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pleasures, and commodities of the same, digested into a poem.' It was not a success, though it deserved success. Its great length was against it, but the real reason was, that this kind of poetry had had its day. It appeared in 1613, in James I.'s reign.

come.

PHILOSOPHICAL POETRY.-Before that time a change had As the patriotic poets came after the romantic, so the romantic were followed by the philosophical poets. The youth and early manhood of the Elizabethan poetry passed, about 1600, into its thoughtful manhood. The land was settled; enterprise ceased to be the first thing; men sat down to think, and in poetry questions of religious and political philosophy were treated with 'sententious reasoning, grave, subtile, and condensed.' Shakespeare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 1601, represents this change.

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The two poets who represent it are SIR JNO. DAVIES and FULKE GREVILLE, Lord Brooke. In Davies we find an admirable instance of it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra, 1596, in which the whole world is explained as a dance, is as gay and bright as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is compact and vigorous reasoning, for the most part without fancy. Its very title, Nosce te ipsum-Know Thyself-and its divisions, 1. ' On humane learning,' 2. The immortality of the soul'mark the alteration. Two little poems, one of Bacon's, on the Life of Man, as a bubble, and one of SIR HENRY WOTTON'S, on the Character of a Happy Life, are instances of the same change. It is still more marked in Greville's long, obscure poems on Human Learning, on Wars, and on Monarchy and Religion. They are political and historical treatises, not poems, and all in them, says Lamb, is made frozen and rigid by intellect.' Apart from poetry, they are worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit on political science which was to produce the riper speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke.'

TRANSLATIONS.-There are three translators that take liter

ary rank among the crowd that carried on the work of the earlier time. Two mark the influence of Italy, one the more powerful influence of the Greek spirit. SIR JOHN HARINGTON in 1591 translated Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, FAIRFAX in 1600 translated Tasso's Jerusalem, and his book is one of the glories of Elizabeth's reign.' But the noblest translation is that of Homer's whole work by GEORGE CHAPMAN, the dramatist, the first part of which appeared in 1598. The vivid life and energy of the time, its creative power, and its force are expressed in this poem, which is more an Elizabethan tale written about Achilles and Ulysses than a translation. The rushing gallop of the long fourteen syllable stanza in which it is written has the fire and swiftness of Homer, but it has not his directness or dignity. Its 'inconquerable quaintness' and diffuseness are as unlike the pure form and light and measure of Greek work as possible. But it is a distinct poem of such power that it will excite and delight all lovers of poetry, as it excited and delighted Keats."

LESSON 23.

EARLY DRAMATIC REPRESENTATION IN ENGLAND." The drama, as in Greece, so in England, began in religion. In early times none but the clergy could read the stories of their religion, and it was not the custom to deliver sermons to the people. It was necessary to instruct uneducated men in the history of the Bible, in the Christian faith, in the lives of the Saints and Martyrs. Hence the Church set on foot miracleplays and mysteries. We find the first of these about 1110, when Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of St. Albans, prepared his miracle play of St. Catherine for acting. Such plays became more frequent from the time of Henry II., and they were so common in Chaucer's time that they were the resort of idle gossips in Lent. The wife of Bath went to 'plays of miracles and marriages.' They were acted not only by the clergy

but by the laity. About the year 1268, the town guilds began to take them into their own hands, and acted complete sets of plays, setting forth the whole of Scripture history from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. Each guild took one play in the set. They lasted sometimes three days, sometimes eight, and were represented on a great movable stage on wheels in the open spaces of the towns. Of these sets we have three remaining, the Towneley, Coventry, and Chester plays, 1300-1600. The first set has 32, the second 42, and

the third 25 plays.

The Miracle-Play was a representation of some portion of Scripture history, or of the life of some Saint of the Church. The Mystery was a representation of any portion of the New Testament history concerned with a mysterious subject, such as the Incarnation, the Atonement, or the Resurrection. It has been attempted to distinguish these more particularly, but they are mingled together in England into one. From the towns they went to the Court and to the houses of nobles. The Kings kept players of them, and we know that exhibiting Scripture plays at great festivals was part of the domestic regulations of the great houses, and that it was the Chaplain's business to write them. Their Dumb Show' and their 'Chorus' leave their trace in the regular drama. We cannot say that the modern drama arose after them, for it came in before they died out in England. They were still acted in Chester in 1577, and in Coventry in 1580."

