MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563-1631).  Drayton is the most voluminous and, to antiquarians at least, the most interesting of the minor poets.  He is the Layamon of the Elizabethan Age, and vastly more scholarly than his predecessor.  His chief work is Polyolbion, an enormous poem of many thousand couplets, describing the towns, mountains, and rivers of Britain, with the interesting legends connected with each.  It is an extremely valuable work and represents a lifetime of study and research.  Two other long works are the Barons’ Wars and the Heroic Epistle of England; and besides these were many minor poems.  One of the best of these is the “Battle of Agincourt,” a ballad written in the lively meter which Tennyson used with some variations in the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and which shows the old English love of brave deeds and of the songs that stir a people’s heart in memory of noble ancestors.

III.  THE FIRST ENGLISH DRAMATISTS

THE ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA.  First the deed, then the story, then the play; that seems to be the natural development of the drama in its simplest form.  The great deeds of a people are treasured in its literature, and later generations represent in play or pantomime certain parts of the story which appeal most powerfully to the imagination.  Among primitive races the deeds of their gods and heroes are often represented at the yearly festivals; and among children, whose instincts are not yet blunted by artificial habits, one sees the story that was heard at bedtime repeated next day in vigorous action, when our boys turn scouts and our girls princesses, precisely as our first dramatists turned to the old legends and heroes of Britain for their first stage productions.  To act a part seems as natural to humanity as to tell a story; and originally the drama is but an old story retold to the eye, a story put into action by living performers, who for the moment “make believe” or imagine themselves to be the old heroes.

To illustrate the matter simply, there was a great life lived by him who was called the Christ.  Inevitably the life found its way into literature, and we have the Gospels.  Around the life and literature sprang up a great religion.  Its worship was at first simple,—­the common prayer, the evening meal together, the remembered words of the Master, and the closing hymn.  Gradually a ritual was established, which grew more elaborate and impressive as the centuries went by.  Scenes from the Master’s life began to be represented in the churches, especially at Christmas time, when the story of Christ’s birth was made more effective, to the eyes of a people who could not read, by a babe in a manger surrounded by magi and shepherds, with a choir of angels chanting the Gloria in Excelsis.[126] Other impressive scenes from the Gospel followed; then the Old Testament was called upon, until a complete cycle of plays from the Creation to the Final Judgment was established, and we have the Mysteries and Miracle plays of the Middle Ages.  Out of these came directly the drama of the Elizabethan Age.