sons of gods and godlike heroes are no more; by the one incarnation of the Deity all have been alike called to union with God. The Holy Spirit operates internally on all, and every one bears the Divinity within himself. The mystic heroes of the ancient drama, those typical representations of the general qualities of human nature, are wanting entirely in the modern dramatists. Consequently, if their poetry is to have universal import, if the general principles of humanity are to be exhibited objectively, not merely in the character of the acting personages, but also in the exhibited action, they must accomplish this object by a factitious and ideal repetition of it in the greatest possible variety of personages, actions, and events. This requisition of the spirit of christian art the poet involuntarily obeyed, wherever it sprung up freely from the christian enlightenment of the nation; and consequently, while the ancient drama, which had its origin in the greater lyrical simplicity, was continually enlarging the number of actors, the range of subject, and the complication of the action, the modern drama followed a directly opposite course. This is at once proved by the vast extent of subject chosen for representation in the old Mysteries, and which, if indeed it was somewhat reduced at first in the Moralities, from certain external considerations, soon swelled again to equal, if not greater bulk. But now artistically to elaborate such masses is more difficult, than (what was the first problem with Eschylus) so to dispose three persons and a chorus as to form a well-rounded and harmonious whole. No wonder, therefore, that the earlier English dramatists did not at once succeed in this difficult task; no wonder that much of the mass of action and events remained without adequate motive, and that consequently the epic element maintained its predominance, in so far as the incidents of the fable, instead of arising by necessity out of the characters of the personages of the poem or from the position of affairs, followed each other in simple and arbitrary succession.

From the same cause the early English dramatists fell into error as to the very idea of Tragedy. In order to ensure to it its general importance and the greatest possible effect, they exaggerated it even to the terrific and horrible, and to accomplish this they had recourse to the most forced situations, to descriptions of the wildest outbreaks of overwrought passions, and to a diction over

loaded with vehement expressions and boldly hazarded figures. But even Eschylus, according to Aristophanes, not unfrequently offends by the turgid bombast of his tragic sublimity. Moreover, the stronger nerves of a people much more familiar than the present age with scenes of suffering of every kind, and hardened by the many criminal processes, and all the horrors of the Star Chamber, and the religious persecutions of Elizabeth and her predecessors, required the deepest shade of tragedy to move them. To this deep shade of tragedy corresponded in comedy the rude and vulgar, and not unfrequently a low buffoonery and obscene jesting had to supply the want of a more refined wit. The play of words, the form which popular wit most readily assumes, was too often nothing but verbal quibbling; persons of the lowest rank, pages, servingmen, waiters, &c., had the chief parts, and were the favourite exponents of the comic. The clown formed the centre of the sport, who, on all occasions, thrust himself, with or without reason, into the action, and, moreover, had the privilege of conversing with the spectators, in a kind of parabasis, and of making remarks and extemporising jokes on the little incidents of the pit and gallery. At the close it was usual for him to dance in a sort of afterpiece, called jig, for the special exhibition of his skill, to sing and make grimaces, to cut capers of all kinds, and as an accompaniment to improvise certain comic, not unfrequently senseless, verses-a custom which Shakspeare has modified and adapted to his purpose, in his "What you Will," and in "Love's labour's lost."

This is the dark side of the earlier English Drama, which, however, was not only relieved by a few separate rays of light, but was itself deepened by the agreeable warmth and brightness of the flame with which it was contrasted. Poesy as yet resembled a luxurious virgin soil; it was, as it were, a chaos of fermenting elements. Its several productions shot up like rank weeds; their structure was in general rude and disproportioned, the shapeless primary forms of a yet undisciplined creative power. Generally, however, it is even this native luxuriant energy of mind, this swelling, shooting and teeming of the first spring, which delights the intelligent, and refreshes the child of exhausted civilization. Even in Shakspeare's poems we occasionally meet with this dark

fantastic wilderness, resembling the aboriginal woods of America -this vigorous luxuriance of soil, in which his dramas have their lowest roots.

