drama, the one can scarcely be thought or spoken of without the other.
It is of course conceivable that the regular drama, or drama proper, might in England have been called into life without the direct influence of classical examples. Already in the reign of Edward VI. the spirit of the Reformation had (with the aid of a newly awakened desire for the study of history, Beginnings of the regular drama.which was no doubt largely due to Italian examples) quickened the relatively inanimate species of the morality into the beginning of a new development.[1] But though the Kyng Johan of Bale (much as this author abhorred the chronicles as written by ecclesiastics) came very near to the chronicle histories, there is no proof whatever that the work, long hidden away for very good reasons, actually served as a transition to the new species; and Bale’s production was entirely unknown to the particular chronicle history which treated the same subject. Before the earliest example of this transitional species was produced, English tragedy had directly connected its beginnings with classical models.
Much in the same way, nothing could have been more natural and in accordance with the previous sluggish evolution of the English drama than that a gradual transition, however complete in the end, should have been effected from the moralities to comedy. It was not, however, John Heywood himself who was to accomplish any such transition; possibly, he was himself the author of the morality Genus humanum performed at the coronation feast of Queen Mary, whose council speedily forbade the performance of interludes without the queen’s licence. Nor are we able to conjecture the nature of the pieces bearing this name composed by Richard Farrant, afterwards the master of the Children of St George’s at Windsor, or of William Hunnis, master under Queen Elizabeth of the Children of the Chapel Royal. But the process of transition is visible in productions, also called interludes, but charged with serious purpose, such as T. Ingeland’s noteworthy Disobedient Child (before 1560), and plays in which the element of abstractions is perceptibly yielding to that of real personages, or in which the characters are for the most part historical or the main element in the action belongs to the sphere of romantic narrative.[2] The demonstration would, however, be alien to the purpose of indicating the main conditions of the growth of the English drama. The immediate origin of the earliest extant English comedy must, like that of Imitation of classical examples. the first English tragedy, be sought, not in the development of any popular literary or theatrical antecedents, but in the imitation, more or less direct, of classical models. This cardinal fact, unmistakable though it is, has frequently been ignored or obscured by writers intent upon investigating the origines of our drama, and to this day remains without adequate acknowledgment in most of the literary histories accessible to the great body of students.
It is true that in tracing the entrance of the drama into the national literature there is no reason for seeking to distinguish very narrowly between the several tributaries to the main stream which fertilized this as well as other fields under Renaissance culture. The universities then still remained, and for a time became more prominently than ever, the leading agents of education in all its existent stages; and it is a patent fact that no influence could have been so strong upon the Elizabethan dramatists as that to which they had been subjected during the university life through which the large majority of them had passed. The corporate life of the universities, and the enthusiasms (habitually unanimous) of their undergraduates and younger graduates, communicated this influence, as it were automatically, to the students, and to the learned societies themselves, of the Inns of Court. In the Tudor, as afterwards in the early Stuart, times, these Inns were at once the seminaries of loyalty, and the obvious resort for the supply of young men of spirit desirous of honouring a learned court by contributing to its choicer amusements. Thus, whether we trace them in the universities, in the “bowers” or halls of the lawyers, or in the palaces of the sovereign, the beginnings of the English academical drama, which in later Elizabethan and Jacobean literature cannot claim to be more than a subordinate species of the national drama, in an earlier period served as the actual link between classical tragedy and comedy and the surviving native growths, and supplied the actual impulse towards the beginnings of English tragedy and comedy.
The academical drama of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign and of the preceding part of the Tudor period—including the school-drama in the narrower sense of the term and other performances of academical origin—consisted, apart from actual reproductions of classical plays in original Latin or The earlier academical drama.in Latin versions of the Greek, in adaptations of Latin originals, or of Latin or English plays directly modelled on classical examples. A notable series of plays of this kind was performed in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, from the first year of Edward VI. onward, when N. Grimald’s Archipropheta, treating in classic form the story of St John the Baptist, but introducing the Vice and comic scenes, was brought out.[3] Others were J. Calfhill’s Progne and R. Edwardes’ Palaemon and Arcyte (both 1566), and, from about 1580 onwards, a succession of Latin plays by William Gager, beginning with the tragedy Meleager, and including, with other tragedies,[4] a comedy Rivales. Yet another comedy, acted at Christ Church, and extolled in 1591 by Harington for “harmless mirth,” was the Bellum grammaticale, or Civil War between Nouns and Verbs, which may have been a revision of a comedy written by Bale’s friend, R. Radcliff, in 1538, but of which in any case the ultimate origin was a celebrated Italian allegorical treatise.[5] In Cambridge, as is not surprising, the activity of the early academical friends and favourers of the drama was even more marked. At St John’s College, where Bishop Watson’s Latin tragedy called Absolom was produced within the years 1534 and 1544, plays were, according to Ascham, repeatedly performed about the middle of the century; at Christ’s a controversial drama in the Lutheran interest called Pammachius, of which Gardiner complained to the privy council, and which seems afterwards to have been translated by Bale, was acted in 1544; and at Trinity there was a long series of performances which began with Christopherson’s Jephtha about 1546, and consisted partly of reproductions of classical works,[6] partly of plays and “shows” unnamed; while on one occasion at all events, in 1559, “two English plays” were produced. In 1560 was acted, doubtless in the original Latin, and not in Palsgrave’s English translation (1540) for schoolboys, the celebrated “comedy” of Acolastus, by W. Gnaphaeus, on the story of the Prodigal Son. The long series of Trinity plays interspersed with occasional plays at King’s (where Udall’s Ezechias was produced in English in 1564), at St John’s (where T. Legge’s Richardus III. was first acted in 1573), and, as will be seen below, at Christ’s, continued, with few noticeable breaks, up to the time when the Elizabethan drama was in full activity.[7] Among the “academical” plays not traceable to any particular university source may be mentioned, as acted at court so early as the end of 1565 or the beginning of 1566, the Latin Sapientia Solomonis, which generally follows the biblical narrative, but introduces a comic element in the sayings of the popular Marcolph, who here appears as a court fool.
- ↑ As has been already seen, Sir David Lyndsay’s celebrated Satyre of the Three Estaits, a dramatic manifesto in favour of the Reformation, is in form a morality pure and simple.
- ↑ Tom Tiler and his Wife (1578); A Knack to know a Knave (c. 1594); Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (misattributed to G. Peele), (printed 1599).
- ↑ An earlier drama by him, Christus redivivus, is said to have been printed at Cologne.
- ↑ Oedipus; Dido; Ulysses redux.
- ↑ By A. Guarna.
- ↑ Pax; Troas; Menaechmi; Oedipus; Mostellaria; Hecuba; Amphytruo; Medea. These fall between 1546 and 1560. The date and place of the production of William Goldingham of Trinity Hall’s Herodes, some time after 1567, are unknown.
- ↑ The date and place of performance of the Latin Fatum Vortigerni are unknown; but it was not improbably produced at a later time than Shakespeare’s Richard II., which it seems in certain points to resemble.
