. Such were the Latin imitations and translations of Greek and Latin tragedies and comedies by Bishop Martirano, the friend of Lorenzo’s son Pope Leo X., on the adventure of Danaë and other subjects; the famous Progne of G. Corraro (d. 1464), the nephew of an earlier Pope; and the efforts of Pomponius Laetus, who, with the aid of Cardinal Riaro, sought to revive the ancient theatre, especially that of Plautus and Terence, at Rome. Many Latin comedies are mentioned from the 15th century, during which, as during its predecessor, Latin continued the dominant language of the stage in Italy. Nor was the representation even of Greek plays altogether unknown; it was by her performance of the Electra of Sophocles that Alexandra Scala caused Politian to envy Orestes.

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 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 it has hitherto run, more than the after-growth of an aftergrowth. The honour of having been the earliest tragedy in Italian seems to belong to Galeotto’s Sofonisba (1502), a piece in 15 or 20 acts, regardless of unity of scene. A. da Pistoia’s Pamfila (1508) followed, of which the subject was taken from Boccaccio, though the names of the characters were Greek. 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 verse (verso scioltd) instead of the ottava and te·rza rima of the earlier tragedians (retaining, however, the lyric measures of the chorus), by Trissino, who was employed as nuncio by that Pope. Other tragedies of the former half of the 16th century were the Rosmunda of Rucellai, a nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1516); 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, of the notorious Aretino (1549); and the nine tragedies of G. Cinthio, among which HOrbecche (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. In the latter half of the 16 th century may be mentioned the Didone and the Jfαriαnnα of L. Dolce, the translator of Seneca (1565); the Hadriana (acted before 1561 or 1586) of L. Groto, which treats the story of Romeo and Juliet; Tasso’s Torη,smondo (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 (1550) 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.

The tragedians of the 17th century continued to pursue the beaten track, at times in vain, seeking by the introduction of musical airs to compromise with the 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 Errniηigildo (1655), and defended by him in a discourse prefixed to the play, was in Italy no more than in England able to achieve a permanent success; its chief representative was afterwards Martelli (d. 1727), whose rhymed Alexandrian verse (Martelliαno) , 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 beginning of which are attributed to tbe 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, arffl. to a general increase of freedom in treatment. 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 master-piece 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. It was followed by a tragedy full of horrors, noticeable as having given rise to the first Italian dramatic parody; and by the highly esteemed productions of Granelli (d. 1769) and his contemporary Bettinelli. 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, 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. The· spirit of a love of freedom which his creations 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 dramas —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 master-pieces.

The political colouring given by Alfieri to Italian tragedy reappears in the plays of U. Foscolo (c. 1760-1827) and A. Manzoni (1784-1873), both of whom are under the influence of the romantic school of modern literature; and to these names must be added those of S. Pellico (1789-1854) and G. B. Niccolini (1785-1861), whose most celebrated dramas treat national themes familiar to all students of modern history and literature. While Italian tragedy has upon the whole adhered to its love of strong situations and passionate declamation, its later growths have shown a capability of development precluding the supposition that its history is closed. The art of tragic acting at the present day probably stands higher in Italy than in any other European country; if the tragic muse were to be depicted with the features of a living artist, it is those of Adelaide Ristori which she would assume.

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 disputations between pairs of abstract or allegorical figures, in the frottola human types take the place of abstractions, and more than two characters appear. To the farsa (a name used of a wide variety of entertainments) a new literary as well as social significance was given by the Neapolitan court-poet Sannazaro (c. 1492); about the same time a ii capitano valoroso, ” Venturino of Pesara, first brought on the modern stage the capitano glorioso or s/xwente, the military braggart who owed his origin both to Plautus and to the Spanish officers who abounded in the Italy of those days. The popular character-comedy, a relic of the ancient Atellanes, likewise took a new lease of life—and this in a double form. The improvised comedy {Commedia α sogβttoi) was now as a rule performed by professional actors, members of a craft, and was 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 17 th century, when he was ennobled in the person of Cecchino by the Emperor Matthias; of Cecchino’s successors Zaccagnino and Truffaldino, 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, 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 who published six comedies in various dialects, including the Greek of the day (1530). This was the masked comedy to which the Italians so tenaciously cluug, 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.

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 15th century, and before its close to the composition of what is regarded as the first original Italian comedy—in other words, as the first of the modern drama. But the claim to this honour of Boiardo’s Timone (before 1494) is doubtful—not in time, but because this play is only in part original, being founded upon, and in a great measure taken from, a dialogue of Lucian’s; since moreover its personages are abstractions, it represents at most the transition from the moralities. The “first Italian comedy in verse,” Ricchi’s I Tre Tirαηηi (before 1530), is likewise a morality, and Trissino’s comedy, which followed, a mere adaptation of the Menoechmi of Plautus. About this time, however, the Commedia emιdita, or scholarly comedy, began to be cultivated by a succession of eminent writers, among whom th.6 title of the father of modern comedy, if it belongs to any man, belongs to Ariosto (1474-1533). His comedies (though the first two were originally written in prose) are in blank verse, to which he gave a singular mobility by the dactylic ending of the line {sdrucciold). Ariosto’s models were the masterpieces of the palliata, and his morals those of his age, which equalled 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, and more especially in the skillful management of complicated intrigues. Such, with an additional brilliancy of wit and lasciviousness of tone, are likewise the characteristics of Machiavelli’s (1469-1527) famous prose comedy, the Mandrαgola {The Magic Draught)· and, in their climacteric, of the plays of P. Aretino (1492-1557), especially the prose Marescαlco, whose name, it has been said, ought to be written in asterisks. Other comedians 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. B. Araldo and J. Nardi, noteworthy as decent and moral in tone and tendency; 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 and allegorical elements—was purely literary, and arose directly out of the classical studies and tastes of the Renaissance. Its first example was the renowned scholar A. Poliziano’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 II Sagmfizio, 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 B. Guarini, which, while founded on a tragic love-story, introduces into its complicated plot a comic element, partly with a satirical intention. 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. (See 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 (1698-1782).

The comic dramatists of the 17th century are grouped as followers of the classical and of the romantic school, G. B. Porta and G. A. Cicognini (whom Goldoni describes as full of whining pathos and common-place 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 of those introduced in imitation of Spanish examples. Italian comedy had fallen into decay, when its reform was undertaken by the wonderful theatrical genius of C. Goldoni (1707-1793). 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 rampaut immorality, of the Italian comic stage, he drew his characters from real life, whether of his native city (Venice) or of society at large, and sought to enforce virtuous and pathetic sentiments without neglecting the essential objects cf his art. Happy and various in his choice of themes, 1 te produced, besides comedies of general human character, plays on subjects drawn from literary biography or from fiction. Goldoni, whose style was considered defective b jr the purists whom Italy has at no time lacked, met with a severe critic and a temporarily successful rival in Count C. Gozzi (1722-1806), who sought to rescue the comic d rama from its association with the real 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 Neapolitan and Oriental 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 turn —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. During the latter part of the 18th and the early years of the present 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 countries. Villi, Nelli, the Marquis Albergati Capacelli, Sografi, Federici, and Signorelli (the historian of the drama) are mentioned among the writers of this school; to the present 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 Bon and Brofferio. Though no recent Italian comedies have acquired so wide a celebrity as that which has been obtained by the successful productions of the recent French stage, there seems no reason to predict a barren future for Italian comedy any more than for Italian tragedy. Both the one and the other have survived periods of a seemingly hopeless decline; tragedy has been rescued from the pedantry of a timid classicism, and comedy from the conventionalism of its most popular but least progressive form; and neither the opera nor the ballet has succeeded in ousting from the national stage the legitimate forms of the national drama.

To the above summary of the history of the modern Italian drama it would not have been inappropriate to append a brief account of that of the modern Greek. The dramatic literature of the later Hellenes is a creation of the literary movement which preceded their glorious struggle for independence, or which may be said to form part of that struggle. After beginning with dramatic dialogues of a patriotic tendency, it took a step in advance with the tragedies of J. R. Nerulos (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 journalism ®—largely contributed to open a literary life for the modern Greek tongue. Among the earlier patriotic Greek dramatists of the present century are T. Alkaeos, J. Zampelios (whose tragic style was influenced by that of Alfieri), S. K. Karydis, and A. Valaoritis. A. Zoiros 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 seem to justify the hope that a worthy future awaits it.

