bar to the prisoner;" but what he adds, plays. A painted board leads 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?" (Sidney - 'Defence of Poesy.') 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. Tarleton, the famous Clown, plays the Kentish carrier. 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 prompt-books. 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 ❘terest, when we recollect the great parallel scene of Shakspere's Henry IV. Part II., ❘ Now trust me, my lords, I fear not but my son beginning "I never thought to hear you speak again." 'The Famous Victories' was printed in 1594. In that copy much of the prose is chopped up into lines of various lengths, in order to look like some kind of measure : Hen. V. Most sovereign lord, and well-beloved father, I came into your chamber to comfort the melan- Soul of your body, and finding you at that time But with weeping tears lament the death of you, And after that, seeing the crown, I took it. After your death? but, seeing you live, hands, And the happiest man alive that my father lives; Hen. IV. Stand up, my son; Thine answer hath sounded well in mine ears, sound sleep, And altogether unmindful of thy coming: And let me put thee in possession whilst I live, Hen. V. Well may I take it at your majesty's But it shall never touch my head so long as my Hen. IV. God give thee joy, my son; For God knows, my son, how hardly I came by it, Hen. V. Howsoever you came by it I know And now I have it from you, and from you I will keep it: And he that seeks to take the crown from my head, Will be as warlike and victorious a prince Henry IV. dies; Henry V. is crowned; the evil companions are cast off; the Chief Justice is forgiven; and the expedition to France is resolved upon. To trace the course of the war would be too much for the patience of our readers. The clashing of the four swords and bucklers might have rendered its stage representation endurable. 'The True Tragedy of Richard III.' is the only other History, of which we possess a printed copy, that we can assign to the period before the first real dramatists. This old play is a work of higher pretension than 'The Famous Victories.' Like that play, it contains many prose speeches which are printed to have some resemblance to measured lines; but, on the other hand, there are many passages of legitimate verse which are run together as prose. The most ambitious part of the whole performance is a speech of Richard before the battle and this we transcribe : "King. The hell of life that hangs upon the crown, The daily cares, the nightly dreams, cry; The headless peers come pressing for revenge; Let him look that his armour be thicker than And all, yea, all the world, I think, I doubt my food, lest poison lurk therein; Nay, who dare so much as once to think my death? Though enemies there be that would my body kill, Yet shall they leave a never-dying mind. Where was our friends to intercept the foe? chance, Wild-fire, with whirlwinds, light upon your heads, That thus betray'd your prince by your untruth!" There is not a trace in the elder play of the character of Shakspere's Richard:- in that play he is a coarse ruffian only an intellectual villain. The author has not even had the skill to copy the dramatic narrative of Sir Thomas More in the scene of the arrest of Hastings. It is sufficient for him to make Richard display the brute force of the tyrant. The affected complacency, the mock passion, the bitter sarcasm of the Richard of the his torian, were left for Shakspere to imitate and improve. Rude as is the dramatic construction, and coarse the execution, of these two relics of the period which preceded the transition state of the stage, there can be no doubt that these had their ruder predecessors,dumb-shows, with here and there explanatory rhymes adapted to the same gross popular taste that had so long delighted in the Mysteries and Moralities which even still held a divided empire. The growing love of the people for "the storial shows," as Laneham calls the Coventry play of 'Hock Tuesday,' was the natural result of the energetic and inquiring spirit of the age. There were many who went to the theatre to be instructed. In the prologue to Henry VIII.' we find that this great source of the popularity of the early Histories was still active : "Such as give Their money out of hope they may believe, May here find truth too." Heywood, in his 'Apology for Actors, thus writes in 1612:-" Plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of our English Chronicles: and what man have you now of that weak capacity that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conqueror, nay, from the landing of Brute, until this day, being possessed of their true use?" There is a tradition reported by Gildon, (which Percy believes, though Malone pronounces it to be a fiction,) that Shakspere, in a conversation with Ben Jonson upon the subject of his historical plays, said that, "finding the nation generally very ignorant of history, he wrote them in order to instruct the people in that particular." It is not recessary that we should credit or discredit this anecdote, to come to the conclusion that, when Shakspere first became personally interested in providing entertainment and instruction for the people, there was a great demand already existing for that species of drama, which subsequently became important enough to constitute a class apart from Tragedy or Comedy. The Legendary History of England was seized upon at an early period, as possessing dramatic capabilities; and in 'Ferrex and Porrex,' (sometimes called 'GORBODUC,') we have the work of two poetical minds, labouring, however, upon false principles. This drama was acted before Queen Elizabeth as early as 1562. Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, its joint author with Thomas Norton, was a man of real genius; yet the dramatic form overmastered his poetical capacity. Stately harangues stand in the place of earnest passion; rhetorical description thrusts out scenic action. Some of the lines, no doubt, are forcible and impressive, such as those on the causes and miseries of | isle twenty-four years, died, and was buried civil war : To the Legends of England belongs 'LoCRINE,' a play falsely ascribed to Shakspere himself, and Shakspere's own Lear.' The 'Lear' wholly belongs to the Tragic Drama, "the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world." 