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good soldiers; they fed upon roots and barks of trees; they would stand up to the chin many days in marshes without victuals ;" and, on the other hand, "but the exercise that is now among us is banqueting, playing, piping, and dancing, and all such delights as may win us to pleasure, or rock us in sleep. Quantum mutatus ab illo !" If the young Shakspere had his ambition turned towards dramatic poetry when he was sixteen, that ambition was not likely to be damped by Gosson's general declamation; and in truth in this his first tract the worthy man has a sneaking kindness for the theatre which he can with difficulty suppress :-"As some of the players are far from abuse, so some of their plays are without rebuke, which are easily remembered, as quickly reckoned. The two prose books played at the Bell Savage, where you shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain. The Jew,' and 'Ptolemy,' shown at the Bull; the one representing the greediness of worldly choosers, and bloody minds of usurers; the other very lively describing how seditious estates with their own devices, false friends with their own swords, and rebellious commons in their own snares are overthrown; neither with amorous gesture wounding the eye, nor with slovenly talk hurting the ears of the chaste hearers. The Blacksmith's Daughter,' and 'Catiline's Conspiracies,' usually brought in at the Theatre: the first containing the treachery of Turks, the honourable bounty of a noble mind, the shining of virtue in distress. The last, because it is known to be a pig of mine own sow, I will speak the less of it; only giving you to understand that the whole mark which I shot at in that work was to show the reward of traitors in Catiline, and the necessary government of learned men in the person of Cicero, which foresees every danger that is likely to happen, and forestalls it continually ere it take effect."

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The praise of the "two prose books at the Bell Savage," that contained never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain," is quite sufficient to show us that these prose books exhibited neither character nor passion. The 'Ptolemy' and the 'Catiline' there can be no doubt were composed of a succession of tedious monologues, having nothing of the principle of dramatic art in them, although in their outward form they appeared to be dramas. Gosson says, "These plays are good plays and sweet plays, and of all plays the best plays, and most to be liked, worthy to be sung of the Muses, or set out with the cunning of Roscius himself; yet are they not fit for every man's diet, neither ought they commonly to be shown." It is clear that these good plays and sweet plays had not in themselves any of the elements of popularity; therefore they were utterly barren of real poetry. The highest poetry is essentially the popular poetry: it is universal in its range, it is unlimited in its duration. The lowest poetry (if poetry it can be called) is conventional; it lives for a little while in narrow corners, the pet thing of fashion or of pedantry. When Gosson wrote, the poetry of the English drama was not yet born; and the people contented themselves with something else that was nearer poetry than the plays which were "not fit for every man's diet." Gosson, in his second tract, which, provoked by the answer of Lodge to his 'School of Abuse,' is written with much more virulence against plays especially, thus describes

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what the people most delighted in: "As the devil hath brought in all that Poetry can sing, so hath he sought out every strain that Music is able to pipe, and drawn all kinds of instruments into that compass, simple and mixed. For the eye, beside the beauty of the houses and the stages, he sendeth in garish apparel, masks, vaulting, tumbling, dancing of jigs, galiards, morisces, hobbyhorses, showing of juggling casts; nothing forgot that might serve to set out the matter with pomp, or ravish the beholders with variety of pleasure." Lodge, in his reply to Gosson's 'School of Abuse,' had indirectly acknowledged the want of moral purpose in the stage exhibitions; but he contends that, as the ancient satirists were reformers of manners, so might plays he properly directed to the same end. "Surely we want not a Roscius, neither are there great scarcity of Terence's profession: but yet our men dare not now-a-days presume so much as the old poets might; and therefore they apply their writings to the people's vein; whereas, if in the beginning they had ruled, we should now-adays have found small spectacles of folly, but of truth. You say, unless the thing be taken away the vice will continue; nay, I say, if the style were changed the practice would profit." To this argument, that the Theatre might become a censor of manners, Gosson thus replies: "If the common people which resort to theatres, being but an assembly of tailors, tinkers, cordwainers, sailors, old men, young men, women, boys, girls, and such-like, be the judges of faults there pointed out, the rebuking of manners in that place is neither lawful nor convenient, but to be held for a kind of libelling and defaming." The notion which appears to have possessed the minds of the writers against the stage at this period is, that a fiction and a lie were the same.† Gosson says, "The perfectest image is that which maketh the thing to seem neither greater nor less than indeed it is; but in plays, either the things are feigned that never were, as Cupid and Psyche played at Paul's, and a great many comedies more at the Blackfriars, and in every playhouse in London, which, for brevity sake, I overskip; or, if a true history be taken in hand, it is made like our shadows, longest at the rising and fall of the sun; shortest of all at high noon."