Italy produced many brilliant growths, from which the dramatic literatures of other nations largely borrowed; but 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 peculiar 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 precisely 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 had derived that rich glow of colour which became permanently distinctive of their national life, and more especially of its literary and artistic expressions; they had also perhaps derived from the same source an equally characteristic refinement in their 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 great achievements to which they had contributed in other fields had already been wrought. 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 master-pieces of its literature is indeed a characteristic 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 iu 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 in the beginnings but in the great age of Spanish dramatic literature thatthere is often mostdifficulty in distinguishing between what is to betermed 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 master-pieces 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 Couplets of Mingo Pevulgo (R. Cota the elder) likewise composed the first act of a story of intrigue and 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 (b. c. 1468), whose represcntacion.es under the name of “eclogues” were dramatic dialogues of a religious or pastoral character. His attempts were imitated more especially by Gil Vicente (fl. 1502-1536), a Portuguese who wrote both in Spanish and in his native tongue—the dramatic literature of which is stated to have produced nothing of equal merit afterwards. (The Portuguese literary drama is held to have begun with the prose comedies of Vicente’s contemporary, F. de Sa de Miranda.) A further impulse came, as was natural, from Spaniards resident in Italy, and especially from B. de T. Naharro, who in 1517 published, as the chief among the “firstlings of his genius ” (Propaladia), a series of eight commedias— 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 iornadas (to correspond to acts), and opened them with an iηtroyto (prologue). Very various iu their subjects, and occasionally odd in form, 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. The few translations published from the classical drama exercised no effect.

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 (fl. 1544-1567), a mechanic of Seville, who with his 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 com 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, and one of Timoneda ’ s, seem to have been taken from an Italian source; others mingled modern themes with classical apparitions; one of Timon eda’s was (perhaps again through the Italian) from Plautus. Others of a slighter description were called pasos,— a species afterwards termed entremeses and resembling the modern French 2rroνerbes. With these popular efforts of Lope de Rueda and his friends a considerable dramatic activity began in the years 1560-1590 in geveral 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 to follow Italian in turning to 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 jorηadαs') ; and the tragedies of L. L. de Argensola (acted 1585, and praised in Don Quixote) alike pointed in this direction.

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, 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 personifiîd 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 A r Mwzαnciα, 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 bad 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 to which more than one drama is indebted for its plot, and for much of its dialogue to boot.

Lope de Vega (1562-1635), 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 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 ho 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 13 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 gracicso” (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 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 the principal personages in which are taken from the class of society which 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 people, upon the theme suggested by which the plays often (as Mr Lewes admirably expresses it) constitute a kind of gloss (glosai) 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. (2) The c. heroicas are distinguished by some of their personages being of royal or very high rank, and by their themes being often historical and largely (though not invariably) taken from the national annals, or founded on contemporary or recent events. 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. 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 IL, and remained so for tw o 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 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. 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 (lοa), 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 Man in triumph across it. Not all the entremeses of Lope and others were, however, composed for insertion in these aτdos. 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. Among the writers of Lope’s school, his friend G. de Castro (1569-1631) must not be passed by, for his Cid was the basis of Corneille’s; nor J. P. de Montalvan (1612-1638), “the first-born of Lope’s genius,” the extravagance of whose imagination, like that of Lee, culminated in madness. Soon after him died (1639) 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 excellent though at times “sensational” plots. F. de Roxas y Zorilla (b. 1607), who was largely plundered by the French dramatists of the latter half of the century, survived Molina for about a generation. Tn vain scholars of strictly classical tastes protested in essays in prose and verse against the ascendency 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 (1600-1681), 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 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 him 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 he 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, while they uniformly possess great beauty of poetical detail. Other of his most famous or interesting pieces are comedias de santos. In his secular plays Calderon 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 iu romantic historical tragedy, in the comedy of amorous intrigue, 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.

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 the expulsion of the J esuits 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 drama continued to command popular favour; and with A. Moreto (1618-1669) may be said to have even taken a fresh step. "While he wrote in all the forms established by Lope and cultivated by Calderon, his manner seems most nearly to approach the master-pieces 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. His master-piece, 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 Shakespearean truth. 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 saynète (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 discord among the Governments of Europe, the Spanish people lay, in the words of a 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 French, and France in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, 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 assurance and the rhymed redondillα 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) (1751), and the first original Spanish comedy on the same model, Moratin’s Petimetra (Petite-Maîtresse), printed in 1726 with a critical dissertation, likewise remained unacted. In 1770, however, the same author’s Hormesiηda, 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 Yriarte and Jovellanos (afterwards minister under Godoy), who produced a sentimental comedy in Diderot’s manner. But 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 (b. 1731), a fertile author of light pieces of genuine humour, especially saynetes, depicting the manners of the middle and lower classes. In literary circles 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 Cornelia (fl. 1780) and of the new, such as the younger Moratin (1760-1828), whose comedies—of which the last and most successful was in prose—raised him to the foremost position among the dramatists of his age. In tragedy N. de Cienfuegos (d. 1809) 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. The Spanish dramatists of the present century, after passing, as in the instances of F. Martinez de la Rosa and Breton de los Horreros, 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 national models. Among the former class A. Gil y Zarate, among the latter J. Zorilla, are mentioned as specially prominent. Meanwhile the old popular religious performances are not wholly extinct in Spain, and their relics may long continue to survive there. Whatever may be the future history of one of the most remarkable of dramatic literatures, it may confidently be predicted that so long as Spain is Spain, her theatre will not be permanently denationalized, and that the revolutions it may be destined to undergo are unlikely to extinguish, in whatever degree they may repress, its conservative elements.

The beginnings of the regular drama in France, which here, without absolutely determining, potently swayed its entire course, sprang directly from the 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 round Ronsard, and with him formed the “Pleiad” of French literature, Stephen Jodelle (1532-1572), 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 Grégoire (Gringore), and when the Mère Sotte had mockingly masqueraded in the petticoats of Holy Church. Under Francis I. the Inquisition 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 had been prohibited. Meanwhile, isolated translations of Italian or classical dramas had in literature begun the movement which Jodelle now transferred to the stage itself. His tragedy, Cleopatre Captive, was produced there on the same day as his comedy, HEugene, 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 Cleopatre Captivefra 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 and provided with a ghost and a chorus. Though mainly written rn the five-foot Iambic couplet, it already contains passages in the Alexandrine metre, which soon afterwards La Péruse by his Μedee (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 Bounyn produced the first French regular tragedy on a subject neither Greek nor Roman, and the brothers De la Taille, and J. Grevin, distinguished themselves by their style. Though in the reign of Charles IX. a vain attempt was made by Filleul to introduce the pastoral style of the Italians into French tragedy (while 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), the classical school, in spite of all difficulties, prevailed. Monchrestien exhibited unusual vigour of rhetoric; and in R. Garnier (1545-1601) 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 tragedies 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. HEugene 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 of 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, 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( 1528-1577), a member of the “Pleiad,” produced a comedy in which the type (already approached by Jodelle) of the swaggering captain appears; J. Grevin copied Italian intrigue, characters, and manners; O. de Turnèbe (d. 1581) borrowed the title of one Italian play and perhaps parts of the plots of others; the Florentine F. d’Amboise (d. 1558) produced versions of two Italian comedies; and the foremost French comic poet of the century, P. de Larivey (1550-1612), 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, Secchi, 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.

