The English drama, on the other hand, strove to represent the whole sweep of life in a single play.  The scene changed rapidly; the same actors appeared now at home, now at court, now on the battlefield; and vigorous action filled the stage before the eyes of the spectators.  The child of one act appeared as the man of the next, and the imagination of the spectator was called upon to bridge the gaps from place to place and from year to year.  So the dramatist had free scope to present all life in a single place and a single hour.  Moreover, since the world is always laughing and always crying at the same moment, tragedy and comedy were presented side by side, as they are in life itself.  As Hamlet sings, after the play that amused the court but struck the king with deadly fear: 

    Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
    The hart ungalled play;
    For some must watch, while some must sleep: 
    So runs the world away.

Naturally, with these two ideals struggling to master the English drama, two schools of writers arose.  The University Two Schools Wits, as men of learning were called, generally of Drama upheld the classical ideal, and ridiculed the crude-ness of the new English plays.  Sackville and Norton were of this class, and “Gorboduc” was classic in its construction.  In the “Defense of Poesie” Sidney upholds the classics and ridicules the too ambitious scope of the English drama.  Against these were the popular playwrights, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and many others, who recognized the English love of action and disregarded the dramatic unities in their endeavor to present life as it is.  In the end the native drama prevailed, aided by the popular taste which had been trained by four centuries of Miracles.  Our first plays, especially of the romantic type, were extremely crude and often led to ridiculously extravagant scenes; and here is where the classic drama exercised an immense influence for good, by insisting upon beauty of form and definiteness of structure at a time when the tendency was to satisfy a taste for stage spectacles without regard to either.

In the year 1574 a royal permit to Lord Leicester’s actors allowed them “to give plays anywhere throughout our realm of England,” and this must be regarded as the beginning of the regular drama.  Two years later the first playhouse, known as “The Theater,” was built for these actors by James Burbage in Finsbury Fields, just north of London.  It was in this theater that Shakespeare probably found employment when he first came to the city.  The success of this venture was immediate, and the next thirty years saw a score of theatrical companies, at least seven regular theaters, and a dozen or more inn yards permanently fitted for the giving of plays,—­all established in the city and its immediate suburbs.  The growth seems all the more remarkable when we remember that the London of those days would now be considered a small city, having (in 1600) only about a hundred thousand inhabitants.