*

The notion evidently was, that nothing ought to be presented upon the stage but what was an historical fact; that all the points belonging to such a history should be given; and that no art should be used in setting it forth beyond that necessary to give the audience, not to make them comprehend, all the facts. It is quite clear that such a process will present us little of the poetry or the philosophy of history. The play-writers of 1580, weak masters as they were, knew their art better than Gosson; they made history attractive by changing

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* Plays Confuted,' &c. The Shakespeare Society has reprinted in one volume The School of Abuse,' first published in 1579, and Heywood's Apology for Actors,' first published in 1612. These publications belong to different periods. We regret that the controversy of the first period was not presented to us more completely by the reprint of Lodge's answer to Gosson, of Gosson's 'Plays Confuted' in reply to Lodge, and of the Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres,' the author of which counted The School of Abuse' the First Blast. These tracts are exceedingly rare, and they open to us clearer notions of the early stage than any other contemporary productions.

† See Note at the end of this chapter.

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it into a melo-drama :-" The poets drive it (a true history) most commonly unto such points as may best show the majesty of their pen in tragical speeches, or set the heroes agog with discourses of love, or paint a few antics to fit their own humours with scoffs and taunts, or bring in a show to furnish the stage when it is bare. When the matter of itself comes short of this, they follow the practice of the cobbler, and set their teeth to the leather to pull it out. So was the history of Cæsar and Pompey,' and the play of 'The Fabii,' at the theatre both amplified there where the drums might walk or the pen ruffle. When the history swelled or ran too high for the number of the persons who should play it, the poet with Proteus cut the same to his own measure: when it afforded no pomp at all, he brought it to the rack to make it serve. Which invincibly proveth on my side that plays are no images of truth." The author of The Blast of Retreat,' who describes himself as formerly "a great affector of that vain art of play-making," charges the authors of historical plays not only with expanding and curtailing the action, so as to render them no images of truth, but with changing the historical facts altogether:-" If they write of histories that are known, as the life of Pompey, the martial affairs of Cæsar, and other worthies, they give them a new face, and turn them out like counterfeits to show themselves on the stage." From the author of 'The Blast of Retreat' we derive the most accurate account of those comedies of intrigue of which none have come down to us from this early period of the drama. We might fancy he was describing the productions of Mrs. Behn or Mrs. Centlivre, in sentences that might appear to be quoted from Jeremy Collier's attacks upon the stage more than a century later:-" Some, by taking pity upon the deceitful tears of the stage-lovers, have been moved by their complaint to rue on their secret friends, whom they have thought to have tasted like torment: some, having noted the ensamples how maidens restrained from the marriage of those whom their friends have misliked, have there learned a policy to prevent their parents by stealing them away: some, seeing by ensample of the stage-player one carried with too much liking of another man's wife, having noted by what practice she has been assailed and overtaken, have not failed to put the like in effect in earnest that was afore shown in jest. The device of carrying and recarrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport their tokens by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other kind of policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of their wifes, guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants, is it not aptly taught in The School of Abuse "?"* Perhaps the worst abuse of the stage of this period was the licence of the clown or fool-an abuse which the greatest and the most successful of dramatic writers found it essential to denounce and put down. The author of The Blast of Retreat' has described this vividly:-" And all be [although] these pastimes were not, as they are, to be condemned simply of their own nature, yet because they are so abused they are abominable. For the Fool no sooner showeth himself in his colours, to make men merry, but straightway lightly there followeth some vanity, not only superfluous, but beastly and wicked. Yet

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The editor of the tract appends a note :-" He meaneth plays, who are not unfitly so called."

we, so carried away by his unseemly gesture and unreverenced scorning, that we seem only to be delighted in him, and are not content to sport ourselves with modest mirth, as the matter gives occasion, unless it be intermixed with knavery, drunken merriments, crafty cunnings, undecent jugglings, clownish conceits, and such other cursed mirth, as is both odious in the sight of God, and offensive to honest ears."

