as pirated music-hall songs are sold to-day.  This is to be noted because it explains a great deal in the subsequent evolution of the drama.  It explains the delight in having everything represented actually on the stage, all murders, battles, duels.  It explains the magnificent largesse given by Shakespeare to the professional fool.  Work had to be found for him, and Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in Macbeth and the Fool in Lear.  Others met the problem in an attitude of frank despair.  Not all great tragic writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of comedy, and Marlowe in Dr. Faustus took the course of leaving the low comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor demanded, to an inferior collaborator.

Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and public theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, produced the Elizabethan drama which we know.  The public theatres were not the only places at which plays were produced.  At the University, at the Inns of Court (which then more than now, were besides centres of study rather exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important part of almost every festival.  At these places were produced academic compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca.  The last were incomparably the most important.  The Elizabethan age, which always thought of literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a poet who dealt in maxims and “sentences”; his rhetoric appealed to men for whom words and great passages of verse were an intoxication that only a few to-day can understand or sympathize with; his bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink from horrors.  Tragedies early began to be written on the strictly Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca’s, with some ulterior intention.  Sackville’s Gorboduc, the first tragedy in English, produced at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession.  To be put to such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical tragedy of the learned societies and the court.  None of the pieces composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and indeed they could not have been a success on it.  The Elizabethan audience, as we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action took place “off.”  But they had a strong and abiding influence on the popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave it