Masques and interludes—­the latter a species of short farce—­were popular at the court of Henry VIII.  Elizabeth was often entertained at the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto.  Original comedies and tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence and Seneca, and chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings.  There was a master of the revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays to be performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children of the Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  These early plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakspere’s; but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary value.

There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players, who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens.  It was not until stationary theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of literature.  In 1576 the first London play-houses, known as the Theater and the Curtain, were erected in the suburb of Shoreditch, outside the city walls.  Later the Rose, the Hope, the Globe, and the Swan were built on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers resorting to them were accustomed to “take boat.”  These locations were chosen in order to get outside the jurisdiction of the mayor and corporation, who were Puritans, and determined in their opposition to the stage.  For the same reason the Blackfriars, belonging to the company that owned the Globe—­the company in which Shakspere was a stockholder—­was built, about 1596, within the “liberties” of the dissolved monastery of the Blackfriars.

These early theaters were of the rudest construction.  The six-penny spectators, or “groundlings,” stood in the yard or pit, which had neither floor nor roof.  The shilling spectators sat on the stage, where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence they chaffed the actors or the “opposed rascality” in the yard.  There was no scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys.  Plays were acted in the afternoon.  A placard, with the letters “Venice,” or “Rome,” or whatever, indicated the place of the action.  With such rude appliances must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets.  The dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their public, and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of that day, that it responded to the appeal.  It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals of space and time, and “with aid of some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars.”  Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the Elizabethan