THE MORALITIES AND INTERLUDES.

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and his hard blows and scoldings with the Vice, furnished many 66 a fit of mirth."* The oldest English Moral-play now extant is The Castle of Perseverance, which was written about 1450. It is a dramatic allegory of human life, representing the many conflicting influences that surround man in his way through the world. Another, called Lusty Juventus, contains a vivid and humorous picture of the extravagance and debauchery of a young heir, surrounded by the Virtues and the Vices, and ends with a demonstration of the inevitable misery which follows a departure from the path of virtue and religion.

Springing from the Moralities, and bearing some general resemblance to them, though exhibiting a nearer approach to the regular drama, are the Interludes, a class of compositions in dialogue, much shorter in extent and more merry and farcical. They were generally played in the intervals of a festival, and were exceedingly fashionable about the time when the great controversy was raging between the Catholic Church and the reformed religion in England. The most noted author of these grotesque and merry pieces was John Heywood, a man of learning and accomplishment, who seems to have performed the duties of entertainer at the court of Henry VIII. His Four P's is a good specimen of this phase of the drama. It turns upon a dispute between a Peddler, a Pardoner, a Palmer and a Poticary, in which each tries to tell the greatest lie. They tax their powers, until at last, by chance, the Palmer says that he never saw a woman out of temper; whereupon the others declare his lie the greatest that can be told, and acknowledge him the victor.

The national taste for dramatic entertainments was still further fostered by those pageants which were often employed to gratify the vanity of citizens, or to compliment an illustrious visitor. On

* "As for the Vice, he commonly acted the part of a broad, rampant jester and buffoon, full of mad pranks and mischief-making, liberally dashed with a sort of tumultuous, swaggering fun. He was arrayed in fantastic garb, with something of drollery in its appearance, so as to aid the comic effect of his action, and armed with a dagger of lath, perhaps as symbolical that his use of weapons was but to the end of provoking his own defeat. Therewithal he was vastly given to cracking ribald and saucy jokes with and upon the devil, and treating him in a style of coarse familiarity and mockery; and a part of his ordinary business was to bestride the Devil, and beat him till he roared, and the audience roared with him; the scene ending with his being carried off to Hell on the Devil's back."-Hudson: Shakespeare's Life, Art and Characters, Vol. I., p. 73.

some lofty platform, in the porch or churchyard of a cathedral, in the Town Hall or over the city gate, a number of figures suitably dressed, accompanied their action with poetical declamation and music. The Prophets and Saints who welcomed the royal stranger in the thirteenth century with barbarous Latin hymns, were gradually supplanted by the Virtues; and these, in their turn, made way for the Cupids, the Muses, and other classical personages, whose influence has continued almost to the literature of our own time. Such spectacles were of course frequently exhibited at the Universities, where the Latin tongue was invariably employed and Latin plays were imitated. These dramas, however, do not appear to have exercised any appreciable influence on the growth of the English stage.

We have now traced the progress of the dramatic art from its rude infancy in England, and have seen how every step of that advance removed it farther from a purely religious character. The last step of the progress was the creation of a drama which gives a scenic representation of historical events and of social life. It was about the middle of the sixteenth century that activity of creation was first perceptible in this direction. John Bale (1495-1563), the author of many semi-polemical plays, set the example of extracting materials for rude dramas from the chronicles of his native country. His King John occupies an intermediate place between the Moralities and the historical plays. But the earliest composition in our language that possesses all the requisites of a regular tragedy, and the first that is written in blank verse, is the play of Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, written by Thomas Sackville * (the principal writer in the "Mirror for Magistrates"), and acted in 1562 for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth. Its subject is borrowed from the old half-mythological Chronicles of Britain. The dialogue of Gorboduc is regularly and carefully constructed; but it is totally destitute of variety of pause, and consequently is unnatural. The sentence almost invariably terminates with the line; and the effect of the whole is tedious; the action also is oppressively tragic, being a monotonous, dismal succession of slaughters, ending with the desolation of an entire kingdom.

The first English comedy was Ralph Royster Doyster, acted in

* One Thomas Norton is said to have been the author of the first three acts of this play, but his claim is disputed.

1551] 1551, and written by Nicholas Udall, master of Eton College. This was followed, about fifteen years later, by Gammer Gurton's Needle, composed by John Still, afterwards a bishop, who had previously been master of St. John's and Trinity Colleges in Cambridge. This play was probably acted by the students of those colleges. Both these works are curious and interesting, not only as the oldest specimens of the class of literature to which they belong, but also in some measure from their intrinsic merit. The action of the former and better comedy takes place in London. The principal characters are a rich and pretty widow, her lover, and an insuppressible suitor, who gives the title to the play. This ridiculous pretender to gayety and love is betrayed into all sorts of absurd and humiliating scrapes. The piece ends with the return of the favored lover from a voyage which he had undertaken in a momentary pique. The manners represented are those of the middle class of the period; and the picture given of life in London in the sixteenth century is curious, animated, and natural. The language is lively, and the dialogue is carried on in loose doggerel rhyme, very well adapted to represent comic conversation. The plot of this drama is well imagined, and the reader's curiosity is kept alive.

