and tail, and Noah's wife boxed the patriarch's ears before entering the ark;"-moralities, which sprang from the mysteries, and approached nearer to regular plays, their characters being composed of allegorical personifications of virtues and vices; and free translations from the classics, performed at the inns of court, the public seminaries, and the universities.

In 1574, the queen licensed a company of actors, called the Earl of Leicester's Servants, to play throughout England, "for the recreation of her loving subjects, as for her own solace and pleasure when she should think good to see them." Theatres rapidly increased. In 1606, there were seven in London; in 1629, we believe there were seventeen. They were opposed, in an early stage of their career, by the Puritans and the graver counsellors of the sovereign. In 1583, at the time that Sir Philip Sidney published his Defence of Poesy, he could find little in their performances to approve. Though forbidden, after the year 1574, to be open on the Sabbath, the prohibition does not appear to have been effective during the reign of Elizabeth. Secretary Walsingham laments over the whole matter in this wise: "The daily abuse of stage plays is such an offence to the godly, and so great a hindrance to the Gospel, as the Papists do exceedingly rejoice at the blemish thereof; for every day in the week the players' bills are set up in sundry places in the city, - some in the name of her Majesty's men, some of the Earl of Leicester's, some the Earl of Oxford's, the Lord Admiral's, and divers others, so that, when the bell tolls to the lecture, the trumpet sounds to the stage. The playhouses are filled, when the churches are naked. It is a woful sight to

see two hundred proud players jet in their silks, when five hundred poor people starve in the streets."

As the taste for theatrical exhibitions increased, the task of providing the theatres with plays became a profession. Most of the precursors, contemporaries, and successors of Shakspeare, were young men of education, who came down to the city from the universities, to provide themselves with a living by whatever cunning there was in their brain and ten fingers. Some became actors as well as writers. The remuneration of the dramatist was as small. Poverty and dissoluteness seem to have characterized the pioneers of the drama. As the theatre was popular as well as fashionable, the "groundlings," who paid their sixpences for admission, had their tastes consulted. This accounts, in some degree, for the rant and vulgarity which strangely disfigure so many of the plays. The usual miseries and vices which characterize men of letters in an unlettered age, when authors are numerous and readers are few, distinguish the lives of many of the elder dramatists. Ben Jonson, in the Poetaster, makes Tucca exclaim, with a side reference to the poets of his own day, that "they are a sort of poor, starved rascals, that are ever wrapt up in foul linen ; and can boast of nothing but a lean visage peering out of a seam-rent suit, the very emblem of beggary." We suppose this was too true a picture of many, whose minds deserved a better environment of flesh and raiment.

Of those who preceded Shakspeare, the best known names (leaving Buckhurst and Still out of the list) are Lyly, Kyd, Nash, Greene, Lodge, and Marlowe. Much cannot be said in praise of these, if we except the latter. Lyly is full of daintiness and conceit, with sweet fancy and sentiment occasionally thrown in. He translates

everything into quaint expression. Thus, his Endymion professes that "his thoughts are stitched to the stars." Another of his characters looks forward to the time when "it shall please the fertility of his chin to be delivered of a beard." Peele has melody of versification, and a sort of Della-Cruscan fancy. His David and Bethsabe contains striking passages, as when Zephyr is addressed:

"Then deck thee with thy loose, delightsome robes,
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes; ".

or the resolution of David :—

"To joy her love I'll build a kingly bower,
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams."

Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy, a play bad enough in itself, but celebrated from the additions made to it by "eminent hands." Its bombast was probably popular. Ben Jonson was one of those engaged to write additional scenes; but he has ridiculed the whole play in Every Man in his Humor, in the scene between Bobadil and Master Mathew, the town gull. Bobadil says, “I would fain see all the poets of these times pen such another play as that was!" Greene's death was more tragic than anything he wrote or conceived. He is now principally remembered for having called Shakspeare 66 an upstart crow."

But a more potent spirit than any of these, and beyond all question the first in rank among the precursors of Shakspeare, was CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. His "mighty line" has been celebrated by Ben Jonson; Drayton finely ascribes to him "those brave sub

lunary things that the first poets had; " and according to old George Chapman,

"He stood

Up to the chin in the Pierian flood."

Marlowe, indeed, towers up among his contemporaries, huge, lawless, untamable, the old Adam burning fiercely. within him, his frame of mind

"Betokening valor and excess of strength,"

and in his strange compound of sublimity and rant, giving an impression half-way between a thunder-scarred Titan and an Alsatian bully. From the impress of perverse and turbulent power that his dramas bear, and the evident heartiness with which he deifies self-will, we may well suppose that his life diverged considerably from the strait line of the commandments. The two prominent features of his biography are exceedingly characteristic. In his life, he labored under the imputation of infidelity, and is said to have blasphemed the Holy Trinity; and he died in a tavern brawl, in 1593, or 1594, about the time that Shakspeare was writing Richard the Second. Campbell suggests, that, had Marlowe lived, Shakspeare might have had something like a competitor. This we think is too high praise; for Marlowe, with all his fire and fancy, is limited in his range of character, and stamps the image of himself on all his striking delineations. He is intense, but narrow. The central principle of his mind was self-will, and this is the bond which binds together his strangely huddled faculties. Of all English poets, he most reminds us of Byron; ruder, it may be, but at the same time more colossal in his proportions. He is a glorious old heathen, "large in heart

and brain,"

fiery and fickle Goth, on whose rough and savage energies a classical culture has been piled, tossed among the taverns, and theatres, and swelling spirits of London, to gratify the demands of his senses in some other way than by acts of brilliant pillage. In his ustiness, his absence of all weak emotions, his fierce delight in the mere feeling of self, in the heedlessness with which he heaps together rubbish and diamonds, and in the frequent "starts and strange far-flights of his imagination," he is the model of irregular genius. His mind, in its imperiousness, disregarded by instinct the natural relations of things, forced objects into the form of his individual passions, and lifted his vices into a kind of Satanic dignity, by exaggerating them into shapes colossal. His imagination, hot, swift, impatient of control, pervaded by the fiery essence of his blood, and giving wings to the most reckless desires, riots in the maddest visions of strength and pride. Of all writers, he seems to feel the heartiest joy in the mere exercise of power, regardless of all the restraints which make power beneficent. His most truculent characters, Tamburlaine, Eleazar, Barabbas, Faustus, all have blazoned on their brows, "Kit Marlowe, his mark." There is no mistaking his heaven-defying energy, nor his Ishmaelitish strut and swagger. His soul tears its way through his verse, "tameless, and swift, and proud," scorning all impediments, and ever ambitious to go

"Right forward, like the lightning

And the cannon-ball, opening, with murderous crash,
Its way to blast and ruin."

From this headlong haste come his bombast and extravagance, "his lust of power, his hunger and thirst after