of the sea has permeated with its flavor and its tone every age of art in England. "Without the voyagers," it has been said, "Marlowe is inconceivable." Without the writers of the stories collected by Richard Hakluyt and added to by Samuel Purchas, of the winning of the world by the adventurous voyagers, and without Marlowe, too, Shakespeare is inconceivable. The effect of the spirit of freedom upon the language of these men was incalculably great; hence it was great upon the language of ourselves. They used language as they pleased; but fortunately they were always pleased to use it in such way as would most efficiently accomplish the conveying of what they wished to convey. It has even been said that these men were language mad; but if they were, it was the madness of genius, which, as Emerson says, is simply "the power to labor better and more availably," for their language does what they intended it to do. If, like Spenser, they preferred archaic English, they employed it. (Ben Jonson said of Spenser that he used no language at all!) If, like the schoolmasters at the universities (such as Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham and Nicholas Udall who, though eminent classical scholars, fought for "our own tongue, clean, pure, unmixed, and unmangled with the borrowing of other tongues"), they desired to use the current correct English, they employed it. And if they preferred to spangle their pages with "borrowings" from the Latin tongue, as Shakespeare in

When the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine.

they took and used what they preferred. With this language they both held the mirror up to nature for themselves and for us, and provided the means for so enlisting our attention that we are taken out of ourselves, our troubles and self-centered interests. and made to live in our own minds the lives of others.

The earlier antecedents of the Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare," the light that was to shine over many lands," was the greatest product of the Renaissance. But before we come to him, if we would understand the form of literature with which he is chiefly associated, that is, the Drama, we should go back into history a little way.

Of the three great epochs in dramatic history, the Greek, the Spanish, and the English, the last was the most fruitful in varied types and the richest in quantity. All drama results from the play impulse which exists in all vital things and from the fact that men's attention is most readily attracted and held by action, or by something in motion. These are the general psychological sources of drama. The English drama, of course, resulted from this impulse and this fact; but more directly from the desire of the priesthood to influence the common people more speedily and more powerfully than in religious matters they were influencing them. They thought they could do this, first, by opposing the influences of the pagan drama of old Greece and Rome, and, second, by impressing the people with the importance of the Biblical stories. The liturgy of the mass of the Roman Catholic Church already existed as a public performance. It was a ready step from that to the acting of Biblical stories in the church and then out in the open air upon a raised platform or up in a wagon where the people could see the acting well. A Biblical story thus acted was called a mystery, or mystery play. It had to do with the mysterious doctrines of life, death, and the great hereafter, which were associated with the character and deeds of the Scriptural personages. The Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau in modern times is an illustration of this sort of dramatic play.

The extension of the subject matter to include the legends connected with the lives of the saints of the Church brought

the miracle, or miracle play, into vogue. It is doubtful if the priests and the people of that day distinguished between mystery and miracle in this way, but the distinction has now become a convenient one to mark the growing change in subject matter. No doubt the miracle plays became popular with the priests themselves because of some hesitation about the sacredness of publicly assuming the characters of the Scriptures as they had to do in the mysteries. The mysteries were not allowed to become extinct, however, for the trade guilds took them up, both for amusement and for money making.

For the sake of variety and of subtlety, too, the Biblical and legendary stories were, not abandoned altogether, but less and less used, and symbolical characters, some of which had already begun to be used in the mysteries and miracles, came to absorb almost the whole of the interest; and thus arose what are called moralities, or moral plays. Everyman is the moral play best known to the public of to-day. The moralities were allegories intended to teach men to live better lives, the dramatic conflict in them being between the good and the bad in typical men. The religious ideas of the mystery play were now merged into the ideas of practical morality.

How did the Shakespearean play derive itself from all this rather remote form and these rather direct purposes of the mystery, the miracle, and the morality? In this way,

The step from the morality to true drama was an easy one. Substitute worldly personages for the allegorical characters, and, for the religious or moral purpose, substitute any motive that might rule the life of these personages, and let it work joy or havoc among them, let it proceed by comic scenes to a pleasant ending or through tragic scenes to a fatal and terrible ending, and let this all be placed before the spectator clothed in the power and beauty of poetry, and there exists the drama of Marlowe and of Shakespeare. It was genius alone which could so clothe these personages, their motives, and their actions; but independence of thought and industry could provide the material for this poetic expression.

Some intermediate work was done between the morality and the real drama, as the table given suggests. We know that mysteries were performed in England as early as 1119, and that moralities had become very popular as early as the reign of the first Tudor, Henry VII, who came to the throne in 1485. Then during the reigns of Henry VIII and of Mary it came to be the fashion in the intervals of banquets and of other pastimes to bring forward players who would deliver dialogue, which usually arose from some comic situation and revealed the nature of certain characters by their grouping and by the contrasts brought out in their sayings. This was a peculiarly English fashion, . though it corresponded somewhat to an ancient Latin one known as Disputationes. The English called it an Interlude. The best-known writer of the interlude was John Heywood, probably its originator. When he used the interlude not merely for a pastime but for religious satire, he was exiled.

Before Heywood there had already existed a comic element in the morality. Even in the mystery and in the miracle play the Devil had been a prominent character, and with him had come to be associated a constant attendant known as the Vice. In

the morality the Vice became very much a buffoon. Now, when we take this comic element represented by the antics and sayings of the Vice (later the "fool "), and when we take also the power of characterization by means of dialogue alone which Heywood showed in the interlude, all that is lacking for the production of a comedy is the construction of a plot. The Latin models, poor as they were, and imitative of the more degenerate days of the Greek comedy, nevertheless furnished the suggestion for plot; and before 1551 Nicholas Udall, head master of Eton, wrote Ralph Roister Doister, bringing the grotesquerie and the allegorical method of the middle ages into actual life, by taking a cowardly and vain-glorious braggart as the chief character, and telling the story of his courtship and rejection. This is usually known as the first English comedy.

Comedy came before tragedy, for two reasons: (1) it has a quicker appeal to a wider audience; and (2) the fun-making scenes in the moralities were really foreign to the underlying purpose of the moralities, and could be easily detached and acted alone. Detaching them, stripping them of their merely allegorical method, and forming their material into plot, made the comedy, and made at least a crude one very easily.

The first English tragedy we have already mentioned. It was called Gorboduc. It was performed at Whitehall before the Queen, in 1561. As the comedy sprang in England from the fun-making scenes of the moralities, so the tragedy was derived from the seriously sacred parts of the mysteries and miracle plays and from the sober moral idea of the moralities. Not the recklessness or the comic enmeshments of life, as in the comedy, but the seriously responsible moments of life make up the subject matter of the tragedy. Tragedy is the record of a fatal event. The Chronicle histories, such as those of Raphael Holinshed and his contemporary, Edward Hall, were filled