master's children, the youth deeply in love, the fathers unwilling to consent. RISCIO. I'll take the tale by the end,-then we four met, which argued we were no mountains; and in a tavern we met, which argued we were mortal; and every one in his wine told his day's work, which was a sign we forgot not our business; and seeing all our masters troubled with devices, we determined a little to trouble the water before they drunk; so that in the attire of your children, our master's wise children bewrayed their good natures; and in the garments of our master's children yours made a marriage; this all stood upon us poor children, and your young children, to show that old folks may be overtaken by children.1 It will be readily derived from this that, in Lyly's plays, everything depends on the "wit" of the dialogue. Devoid of human nature and human interest, the course of the action wanders confusedly through a series of conversations, in which the speakers encounter each other like fencers with incessant thrusts and parries of words, turning sense topsy-turvy, striking sparks from the collision of their quips and conceits, with an activity which was doubtless highly satisfactory to the audiences of the time, but which is now unutterably tedious. Lyly was a man of brilliant talents, without a glimpse of genius. He has a fine fancy, clear and cold like moonlight, which never touches the heart; a skilled invention, incapable of bringing into being the airy creatures of imagination. And yet, in spite of his frigidity and vapid conceit, we see that Lyly is conducting true poets to the brink of great discoveries and unexplored regions of art. His is the refining influence, by means of which Shakespeare will learn how to fuse the elements of manners and character, inherent in the old Interlude, into a new form of comedy. Comparing the brilliant and balanced periods of Lyly's sentence with the jolting verse of the Moralities, we find the original source of the delightful prose dialogue of Twelfth Night. Cold and unpoetical as is the lunar 1 Mother Bombie, Act v. Scene iii. John Lilly's Dramatic Works (edited by Fairholt, 1858), p. 140. light in Endimion; uninspired as is the vision of fairies which, in this play, flits for a moment across the stage tormenting mortals, it is in these inventions that he who reflects will find an anticipation of the incomparable elfworld, presently to come into being in the Midsummer Night's Dream. Summed up, therefore, the dramatic movement from Interlude to Comedy may be thus described. The Morality, gradually dropping the didactic purpose and the allegorical form bequeathed to it by its old traditions, passed insensibly to the simple imitation of manners. In order to provide the amusement required to compensate the audience for the severity of their instruction, it had, at a very early period, been customary to give the representative of Evil in the play a ludicrous appearance; and from this custom the "Vice" attired in the garb of the fools kept by great men, became an established character in the Interlude. Employed to embroil the action or to amuse the audience by his wit, the Vice was readily transformed into the Fool or Clown, so familiar to us in the plays of Shakespeare. Heywood was the first to make the interest of the Interlude depend solely on the action of human personages. The study of the classics suggested to Udall and Still the manner in which the traditional features of the Morality might be blended with plots of the kind found in Plautus and Terence. Gascoigne began the refinement of dialogue by his prose translation of Ariosto's comedy, I Suppositi; while Lyly carried this improvement still further by enlivening prose dialogue with his Euphuistic wit. It remained for Shakespeare to take account of these opposite elements, and by his all-embracing genius to create out of them the poetical Comedy. The manner in which the form of Tragedy and Tragi-Comedy, as conceived by Shakespeare, grew out of the Interlude is more complex, but in my opinion not less certain. In his very admirable volume on Shakespeare's Predecessors, the late Mr. J. A. Symonds 1 John Lilly's Dramatic Works (Fairholt), vol. i. p. 57. puts forward a theory of the origin of the English Romantic Tragedy, which, though plausible, is also, I think, misleading. He maintains that for many years in the early part of Elizabeth's reign a struggle proceeded on the stage between two types of tragedy, the one modelled on the lines of Seneca, and favoured by the Court; the other, resembling the Italian farsa—a species of play which imitated Nature in every shape without distinction -adapted to the tastes of the people. The latter class, he thinks, prevailed, and being fully developed in the hands of Marlowe and Shakespeare, at last drove its rival from the theatre.1 No evidence is adduced in support of this opinion, except the description of contemporary plays given by critics like Whetstone and Sidney, and the names of some of the plays preserved in the annals of the stage by Collier. Nor has any example of an English drama answering to the Italian farsa come down to us. On the contrary, every ancient romantic