of revived classical and Italian models, it was not wholly unaffected by the popular and Court festivals and the religious representations which had been developing for centuries on the native soil. The pageants and masques, the mysteries, miracle and morality plays, the interludes and mummings which delighted the medieval Englishmen furnished one fruitful source. From them came the local color, the life and the old time jollity. The other source is to be found in the Roman dramas, revived in the Italy of the Renascence. They served as models of style and structure and provided many of the plots. Masters of the great public schools prepared scenes from the Roman comedy writers, chiefly Plautus and Terence, for their boys to act, either in Latin or in English translation. Nicholas Udall marked an epoch when, about 1541, he wrote in English, from a Latin model, Ralph Roister Doister, the first English comedy. In tragedy the chief model was Seneca. The first English tragedy in the approved classical style was Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, based on an old British legend from Geoffrey of Monmouth. Written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, it was presented before Queen Elizabeth, in 1561. In general, however, the first half of Elizabeth's reign was not productive of significant dramatic works, and while plays of all sorts were written, it was largely a time of experiment.

The "University Group." - The "great dramatic period" opened first with the so-called "University Group." The list includes many names. George Peele, an Oxford man who wrote plays, pageants, and miscellaneous verse, was brilliant and versatile but weak in power of construction, as is evident in his David and Bethsabe, full of fine, detached passages. Preeminent among the Cambridge group was Christopher Marlowe, the author of many remarkable plays – Tamburlaine (about 1587); The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus (1588); and The Jew of Malta (1593). Also he wrote a goodly part of the second and third parts of Henry VI, which Shakespeare revised and completed. Much other work, too, he produced before he was killed in a drunken brawl at the age of twenty-nine. His Tamburlaine marked an epoch in tragedy, while his sonorous, uneven blank verse far excelled that of any who had preceded him. With an amazing mingling of bombast and sublimity he set forth the soaring flights of human ambition, for power in Tamburlaine, for knowledge in Dr. Faustus, for wealth in the Jew of Malta. In spite of his lack of humor and restraint, some leading critics have ranked him among the world's

1 While the scenes of the Elizabethan writers were laid in far-off countries in bygone days their characters were English to the core.

great poets. Robert Greene went first to Cambridge and later to Oxford. Although his prose, and the poetry scattered through it, are superior to any of his dramas, one of the latter, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bungay, contains glowing pictures of healthy country life. Altogether, the "University Group struck out one of the faultiest, but one of the most original and vigorous kinds of literature that the world has seen." While it is full of extravagance and horror, it is charged with passion and power. If many of the plots are ill constructed and told in language often overwrought, frequent passages of lofty eloquence and rare sweetness more than make atonement. The lives of most of this set were as tempestuous as their works, and, with one or two exceptions, they came to a sad and untimely end.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616). - The English drama reached its culmination in Shakespeare, who, indeed, has been without a peer before or since in any language. Something, but not overmuch, is known about him, nor is it strange that so few details of his life have survived, for he came of a family of no distinction, he did not go to a university, he did not belong to a learned profession, and nothing that he wrote, save a few poems, was published with his authority in his lifetime. For twenty years, from about 1591, when he wrote Love's Labour's Lost, until 1611, when he completed The Tempest, he was actively writing. During this time he produced about forty plays, besides the sonnets and the poems, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece. The plays include all sorts: history, comedy, tragedy, dramatic romance, and melodrama. He portrays every mood from mirth and joy to black despair, and every class of society from peasant to king; he deals with every phase of human passion: love, jealousy, ambition, and resignation, besides telling the past life of his people and reflecting to posterity the conditions of his own age. Though while he lived, his works appeared only in pirated editions, and are not mentioned in his will, they were collected in a folio edition, in 1623, and thus have come down to us.

The Shakespearian Theater. The means for presenting the wonderful dramas of that age were curiously primitive. The early mystery or miracle plays had been given in churches and churchyards, then on moving carts or pageants. Others were rendered in noblemen's halls or in the courtyards of inns, the audience looking down from surrounding galleries; still others were produced privately at court. By the middle of Elizabeth's reign independent theaters had begun to spring up. Originally they were placed in the suburbs, since, for reasons of public policy, the authorities refused to have

them in London; within a few years, however, the actors pushed into the City, and, before the close of the century, there were eleven playhouses in London and the adjoining districts. They were very simple structures, circular or octagonal in shape, with the center or pit where the poorer classes stood, open to the sky, which afforded the only light. The surrounding galleries only were roofed; here or on the stage the fashionable classes sat, lounging, eating, smoking, talking, flirting, and interrupting the actors when it pleased them. Female parts were played by young men. While costumes were often rich, scenery and properties were most primitive: a change of scene was indicated by a placard; a lantern represented the moon; a wooden cannon and a pasteboard tower a siege. Yet the absence of elaborate scenery had its advantages; it fixed attention on the play and it called forth some of Shakespeare's finest descriptive passages. The Successors of Shakespeare. While no one reached the height of Shakespeare, the great age of Elizabethan drama continued under the Stuarts, until an ordinance of 1642 closed the theaters for some years. Foremost among the younger contemporaries and successors of Shakespeare was Ben Jonson (1573-1637), poet laureate of James I, literary dictator of the time and king of tavern wits. Learned, rugged, and fearless, he struggled for pure classicism against the prevailing romantic tendencies, drew lifelike pictures of his age, and strove for workmanlike restraint, though he could fashion sweet, beautiful lyrics. It would take pages merely to enumerate the names and plays of hosts of others. In spite of their achievements the drama steadily declined. The youthful ardor was gone, and the growing Puritan spirit was hostile. By way of reaction, playwrights catered more to the courtier and the cavalier with coarseness and sensational horror. Many fair pieces continued to be written, but the greatest literary work now came to be produced in other fields. "Merrie England," throbbing with fullness of life, was yielding to riotousness and dissipation at one extreme, at the other to soberer ideals and practice.