In the controversial writers of the period immediately before us we find no direct mention of those Histories, "borrowed out of our English chronicles, wherein our forefathers' valiant acts that have been long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence." This is a description of the early chronicle histories of the stage, as given by Thomas Nashe in 1592; and although we believe that in this description some of the plays of Shakspere himself would necessarily be included, it can scarcely be imagined that he was altogether the inventor of this most attractive as well as most obvious species of drama. Whilst the writers for the stage previous to 1580 were reproducing every variety of ancient history and fable, it is not likely that they would have entirely neglected the copious materials which the history of their own country would present to them. Nashe in another passage says, "What a glorious thing it is to have King Henry V. represented on the stage leading the French King prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dauphin to swear fealty!" Something like this dramatic action is to be found in one of these elder historical plays which have come down to us, 'The Famous Victories of Henry V., containing the Honourable Battle of Agincourt.' The only other English historical play that can be safely assigned to the dramatic period before Shakspere is The True Tragedy of Richard III.'* It has been already necessary for us to notice The Famous Victories' somewhat fully in connexion with Shakspere's plays of King Henry IV., and King Henry V., but the view which we are here endeavouring to give of the state of the early stage would be essentially incomplete, were we to pass over a class of dramas so important in themselves, and so interesting in connexion with what we may believe to have been the earliest productions of Shakspere's dramatic genius, as the English Histories; and of these The Famous Victories' is an authentic and a very curious example.†

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There is a full audience collected in the Town Hall of Stratford, to witness the new performance of the Earl of Darby's players. Slight preparation will be necessary for the performance, although the history to be performed will be a regal story; its scenes changing from the tavern to the palace, from England to France; now exhibiting the wild Prince striking the representative of his father on the seat of justice, and then after a little while the same Prince a hero and a conqueror. The raised floor at the upper end of the Town Hall will furnish ample room for all these displays. The painted board will lead

• See the Notices of Richard III. in the Works of Shakspere, edited by C. Knight.

+ The play of 'The Famous Victories' was not printed till 1594; but there is no doubt that the celebrated Tarleton, who died in 1588, played the clown in it; and it is reasonably assigned to the period of which we are writing.

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the imagination of the audience from one country to another; and when the honourable battle of Agincourt is to be fought, "two armies fly in represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?" The curtain is removed, and without preparation we encounter the Prince in the midst of his profligacy. Ned and Tom are his companions; and when the Prince says, "Think you not that it was a villainous part of me to rob my father's receivers ?" Ned very charitably answers, “Why no, my lord, it was but a trick of youth." Sir John Oldcastle, who passes by the familiar name of Jockey, joins this pleasant company, and he informs the Prince that the town of Deptford has risen with hue and cry after the Prince's man who has robbed a poor carrier. The accomplished Prince then meets with the receivers whom he has robbed; and, after bestowing upon them the names of villains and rascals, he drives them off with a threat that if they say a word about the robbery he will have them hanged. With their booty, then, will they go to the tavern in Eastcheap, upon the invitation of the Prince :— “We are all fellows, I tell you, sirs; an the king my father were dead, we would be all kings." The scene is now London, with John Cobbler, Robin Pewterer, and Lawrence Costermonger keeping watch and ward in the accustomed style of going to sleep. There is short rest for them; for Derrick, the carrier who has been robbed by the Prince's servant, is come to London to seek his goods. But why does the Stratford audience begin to roll about in a phrenzy of laughter, which waits not for laughter-moving words, but is set on by a look or a gesture, more irresistible than words? It is Tarleton, the famous Clown, who plays the Kentish carrier; and he is in high humour tonight. It matters little what the author of the play has written down for him, for his "wondrous plentiful pleasant extemporal wit" will do much better for the amusement of his audience than the dull dialogue of the promptbooks. In the scene before us he has to catch the thief, and to take him before the Lord Chief Justice; and when the Court is set in order, and the Chief Justice cries, "Gaoler, bring the prisoner to the bar," Derrick speaks according to the book,-"Hear you, my lord, I pray you bring the bar to the prisoner;" but what he adds, having this hint for a clown's licence, soon renders the Chief Justice a very insignificant personage. The real wit of Tarleton probably did much to render the dullness of the early stage endurable by persons of any refinement. Henry Chettle, in his curious production KindHartes Dreame,' written about four years after Tarleton's death, thus describes his appearance in a vision:-"The next, by his suit of russet, his buttoned cap, his tabor, his standing on the toe, and other tricks, I knew to be either the body or resemblance of Tarleton, who living, for his pleasant conceits was of all men liked, and dying, for mirth left not his fellow." The Prince

Sidney. 'Defence of Poesy.'

From the Palladis Tamia' of Francis Meres we learn that Dr. John Case, the commentator upon Aristotle, did not think Tarleton beneath his notice :-" As Antipater Sidonius was famous for extemporal verse in Greek, and Ovid for his Quicquid conabar dicere versus erat,' so was our Tarleton, of whom Dr. Case, that learned physician, thus speaketh in the seventh book and seventeenth chapter of his 'Politics:'-' Aristoteles suum Theodoretum laudavit quendam peritum tragœ

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