same kind at a much lower level. He disengaged French drama from the last remnants of Mystery and didactic Morality; he taught it to present a story, tragic or romantic, in a condensed and telling form; and he made a beginning, though a crude and imperfect one, with the delineation of character and passion. Or if we look at his work from another point of view, and compare it with the academic instead of the popular drama, we may justly say that, while infinitely inferior to Garnier's as poetry, Hardy's plays have what these elegiac and lyrical performances have not—that action which is the soul of a living drama.
We know, unfortunately, very little of Hardy's life and education. He was certainly not illiterate, as Alexandre
Hardy. Sainte-Beuve seems to suggest. He was probably as well educated as Marlowe, possibly rather better than Shakespeare, if by education we understand academic training. He was acquainted with the classics as well as with the contemporary literature of Spain and Italy, and in his poetic theories and licences of diction shows himself an enthusiastic admirer of Ronsard and his school. All that we know of his career is that about 1593 he became journeyman playwright, or poète à gages, to a wandering troupe of players under a certain Valleran Lecomte. The Confrérie de la Passion had the monopoly of dramatic entertainments in Paris, and by the end of the sixteenth century their performances had sunk to the lowest level of illiteracy. The future of the French stage depended not on them but on the efforts of the wandering troupes of professional