Before, however, either tragedy or comedy in France entered into the period of their history when genius was to illuminate both with creations of undying merit, they had, together with the general literature of the country, passed through a new phase of the national life. The troubles and terrors of the great civil and religious wars of the 16th century had in certain spheres of society produced a reaction towards culture and refinement; and the seal had been set upon the results of the Renaissance by Malherbe, the father of French style. The people continued to solace or distract its weariness and its sufferings with the help of the 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 recalliug the earliest days of the popular drama—had made the Pont-Neuf the favourite theatre of the Parisian populace. Meanwhile the influenβe 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 and De la Calprenède; the Hôtel de Rambouillet was in its glory; the true (not the false) précieuses sat on the heights of intellectual society; and Balzac (ridiculed in the earliest French dramatic parody) 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 Calprenède (1610-1663), G. de Scudéry (1601-1667) and his sister (1607-1701), and others were equally fashionable in both species. Meanwhile Spanish and Italiau 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 Tristan (1601-1655) overpowered Herod on the stage, and drew tears from Cardinal Richelieu in the audience. Even Duryer’s (1609-1659) style, otherwise superior to that of his contemporaries, is stated to have been 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. Hardi (1560-1631), 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 Racan (1589-1670), Rotrou (1609-1650), and others; and among these comedies of intrigue in the Spanish manner the earliest efforts of Corneille himself are to be classed. Rotrou’s notewortbier productions are later iu date than the event which marks an epoch in the history of the French drama, the appearance of Corneille’s Cid (1636).

P. Corneille (1606-1684) 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 iu his practice. The attempts of his predecessors had been 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 master-pieces,—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, and Polyeucte, 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, 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 once the example and the despair of their successors.

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 of a numerous dramatic progeny) was itself derived from a Spanish original, which it did not (as was the case with the Cidj) transform into soinethir g new. French tragicomedy Corneille can hardly be said to have invented; and of the mongrel growth of sentimental comedy, domestic drama or drame, he rather suggested than exemplified the conditions.

The tragic art of Racine (1639-1699) 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 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. Madame de Sévigné said of Racine, whose plays so well suit themselves to the successive phases in the life of Louis XIV., that in his later years he loved God as he had formerly loved his mistresses; aud 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,” with the exception of the scriptural figures, which stand apart from the rest.

T. Corneille (1625-1709), Campistron, Duché, Lafosse, and Quinault (1637-1688) 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 form 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 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 real elevation, but its heights do not lose themselves in a sphere peopled by the myths of a national religion. Its personages 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 master-pieces, but the chorus is consistently banished, to reappear only in Racine’s latest works 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, and, while preserving the stage intact from realisms, suit themselves to the generally rhetorical character of this species of the tragic drama. This character impresses itself more and more upon the tragic art of a rhetorical nation in an age when the loftiest themes are elsewhere (in the pulpit) receiving the most artistic oratorical treatment, and develops in the style of French 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 is at times an imperceptible one.

The universal genius of Voltaire (1694-1778) 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 v orld with the belief that his innovations had imparted a fresh vitality to French tragedy; in truth, however, they represent no essential advance in art, but rather augmented the rhetorical tendency which paralyzes true dramatic life. Such life as his plays possess lies in their political and social sentiments, their invective against tyranny, and their exposure of fanaticism. In other respects his versatility was barren of enduring results. He might take his themes from French history, or from Chinese, or Egyptian, or Syrian, from the days of the Epigoni or from those of the Crusades; lie might appreciate Shakespeare, with a more or less partial comprehension of his strength, and condescendingly borrow from and improve the barbarian. 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 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 Saurin (1706-1781), Saurin’s royalist rival De Belloy (1727-1775), Racine’s imitator Lagrange-Chancel (1676-1758), and Voltaire’s own would-be rival, the “terrible” Crébillon the elder (1674-1762), 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 further. 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 Ducis (1733-1816)·—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’s Othello (1791); but though Talma might astonish the theatre, Shakespeare’s influence over the French drama was only gradually preparing itself, by means more especially of Letourneur’s translation (1776- 1782), which attracted the sympathy of Diderot and the execrations of the aged Voltaire. The command which classical French tragedy continued to assert over the stage was due in part, no doubt, to the love of Roman drapery which in more than one sense 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 (1763-1826) judged those of Le Kain (1728- 1778); but it was Talma himself whose genius was preeminently 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 (1821-1858) 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 popu larity; nor will occasional literary aftergrowths, however meritorious, such as the effective Lucrèce of F. Ponsard, and the attempts of even more recent writers, suffice to reestablish a living union between it and the progress of the national literature.

The rival influences under which classical tragedy has become a thing of the past in French literature connect themselves with the history of French comedy, which under the co-operation of other influences 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, and, in some respects, the most consummate comic dramatist the world has known,—Molière (1622-1693). 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 poiuted 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 Ecole 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 extravagance of Aristophanes’s burlesque was not left wholly unreproduced by him. Molière is both a satirist and a humourist; 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 safe 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 he rendered to his art are not the less services rendered to society, concerning which the laughter of true 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 of a tentative kind, and one was reviving Patelin while another was translating the Andma. 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— Les Plaideurs of Racine. The tragic poets Quinault and Campistron likewise wrote comedies, one or more of which furnished materials to contemporary English dramatists, as did one of the felicitous plays in which Boursault (1638-1701) introduced Mercury and Aesop into the theatrical salon ? 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 (1655-1709), who imitated the great master in both themes aud characters, while the skilfulness of his plots, and his gaiety of the treatment even of subjects tempting into the by-path of sentimental comedy, entitle him to be regarded as a comic poet of original genius. In the next generation (that of Voltaire) this by-path threatened to become the chosen walk of comedy, though Gresset (1709- 1777) still attempted comedy of character, and the witty Piron (1689-1778) produced something like a new type in the hero of his epigrammatic, but hardly dramatic, Metromanie. Marivaux (1688-1763), “the French Spectators whose minute analysis of the tender passion- excited the scorn of Voltaire, forms the connecting link between comedy and the mixed species of the sentimental or “tearful” domestic drama, which still retained the name, but no longer pursued the ends, of the comic art. The most effective and professedly didactic dramatic moralists of this school were Destouches (1680-1754) and Nivelle de la Chaussée (1692-1754), 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.

Melpomene, humbly shod with the sock, and Thalia, dissolved in tears, had now entered into partnership. The species which varied as comédie larmoyante or as tragédie bourgeoise, and which ruled or was to rule supreme in so many dramatic literatures of Europe, more and more firmly established its hold on that of France. In the hands of Diderot (1713-1784) it sought to proclaim itself as an agent of social reform, and as an apostle of the gospel of philanthropy; but the execution of these works fell short of their aims; it was, in Mme. de Staël’s words, “the affectation of nature,” not nature itself which they exhibited. 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 reformation of mankind. The idea was neither new nor just, but its speciousness will probably continue to commend it to many benevolent 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. Beaumarchais (1732-1799), who for his early sentimental plays, 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 Seville 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 signifiance. The comedy of the empire is, in the hands of Collin d’Harleville, Picard, A. Duval, Étienne, and others, mainly a harmless comedy of manners; nor was the attempted innovation of N. Lemercier (1771-1840)—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; but the impulse which gave rise to the revolution the drama itself was to undergo was not one of 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. (See Opera). 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 from it, was cultivated by Ponsard (1690-1765) and Marmontel (1723-1799). The latter, as well as Rousseau, likewise composed opérettes — a smaller kind of opera, at first of the pastoral sort; and these flexible species easily entered into combination. The melodrama proper, of which the invention is also attributed to Rousseau, 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 times made itself audible; and the most prominent tragic poet of the Revolution, Μ. J. de Chenier (1764-1811), a disciple of Voltaire in dramatic poetry as well as in political philosophy, wrote for the national stage the historical drama—with a political moral —in which in the memorable year 1789 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 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 out of the earth. The tragedies of C. Delavigne (1794-1844) represent the transition from the expiring efforts of the classical to the ambitious beginnings of the romantic school of the French drama. Of this 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 modern European literature, others from the rhetorical tendency which is a French national feature. Victor Hugo was its conquering founder; A. Dumas the elder (1803-1870) its middleman. The marvellous energy and poetic genius of the former, always in extremes, was nowhere more signally so than in the drama; the latter was a Briareus, working with many hands besides his own. The name of A. de Vigny (1799-1863), “George Sand” (1804-1876), A. de Musset (1810-1857), whose dramatic “proverbes” and other pieces of a similar kind have a delicate flavour all their own, and perhaps that of P. Mérimée (1803-1870), who invented not only Spanish dramas but a Spanish dramatist, may be all with more or less precision classed in the romantic school, which in its turn has come to an end as a productive body of writers. It was not, however, the brief classical revival begun by F. Ponsard, and continued, in closer relation to modern ideas, both by him and by E. Augier, which overthrew the Romanticists. While the theatrical ability of E. Scribe (1791-1858) supplied a long series of productions attesting the rapid advance of the playwright’s mastery over the secrets of his craft, and while the name of his competitors, with the aid of some of whom he held his own against the rest, is legion, the latest developments of the French drama possess a social and often a moral interest of greater depth, while they are not inferior in technical skill to anything that has preceded them. After a fashion which would have startled even Diderot, the younger A. Dumas has undertaken to reform society by means of the stage; O. Feuillet and others have, with perhaps fewer prefaces, applied themselves to the solution of the same “problems;” and whatever style will best succeed with the public is the style of V. Sard ou.