I mean, that the chief characteristic of the earlier dramatic poetry of England lies not so much in its single creations, as rather in this general spirit of youthful energy and freshness, which expresses itself therein and in the general form of the art. In the latter respect it may be named negative rather than positive. For it may unquestionably be taken as the distinctive feature of these poets, that, notwithstanding many of them were well acquainted with the dramatic laws of the ancients, they still refused to imitate the classical Drama in these respects. Even here the spirit of the christian romantic poetry unconsciously and involuntarily made itself felt. As Christianity had emancipated the human mind from the chains of the finite and the temporal, so christian art set itself loose from the fetters which were nothing else than the consequence and the continuation of the former. Ancient pocsy, in its sensuousness, its outward definiteness and plastic regularity of form, its adherence to the idea of a destiny by which man is placed beneath the sway of a physical and moral law, and its stern necessity, demanded such a constraint; since this dependence on the material and spiritual laws of man's earthly nature, which is intimately implied in the essence of the classical drama, naturally required to be exhibited in its outward form also. Christian or romantic poetry, on the other hand, whose very spirit is liberty, must as necessarily reject it. It must bring the rules of an outward, sensuous, and consequently a plastic rather than a poetic beauty of form, in subjection to the laws of spiritual beauty. Instead of a merely sensible, i. e. numerical unity, an ideal unity of action, i. e. an unity of idea, or a single view of life and history, such as may manifest itself in any arbitrary number of actions and events, became the principle of the romantic drama. For the unity of a sensuously perceptible period, such as is measured by the rising and setting of the sun, it substituted the unity of mental time, the ideal succession and consequence of things, and in the same way, instead of the unity of external place, christian art had to observe that of intellectual space-i. e. of mental correlation and the ideal co-existence of things. It is in the obser

vance of these laws that genuine artistic form and true dramatic construction consists, and which, in its greatest perfection, Shakspeare exhibits in all his pieces, while the moral as well as æsthetical difficulty of making a right use of this liberty, led the earlier poets into license and anarchy. But this was a result of the very construction of the human mind, according to which liberty invariably expresses itself negatively at first, i. e. assumes the appearance of caprice and extravagance.

From the same cause did that mixture of Tragedy and Comedy which has, from the earliest times, invariably prevailed in the national Drama of England and Spain, appear in the earlier poets to be arbitrary and accidental. Yet it was the necessary consequence of the properly christian development of mind which in England and Spain, being undisturbed by any foreign influence, determined the shape and manner of the evolution of art. In the ancient view a physical and moral necessity stood in direct and irreconcileable opposition to human freedom. Now, if the former be the province of Tragedy, and the latter of Comedy, (see Section III.) it follows at once that the dramatic poetry of the ancients, even though within itself it combined all the branches of art (poesy, music, statuary) into an organic and articulate whole, must insist even the more strictly on the separation of the Tragic and the Comic. On the other hand, the wall of separation between the two inevitably fell as soon as in obedience to the christian view the limits between necessity and freedom were dissolved, and the two merged into each other, as nothing more than different aspects of one and the same idea, and being exalted into manifestations of the Divine love and justice, they subordinated themselves under the one idea of the free grace of God. In order to establish this profounder view, and, at the same time, to furnish the justification of this blending of Tragedy and Comedy, there was truly need of so great and profound a genius as Shakspeare. This consideration alone must be our justification for reserving the closer examination of this whole point to our exposition of the general poetical view which Shakspeare entertained. In the present place we must content ourselves with observing, that the language of the older dramas exhibits a similar combination, and so was in perfect harmony with the union of the Tragic and the Comic. I allude to the

free intermixture of prose with poetry-of rhyming with blank verse, which at first followed no rule, although subsequently the latter was generally used in scenes of extrinsic or intrinsic grandeur and elevation, while the former was reserved for the comic parts, or scenes of every-day life, and for characters of low birth and station, servants and others. The union of the two appears quite unforced and natural, and raises rather than lowers the poetical effect wherever the versification is not strictly metrical throughout, but rather rhythmical, and so what is lost of the music and melody of the verse, adds to the force and gravity of the language by the rising and falling of the rhythm.

Such were the general principles of composition which Shakspeare and his earlier contemporaries found already established in the character and shape of the national Drama. Their establishment was no little advantage to him, since, in spite of his great genius and powerful talents, his authority would have been insufficient for their introduction, and without them he could never have accomplished what, with them, he has been able to effect. As we shall afterwards see, it was not so much in the numerous separate pieces of his immediate predecessors and early contemporaries, which may perhaps have served him for models, that the genius of Shakspeare found its stay and support, as in the general spirit and form of dramatic art which had been long previously developed and established.

On a similar, perhaps still lower grade, stood all the material of the theatre,-stage, scenery, decorations, &c., before the time of Shakspeare. The ancient custom of employing churches and chapels as theatres was not discontinued even in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, when dramatic representations were sometimes, though not frequently, exhibited in them by the privileged players. But as soon as the choir-boys began to relieve the clergy of their histrionic duties, and kings and nobles began to keep troops of players in their service, (it is certain that as early as in the reign of Edward IV. Richard Duke of Gloucester maintained such a company), these representations generally took place in schoolrooms, halls of audience and justice, and the spacious innyards, or the seats of the gentry and castles of the nobles, where temporary stages were erected for the purpose. Such, too, was