[9] Page 120 of this volume.

It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that those two passions thus coexisting should somehow work together, and at least endeavour to produce a joint result.  And so it was in fact.  Historical plays, or things purporting to be such, were highly popular:  the public taste evidently favoured, not to say demanded them; and some of Shakespeare’s earliest essays were undoubtedly in that line.  There are many clear evidences to this point.  For instance, Thomas Nash, in his Pierce Penniless, 1592, speaks of certain plays “wherein our forefathers’ valiant acts, that have been long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence.”  And again:  “How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that, after he had lain two hundred years in the tomb, he should triumph again on the stage; and have his bones new-embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least,—­at several times,—­who, in the tragedian that represents his person, behold him fresh-bleeding!” From these passages it is clear that historical plays on English subjects were strong in the public interest and patronage.  And I have no doubt that the second passage quoted refers to Shakespeare’s First Part of King Henry the Sixth.  And it might well be that the popular mind should take special delight in entertainments where, to the common interest of dramatic exhibitions was added the further charm of national feeling and recollection, and where a large patriotism, “looking before and after,” would find itself at home.

The Historical Drama, then, grew up simultaneously with Comedy and Tragedy, and established itself as a cooerdinate branch of the Gothic Drama in England.  Now this circumstance could not be without great influence in determining the whole scope and character of the English Drama in all its varieties.  The natural effect was to make them all more or less historical in method and grain.  For the process generated, and could not fail to generate, corresponding modes and habits of thought in dramatic composition; and these would needs go with the writers into whatever branch of the Drama they might take in hand.  Because modes and habits of thought are not things that men can put off and on for different subjects and occasions.  What they learn to practise in one field of labour transfers itself with them, whether they will or no, to other fields.  Their way of viewing things, nay, their very faculties of vision, catch the temper and drift of what they work in; which drift and temper cleave to them in spite of themselves, and unconsciously shape all their movements of thought; so that, change their matter as they may, their mind still keeps the same.  Accordingly, even when Shakespeare does not deal specifically with the persons and events of history; when he fetches his incidents and characters from the realms of imagination; still his workmanship is historical in its spirit and method; proceeding according to the laws, even while departing from the matter, of history; so that we have pure creations formed upon the principles, and in the order and manner, of historical dramas.