That the theatre will lose the hold it possesses over the intellectual and moral sympathies of nearly the whole of the educated, and of a great part of the uneducated population of France, seems hardly within the range of probability. But this is not tantamount to a prophecy that the creative activity of French dramatic literature is certain to endure. The art of acting is not dependent upon a contemporary literary productivity; Talma and Mdlle. Mars (1779-1847) flourished in one of the most barren ages of the French literary drama; the authors and actors of the sotties, like those of the Palais Royal farces of our own day, could strike their roots in the lightest of soils. The constantly accumulating experience and the apparently inexhaustible fertility of the art of acting in France may ensure to it a future not less brilliant than its past; and the judicious policy of not leaving the leading theatres at the mercy of shifting fashion will at all events supply the possibility of maintaining a high histrionic standard. So long as the French nation continues to maintain its ascendency over other nations in much that adorns and brightens social life, the predominant influence of the French theatre over the theatres of other nations is likewise assured. But in the end its own future must be ruled by that progress or decay of French dramatic literature. The history of that literature shows periods of marvellously rapid advance, of hardly less swift decline, and of frequent though fitful recovery. Its future may be equally varied; but it will not be less dependent on the conditions which in every people, ancient or modem, are indispensable to national vigour and vitality. Should the calamity—for it would be nothing less—befall modern civilization of a hopeless degeneration of the French drama, the fault will lie in the severance of self-consciousness from self-control; and, under other circumstances, but with even deeper regret, the story of the Roman theatre of the later Empire may have to be told again.

Among the nations of Germanic descent, but one—our own—succeeded under the influence of the Renaissance movement in transforming the last growths of the mediaeval drama into the beginnings of a great and enduring national dramatic literature. This transformation connects itself with one of the greatest epochs of the national history, or, more properly speaking, forms part of it; the Elizabethan drama and the Elizabethan age are, it is no exaggeration to assert, equally inconceivable the one without the other.

It has been seen how already in the reign of Edward VI., the breath of a new age with its “new learning” had quickened the relatively inanimate species of the morality into the first chronicle history (still intermingled witlι remnants of the earlier species); and how at an even earlier date John Heywood’s interludes had bridged the distance separating from only partially relieved abstractions the concrete directness of comedy proper. Soon afterwards, the study and imitation of the ancient classical drama were introduced into the English world of letters; and under their influence tragedy and comedy, which might otherwise have from the first coalesced, were in their early growths in our literature kept asunder, though not absolutely so. Already, ia 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, as a favourite author for such exercises. With the year of Elizabeth’s accession began a series of translations of his plays by Jasper Heywood (John Heywood’s son) and others; and to the direct influence of one of Seneca’s tragedies is to be ascribed the composition of the first tragedy proper in the English tongue, the Gorboduc (afterwards renamed Ferrex and PorreT) of T. Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, with whom T. Norton was joint author (1562). Though, unlike Gorboduc, classical in theme, and in some respects approaching nearer to the true conception of tragedy in their treatment of dramatic passion, the nearly contemporary Apius and Virginia (c. 1563) and Preston’s Cambises King of Percia, in the roughness of their form more closely resemble the old religious drama; of other tragedies on classical subjects we have only the names, except in the instance of Gascoigne’s Jocasta, a free version of the Phoenissae of Euripides (1566), and of R. Edwards’s Damon and Pithias (printed 1571), which calls itself a comedy, and is in fact a mixture of both species. Simultaneously with the influence, directly or indirectly exercised, of classical literature, that of Italian, both dramatic and narrative, asserted itself; early works from this source were the first Romeo and Juliet (not preserved, but apparently anterior in date even to Gorboduc}, Tancred and Gismunda (1563 ί), and G. Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (printed 1578), from which Shakespeare took the story of Measure for Measure.

From the double danger which threatened our tragic drama in the days of its infancy—that it would congeal on the cold heights of classical themes, or dissolve its vigour in the glowing heat of a passion fiercer than that of the Italians (Iηglese Italianato è un diαvolo incarnato) — it was preserved, more than by any other cause, by its happy association with the traditions of the national history. The crude growth of the chronicle history proved strong enough to assert itself by the side of tragedy based on classical and Italian models; and in a series of works of more or less uncertain dates, a vein was worked from which »Shakespeare was to draw the richest ore. Among these rude compositions, which intermixed the blank verse introduced by Gorboduc with pros n , and freely mingled comic with tragic elements—works half-epic, half-dramatic, and popular in form as they were national in theme,—are the Famous Victories of Henry V., acted before 1588, The Troublesome Raigne of King John (printed 1591), and the True Chronicle History of King Leir (acted 1593). A still further step in advance was taken in what really deserves the title of the Tragedy of Sir Thomas More {c. 1590), not so much on account of the relative nearness of the subject to the time of its 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 dramatists worthy to be called the predecessors of Shakespeare, under the influence of a creative literary epoch, seized the form ready to their hands. The birth of comedy, at all times a process of less labour, had slightly preceded that of tragedy in the history of our drama. Isolated Latin comedies had been produced in the original or in English versions or reproductions as early as the reign of Henry VIII., and the morality and its descendant, the interlude, pointed the way towards nationalizing and popularizing types equally fitted to divert Roman aud Italian and English audiences. Thus the earliest extant English comedy, N. Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, which cannot be dated later than 1551, may be described as a genuinely English adaptation of Plautus, while its successor, Gammer Gurton ’ s Needle, printed 1575, and probably written by (Bishop) Still, has an original, and in consequence a slighter, though by no means unamusing, plot. In the main, however, our early English comedy, while occasionally introducing characters of genuinely native origin, and appealing to the traditional humour3 of Will Summer, the court-fool of Henry VIII., or Grim, the collier of Croydon, was content to borrow its themes from Italian or classical sources; Ariosto’s I Suppositi found a translator in Gascoigne (1566), and the Menoechmi of Plautus translators or imitators in writers of rather later dates. While on the one hand the mixture of tragic with comic motives was already leading in the direction of tragi-comedy, the precedent of the Italian pastoral drama encouraged the introduction of figures and stories from classical mythology; and the rapid and versatile influence of Italian corned seemed likely to continue to control the progress of the lighter branch of the English drama.

