action. Characterization is not especially strong, and speeches are long and argumentative. "Everywhere hurried action and unreasoning instinct give place to deliberation and debate. Between this play and its predecessors no change can be more sweeping or more abrupt. In an instant, as it were, we pass from the unpolished Cambyses, savage and reeking with blood, to the equally violent events of Gorboduc, cold beneath a formal restraint. Had this severe discipline of the emotion been accepted as forever binding upon the tragic stage Elizabethan drama would have been forgotten. Conscious that the banishment of action from the stage, while natural enough in Greece, must meet with an overwhelming resistance from the popular custom in England, the authors invented a compromise. Before each act they provided a symbolical Dumb Show which, by its external position, infringed no classical law, yet satisfied the demand of an English audience for real and melodramatic spectacles." They also excluded comic matter, and thus in one way or another they cultivated a dignity that would otherwise have been lost.

8

After Gorboduc one of the most noteworthy productions belonging to the early history of English tragedy was The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), mainly by Thomas Hughes, an entertainment by "the Gentlemen of Gray's Inn " presented before the Queen "the twenty-eighth day of February in the thirtieth year of her Majesty's most happy reign." Hughes also went back to the sources of early English legend, to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory; and the play deals with the love of Mordred, the incestuous son of Arthur, for the Queen Guenevora, with the battle between father and son on Arthur's return from 8 Wynne: The Growth of English Drama, 103.

France, and the final engagement in Cornwall, with the death of Mordred and the wounding and suggested departure of Arthur. Blank verse is used, as in Gorboduc, but the style is sententious and argumentative, and again, in accordance with the Greek tradition, action is rigidly excluded from the play. Interesting for its literary connections, however, is the Ghost, in this case that of Gorlois, the first husband of Arthur's mother, Igerna-Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, who had so foully been slain by Uther Pendragon, Arthur's father.

17. Chronicle Plays.-In one way or another in this developing period of the drama there was exhibited an eagerness on the part of Englishmen to hear about their country's past, and such interest was greatly stimulated by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Thus arose the Chronicle Play. The ultimate origins of this might carry us back to the period of the old miracle plays and the ballads, and in later years there were close connections with moralities. Interest attaches to Kynge Johan, by Bishop Bale, produced about 1538. This play is a defiance of the Pope and of the system which he represents; it at one time likens King John to a Moses leading his people through the wilderness, and in the figure of Imperial Majesty recalls the age of controversy in which it was produced by strongly suggesting the person of Henry VIII. Sedition, who is the sole comic character, and the one who does most to further the action of the drama, is simply the old Vice come again; the play as a whole is quite lacking in the historical spirit; and in general its tone and method are such as to place it with the moralities rather than with the strict Chronicle Plays. More important is Gorboduc, “the earliest of a long list of English dramas which laid

in tragedy, interest is in a personality

THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

33

under contribution those legendary and pseudo-historical materials of the early chronicles of Britain which emanated from the fertile brain of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The relation of the earliest English tragedy to the English Chronicle Play is sufficiently defined in the recognition of this fact." In the earlier years of Elizabeth moreover great impetus to production was furnished by the work of the professional historians, who responded abundantly to the eager demand for books dealing with England's story. Of surpassing importance was the work of Raphael Holinshed, whose Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, produced in 1577, became the great storehouse of material for the historical plays of Shakespeare as well as those of his contemporaries.10 In 1579 also, at Cambridge, appeared a play exactly in the field of the Chronicle in Richardus Tertius Tragedia of Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College and Vice-Chancellor of the University. This production, which was in Latin, was greatly praised, and not unnaturally it had influence on such university men as Marlowe and Peele. It is "the earliest recorded drama dealing with a subject derived from the actual history of England." By 1590 had very probably appeared The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, Cordella, to all of which Shakespeare was indebted. By this time, however, not only Shakespeare himself, but Marlowe, Peele, and others, were using the Chronicle as a

• Schelling: The English Chronicle Play, 20.

1o A slight influence, however, as upon Shakespeare's Richard II, came from Froissart. See Smith: Froissart and the English Chronicle Play.

regular dramatic medium and the great period of its popularity had begun.

18. First Theatres. At this point it is well to see under just what conditions plays were actually produced in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The Elizabethan theatre found its home first of all in the yards of the inns of London. These inns were most frequently built in the form of a quadrangle surrounding an open court. When a play was to be performed a platform that was to serve as a stage was built out into the yard, and in the galleries or balconies round about the spectators of the better class would sit. Near the platform would stand those who were admitted for the cheapest fee and who would correspond most nearly to those who occupy the "bleachers" at a modern baseball game or the top gallery in a present-day theatre. These people became an important element in the development of the Elizabethan drama. Most of the coarse jokes were directed at them, and when we remember this we see all the more the point of Hamlet's reference to the "groundlings," "who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise." Naturally there was no covering to the yard; so that if a shower came up the spectators who were standing near the platform might be sprinkled, while those in the galleries would be protected. The dandies or gallants of the period would sometimes occupy special seats on the sides of the platform or stage proper, where they would "drink tobacco" and sometimes rather noisily express their opinion of the actors or the performance. The rear of the platform was commonly just below a gallery, which of course might serve all the more easily as a balcony or upper window. The innyard determined the general style

of the Elizabethan theatre. Receiving from the bear-baiting ring, however, a suggestion for better acoustic quality, the buildings that were first specially constructed for plays were circular rather than rectangular in shape; but throughout the period of the Elizabethan drama they remained open to the sky. "In 1575 London had no theatres; that is, no buildings especially designed for the acting of plays. By 1600 there were at least six, among which were some so large and beautiful as to arouse the unqualified admiration of travelers from the continent." 11 "The opposition to playing in the city led to the erection, in 1576, of the first Elizabethan playhouse, the Theater. It was built by James Burbage, formerly a joiner by trade, and a member of the Earl of Leicester's company," just outside the city on the north in Finsbury fields, "an open holiday ground where archery, fencing, sword-play and other sports were practised, and where the trained bands drilled." 12 Not far away, and very probably in 1577, was erected a second playhouse, the Curtain, so called from Curtain close, "a meadow once in the possession of the priory on which, later, was built a house called Curtain house." Next in order was the Rose, constructed by Philip Henslowe, a well-known theatrical manager, on the Surrey side of the Thames, possibly as early as 1587, but certainly not later than 1592. In 1596, working over a collection of rooms (including "seven great upper rooms"). in the old precinct of the "Blackfriars preachers," or Dominican monks, James Burbage opened an indoor or

11 W. H. Durham, in MacCracken, Pierce, and Durham: An Introduction to Shakespeare, 35.

" Harold Child: "The Elizabethan Theatre," in C. H. E. L., VI,