Final Estimate of the Elizabethan Period. Altogether, Elizabeth's long reign, though blemished by traits of meanness, shuffling, and evasion, was a period of glorious achievement. Her Court was a center of pomp and magnificence, learning and statesmanship, where polished gentlemen, brilliant adventurers, wise councilors and judges strove with each other for her favor. If the peace, prosperity, and industrial development, the ecclesiastical settlement, and the Though plays were given in the afternoon it grows dark very early in London in the autumn and winter.

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wonderful literary outburst were not all her work, they all redounded to her credit. For a time Elizabeth seemed the most absolute, the strongest, and the most popular of all the rulers of her House. But the splendor and strength of her power reached maturity during the years just following the Armada. As she approached the close of her reign, the luster of her glory had begun to dim and the vigor of her power to decline. Her people began to await impatiently for her decease to open the way for new men and new measures. Those who valued religious and political liberty more than wealth eagerly greeted the new dynasty from Scotland.

FOR ADDITIONAL READING

Constitutional. Prothero, Statutes, introduction, an admirable survey. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, A Discourse on the Commonwealth of England (first published in 1583; the best and most recent edition, 1906, ed. L. Alston). Also Taswell-Langmead; Taylor; and Hallam.

Social and Industrial. Innes, England under the Tudors, ch. XXVIII. Traill; Cunningham; Ashley; Rogers; Tickner and Usher. E. M. Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief (1900). Hubert Hall, Society in the Elizabethan Age (1901). Stephenson, The Elizabethan People (1910). G. Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904). Harrison's famous Description of England, from Holinshed's Chronicle, is reprinted in the "Camelot Series" (ed. L. Withington, n. d.). P. H. Ditchfield, The England of Shakespeare (1917). Shakespeare's England (2 vols., 1916), a coöperative work. Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (1913).

Maritime enterprise, the Navy and the Army. Pollard, ch. XVI; Innes, ch. XXIII; Froude, English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century (1895); J. W. Williamson, Maritime Enterprise, 1485-1588 (1913), based on documents. Selections from Hakluyt's Voyages ed. by E. J. Payne (2 series, 1893-1900) and C. R. Beazley (1907). Oppenheim, Administration of the Royal Navy, I; J. S. Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy (2 vols., 1898) and The Successors of Drake (1900). Fortescue, British Army, I.

Literature. Moody and Lovett; Cambridge History of Literature; Jusserand, II; and Taine, I, II. Saintsbury, History of Elizabethan Literature (1890). Cambridge Modern History, III; Pollard, ch. XXIII; Innes, ch. XXVII. Sidney Lee, Life of Shakespeare (1898), the standard biography. Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare (1907), a charming appreciation.

For the Church, see references to chs. XXIV and XXV, together with R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church (2 vols., 1910).

CHAPTER XXVII

JAMES I AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PURITAN REVOLUTION (1603-1625)

The Significance of the Accession of James I. The accession of the Stuarts in the person of James I, 24 March, 1603, was fraught with consequences. United and prosperous, the mass of the English people were now eager to throw off the Tudor absolutism, which had fulfilled its mission, and to ask for more liberty. There was much in the old system which they opposed, and which not only stood in the way of free religious and political development, but might, under a new line of Sovereigns, menace the little which they still enjoyed. There was the State Church absolutely under royal control; there were the extraordinary courts, all independent of common law guarantees; and there were taxes and exactions, not only oppressive in themselves, but peculiarly dangerous from the fact that they made the Sovereign independent of Parliament. These were the special grievances, actual or potential. The main issue which was tried out under the Stuarts was whether the sovereignty, supposed to rest in the King-in-Parliament, should, in cases of conflict, be exercised by the Monarch or by the body which stood between him and the people. The result was victory for Parliament. In this respect England led, by nearly two centuries, the countries of Continental Europe, where the tendency, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was toward increasing absolutism, and the tide did not turn till the French Revolution.

The King's Early Scotch Environment. James, called upon to face a situation grave enough for any one, turned out to be one of those curiosities which the laws of inheritance occasionally bring to the notice of mankind." Not only did he represent an alien house to whom the English were bound by no ties of gratitude, but he was totally unfitted by training and temperament to rule a country where the ideal was constitutional government. When, as an infant scarcely more than a year old, James VI had succeeded to the throne of Scot