example was followed in 1566 in Gascoyne's Jocasta, played at Gray's Inn; and at a still greater interval by Thomas Hughes, in his Misfortunes of Arthur, represented before the Queen at Greenwich, in 1587. These, it will be remarked, were plays either performed at Court or before private societies. The question is, when blank-verse was first used in dramatic compositions performed at the public theatres of the metropolis?

Gosson, in his School of Abuse, 1579, mentions two prose books played at the Bell Savage;' and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, already examined, is an instance of an early 'history' in prose, although printed to look like metre. These seem to have been exceptions to the ordinary rule, for Gosson, in his Plays Confuted in five Actions, tells us that poets send their verses to the stage upon such feet, as continually are rolled up in rhyme.' He says nothing of blank-verse, and there is no doubt that when he wrote, prose and rhyme only were used in popular dramatic exhibitions.

Blank-verse was first employed in plays performed at the public theatres of London, about the year 1586, four or five years after Gosson had published his Plays Confuted in five Actions. The evidence of this fact is contained in the epistle by Thomas Nash 'to the Gentlemen Students of both Universities,' prefixed to Robert Greene's Menaphon, printed in 1587. We there meet with the following passage :—

I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age

is grown of late, so that every mechanical mate ' abhorreth the English he was born to, and plucks, with a solemn periphrasis, his ut vales from the ink'horn: which I impute not so much to the perfection of arts, as to the servile imitation of vain-glorious • tragedians, who contend not so seriously to excel in 6 action, as to embowel the clouds in a speech of comparison; thinking themselves more than initiated ' in poets' immortality, if they but once get Boreas by ❝ the beard, and the heavenly Bull by the dewlap. But herein I cannot so fully bequeath them to folly, as their idiot art-masters, that intrude themselves to our 'ears as the alchymists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better

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pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank• verse. Indeed, it may be the engrafted overflow of 'some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagina⚫tion with a more than drunken resolution, being not • extemporal in the invention of any other means to • vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their • choleric incumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon. Amongst this kind of men, 'that repose eternity in the mouth of a player, I can 'but engross some deep-read school-men or grammarians, who having no more learning in their skull than will serve to take up a commodity, nor art in their brain than was nourished in a serving-man's ' idleness, will take upon them to be the ironical censors of all, when God and poetry doth know they are 'the simplest of all.'

Hence it is quite evident that blank-verse had been employed upon the common stage prior to 1587, when the work from which the above quotation is made bears date. Nash talks of the swelling bombast of bragging blank-verse,' which he also calls a drumming decasyllabon,' and ridicules those who reposed eternity in the mouth of a player.' The turn of expression in the whole passage also seems to show clearly, that independently of any general censure of the dramatic poets of the time, Nash had also some particular individual allusion. Having been entered of St. John's College in 1585, he was obliged to leave the University in 1587, without taking his degree*, and coming to London he joined his friend Greene, who was supporting himself by his prolific pen :-'Give 'me the man' (says Nash of Greene, in another part of the address above quoted) whose extemporal vein ' in any humour will excell our greatest art-masters' 'deliberate thoughts; whose inventions, quicker than his eye, will challenge the proudest rhetorician to the 'contention of the like perfection with the like expe'dition.' It will be observed that Nash twice employs

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* He was engaged with some friend in writing a satirical piece called Terminus et non Terminus: his friend was expelled, and it is doubtful if Nash did not share his disgrace and punishment: at all events he could not take his degree; and this circumstance is alluded to in the epistle of 'England to her three Daughters,' in Polimanteia, 1595, where, speaking of Nash and Harvey, the writer says, Cambridge, make thy two children friends: thou hast been unkind to 'the one [Nash] to wean him before his time, and too fond upon the other to keep him so long without preferment.'-Sign. Q 4.

the term 'art-master' contemptuously, and I apprehend that it has reference to some individual who had set himself up as a sort of rival of Greene, or, in the phrase of Nash, to outbrave a better pen.' The prefatory matter to one of the productions of Greene, which was published in the year following that in which Nash's address to the Gentlemen Students of both Universities' was printed, may enable us to decide to whom the term 'art-master' alludes.

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Greene's Perimedes, the Blacksmith, appeared in 1588; and in the epistle to the Gentlemen readers,' after stating that he still keeps his old course to palter up something in prose,' he goes on to mention, that the motto he usually prefixed to his productions, omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, had been ' had in derision' by 'two gentlemen poets,' because (says Greene) I could not make my verses jet on the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the ' mouth like the faburden of Bow-Bell, daring God out ‹ Heaven with that atheist Tamburlan, or blasphem'ing with the mad priest of the sun.' Farther on he laughs at the 'prophetical spirits' of those who set the end of scholarism in an English blank-verse,' and who had accused him of not being able to write it. Greene, at this date, was a highly popular author of pamphlets, if not of plays; and it is a curious fact, to be gathered from what he adds, that his incapacity in the last respect was then important enough to have been even brought in some way upon one of the theatres: If I speak darkly, Gentle

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men' (he proceeds), and offend with this digression, I 'crave pardon, in that I but answer in print what

they have offered on the Stage*? Greene seems to have felt very sore at the charge, that he could not write blank-verse, and make it 'jet in tragical buskins' as well as some of his contemporaries; and it is, therefore, fair to infer that prior to the date when he was writing, 1588, he had made the attempt. He particularly specifies two plays of this kind that had been successful-one in which the mad priest of the sun' was exhibited, and the other Tamburlaine, the author of which was Christopher Marlow. It is to be observed that Marlow took his degree of Master of Arts in the very year when Nash was unable to do so in consequence of being obliged to quit Cambridge in disgrace. I apprehend that it is to Marlow Nash alludes, under the term art-master,' in the quotations already made from his address prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, 1587.

I thus arrive at the conclusion, that Christopher Marlow was our first poet who used blank-verse in dramatic compositions performed in public theatres— that Tamburlaine was the name of the play in which the successful experiment was made, and that it had been acted anterior to 1587. The two parts of Tamburlaine the Great are extant, but nothing is now

* Perhaps something in the same way that Ben Jonson subsequently, in his Case is Altered, brought Anthony Munday on the stage in the character of Antonio Balladino, 'Pageant Poet of the City of Milan.' See Act i. Sc. 1.