Limits of their opera tion. they had introduced a considerable admixture of ludicrous characters, passages, and scenes, and had constituted it virtually an integral part of themselves. The moralities, on the other hand, had familiarised their spectators with personifications of the loftiest of virtues, as well as of the meanest and most ridiculous kinds of vices. They had likewise given bodily form to many conceptions involving the highest interests of their public, or again coming nearest home to its business and bosoms. But from an artistic point of view the miracles had failed to correspond in dignity of form to the sublimity of their subjects. The action of a collective mystery was indeed, regarded as a whole, of the utmost magnitude; but the connexion between the several 'pageants' merely underlay the often fragmentary action of each. The endless repetition of the well-known episodes of the Sacred Narrative had deprived them of freshness of interest. And so stereotyped had the characters become, that pity or terror could hardly be aroused, except in a very modified degree, in a spectator moderately experienced. The cohesion between the several plays was epical rather than dramatic; and the emotions aroused by each could rarely amount to more than a faint curiosity, which they contrived to gratify either by the addition of new external effects or by trifling comic intermezzos weakening the total tragic impression. The moralities, artificial in their origin, could produce no powerful results by their didactic abstractions, which, ringing the changes on a not very flexible system of arguments, addressed themselves in the first place to the intellectual faculties, and only secondarily to the moral sympathies of their audiences. To move real men and women into something beyond a calm acquiescence in indubitable moral truths, it was necessary either to give these truths a practical application to relations of immediate personal interest, or to make the representatives of abstract qualities and ideas types of their most familiar human embodiments. Pity and terror on the one hand, and contemptuous dislike on the other, could only be excited in a high degree by TRANSITION TO THE REGULAR DRAMA. abandoning the basis on which the moralities were constructed. What more natural, then, than that it should have suggested itself to develope both the miracles and moralities in the directions suggested by observation of these defects? To apply a dramatic treatment similar to that of the miracles to personages and passages of profane history, and one similar to that of the moralities to actual types of contemporary life, was therefore an advance which may seem to have been of its nature inevitable. The transition was so easy, that the difficulty lies rather in understanding why it took so long to accomplish. All classes of the population were familiar with the characters and events of religious history and legend; it was only necessary that a similar acquaintance should come to prevail with personages of profane history and their deeds, and these could not fail to gain admission to the popular stage. Such an acquaintance was, however, only gradually produced by the influences of the Renascence and Reformation, which led both to a more widely-spread knowledge of the national history, to a study of classical historical works, and to the introduction of foreign, especially Italian, narrative literature into England. On the other hand, the tendency towards substituting real types for personified abstractions had long been asserting itself in individual instances. Some such types had of course found their way into the mysteries from the very first, or rather the mysteries had found them ready to hand in the Sacred Narrative on which they were based'; but many moralities had likewise admitted them; and the figure of the Vice had been a halfconcrete being from the outset, and frequently a type of the mischievous fool pure and simple. In general, moreover, it will not be forgotten that the religious plays and the moralities had never been kept absolutely distinct. Whatever new species of dramatic production formed itself, was accordingly likely to contain elements of both the one and the other. Yet, as it happened, in England at all events tragedy and comedy arose 1 I refer to such characters as the Shepherds, Soldiers, Tortores, &c. Impulse derived from the Classical and the Italian drama. neither consentaneously nor simultaneously. Both took their rise more immediately from the moralities, though the mysteries were not unconnected with the beginnings of tragedy. Lastly, both tragedy and comedy, before they sprang into independent being, needed the impulse of foreign literary examples. These were supplied by Classical literature, the study of which advanced in England without any real interruption throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century; and by the literature of that country which was not only the birthplace, but long the favourite home of the Renascence. At a critical time in the history of the English drama, our dramatists became familiar, not only with Classical and Italian subjects, but also with Classical and Italian plays. Though it is well known that a company of Italian actors visited England and performed before the Queen in the year 1578, the direct influence of Italian examples traceable in the efforts of many of our early dramatists has been hitherto rather under- than overestimated'. These