play, containing the element of tragedy, before the appearance of Marlowe, is of a type utterly unlike either the tragedies or the tragicomedies of Shakespeare. Tragedies or tragi-comedies there are of an early date, but all of them have a close affinity with the Interludes, and either contain the character of the Vice, or some other comic personage intended, like the Vice, to amuse the people, without relation to the action as such. For instance, Grim, the collier of Croydon, an established farcical character, is introduced in Edwards' Damon and Pithias, where the scene is laid in the Court of Dionysius of Syracuse (1564); in Appius and Virginia (1563) there is a vice "Haphazard"; and in Cambyses (1561) that part is performed by "Ambidexter," who enters "with an old capcase on his head, an old pail about his hips for harness, a scummer and a pot-lid by his side, and a rake on his shoulders." His character is a variation of the boaster's in Thersites which had been rendered popular by that Interlude. Both this tragedy and Appius and Virginia include among 1 Shakespeare's Predecessors, chapters vi. vii. the actors allegorical personages like those of the Moralities. With such evidence before us we should be wrong to look for the origin of English tragedy in an abstract popular taste for "romance," such as Mr. Symonds imagines to have prevailed: it is equally certain that, so far from there being a conflict between the type of tragedy favoured by the Court, and that dear to the people, both the form of tragedy cultivated by the learned societies, and that exhibited in the popular theatres, sprang, though in different ways, out of an idea which, for many generations, had been consecrated by the authority of Seneca. Misfortune has of course always been the most essential element in tragedy, and in the highest conception | of tragedy the idea of justice has been no less invariably present. In Greek tragedy-at least as represented by Æschylus and Sophocles-this shows itself in the doctrine that sin produces the curse of enduring evil; and that there is in Nature a law of Necessity exacting the purgation of the offence, even by the sacrifice of comparatively innocent individuals. Out of the stories from which the greater Greek tragedians evolved this moral, Seneca drew examples favourable to the Stoic doctrine of physical Necessity. It was his object to exalt the freedom of man's will as something independent of the overwhelming force of external Nature, to inculcate the advantage of death, and even the expediency of suicide. Accordingly all his plays exaggerate the elements of misfortune, and completely subordinate the idea of eternal justice associated with suffering. On one of its sides the philosophy of Seneca was not opposed to the teaching of the Catholic Church. While Christianity held with the Stoic that death was a release from the evils of the world, and that all earthly things were vanity, it encouraged hopes of which Seneca knew nothing, holding that "to depart and be with Christ was far better." Regarding universal "history," mainly as matter for the promotion of her own doctrines, the Church, in her system of education, dwelt impressively on the downfall of earthly grandeur, and her doctrines on the subject were embodied by Boccaccio in his De Casibus Illustrium Virorum, which, as a text-book in the schools, became the fountain-head of the mediæval idea of tragedy. This is defined by the Monk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as follows: Tragedie is to sayn a certain storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie Into miserie, and endeth wretchedly. Translated by Lydgate in his Fall of Princes, Boccaccio's book provided the English reader with a long list of illustrious and unfortunate men taken from universal history, and this, as we have seen, was amplified by the authors of The Mirror for Magistrates, with many examples drawn from the annals of their own country. The national conception of tragic misfortune was moreover intensified by the atmosphere of gloom, horror, and blood, which prevails in the tragedies of Seneca, now made familiar to the public by means of translations. But while men were thus taught to associate the idea of tragedy with the horrible rather than the terrible, they were also recovering for tragedy the sense of justice. Seneca had dwelt on the freedom of the will, but to the Christian this doctrine carried with it consequences unrecognised by the Stoic. Man in the Christian scheme was, to a very great extent, the author of his own misfortunes. Every Miracle Play, exhibited in the streets of Chester or Coventry, taught the people the story of man's Fall and the necessity of his Redemption. Every one of the older Moralities represented, allegorically, the conflict perpetually proceeding in the mind of man between the principles of Good and Evil; and as the Reformation took deeper root in the country, the idea of the antagonism between Conscience and the Will became more and more prominent in the Moralities. Vice must be punished; virtue must be rewarded; evil must be converted to good. By degrees these moral ideas expressed themselves in a tragic form |