Out of such promises as these the glories of our 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 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 Northbrooke, the repentant playwright Gosson, Stubbes, and others, were to be set not only the barren favour of royalty, aud the more direct patronage of great nobles, 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 shrunk from the desipience of idle pastimes. As 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 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 Dr 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 connection, on behalf of an ally whose sympathy with it can only have been of a very limited kind. The Marprelatc controversy 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. The true remedy was at last applied, when from about the year 1591 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 t·he full sense of the word, respectable men. To the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which, after being settled at “the Theater,” moved to the Globe on the Bankside in 1599, Shakespeare and Richard Burbadge, 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 our 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. No dramatic literature which has any claim to rank beside it—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 (1554- 1660), whose plays were all written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul’s, holds a position apart in our dramatic literature. The euphuism, to which his famous romance gave its name, likewise distinguishes his mythological, quasi-historical, allegorical, and satirical comedies. But his real service to the progress of our 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. It lies in his adoption of Gascoigne’s innovation of writing plays in prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and vicious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious dialogue—an example to which even such successors as Shakespeare and Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd (d. c. 1594), the author of the Spanish Tragedy, possesses some of the characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whose violent end prematurely closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play, Taml>urlaine the Creat, 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 this poet’s most characteristic feature, and which was to find expression so luxuriant in his Doctor Faustus and so surpassingly violent in his Jew of Malta. His master-piece, Edward II., is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele (1552-1596-7) 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 Bethsabβ, 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 Peelo and Shakespeare is still in many respects besides that of genius an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something like a Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene (1561-1592), unfortunate perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in his notorious enmity to Shakespeare himself. His genius, which shone most brightly in plays treating English life and scenes, was in the main free from the pedantry which occasionally besets the flight of Peele’s and even of Marlowe’s muse; and his most delightful work at all events seems to breathe somethiug of that indescribable freshness which we recognize, if not as a peculiarly Shakespearian characteristic, at least as one belonging to none but a truly national art. Thomas Lodge (c. 1558-1625), Thomas Nash the redoubtable pamphleteer (c. 1565-c. 1602), Henry Chettle (1564-c. 1667), who worked the chords of both pity c and terror with equal vigour, and Anthony Munday (1553-1633), better remembered for his city pageants than for his plays, are among the other more generally known writers of the early Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be called predecessors of Shakespeare.

The common characteristics of nearly all these dramatists 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 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. Distinct as the chief of these poets are from one another by the marks impressed upon both form and matter by individual genius, yet the stamp of the age is upon them all. Writing for the stage only, of which some of them possessed a personal experience, 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 our 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 the connec tion 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 Tarleton, had not succumbed before more exacting demands. The way of escaping 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 real 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 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 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 national character, expanded 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 our national drama divides itself in very unequal proportions into a direct and an indirect one. 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, 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, under influences naturally connecting themselves with the general current 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 which has not unnaturally inspire 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 add to it more than an occasional supplement. None of them was 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 historiés. But to furnish such supplements accorded, little with the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans; and with the exception of an isolated work, 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, S. Rowley, 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 themes, 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 Ί 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 comic interest asserts itself to the instinct of reader or spectator as supreme, it is still of its nature incidental to the progress of the action; for it seems a just criticism (and one agreeing with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare’s process of construction) that of all his comedies but one 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 ∙^hole 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 th03e of the English drama in general can hardly be over-rated, 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 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 plays. But such distinctions apart, there can be on 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 unnatural experiment.

It may seem paradoxical to assert 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, 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 reconciled these conditions with creations of matchless strength and of unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them as the conditions of what a popular (and consequently often abused) term has instinctively come to designate as the Shakespearian drama. 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,—an assertion which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life would satisfactorily establish.

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 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 (which, forsooth, regarded him as supremely excellent in male but not in female characters). But it was a sure sign of decay when our 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 Renaissance. The mystery could not here, as in Spain, produce such an aftergrowth as the auto, and the confines of the religious drama were only now and then tentatively touched. The direct imitations of the classical drama were few and feeble; Chapman, while affecting some of its usages, made no serious attempt to reproduce its essentials; experiments like W. Alexander’s (afterwards Earl of Stirling) Mσnarchiclce Tragedies · (1603- 1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, like Milton’s Samson Agonistes at a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the light gaiety of the Italian and French force could not establish itself on the English popular stage without more solid adjuncts; the Englishman’s festive digestion is robust, and he likes his amusements substantial. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many of our 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,— Jonson coming nearest to nationalizing an essentially foreign growth by the fresh simplicity of his treatment, Fletcher bearing away the palm for beauty of poetic execution. The mask 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, of course, externally was the most elaborate— it closely approached the pageant; in other instances the distinctness of its characters or the fullness 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 only incidentally in the course of his dramas expended the resources of his fancy; 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 our 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 (d. 1623) 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 J ones, it need not here be further pursued. 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 a very different Puritan had not long afterwards (1634) composed 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 the species. Nor need its history in England have here been referred to, were it not so 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 our later poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form of so proved a flexibility as the poetic mask.

The annals of our 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 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, stands in a position of undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson (1573-1635), to whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did 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 works stand almost, though not quite, alone in this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. G. Chapman (1557 or 1559-1634) treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French history, 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 already been made of Ford’s isolated effort in the direction of historic tragedy and of those excursions into the still popular domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker, and others, which are to be regarded as nothing 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 fill our literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight astonishing exuberance, aud in mere externals of theme—ranging 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 constantly on the increase. 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 clustered round Lope de Vega and Calderon 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 materials, a new field of resources was at hand since our dramatists had begun to regard events aud episodes of English domestic life as fit subjects for tragic treatment.

Domestic tragedy of this description was indeed no novelty on the Engιish stage; Shakespeare himself may have touched, with his master-hand, more than one effort of this kind; but T. Heywood (c. 1570-c. 1605) may be regarded as the first who achieved any work of considerable literary value of this class, to which some of the plays of T. Dekker (c. 1570—c. 1640), 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 w orks. Politic 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 excess 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 (d. c. 1650), master as he is of the effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford (1586-c. 1640), 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 (1586-1616) and J. Fletcher (1576-1625) undoubtedly exhibit be confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and 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 popularity, 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 which ennobles the rhetorical genius of P. Massinger (1584- 1640), and the gift of poetic illustration which entitles J. Shirley (1595-1666) to be remembered as something besides 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 not capable of obscuring the distinctive features in its individual writers which it is the highest function of criticism to discover and establish.

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 plays), if trarrslated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the creation of distinctive human types. In the actual creation of these it was impossible that Jonson should excel Shakespeare; but in the consciousness with which be recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist’s labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which Shakespeare had left unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some of whom (such as 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 (1575-1624), 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 (1574—1624), the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field (c. 1590-c. 1640), and the artistic versatility of Shirley—not to mention many later and lesser names— 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 living realities of life,—but in a lightness which did not impair their sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity in treatment which is the result of accumulated experience, enabled them to maintain a steady progress. Thus our 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 (1611 or 1615-1643) 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 interregmιm of the Revolution, and connected themselves in some measure with later growths of English comedy.

The rivals against which in its closing period the old English drama had to contend have been already noticed. From the masks and triumphs at court and 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, Burbadge 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 artistic merit in 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 placed the English theatre at a considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never obtained), and which probably to some extent reacted upon the licence of expression assumed by our dramatists. The arrangement of the stage, which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for their being organically connected with oue another, remained essentially the same as 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 there is no reason to suppose that the English stage of this period had not gone as far as was expedient in a direction in which in feebler times so vast an amount of effort has come to be spent. The drama still depended in the main upon its literary essentials and upon the actor’s art; but 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 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. 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, though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions, rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson; and the comedies of his contemporaries and successors 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 amusements of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Γuritan 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 so soon as 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 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; 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 (1606-1669), whose name, though not otherwise eminent in our dramatic 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 limited 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 leads actors, in order to outshine their fellows, to attempt parts for which they often 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 (1635-1710) and his contemporaries, among whose names those of Hart, Mohun, Kynaston, Nokes, Mrs Barry, Mrs Betterton, Mrs Bracegirdle, and Mrs Eleanor Gwynne have, together with many others, survived in various connections 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 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.

