a Poticary,* and a Pedlar, and ends in their trying to see which can tell the greatest lie. The Palmer is considered victorious when he says, speaking of the distant lands through which he has travelled :

"Yet have I seen many a mile,

And many a woman in the while;

And not one good city, town, or borough,
In Christendom but I've been thorough:
And this I would ye should understand,
I have seen women five hundred thousand,
Yet in all places where I have been,
Of all the women that I have seen,

I never saw nor knew on my conscience,
Any one woman out of patience!"

Unwillingly the other P's yield the palm to this narrator, who has excelled them in the "most ancient and notable art of lying.".

The first comedy in the language was written by NICHOLAS UDALL (1506-1604), about the middle of the sixteenth century, or near the time of Elizabeth's accession to the throne, and was called Ralph Royster Doyster.

Ralph, the hero, is a blustering, vain fellow, in mad pursuit of a rich widow, whom he does not obtain. The language, though not polished, is not indecent, and probably represents the rustic manners of the time. "Tibet Talkapace," one of the rich widow's servants, thus congratulates herself on the approaching marriage of her mistress to "a rich man and gay."

"And we shall go in our French hoodes every day,

In our silk cassocks I warrant you, fresh and gay,

Then shall ye see, Tibet, sires, treade the mosse so trimme,
Nay, why said I treade? ye shall see hir glide and swimme,—
Not lumperdee, clumperdee, like our spaniell Rig."

The first English tragedy was called Ferrex and Porrex or Gorboduc. It was written by SACKVILLE† and NORTON, and was played before Elizabeth a few years after her accession. The story was based on an old British legend, found in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

* Apothecary.

†Thomas Sackville, author of The Mirror for Magistrates.

Soon after, RICHARD EDWARDS (1523-1566) produced the play of Damon and Pythias, the first English tragedy founded on a classical subject. The play was probably inferior to Gorboduc, but it became more popular.

Following in the list of dramatic writers, were PEEle, Nash, Kyd, LYLY, GREENE, and MARLOWE, antedating by a few years only the appearance of SHAKESPEARE. Grouped around this central luminary were still others of various magnitude. There were BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, MASSINGER, CHAPMAN, WEBSTER, MIDDLETON, MARSTON, FORD, THOMAS HEYWOOD, DEKKER, ROWLEY, LODGE, and the last of the Elizabethan dramatists, JAMES SHIRLEY.

The lives of these writers present a series of struggles for a bare existence. They did not write for fame-they seem simply to have offered themselves as sacrifices to the spirit of the age, and died, many of them, of poverty and neglect.

Although Elizabeth was very fond of plays, it is not at all improbable that she encouraged them somewhat with the aim of opposing the Puritan spirit which condemned such amusements. Be that as it may, play-going was the chief entertainment of the time. newspaper, magazine, and novel of the present day.

It served for the

Blackfriars was the first theatre built in London, and before thirty years had elapsed there were eighteen.*

With scarcely an exception, all the dramatists participated in the acting of their own plays. Shakespeare, it is said, played the Ghost in Hamlet, and Adam in As You Like It.

PEELE, NASH, GREENE, and MARLOWE were wild, reckless characters, given to all manner of excesses. Educated at Oxford and at Cambridge, and with a wealth of native genius, their lives were actually squandered in lawless dissipation.

*At an early hour in the afternoon the signal for assembling was given, by the hoisting of a flag from the roof of the theatre. These buildings were constructed of wood, and were of a circular form, and uncovered, except by a thatched roof extending over the stage. The Queen and her retinue sometimes occupied seats below the gallery, and sometimes upon the stage, where the gay courtiers lounged upon the rush-strewn floor, while their pages supplied them with pipes of tobacco, that new article of luxury introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh.

The furnishing of the stage was meagre. There were no illusions of movable scenery, but when the place of action was to be changed, a board containing the name of the place was exhibited.

No woman ever acted upon the stage until nearly half a century after Shakespeare's time. All the female characters were represented by youths and delicate-looking young men.

GEORGE PEELE (1553-1598) was, with Shakespeare, a shareholder in Blackfriars theatre, and also an actor. His tragedy of Edward I. is the first play founded on an English historical subject. His other plays are King David and Bethsaba, and the tragedy of Absalom. Besides plays, Peele also wrote a legendary story, partly in prose and partly in blank

verse.

ROBERT GREENE (1560-1592) also wrote tracts, or pamphlets as they were called, consisting of short stories from one of which, it is said, Shakespeare derived his Winter's Tale. Greene's most famous tract was called "A Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance," in which he addresses his associates, and warns them against the folly and wickedness of their ways. This was his last work, and although written in the spirit of repentance, it expresses the bitterness which he felt against "the upstart crow," as he jealously termed Shakespeare. Greene wrote numerous plays. His principal comedy is Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593), or, as he was often called, Kit Marlowe, was the most brilliant of the dramatists before Shakespeare. His life presents a scene of debaucheries, and his death was as violent and unhappy as his life. Marlowe's plays are not numerous, but are marked by strength and poetic skill, and in their wild exaggeration reflect his own extravagant life. His principal dramas are Tamburlane, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II. The play of Tamburlane represents unbounded ambition; the Jew of Malta, the passions of hatred and gain; Doctor Faustus, based on the same legend upon which Goethe afterwards founded his celebrated Faust, depicts "the struggle and failure of man to possess all knowledge and all pleasure without toil and without law." Edward II. is the tragic story of that king, which in itself needs no coloring. Marlowe was the first to use blank verse in the English drama.