general remarks will suffice to introduce a brief account of the beginnings of English tragedy and comedy respectively. Though it was comedy which sooner attained to an independent life of its own in England, it may be more appropriate to speak of tragedy in the first instance. Long before the influence of the Renascence movement asserted itself on the English drama, Italian tragedy had seized on subjects of national interest as well as of Classical origin, and had imitated in form the most familiar Latin model of Classical tragedy. Alberto Mussato's Eccerinis was the work of a Paduan born only three years after the 1 Cf. Klein, iv. 560; with reference to Collier, i. 235 and iii. 398; and to a well-known passage in The Spanish Tragedy: 'The Italian Tragedians were so sharp of wit, That in one hour's meditation They would perform anything in action.' Though the Italian actors may therefore be concluded to have usually played the improvised comedies, which under the name of Commedie dell' Arte will have to be noticed below, they also carried with them regular plays, so-called Commedie Erudite, which had to be got by heart. BEGINNINGS OF THE SECULAR DRAMA. 93 death of the tyrant Ezzelino himself1; and though the play is written in Latin, and is a close imitation of Seneca, from whose Thyestes it even borrows a passage verbatim, its subject is one of immediately national interest. Another Latin drama of the same century treats a contemporary event, the Capture of Cesena2; and Landivio, a poet of the fifteenth century, commemorates in another Latin tragedy the Captivity and death of a famous captain of its times3. When, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Italian tragic poets began to compose in their own tongue, they generally preferred classical subjects, though we meet with a Rosmonda; so that by the time when the English drama came into contact with the Italian, the example of the latter no longer pointed in a direction which the former had already in an earlier period come to pursue of its own accord. Early in dications of the transi tion from the religious to the drama. Of the influence of Italian examples it would therefore at present be premature to speak. It is, however, strange that it should not have independently suggested itself to the minds of many of the authors of our later miracleplays to widen their range of subjects so as to include secular dramatic versions of secular narrative. When historical figures such as Octavian and Tiberius Caesar found their way into the religious plays, and Pompey the Great and other heroes of profane lore into the pageants, the step might seem to have been so easy to the dramatic treatment of an entire passus of secular history or of pseudohistorical romance, that the only wonder is that this step should hardly ever have been taken. An exception may Robert perhaps be noted in the instance of a play acted at Chester in 1529, the title of which was Robert Cicill, i.e. King Robert of Sicily. It was doubtless founded on the old romance of that name, and showed, according to a letter 1 Mussato was born 1261, and died 1330. Klein, v. 235. 2 A.D. 1357; ib. 251. 3 De Captivitate Ducis Jacobi tragoedia. J. P. was executed in 1464; ib. * One or two French 'profane mysteries' have been already noted. Cicill The be ginnings of the study of national history. from the Mayor and Corporation of Chester discovered by Mr. Collier, how its hero 'was warned by an Aungell whiche went to Rome, and shewyd Kyng Robart all the powre of God, and what thynge yt was to be a pore man; and thanne, after sondrye wanderynges, ledde hym backe agayne to his kingdom of Cicylye, where he lyved and raygned many yeres. It was therefore to all intents and purposes a miracle-play, and is to be classed with productions of this kind rather than regarded as a precocious attempt in the direction of historical tragedy. Our own national history had long been a sealed book to the people. Though chronicles had been composed in a long succession, which even the Wars of the Roses had been unable wholly to break, their authors had been chiefly ecclesiastics, and their design had never been to gratify such interest in the past as might exist in the public at large. But the Renascence brought with it into England the first attempts at historical writing of a more attractive description; an Italian wrote English history in Latin under the first two Tudors; and already Henry VII's reign produced in Fabyan's Chronicle, or Concordance of Histories, the earliest of a series of historical efforts in the native tongue destined to exercise an enduring effect upon the sentiments of the nation. It was not indeed part of the policy of Henry VIII to use the art of printing, as it was used by the German reformers, for the encouragement of a spirit which should be at once national and antiRoman; but of the 'new learning' spread by the Renascence and the Reformation, some study of national history, and a consequent endeavour to produce historical works in a widely acceptable literary form, inevitably formed part. It was impossible, especially in a people so ineradicably conservative as the English, that a great political as well as religious change should accomplish itself without a conscious appeal on the part of its advocates to the historical past of the nation. The Tudor dynasty availed itself of the beginnings of our modern historical literature 1 Collier, i. 113-115; ii. 128. 2 Polydore Virgil. |