exacerbated; the confusion seems hopeless, when the needle is found sticking in the breeches of Hodge, the Gammer's farm-servant. Diccon the Bedlam, who raised and controlled the storm, may be compared to the Vice of the Moralities, inasmuch as all the action turns upon him. But he has nothing in common with abstractions. He is a vigorously executed portrait of a personage familiar enough in England at that epoch. After the dissolution of the monas teries, no provision was made for the poor folk who used to live upon their doles. A crowd of idle and dissolute beggars were turned loose upon the land, to live upon their wits. The cleverer of these affected madness, and got the name of Bedlam Beggars, Abraham Men, and Poor Toms. Shakspere has described them in 'King Lear':

The country gives me proof and precedent,
Of bedlam beggars who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms,
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,

And with this horrible object from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,

Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers,
Enforce their charity.

Dekker in one of his tracts introduces us to the confraternity of wandering rogues in the following curious passage: 'Of all the mad rascals, that are of this wing, the Abraham Man is the most fantastic. The fellow that sat half-naked at table to-day, from the girdle upwards, is the best Abraham Man that ever came to my house, and the notablest villain. He swears he hath been in Bedlam, and will talk frantically of purpose. You see pins stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his arms, which pain he gladly puts himself to (being indeed no torment at all, his skin is either so dead with some foul disease or so hardened with weather) only to make you believe he is out of his wits. He calls himself by the name of Poor Tom, and coming near anybody cries out, "Poor Tom is a-cold! These vagrants wandered up and down the country, roosting in hedge-rows, creeping into barns, extorting bacon from farm-servants by intimida

DICCON THE BEDLAM

167

tion, amusing the company in rural inns by their mad jests, stealing and bullying, working upon superstition, pity, terror, or the love of the ridiculous in all from whom they could obtain a livelihood. How Shakspere used this character to heighten the tragedy of Lear,' requires no comment. Still employed the same character in working out a purely farcical intrigue. His Diccon is simply a clever and amusing vagabond.

It is worthy of notice that Gammer Gurton's Needle was played at Christ's College, with the sanction of the authorities, in 1566. We might wonder how grave scholars could appreciate the buffoonery of this coarse art, which has neither the intrigue of Latin comedy nor the polish of classic style to recommend it. Yet, if the intellectual conditions of the time are taken into account, our wonder will rather be that 'Roister Doister' should have been written than that 'Gammer Gurton' should have been enjoyed. The fine arts had no place in England. Literature hardly existed, and the study of the classics was as yet confined to a few scholars. Formal logic and the philosophy of the schoolmen occupied the graver thoughts of academical students. When those learned men abandoned themselves to mirth, they relished obscenity and grossness with the same gusto as the cheese and ale and onions of their supper table. Nor let it be forgotten that the urbane Pope of the House of Medici, the pupil of Poliziano, the patron of Raphael, could turn from Beroaldo's Tacitus' and Bembo's courtly elegiacs, to split his sides with laughing at Bibbiena's ribaldries. Allowing for the differences between Italy and England, the 'Calandria' is hardly more refined than Gammer Gurton's Needle.' Beneath its classical veneer and smooth Italian varnish, it hides as coarse a view of human nature and a nastier fable.

VI

There are many reasons why Comedy should have preceded Tragedy in the evolution of our Drama. The comic scenes, which formed a regular department of the Miracle, allowed themselves to be detached from the whole scheme.