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 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, be true in spirit to the higher purposes of the dramatic art, to the nobler tendencies of the national life, and to the eternal demands of moral law. Because the later Stuart drama was as a whole 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 our post-Restoration plays. Comic scenes are still occasionally introduced into tragedies by some of our 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 our 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.” The student of the drama will find much both to entertain and to instruct him in these prefaces, apologies, dialogues, and treatises; he will acknowledge that Dryden’s incomparable vigour does not desert him either in the exposing or in the upholding of fallacies; and that even Rymer, usually regarded as having touched the nadir of dramatic criticism, is 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 our 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 (1621-1679), 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. 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 it was sought to enforce for it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his brother-in-law Sir R. Howard (1626-1698), and afterwards more confidently by himself, Dryden (1631-1699) threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his genius into the; cale, 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. 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 returned to the defence of a species which he was himself in the end to abandon. 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, he came to recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of the Elizabethan drama, β and, after audaciously but not altogether unhappily essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own ground, produced under the influence of the same views at least one work of striking merit. 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 (1650-1690), 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. His rhetorical genius was not devoid of genuine energy, nor is he to be regarded as a mere imitator. T. Otway (1651-1695), 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 of expressive tenderness; but his genius had an alloy of impurity, and though he was often happy in his novel choice of themes, his efforts were as incomplete as his end was pre· mature. T. Southerne (1660-1746) was likewise possessed of pathetic power; but his success was primarily due to his skill in the choice of “sensational” plots; J. Crowne (d. c. 1703), Lord Lansdowne (“Granville the polite”) (c. 1667-1735), Congreve, by virtue of a single long celebrated but not really~remarkable tragedy, and N. Rowe (1673-1718) 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 are not to be forgotten, indicate with singular distinctness the transition from the fuller declamatory style of Dryden to the calmer and thinner manner of Addison. 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 (1672-1719), in allowing his Cato to take its chance upon the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured it an éxtraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds, except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar quotations, 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, 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. 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 Etherege (c. 1636-c. 1694), Sir Charles Sedley (c. 1639- c. 1728), and the ether “gentlemen who wrote at 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 (1630-1723), while of its moral degradation the “divine Astraea,” the “unspeakable” Mrs Aplιra Behn (1642-1689) has an indefeasible title to be considered the most faithful representative. T. Shadwell (1640—1692), fated like the tragic poet Elkanah Settle (1648-1724), to be chiefly remembered as a victim of Dryden’s satire, deserves more honourable mention. Like J. Wilson (d. 1690), whose plays seem to class him with the pre-Restoratidn 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. The absence of a moral sense, which, together with a grossness of expression often defying exaggeration, characterizes our 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. 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, eveu the greatest comic authors of this age moved. W. Wycherley (1640-1715) 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. The most brilliant of these was indisputably W. Congreve (1672-1728), 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 (c. 1666- 1726), licentiousness in him as in them corrupts the spirit of his comic art; but of his best though not most successful play it must be allowed that the issue of the main plot is on the side of virtue. G. Farquhar (1678— 1707), 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.

The improvement which now begins to manifest itself in the moral tone and spirit of English comedy is partly due to the reaction aga∖nst 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 Collier (1698), of all the assaults the theatre in England has had to undergo the best-founded, and that which produced the most perceptible results. The comic poets, who had always been more or less conscious of their sius, and had at all events not defended them by the ingenious sophistries which it lias 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 (c. 1678-1722) became anxious to reclaim their offenders with much emphasis in the fifth act; and Colley Cibber (1671-1757)—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)—may be credited with the moral intention he claims to have kept in view throughout his career as a dramatist. Sir R. Steele (1671-1729), in accordance with his general tendencies as a writer, pursued a still more definite moral purpose in his comedies; but his geuius perhaps lacked the sustained vigour necessary for a dramatist, and his humour naturally sought the aid of pathos. Accordingly, taking a hint from Colley Cibber, who so well understood the public taste, Steele, passing from partial to more complete experiment, became the founder of that sentimental comedy which exercised so depressing an influence upon the progress of our drama. Thus the two writers whose associated efforts so largely contributed to open a new and productive vein in our literature, both signally helped to hasten the decline of its dramatic branch. With Cato English tragedy committed suicide, though its pale ghost survived; with The Conscious Lovers English comedy sank into the tearful embrace of artificiality and weakness, from which it has never again altogether torn itself away.

It seems superfluous within the limits of a summary like the present to attempt to classify with any degree of minuteness the remaining phenomena in the history of our dramatic literature. During the 18th century its productions 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. But the de mauds of the stage and those of its patrons and of the public of the “Augustan” age, and of that which succeeded it, in general were fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of the poetic drama remained irreconcilable during a long period of our literature. There is every reason to conclude that the art of acting progressed in the same direction of artificiality, and stiffened into apparently immutable forms in such actors as Macklin and Quin. The genius of Garrick, whose theatrical career extended from 1741 to 1776, opened a new era in his art. His unparalleled success was due in the first instance to his incomparable natural gifts; but 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 our drama, and indirectly helped to seal the doom of the surviving tendency to maintain in the most ambitious walks of our 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 Bosciad (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 indeed weakened by the mutilated form in which these generally, if not always, made their appearance there. Even so, however, there are perhaps few instances in theatrical history in which so strange a competition was so long sustained. In the hands of the tragic poets of the age of Pope, as well as of that of Johnson, tragedy had hopelessly stiffened into the forms of its accepted French models. Direct reproductions of these continued, as in the case of Ambrose Philips’s (c. 1671— 1749) and Charles Johnson’s (1679-1748) translations from Racine, and Aaron Hill’s (1685-1750) from Voltaire. Among other tragic dramatists of the earlier part of the century may be mentioned J. Hughes (1677-1720), who, after assisting Addison in his Cato, produced at least one praiseworthy tragedy of his own j E. Fenton (1683-1730), a joint translator of “Pope’s Homer” and the author of one extremely successful drama; and L. Theobald (d. 1744), 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. A more distinguished name is that of J. Thomson (1700-1748), whose unlucky Sophonisba and subsequent tragedies are, however, barely remembered by the side of his poems. The literary genius of E. Young (1681-1765), 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; but by his main characteristics as a dramatist he belongs to the school of his contemporaries. The endeavours of G. Lillo (1693- 1739) to bring the lessons of tragedy home to his fellowcitizens were destined to exercise a powerful influence upon the early progress of the German drama, and not to remain without significance for the history of our own; but his pedestrian muse failed in the end to satisfy higher artistic demands than those met in his most popular play, and broke down in the attempt to carry the terrors of Macbeth into the regions of domestic tragedy. “Classical” tragedy in the generation of Johnson pursued the even tenor of its way, the dictator himself treading with solemn footfall in the accustomed path, and Mason (1725-1797) making the futile attempt to produce a close imitation of Greek models. The best-remembered tragedy of the century, Home’s Douglas (1757), was the production of an author whose famous kinsman, David Hume, 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 child 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 the most formidable of those rivals forms no part of this sketch (see Opera); but the points of contact between its progress and the history of our dramatic literature cannot be altogether left out of sight. H. Purcell’s (1658-1695) endeavours to unite English music to the words of English poets were now a thing of the past; the isolated efforts of Addison 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 German genius of Handel completed the triumphs of a form of art which no longer had any connection 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, have ever rivalled it in celebrity. Among these the pieces of J. Bickerstaff (ç. 1735—c. 1788) and of C. Dibdin ° (1745-1814) may be signalized. The opera in England as elsew here 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 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 (1707-1754), 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 first of the novels which have made his name immortal, accordingly ventured in two extravaganzas (so we should call them in these days) upon a larger admixture of political with literary and other satire. A third attempt (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 on candid consideration untenable. 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.