“There were neither theatres nor professional actors in England, indeed in Europe, at the period when miracle-plays first came in vogue. The first performers in these plays were clergymen; the first stages, or scaffolds, on which they were presented were set up in churches. Evidence that this was the case has been discovered in such profusion that it is needless to specify it more particularly in this place than to remark that councils and prelates finally found it necessary to forbid such performances either in churches or by the clergy. But it is worthy of remark that evidence of the ecclesiastical character of the first actors of our drama is preserved in dramatic literature to this day in the Latin

words of direction, Exit and Exeunt. After the exclusion of the clergy from the religious stage, lay-brothers, parish clerks, and the hangers-on of the priesthood naturally took the place of their spiritual fathers, under whose superintendence, or to speak precisely, management, the miracle-plays were brought out. Excluded from the church itself, the miracle-play found fitting refuge in the church-yard. But it was finally forbidden within all hallowed precincts, and was then presented upon a movable scaffold, or pageant, which was dragged through the town, and stopped for the performance at certain places designated by an announcement made a day or two before.

At last the presentation of these plays fell entirely into the hands of laymen, and handicraftsmen became their actors; the members of the various guilds undertaking respectively certain plays which they made for the time their specialty. Thus the Shearmen and Taylors would represent one; the Coppers another; and so with the Smiths, the Skinners, the Fishmongers, and others. In the Chester series, Noah's flood was very appropriately assigned to the Water-dealers and Drawers of Dee. It is almost needless to remark that female characters were always played by striplings and young men. Women did not appear upon the English stage until the middle of the seventeenth century. It would seem that the priests appeared only as amateurs, and that their performances were gratuitous. But when laymen, or, at least, when handicraftsmen undertook the business, they were paid, as we know by the memorandums of accounts still existing.”—R. G. White.

MORAL-PLAYS.—"The Morality was the next step to these, and in it we come to a representation which is closely connected with the drama. It was a play in which the characters were the Vices and Virtues, with the addition afterwards of allegorical personages, such as Riches, Good Deeds, Confession, Death, and any human condition or quality needed for the play. These characters were brought together in a rough story, at the end of which Virtue triumphed, or some moral principle was established. The dramatic fool grew up in the Moralities out of a personage called 'The Vice,' and the humorous element was introduced by the retaining of The Devil' from the Miracle play, and by making the Vice torment him. They were continually represented, but, becoming

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coarser, were finally supplanted by the regular drama about the end of Elizabeth's reign.

The Transition between these and the regular Drama is not hard to trace. The Virtues and Vices were dull, because they stirred no human sympathy. Historical characters were therefore then introduced, who were celebrated for a virtue or a vice; Brutus represented patriotism, Aristides represented justice; or, as in BALE'S Kynge Johan, historical and allegorical personages were mixed together. The transition was hastened by the impulse of the Reformation. The religious struggle came so home to men's hearts that they were not satisfied with subjects drawn from the past, and the Morality was used to support the Catholic or the Protestant side. Real men and women were shown under the thin cloaks of its allegorical characters; the vices and the follies of the time were displayed. It was the origin of satiric comedy. The stage was becoming a living power when this began. The excitement of the audience was now very different from that felt in listening to Virtues and Vices, and a demand arose for a comedy and tragedy which should picture human life in all its forms.

The Interludes of JOHN HEYWOOD, most of which were written for Court representation in Henry VIII.'s time, 1530, 1540, represent this further transition. They differed from the Morality in that most of the characters were drawn from real life, but they retained the Vice' as a personage. The Interlude a short, humorous piece, to be acted in the midst of the Morality for the amusement of the people-had been frequently used, but Heywood isolated it from the Morality, and made of it a kind of farce. Out of it we may say grew English comedy."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. THE DRAMA.-R. G. White's Account of the Rise and Progress of; Whipple's Lit. of Age of Eliz.; W. Hazlitt's Lectures on the Dra. Lit. of Age of Eliz.; T. Gilliland's Dramatic Mirror; H. N. Hudson's Origin and Growth of; J.Skelton's Early Eng. Life in; H. Ulrici's Sketch of Hist. of Eng. Drama; Nat. Quar. Rev., Dec., 1873.

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