drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place, to make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy.  But the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the audience, and they decided for feedom and action, rather than restraint and recitation.  Hence our national drama is of Shakspere and not of Racine.  By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in London in full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants.

Fresh plays were produced every year.  The theater was more to the Englishmen of that time than it has ever been before or since.  It was his club, his novel, his newspaper, all in one.  No great drama has ever flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the Elizabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors, and familiar with stage effect.  Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and Fletcher, who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not dependent on their pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived in a theatrical atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be put on.

It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright.  Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of their generation, made large fortunes.  Shakspere himself made enough from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence, some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome property in his native Stratford.  Accordingly, shortly after 1580, a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a career.  These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors and playwrights.  Most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in wretchedness.  Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring, and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl.

The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays between 1584 and 1601.  They were written for court entertainments, mostly in prose and on mythological subjects.  They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk and vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them.  All the characters talk Ephuism.  The best of these was Alexander and Campaspe, the plot of which is briefly as follows.  Alexander has fallen in love with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the artist Apelles to paint her portrait.  During the sittings Apelles becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion, which is returned.  Alexander discovers their secret, but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the lovers’ hands.  The situation is a good one, and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist.  But Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives us clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings.  For example: