lines (Albion's England, 1586); Samuel Daniel dealt with English history in his Barons' Wars (1596), a poem on the reign of Edward II., and in his Heroical Epistles (1598): while later Michael Drayton wrote his splendid ballad The Battle of Agincourt and The Polyolbion (1613), "my strange herculean toil" he appropriately calls it, a poetical description of England in thirty books containing about one hundred thousand lines. All these writers were bidding the people to

“Look on England,

The Empress of the European Isles.
The mistress of the ocean, her navies

Putting a girdle round about the world."*

From the historical plays already named we pass easily to a higher order of drama in the Edward II., of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's great predecessor, until we reach the climax of England's patriotic drama in the work of Shakespeare himself.

About 1580, we find the drama rapidly taking form in London through the work of a group of rising dramatists, many of whom brought from the universities a tincture of the new learning. Prominent among Shakespeare's these were John Lyly (b. 1553, d. 1606), the Predecessors. Euphuist, who produced a play before 1584; Thomas Kyd (d. about 1595), whose Spanish Tragedy was written in a ranting and extravagant style much ridiculed by Shakespeare and the later dramatists; George Peele (b. about 1552, d. about 1597), whose chronicle of Edward I. (1593) holds an important place in the development of the historical drama; Robert Greene (b. 1560, d. 1592) who, like many of his fellow playwrights, led a wild and dissipated life, friendless, except in a few ale houses. In his Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Greene gives some charming scenes of English country life. The *Massinger," The Maid of Honor," act i. sc. I.

name of this unhappy writer will always be associated with his spiteful and jealous reference to Shakespeare as an "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hyde, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his own conceyt, the only Shake-scene' in a countrey.' But, greater than all these in the tragic intensity of his genius and the swelling majesty of his "mighty line," was Christopher Marlowe (b. 1564, d. 1593), the immediate forerunner of Shakespeare. When Marlowe began to write, the form of the English drama was still unsettled. Under the influence of its classic models, tragedy was inclined to be stiff, stilted, and formal; while in contrast with the work of the scholarly and somewhat artificial writers, there were rude, popular interludes in jingling rhymes, full of rough, clownish tricks and jests, and without unity and proportion. Marlowe's fine touch did much to reduce this confusion to order. His verse is the finest before Shakespeare, and stormy and riotous as was his life, his work shows the true artist's unselfish devotion to a high and beautiful ideal. Marlowe was a son of a Canterbury shoemaker, and was born two months before Shakespeare. He graduated at Cambridge, and came to London in 1581 to plunge into the vortex of reckless and lawless life that circled round the theatre. Passionate, unquiet, ambitious, Marlowe is spoken of as an atheist and a blasphemer. Before he is thirty he is stabbed with his own dagger in a low tavern at Deptford. The touch of the unknown, which he thirsted for like his own Faustus, stops him in the midst of his doubts, his passionate longings, his defiance, his love-making, and his fame, -and at length he is quiet.

* In his pamphlet, a kind of dying confession, “Greene's Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance."

Marlowe's earliest play (Tamburlaine, First Part before 1587, Second Part 1590) portrays the insatiable thirst for power, the spirit of the typical conqueror longing for "the sweet fruition of an earthly crown." Another of Marlowe's tragedies, The Jew of Malta, is generally thought to have furnished Shakespeare with some hints for his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Edward II. drew more firmly the lines of the English historical drama, while Dr. Faustus, with its magnificent bursts of poetry, and the accumulating terror of its tragic close, is full of that overmastering longing for the unattainable, which seems to have been the strongest characteristic of Marlowe's restless nature. In these famous lines from Tamburlaine, Marlowe himself seems to speak to us:

"Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breast for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest."

Plays were acted in England long before any theatres were built. The Miracle plays had been produced on temporary scaffolds, or on a two-storied erection, something like a huge doll's house on wheels, called a pageant. The Interludes or the early dramas were often played before the Queen, or before some great noble, on a platform at one end of the huge halls, perhaps at a great banquet or festival. But plays were a popular pastime also, performed in the open air in the court-yards of the Inns; and these square Inn-yards, overlooked by the galleries or balconies which ran around the

The Theatre.

inclosing walls of the Inn, are supposed to have furnished the model for the regular theatres. The growing delight in play-going seems to have produced a general demand. for more permanent and commodious accommodations. One building regularly set apart for the performance of plays is known to have been in use before 1576. In the same year the "Black-friars Theatre" was opened, the first theatre regularly licensed. From this time the play houses rapidly increased, and when Shakespeare came up to London (about 1587) a number were in active operation. Shakespeare's own theatre, "The Globe," built 1593, lay across the Thames from London in the "Bankside," a part of Southwark, close to the river. Other famous theatres of the day were "The Fortune," "The Rose," and "The Curtain," at the last of which Marlowe is known to have acted. The theatres were of two kinds, public and private. The first were large six-sided wooden buildings, roofed over above the stage and thatched, the pit or yard being without shelter from the sun or rain. Galleries ran round the walls, as in the Inn-yards. The stage projected into the pit, which was alive with disorderly crowds who stood on the bare ground, joking, fighting, or shoving to gain the best places. There was little attempt at scenery. In the old plays we find such significant stage directions as these: "Exit Venus; or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up."† In more than one place through the Choruses of Henry V. Shakespeare seems to be impatient of the slender resources of his stage-setting, as when he asks:

'Can this cock-pit hold

The vasty fields of France? or may we cram

* See Shakespeare's "Henry VIII.," act iii. sc. 3. In Green's "Alphonsus "-quoted by Collier.

'Annals of the Stage,"

vol. iii. p. 357.

Within this wooden O, the very casques,

That did affright the air at Agincourt ? "*

And in the wonderful description that precedes the battle of Agincourt, he complains;

"And so our scene must to the battle fly;
Where (O for pity) we shall much disgrace-
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed, in brawl ridiculous,-
The name of Agincourt; yet sit and see,

Judging true things by what these mockeries be."t

The private theatres were smaller and more comfortable than the public. They had seats in the pit and were entirely under roof. Performances were given by candle or torch light, and the audiences were usually more select. The following description of Mr. Symonds gives us a vivid notion of the performance of a play in Shakespeare's time:

"Let us imagine that the red-lettered play-bill of a new tragedy has been hung out beneath the picture of Dame Fortune [i. e., at "The Fortune" theatre, the great rival of Shakespeare's theatre, " The Globe "]; the flag is flying from the roof, the drums have beaten and the trumpets are sounding for the second time. It is three o'clock upon an afternoon of summer. We pass through the great door, ascend some steps, take our key from the pocket of our trunk-hose and let ourselves into our private room upon the first or lowest tier. We find ourselves in a low, square building, not unlike a circus; smelling of sawdust and the breath of people. The yard below is crowded with simpering mechanics and prentices in greasy leathern jerkins, servants in blue frieze with their masters' badges on their shoulders, boys and grooms elbowing each other for bare standing ground and passing jests on their neighbors. Five or six young men are already seated before the curtain playing

* Chorus to " Henry V.," act i.

† Chorus to act iv.