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 home-spun didactic 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, but the very best farce of this age is ascribed to clerical authorship. S. Foote (1720-1761), whose comedies 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 had achieved its greatest success in The Gamester of E. Moore (d. 1757); and sentimental comedy courted sympathetic applause in the works of A. Murphy (1727-1801), the single comedy of W. Whitehead (1714-1785), and tiιe earliest of H. Kelly (1714-1785). It cannot be said that this species was extinguished, as it is sometimes assumed to have been, by O. Goldsmith (1728-1774); but his admirable character-comedy of The Good-Natured Man, and his delightfully brisk and fresh She Stoops to Conquer, 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. Colman (1733-1794) 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 (c. 1752-1816) 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 play of the unfortunate General Burgoyne (d. 1792). IL Cumberland (1732-1811), 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. Like him, Mrs Cowley (“Anna Matilda”) (1743-1809), T. Holcroft ° (1744-1809), and G. Colman the younger (1762-1836), 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 our century. To an earlier date belong the favourite burlesques of O’Keefe’s countryman K. O’Hara (d. 1782), good examples of a species the further history of which may be left aside. In the hands of at least one living writer, J. R. Planché, it has 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, is attributed by Scott to the wearing out of the French model that had been so long wrought upon; while, as he points out, 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. But 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 uurivalled^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 (1788-1824) 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 JFcrner is a hastily-dramatized sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772-1834), who gave to English literature a fine though inaccurate 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 Berlichingeη, gained no reputation by his own dramatic compositions. W. S. Landor (1775-1864), apart from those Imaginary Conversations upon which he best loved to expend powers of observation and characterization such as have been given to few dramatists, 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 (1792-1822) The Cenei, on the other hand, is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power, abnormally revolting in its theme, but singularly pure and delicate in treatment. A humbler niche in the temple of our dramatic literature belongs to some of the plays of C. R. Maturin (1782-1824), Sir T. N. Talfourd (1795-1854), and Dean Milman (1791-1868). Divorced, except for moments, from the stage, English dramatic literature in its higher forms can in the present century no longer be regarded as a connected national growth, though it would be rash to deny that with the isolated efforts of individual poets future developments may connect themselves. Among living poets Sir H. Taylor has perhaps approached nearest to the objective spirit and the fullness of style of the Elizabethan drama; R. H. Horne survives as a worthy representative of the modern Romantic school; Matthew Arnold has the dignity of form of his classic models, Longfellow the graceful facility of a mellow literary culture; while R. Browning’s insight into the secrets of human character, and A. C. Swinburne’s gift of passionate poetic speech, are true dramatic qualities. By his Hannibal J. Nichol has likewise made a noteworthy contribution to the higher literature of our drama. The latest English dramatic poet is Tennyson, whose homage to the national form of the historic drama may be hopefully interpreted as a promise of the future possibly awaiting it. Far greater is the number of those English writers of the present century who, while seeking to preserve a connection between the demands of the stage and their dramatic productions, have addressed themselves to the theatrical rather than the literary public—since such a distinction must needs be drawn. The respect paid by her contemporaries to the modestly simple and judiciously concentrated efforts of Mrs Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) entitles her to remembrance in the annals of literature as well as those of the stage; but it woιdd be going too far to make a similar exception in favour of the plays of Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) or of the late Lord Lytton (1806-1873). At the present day the theatre commands the services of many authors of talent, a few of whose most successful productions may peradventure be destined to survive the age which gave birth to them. But here, if anywhere, the task of selection must be left to time.

The history of the English stage in the present century has been one of gradual decline and decay, not (especially at the present day) without prospects of recovery, of which a praiseworthy hopefulness is ever willing to make the most. At the beginning of the century the greatest tragic actress of the English theatre, Mrs Siddυns, 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 upon which the present generation would hardly dare to look, had withdrawn from the boards. Mrs Siddons was soon followed into retirement by her successor Miss O’Ncill (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 steady 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 who remain to suggest its semblance to the living generation. But even these—among whom a tribute of gratitude is specially due to Helen Faucit and S. Phelps—are now lost (or all but lost) as active members to the theatre, and they have left no school behind them. The comic stage has been fortunate in an ampler aftergrowth, from generation to generation, of the successors of the old actors who live for us in the reminiscences of Charles Lamb; nor are the links all snapped which bind the humours of the present to those of the past. It is least of all in any spirit of depreciation that the efforts of the actors of our day, in any branch of the art, should be discussed. But it is right to point out that these efforts are carried on under conditions of a partly novel character, to which the actors are forced to submit. No art stands in greater need of the help of training,—an advantage with which the modern English actor is virtually obliged to dispense. No art stands in greater need of the relief of change in the subjects of its exercise,—but the modern English actor is made to look forward, as to the height of success, to playing the same character for three hundred nights. No art stands in greater need of the guidance of criticism,—but the modern English actor is too often left to criticise himself. Finally, none stands in greater need of the protection of self-respect,—but there are few theatres in England which are not from time to time degraded in deference to tastes which in earlier days not Puritan censors only would have called by a simpler name.

The reaction against the theatre, which set in with the spread of the religious movement at the close of the last century, had the natural effect of lowering instead of raising its tone and manners, as well as those of the literature designed to supply its immediate demands. With the growth of that enlightenment which is inseparable from tolerance, this reaction seems to be giving place to a counter-reaction; while on the other hand, a larger section of the educated classes have begun to take an interest in the progress of the national drama, and the world of fashion is condescending to follow the impulse. Dramatic criticism, too—a branch of English literature to which from the days of Steele to those of Hazlitt so many writers of mark were ready to devote their efforts, but which had more recently often fallen into hands either unequal to the task or disdainful of it—seems here and there awakening to a sense of its higher duties. But all this will not permanently recover the stage for its higher tasks, or reunite to it a Jiving dramatic literature, unless an object of serious moment for the future of the nation is pursued in a serious spirit, and unless it is thought worth while to devise means suited to this end. In a word, so long as there is no national theatre which, removed above the conditions of a commercial speculation, can cultivate the art to which it is dedicated for the sake of that art itself, the future of the English drama will be at the mercy of the likings of London, and of the adoption of those likings by the London which is not London, and by the “provinces,” as in theatrical matters they are only too appropriately called. The time may come when it will be recognized that the progress and culture of a people depend upon its diversions as well as upon its occupations; and that the interests of a national art are not unworthy the solicitude of thoughtful statesmen.

The history of the German drama differs widely from that of our own, 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.

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 guilds, and the composition of plays was more especially cultivated by the master-singers of Nuremberg and other towns. Thus, while the scholars of the German Renaissance, who so largely became the agents of the Reformation, eagerly dramatized, both in the Latin and the native tongue, the narratives of the Bible, and sought to suit the scholastic drama to the demands of the times (P. Rebhun, a protegee of Luther, standing foremost among those religious dramatists), it was under the influence of the Reformation also, and of the impulse given by Luther and others to the use of High German as the popular literary tongue, that Hans Sachs, the immortal 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, 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 courts of the empire, or found a temporary home there, special prominence was acquired, towards the close of the 16 th and in the early years of the 17th century, by the “English comedians,” who appeared at Cassel, Wolfenbüttel, Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, <fcc, 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-Lüneburg (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 byEnglish examples; and in their works, and in those of contemporary playwrights, reappears no small part of what we may conclude to have been the “English comedians’” répertoire. (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 plots 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 performances were deluged, partly to the buffoonery with which they seasoned, and the various tricks and feats with which they diversified them. 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, 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 nation, and the traditions of the popular theatre were left to the guardianship of the marionettes {Puppeηspiele) ∖

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 (1597-1639), who holds an honoured place in the history of the German language 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 (1616-1664), though as a comic dramatist lacking neither vigour nor variety, and acquainted with Shakespearian 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. 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 recently claimed, nor even the 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 Coesarei 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 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 Staαtsactionen (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, who at the head of a company of players for a time entered the service of the Saxon court, and by producing 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. Hi3 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 deWarte. From the latter was borrowed Harlequin, with whom Hans Wurst was blended, and who became a standing figure in every kind of popular play. He established his rule 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.

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 mentioned without respect in connection with the history of the drama. Friderica Caroline Neuber’s (1690-1760) biography is the story of a long-continued effort which, notwithstanding errors and weaknesses, and though, so far aβ 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 Leipsic (hence the new school of acting is called the Leipsic 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 Leipsic professor J. Chr. Gottsched (1672-1766), 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), 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 (1718-1749), the artificial and sentimental comedies of Chr. F. Gellert (1715-1769) 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 Leipsic school exercised a continuous effect upon the progress of the art of acting, and before long the Garrick of Germany, C. Eckhof (1720- 1778), began a career, outwardly far humbler than that of the great English actor, but which made his art a fit subject for the critical study of scholars, and his profession one for the equal esteem of honourable men.