6

From the first they were extraneous to the sacred subjectmatter of those Pageants; and after passing through the intermediate stage of the Morality, they readily blent with Latin models (as in the case of Roister Doister'), and no less readily settled into the form of the five-act farce (as in the case of Gammer Gurton'). Comedy attracts an uninstructed audience more powerfully than Tragedy. Of this we have plenty of evidence in our own days; when the better vulgar' crowd the Music Halls, and gather to Burlesques, but barely lounge at fashion's beck to a Shaksperian Revival. Comedy of the average type can be more easily invented than Tragedy. It appeals to a commoner intelligence. It deals with more familiar motives. Lastly, but by no means least, it makes far slighter demands upon the capacity of actors. Passing over into caricature, it is not only tolerable, but oftentimes enhanced in effect. Whereas Tragedy, hyperbolised-Herod out-Heroding Herod, Ercles' and Cambyses' vein becomes supremely ridiculous to those very sympathies which Tragedy appeals to. Among the Northern nations grotesqueness was indigenous. They found buffoonery ready to their hand. For the statelier and sterner forms of dramatic art, models were needed. What the Teutonic genius originated in the serious style, was epical; connected with the minstrel's rather than the jongleur's skill. Comedy, again, was better fitted than Tragedy to fill up the spaces of a banquet or to crown a revel. The jongleurs and jugglers, who descended from the Roman histriones, had their proper place in medieval society; and these jesters were essentially mimes. Comedy belonged of right to them. Every daïs in the hall of manor-house or castle had from immemorial time furnished forth a comic stage. The Court-fools were public characters. Sumner, Will Kempe, Tarleton, and Wilson were as well known to our ancestors of the sixteenth century as Garrick and the Kembles to our great-grandfathers. The occasional and extemporaneous jesting of these men passed by degrees into settled types of presentation. They wrote, or had written for them, Merriments, which they enriched with. sallies of the choicest gag, illustrated with movements of

PRIORITY OF COMIC DRAMA

169

the most fantastic humour. When formal plays came into fashion by the labour of the learned, these professional comedians struck the key-note of character, and took a prominent part in all performances. From what we know about private or semi-private theatricals in our own days, we are able furthermore to comprehend how anxiously young gentlemen at College, or fashionable members of an Inn of Court, would imitate the gestures of a Tarleton; how pliantly the scholarplaywright would adapt his leading comic motive to the humours of a Kempe. It was thus through many co-operating circumstances that Comedy took the start of Tragedy upon the English stage. The graver portions of the Miracles, the heavier parts of the Moral Plays, meanwhile, developed a school of acting which made Tragedy possible. The public by these antecedents were educated to tolerate a serious style of art. But the playwright's genius-adequate to a first-rate Interlude like the Four P's,' to a first-rate Comedy of manners like 'Roister Doister,' to a first-rate screaming farce like 'Gammer Gurton '-was still unequal to the task of a true tragic piece.

CHAPTER VI

THE RISE OF TRAGEDY

1. Classical Influence in England-The Revival of Learning-English Humanism-Ascham's' Schoolmaster '-Italian Examples.-II. The Italian Drama-Paramount Authority of Seneca-Character of Seneca's Plays. III. English Translations of Seneca-English Translations of Italian Plays.-IV. English Adaptations of the Latin Tragedy-Lord Brooke-Samuel Daniel-Translations from the French-Latin Tragedies-False Dramatic Theory.-V. 'Gorboduc' —Sir Philip Sidney's Eulogy of it-Lives of Sackville and Norton— General Character of this Tragedy-Its Argument-Distribution of Material-Chorus-Dumb Show-The Actors-Use of Blank Verse.VI. The Misfortunes of Arthur'-Thomas Hughes and Francis Bacon-The Plot-Its Adaptation to the Græco-Roman Style of Tragedy-Part of Guenevora-The Ghost-Advance on 'Gorboduc' in Dramatic Force and Versification.-VII. Failure of this PseudoClassical Attempt-What it effected for English Tragedy.

N.B. The two chief tragedies discussed in this chapter will be found in the old Shakespeare Society's Publications, 1847, and in Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. iv.

I

THE history of our Tragic Drama is closely connected with that of an attempt to fix the rules of antique composition on the playwright's art in England. Up to the present point we have been dealing with those religious pageants, which the English shared in common with other European nations during the Middle Ages, and with a thoroughly native outgrowth from them in our Moral Plays and Comedies. The debt, already indicated, of Jack Juggler' to the Amphitryon' of Plautus, and that of 'Roister Doister' to the 'Miles Gloriosus,' together with a very early English version of the 'Andria' of Terence, prove, however, that classical studies were beginning to affect our theatre even in the period of its