Gammer Gurton's Needle is a composition of a much lower and more farcical order. The scene is laid in the humblest rustic life, and all the dramatis persona belong to the uneducated class. The principal action of the comedy is the sudden loss of a needle with which Gammer (Good Mother) Gurton has been mending a garment of her man Hodge, a loss comparatively serious when needles were rare and costly. The whole intrigue consists in the search instituted after this unfortunate little implement, which is at last discovered by Hodge himself, on suddenly sitting down, sticking in the garment which Gammer Gurton had been repairing.

As yet there were neither regular theatres nor professional actors. Plays were performed in town-halls, court-yards of inns, cock-pits, and noblemen's dining-halls; and the parts were taken by amateurs. Soon, however, companies of actors, singers, and tumblers, calling themselves the servants of some nobleman whose livery they wore, were formed, and wandered about the country, performing wherever they could find an audience. Protected by the livery of their master against the severe laws which

branded strollers as vagabonds, they sought the patronage of the civil authorities. Records of the municipal bodies and the household registers of illustrious families abound in entries of permissions granted to such strolling companies, and of moneys given to them. The most interesting of these entries is found in the municipal records of Stratford-upon-Avon, from which we learn that the players visited that place for the first time, in 1569. Their performance was probably given under the patronage of Shakespeare's father, who was high-bailiff of the town in that year.

1576.]

But in the year 1576, under the powerful patronage of the Earl of Leicester, James Burbadge built the first English theatre. The venture proved so successful, that twelve theatres were soon furnishing entertainment to the citizens of London. Of these the most celebrated was "The Globe." It was so named because its sign bore the effigy of Atlas supporting the globe, with the motto, "Totus Mundus agit Histrionem," and was situated in Southwark, near London Bridge. The majority of the London theatres were on the southern or Surrey bank of the Thames, in order to be out of the jurisdiction of the city, whose officers and magistrates, being under the influence of the severe doctrines of Puritanism, carried on a constant war against the players and the play-houses. Some of these theatres were cock-pits (the name of "the pit" still suggests the association); some were arenas for bull-baiting and bear-baiting; and, compared with the magnificent theatres of the present day, all were poor and squalid, retaining in their form and arrangements many traces of the old model-the inn-yard. Most of the theatres were entirely uncovered,* excepting over the stage, where a thatched roof protected the actors from the weather. The spectators were exposed to sunshine and to storm. The boxes, or rooms," as they were then styled, were arranged nearly as in the present day; but the musicians, instead of being placed in the orchestra, were in a lofty gallery over the stage.

The most remarkable peculiarities of the early English theatres were the total absence of painted or movable scenery, and the necessity that the parts for women should be performed by men or boys, actresses being as yet unknown. A few screens of cloth or

* Shakespeare's company owned the Blackfriars Theatre and the Globe. During the winter the company played in the former, which was the smaller and entirely roofed over; but during the summer they used the Globe.

THE FURNITURE OF THE STAGE.

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tapestry gave the actors the opportunity of making their exits and entrances; a placard, bearing the name of Rome, Athens, London, or Florence, as the case might be, indicated to the audience the scene of the action. Certain typical articles of furniture were used. A bed on the stage suggested a bed-room; a table covered with tankards, a tavern; a gilded chair surmounted by a canopy, and called "a state," a palace; an altar, a church, and the like. A permanent wooden structure like a scaffold, erected at the back of the stage, represented objects according to the requirements of the piece, such as the wall of a castle or besieged city, the outside of a house, or a position enabling one of the actors to overhear others without being seen himself.

Although thus scantily equipped in some respects, in costumery the early stage was lavish and splendid. "The Prologue" appeared in a long, flaming, velvet robe, made after the pattern of the Middle Ages, and all the other actors were attired in the richest dress of their own day. Its picturesqueness, instead of marring, heightened the effect. But the use of contemporary costume in plays whose action was supposed to take place in Greece, Rome, or Persia, naturally led to amazing absurdities, such as arming the assassins of Cæsar with Spanish rapiers, or furnishing Carthaginian senators with watches. Anachronisms, however, were not offensive to the uncritical spectators of those times. Certain attributes were associated with supernatural personages. A "roobe for to goo invisibell" is one of the items in an old list of properties; and in all probability the spectral armor of the Ghost in Hamlet was to be found in the wardrobe of the ancient theatres. The curtain is supposed to have opened perpendicularly in the middle; and besides this principal curtain, there seem to have been others occasionally drawn so as to divide the stage into several apartments.

The foregoing statements concerning the early theatre show how meagre were the material aids on which the dramatist could rely. That very poverty of the theatre was one of the conditions of the excellence of the Elizabethan dramatist. He could not depend upon the painter of scenes for any interpretation of the play, and therefore he was constrained to make his thought vigorous and his language vivid.

The performance began early in the afternoon, and was an nounced by flourishes of a trumpet. The prologue was generally