SOURCE: Berlin, Normand. “Thomas Sackville and Elizabethan Tragedy.” In Thomas Sackville, pp. 120-27. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974.

In the following excerpt, Berlin contends that Sackville should be remembered for more than his authorship of the first English tragedy, arguing that his blank verse and poetic characterizations of tragic figures were instrumental in the subsequent tragedies of more prominent playwrights, including William Shakespeare.

Thomas Sackville is the victim of “the most perfect conspiracy of approval,” to use T. S. Eliot's phrase in his notorious essay about Ben Jonson. Praised for having written the best poem between Chaucer and Spenser, lauded for having presented a play to which the word “first” is always attached, Sackville is read only by historians, antiquarians, and students studying for doctoral comprehensives. My preceding chapters on the “Induction,” the “Complaint,” and Gorboduc have attempted to demonstrate that these works have intrinsic merit and that Thomas...