'LOCRINE' may here claim a slight notice : The subject of this tragedy was a favourite with the early poets. We find it in 'The Mirror of Magistrates,' in Spenser, and in Drayton; occupying seven stanzas of 'The Faery Queen' (Book II., Canto 10), and fifty lines of the Poly-Olbion.' The legend of Brutus is circumstantially related in Milton's 'History of England,' where the story of Locrine is told with the power of a poet : "After this, Brutus, in a chosen place, builds Troja Nova, changed in time to Trinovantum, now London, and began to enact laws, Heli being then high priest in Judæa; and, having governed the whole in his new Troy. His three sons, Locrine, Albanact, and Camber, divide the land by consent. Locrine has the middle part, Loegria; Camber possessed Cambria, or Wales; Albanact, Albania, now Scotland. But he in the end, by Humber, king of the Hunns, who with a fleet invaded that land, was slain in fight, and his people drove back into Loegria. Locrine and his brother go out against Humber; who, now marching onwards, was by them defeated, and in a river drowned, which to this day retains his name. Among the spoils of his camp and navy were found certain young maids, and Estrildis above the rest, passing fair, the daughter of a king in Germany; from whence Humber, as he went wasting the sea coast, had led her captive; whom Locrine, though before contracted to the daughter of Corineus, resolves to marry. But being forced and threatened by Corineus; whose authority and power he feared, Guendolen the daughter he yields to marry, but in secret loves the other: and ofttimes retiring, as to some private sacrifice, through vaults and passages made under ground, and seven years thus enjoying her, had by her a daughter equally fair, whose name was Sabra. But when once his fear was off by the death of Corineus, not content with secret enjoyment, divorcing Guendolen, he made Estrildis now his queen. Guendolen, all in rage, departs into Cornwall, where Madan, the son she had by Locrine, was hitherto brought up by Corineus, his grandfather. And gathering an army of her father's friends and subjects, gives battle to her husband by the river Sture; wherein Locrine, shot with an arrow, ends his life. But not so ends the fury of Guendolen; for Estrildis, and her daughter Sabra, she throws into a river; and, to leave a monument of revenge, proclaims that the stream be thenceforth called after the damsel's name, which, by length of time, is changed now to Sabrina, or Severn." In 'Comus' Milton lingers with delight about the same story: "There is a gentle nymph not far from hence, That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream, The dumb-show, as it is called, of 'Locrine' is tolerably decisive as to the date of the performance. It belongs essentially to that period when the respective powers of action and of words were imperfectly understood; when what was exhibited to the eye required to be explained, and what was conveyed to the imagination of the audience by speech was to be made more intelligible by a sign-painting pantomime. Nothing could be more characteristic of a very rude state of art, almost the rudest, than the dumb-shows which introduce each act of 'Locrine.' Act I. is thus heralded : "Thunder and lightning. Enter Ate in black, with a burning torch in one hand, and a bloody sword in the other. Presently let there come forth a lion running after a bear; then come forth an archer, who must kill the lion in a dumb show, and then depart. Ate remains." Ate then tells us, in good set verse, that a mighty lion was killed by a dreadful archer; and the seventeen lines in which we are told this are filled with a very choice description of the lion before he was shot, and after he was shot. And what has this to do with the subject of the play? It is an acted simile: "So valiant Brute, the terror of the world, In the second act we have a dumb-show of Perseus and Andromeda; in the third "a crocodile sitting on a river's bank, and a little snake stinging it;" in the fourth Omphale and Hercules; in the fifth Jason, Medea, and Creon's daughter. Ate, who is the great show-woman of these scenes, introduces her puppets on each occasion with a line or two of Latin, and always concludes her address with "So"-"So valiant Brute" -"So fares it with young Locrine"-"So Humber" - "So martial Locrine" "So Guendolen." A writer in the 'Edinburgh Review' most justly calls Locrine "a characteristic work of its time." If we were to regard these dumb-shows as the most decisive marks of its chronology, we should carry the play back to the age when the form of the moralities was in some degree indispensable to a dramatic performance; when the action could not move and develop itself without the assistance of something approaching to the character of a chorus. Thus in 'Tancred and Gismunda,' originally acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1568, previous to the first act Cupid cometh out of the heavens in a cradle of flowers, drawing forth upon the stage, in a blue twist of silk, from his left hand, Vain Hope, Brittle Joy; and with a carnation twist of silk from his right hand, Fair Resemblance, Late Repentance." We have their choruses at the conclusion of other acts; and, previous to the fourth act, not only "Megæra riseth out of hell, with the other furies," but she subsequently mixes in the main action, and throws her snake upon Tancred. Whatever period therefore we may assign to 'Locrine,' varying between the date of 'Tancred and Gismunda' and its original publication in 1594, we may be sure that the author, whoever he was, had not power enough to break through the trammels of the early stage. He had not that confidence in the force of natural action and just characterization which would allow a drama to be wholly dramatic. He wanted that high gift of imagination which conceives and produces these qualities of a drama; and he therefore dealt as with an unimaginative audience. The same want of the dramatic power renders his play a succession of harangues, in which the last thing thought of is the appropriateness of language to situation. The first English dramatists, and those who worked upon their model, appear to have gone upon the principle that they produced the most perfect work of art when they took their art entirely out of the province of nature. The highest art is a representation of Nature in her very highest forms; something which is above common reality, |