Marlowe, Greene, and Peele are by far the most important names in the English drama preceding Shakespeare, if two or three years of priority can entitle them to a precedence, in time, worth naming.

THOMAS KYD was called by Jonson the "Sporting Kyd," merely as a play upon the name. His dramas are not especially gay. The Spanish Tragedy is his most important play.

The influence of JOHN LYLY (1553–1600) upon the writers of Elizabeth's time was probably greater than that of any other man. His plays, nine in number, are of comparatively small account. He is known to the literary world by his story

F

of Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, and Euphues and his England, and this work so affected the language of the court and of literature, that only a few-the strongest minds-remained uninjured by its influence. Although forced, artificial, and pedantic in the extreme, the style became so popular that not to be able to discourse in it was to lack one of the most fashionable court accomplishments. The romance of Euphues first appeared in 1579, and its influence lasted throughout Elizabeth's reign, and indeed much longer.*

The style consisted of overdrawn analogies and forced antitheses. Intended as a garb of wit, it became a mere distortion of language. The fashion was admirably burlesqued by Shakespeare in the fantastical Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado, in Love's Labor Lost.

Euphues tastes the bitterness of folly, repents so thoroughly, that he forever after becomes a counsel-monger. Some of his advice is excellent, and throughout the work there is a high moral tone that is gratifying in this age of exuberant expression. The book is pure and chaste throughout.

Euphues makes many friends in Italy and falls in love. Deceived by the lady, he says, "As therefore I gave a farewell to Lucilla, a farewell to Naples, a farewell to women, so nowe do I give a farewell to the worlde, meaning rather to macerate myselfe with melancholy, than pine in follye, rather choosing to die in my studye amiddest my bookes, than to court it in Italy, in ye companye of ladyes."

Euphues then travels in England, and his encounters there, or the experiences of his friend Philautus, form the concluding part of the book, or Euphues and his England.

* Sir Henry Blount, a courtier in the time of Charles I., says in his preface to Lyly's works, "Our nation is in debt for a new English which he taught them. Euphues and his England began first that language; all our ladies were then his scholars; and that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism-that is to say, who was unable to converse in that pure and reformed English which he had formed his work to be the standard of, was as little regarded as she which now, there, speaks not French."

The story of Euphues is of a young Athenian who visits Italy, and there, rejecting the wholesome counsel of an old gentleman in Naples, who, "seeing his mirth without measure, yet not without wit, began to bewail his Nurture, and to muse at his Nature." "But," he reflects, "it hath been an olde sayde sawe, and not of lesse truth than antiquity, that wit is the better if it be deare bought."

The faults of the style of Lyly can be traced to the copying of Italian literature, in which, as Roger Ascham said, a story of Boccaccio was of more account than a story from the Bible. It is “a style modelled on the decadence of Italian prose."*

SHAKESPEARE.

Of the life of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616), the greatest of all writers, we know comparatively little. It is easy and pleasant to conjecture, and many stories are told of his life which may or may not be true.

He was born, it is said, on the 23d of April, 1564, at Stratford, a rural village in the heart of England, on the little stream of Avon. Here for several generations his ancestors had lived as worthy and respectable farmers. Shakespeare's father was high-bailiff, or mayor of the town, and was well-todo. He had married Mary Arden, an heiress, whose ancestors had played a conspicuous part in the old wars of England. The poet was one of ten children. What course in life his parents had laid out for him we do not know. That he was not sent to Oxford or Cambridge we have tolerably clear evidence, but we can imagine him "with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school," over the hills of Warwickshire and through the "forest of Arden,” finding "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."

The love of pageantry and show was not confined to London or to the court, but remote villages like Stratford held their merry-making festivals, and when the players from London would come up to that quiet little town, it is not difficult to imagine the delight with which they were followed by the boy, William Shakespeare. Probably he was permitted to witness the gay performances at Kenilworth Castle,

* At the same time that Euphuism prevailed in England, the "estilo culto," or cultivated style, arose in Spain, threatening, for a time, to overthrow the common language of the people. This affected style in Spain was taught by Gongora. It was a pompous, inflated manner inherited probably from the Moors, and copied by the Italians as well as by the Spaniards. It is a curious coincidence in the history of English and Spanish Literature that these ideas should prevail at the same time and in the midst of the most flourishing literary periods. Fortunately, there was sufficient strength in the speech of both countries to overcome this cultivated jargon and preserve the languages in their simplicity.