INTRODUCTION. THE origin of the drama in English Verse must be sought in the twelfth century in the Miracle plays which were then in vogue, and by which the learned clerks who wrote them endeavored to entertain and instruct their unlearned countrymen through the scenic representation of Bible histories and legends of saints and martyrs. The characters in these rude compositions, of which a sufficiency, even for historical purposes, has reached us in the Chester, Coventry, and Wakefield Mysteries, were always actual personages. They were succeeded by a race of allegorical shadows in the Moralities, which began to appear early in the reign of Henry the Sixth, and which lingered upon the stage until after the death of Elizabeth. golden age of this primitive drama was the reign of Henry the Eighth, and the master-spirits were Skelton and Heywood. Skelton wrote four pieces, one of which, Magnificence, a goodly interlude and a mery, may still be read in his works. It contains eighteen characters; is about the length of one of Shakespeare's plays; and, if somewhat heavy and inartificial, is not without vigor and earnestness. Heywood wrote The six plays, of which the best is The Four P's, a very Mery Enterlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Poticary, and a Pedlar. Distinguished from the Moral plays of the period, in that the story, or fable, of each is conducted by characters of real life, and not by allegorical personifications, they are the first genuine specimens of the drama in English Verse. Contemporary with Heywood was Nicholas Udall, head-master of Eton, who wrote the earliest English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister. Unlike the interludes of Heywood, which were in single acts, it was divided into acts and scenes, was interspersed with merry songs, and was provided with a plot that afforded good matter for good acting. Belonging to this cycle of old plays is Gammer Gurton's Needle, which hardly strikes a modern reader as being a Ryght Pithy, Pleasant, and Merie Comedie, though it contains a rollicking drinking song ("I cannot eat but little meat"), which was probably not written by its reputed author, Bishop Still; the play of Misogonus, which is not composed in couplets, like the interludes of Udall and Heywood, but in rhyming quatrains, and is completed in the unusual number of four acts; and Bale's drama of Kynge Johan, which occupies an intermediate place between the off-going Moralities and the on-coming Chronicle Histories, King John, Pope Innocent, and other historical figures mingling with such abstractions as Widowed Britannia, Imperial Majesty, and Treason, Verity, and Sedition. Precisely when these medleys, and others which might be named, were written, or played, has not been in all cases determined, and is of no consequence except to students of the Early English Drama, to whom as a |