Among the authors contributing to Mme. Neuber’s Leipsic 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. E. Lessing (1729-1781) 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 (1767-9). This alone would invest these papers with a high significance; for though the theatrical enterprise proved abortive, yet it established the principle upon which the future 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 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 modem 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. Then, in his Minna von Barnhelm (1767) he essayed a national comedy drawn from real life, and appealing to patriotic sentiments as well as to broad human sympathies, written in prose (like Miss Sara Sampson), but in form holding 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 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 chosen home of frivolous amusement; but even here a reform was gradually effected, and, under the intelligent rule of the emperor Joseph IL, a national stage grew into being. The mantle of Eckhof fell upon the shoulders of his eager younger rival, F. L. Schröder (1743-1816), 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 (1724-1803)—a species in which he had been preceded by J. J. Bodmer (1698-1783) —and the patriotic Bardietten of the same author be excepted. S. Gessner (1730-1787), J. W. L. Gleim (1719- 1803), 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 (1733-1813), 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 (1737— 1823) seemed a premonitory sign that the coming flood might make a circular motion 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 Galοtti (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 the Wise (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 through causing a reaction in tragedy from prose to blank verse (first essayed in Brawe’s Brutus, 1770), but through 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 than for their individual achievements, was derived from a drama by one of the most prolific of their number, M. F. von Klinger (1752- 1801); other members of the fraternity were J. A. Leisewitz (1752-1806), M. R. Lenz (1750-1792), and F. Müller the “painter” (1750-1825). 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 Gi)tz 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 Gotz was to have crushed with an iron hand the last remnants of theatrical conventionality (those of costume and scenery included), and to have 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 vaιy so widely in form and character, and connect themselves so intimately with the different phases of the development of his own self-determined 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 Claνigο and Stella, which succeeded Gotz, are domestic dramas in proce; 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 Gotz, 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 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, Ficsco, Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), vibrating under the influence of an age of social revolution, mingled in their prose form the truthful expression of passion with no small element 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 master-pieces of the German poetic drama, treating historic themes reconstructed by conscious dramatic workmanship, and clothing their dialogue in a noble vestment of rhetorical verse. In one of these, 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.

Schiller’s later dramas gradually conquered the stage, over which his juvenile works had triumphantly passed, but on which his Don Carlos had met with a cold welcome. For a long time, however, its favourites were authors of a very different order, who suited themselves to the demands of a public little concerned with the literary progress of the drama. After popular tastes had oscillated between the imitators of Götz 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 (1759-1814), 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 εentimental domestic drama. But the most successful purveyor of such wares was an author who, though not himself an actor, understood the theatre with professional instinct,—A. von Kotzebue (1761-1819). 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 it seems time to say that there is some exaggeration in the contempt which has been lavished upon him by posterity. Nor should it be forgotten that German literature had hitherto 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 age 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 owed its classical translation of Shakespeare, and an introduction to the dramatic literatures of so many ages and nations, 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 (1791-1813), whose early promise as a dramatist 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 (1776-1823) in the direction of the historical drama remained isolated attempts. But of the leaders of the Romantic school, A. W. (1767-1845) and F. von Schlegel (1772-1829), contented themselves with frigid classicalities; and L. Tieck (1772-1855), in the strange alembic of his Phantasus, melted legend and fairytale, novel and drama, 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-

Fouquc (1777-1843) infused a spirit of poetry into the chivalry drama. Clemens Brentano (1777-1842) was a fantastic dramatist unsuited to the stage. Here a feeble outgrowth of the romanticists, the “destiny dramatists " Z. Werner (1768-1823), A. Milliner (1774-1829), and C. E. V. Houwald i0 (1778-1845), achieved a temporary furore; and it was with an attempt in the same direction that the Austrian dramatist F. Grillparzer (1791-1871) 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 paid to the genius of H. von Kleist (1776-1811), who in his short life produced besides other works a romantic drama and a rustic comedy of genuine merit, and an historical tragedy of singular originality and power. Grillparzer’s long series of plays includes poetic dramas on classical themes and historical subjects from Austrian history. The Romantic school, which through Tieck had satirized the drama of the bourgeoisie and its offshoots, was in its turn satirized by A. Count von Platen-Hallermünde’s (1796-1835) admirable imitations of Aristophanic comedy. Among the objects of his banter were the popular play-wright E. Raupach,and K. Immermann (1796— 1840), a true poet, who is, however, less generally remembered as a dramatist. F. Hebbel (1813-1863) is justly ranked high among the foremost later dramatic poets of his country, few of whom equal him in intensity.. Other names of literary mark are those of Chr. D. Grabbe (1801-1836), J. Mosen (1803-1867), 0. Ludwig (1813-1865), and “F. Halm” (1806-1871),and, among living writers, K. Gutzkow, G. Freytag, and H. Laube. The last of these names recalls in one of their most noteworthy examples the long-continued and systematic efforts which have raised the modern German stage to the position at present occupied by it among the theatres of Europe. These efforts have not been confined to fostering the art of acting in a succession of eminent representatives, among whom the sons of L. Devrient in various ways acquired a reputation worthy of their name, and B. Dawison was accounted the equal of the most brilliant of the brotherhood, or to maintaining as intimate a relation as possible between the stage and literatüre. Happily contrasting with other countries by the number and variety of its centres of intellectual life—rivals in artistic effort even where political or social rivalry is out of the question—Germany has not only cherished its own national drama, but with a catholicity of taste, aided by the powers of a language admirably adapted for translation, has opened its theatre to the dramatic masterpieces of other nations also, and more especially of our own. The German theatre ha3 its weak points, and has not maintained itself wholly free from vicious influences; but upon the whole its efforts are on a level with the demands of the national culture, and in harmony with the breadth and variety of the national intelligence. No other stage furnishes the same opportunities for the study of dramatic literature.

With this summary of the history of the German drama it is necessary to close this survey. To be even nominally complete, it would have had to take into account the fortunes of more than one other modern European drama. Among these the Dutch is interesting both in its beginnings, which resemble those of the German—the influence of the so-called chambers of the rederykers (rhetoricians), from the early years of the 15th century onwards, resembling that of the master-singers of contemporary 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 fαdieη or farces) enhanced the attractions of those popular pageants in which the Netherlands surpassed all other countries of the North. 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 and the tragedies of Hooft belong to the same period; but its foremost dramatic poet was J. van den Vondel (1587-1659), 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. 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. Still more decidedly the dramatic literature of the Scandinavian peoples springs from foreign growths; but Denmark, where the beginnings of the drama in the plays of the schoolmaster Chr. Hansen recall the mixture of religious and farcical elements in contemporary German efforts, at a later date produced a comic dramatist· of thorough originality and of a wholly national cast. L. Holberg (1684-1754), 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, and set an example, never surpassed, of a series of comedies deriving their types from popular life aud 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 (1758- 1860) is specially noted. Under the influence of the Romantic school, whose influence has nowhere proved so long-lived as in the Scandinavian north, A. Oehlenschläger (1779-1850) began a new era of Danish literature. His productivity, which belongs partly to his native and partly to German literary history, turned from foreign to native themes; and other writers followed him in his endeavours to revive the figures of Northern heroic legend. The reaction recently observable in Danish literary criticism against the supremacy of the Romantic school may be expected to produce results in the drama, in the direction perhaps of those already attested by the success of two living Norwegian dramatists, H. Ibsen and Björnsteme Björnson.

Lastly, the history of the Russian drama, which in its earliest or religious form is stated to have been introduced from Poland (early in the 12th century), is in its later forms an outgrowth of Western civilization. A species of popular puppet-show called vertep, which about the middle of the 17th century began to treat secular and popular themes, had helped to foster the dramatic taste of the people; but the Russian regular drama characteristically enough had its origin in the cadet corps at St Petersburg, a pupil of which, A. Sumarokoff (1718-1777), is regarded as the founder of the modern 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 Catharine IL (1729-1796), 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 has continued to flourish in Russia to the present day, and possesses (or recently possessed) a representative of mark in A. N. Ostrovsky of Moscow. The church is stringently protected against the satire of the stage in the dominions of the Czar, but in all other directions except one considerable licence appears to be allowed to the drama, (a. w. w.)