doors had been early in use; but to make a celestial personage ascend to the roof of the stage was more than the mechanists of those days could always accomplish.18

Much money was often expended on theatrical apparel;19 but the dresses were, of course, less costly at some theatres than at others. The performers of male characters occasionally wore periwigs. Female parts were played solely by boys or young men, who sometimes used visards. The person who spoke the Prologue, and who entered immediately after the third sounding, was usually dressed in a black velvet cloak: an Epilogue does not appear to have been a regular appendage20 to a play.

During the performance, the clown would break forth into extemporaneous buffoonery; there was dancing and singing between the acts; and at the end of the piece was a song or a jig,-a farcical rhyming composition of considerable length, sung or said by the clown, and accompanied with dancing and playing on

18 A stage-direction at the end of Greene's Alphonsus is, "Exit Venus; or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage, and draw her up." See Greene's Dramatic and Poetical Works, p. 248, ed. Dyce, 1861.

19 In 1590, John Alleyn gave 167. for "one cloke of velvett, with a cape imbrothered with gold, pearles, and redd stones, and one roabe of cloth of golde ;" and in the next year, John and Edward Alleyn paid no less than 207. 10s. for "one blacke velvet cloake, with sleves ymbrodered all with silver and golde, lyned with blacke satten stryped with golde.” The Alleyn Papers (printed for the Shakespeare Soc.), pp. 11, 12.

20 Mr. Collier thinks that many epilogues which were spoken have not come down to us, the printer having chosen to omit them, rather than give an additional leaf to the play. Hist. of English Dram. Poet. iii. 444.

the pipe and tabor. A A prayer for the queen, offered by the actors on their knees, concluded all.

The price of admission appears to have varied according to the rank and estimation of the theatres: it would seem that in Shakespeare's days a shilling was charged for a place in the best boxes or rooms; and that the entrance-money was the same to the pit as to the galleries, viz. sixpence, twopence, or a penny (a matter the more difficult to determine, because “gallery" was frequently synonymous with "room"). The performance commenced at three o'clock.21 During the reign of Elizabeth, plays were acted on Sundays as well as on other days of the week;22 but in the time of her successor, dramatic exhibitions on the Sabbath appear to have been tolerated only at court.

Of the dramatists who immediately preceded Shakespeare, the most distinguished were Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd, Nash, and Lodge. The plays of Lyly are, on the whole, frigid and artificial: and it must be remembered that they were not intended for the public theatre. Neither Peele nor Greene were able to draw character with much strength or discrimination: their style is sometimes turgid, sometimes mean; and their blank verse, sweet and flowing as it is, fatigues the ear by its monotony. But in Peele's best drama, David and Bethsabe, there is no inconsiderable portion of ten

21 See Collier's Hist. of English Dram. Poet. iii. 377.

22 In 1580, the magistrates of the city of London obtained from the Queen a prohibition against plays on the Sabbath, which seems to have continued in force but a short time.

derness and poetic beauty; and, till chance has discovered to us some common original of Comus and of The Old Wives' Tale, he must be allowed the honour of having afforded hints to Milton. Greene, too, has his redeeming points: though less rich in fancy than Peele, he is occasionally elegant and spirited; and his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and his George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield, may be pronounced the most pleasing comedies of the time :-after all, however, he is happiest in some of those lyric pieces, scattered through the vast variety of prose pamphlets which he produced with surprising facility. The Spanish Tragedy of Kyd excited great contemporary applause; and it was long remembered by the parodies which its more ridiculous passages called forth: doubtless it is here and there absurd enough; but if not so poetical as the plays of Peele and Greene, it excels them in touches of passion and in depth of thought. To the three writers last mentioned, Nash, as a dramatist, was decidedly inferior: as a prose satirist he was justly celebrated; and in his controversy with Gabriel Harvey he exhibited such specimens of coarse wit and virulent invective as may have been equalled, but have never been surpassed in any language. Lodge, like Nash, was more eminent in other walks of literature than in the drama: his satirical poetry is not without force; and several copies of verses interspersed among his different prose tracts are picturesque and graceful. Marlowe was gifted with a genius of far higher order, an intellect

far more vigorous than any of these play-wrights. In delineating character, he reaches a degree of truth to which they make comparatively slight approaches; and in Faustus and Edward the Second he attains to real grandeur and pathos. Even in his earlier tragedy, Tamburlaine, amid all its extravagance of incident and inflation of style, we recognise a power which none of his contemporaries possessed. He is, on good grounds, supposed to have been the first who introduced blank verse on the public stage, and he certainly was the first who harmonised it with variety of pause.

To the list of dramatic poets preceding Shakespeare may be added the names of Chettle, Munday, and Wilson, who also continued to write when his reputation as an author was established. Plays are still extant by the first two, containing scenes of some merit; but from what remains of Wilson's productions, we cannot entertain a favourable opinion of his talents.

The probability is, that Shakespeare 23 had been some time an actor before he displayed his powers as a writer for the stage. In those days dramatists were frequently employed by managers to alter and make additions to pieces which had ceased to attract the public; and there is every reason to believe that he

23 According to a Certificate of the Sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre, which was discovered by Mr. Collier in Lord Ellesmere's collection, Shakespeare was one of those "sharers" as early as 1589. See that more than suspicious document in Appendix No. I. to the present Memoir.

commenced author by remoulding the works of others, and not by original composition. Of his early performances in this way two yet remain,4-The Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth, which he formed on the still-extant dramas entitled The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke:25 and it is far from unlikely that some of his rifacimenti may have perished along with that host of plays which, after serving the immediate purposes of the theatre, were laid aside to rot in manuscript.Among his first productions as an original dramatist we need not hesitate to reckon The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labour's lost;-in The Comedy of Errors and in Titus Andronicus,26 which certainly belong to the early part of his career, we know not how much he may have been indebted to the labours of his predecessors.

If the following stanzas were intended to apply to Shakespeare, they contain the first notice of him which has yet been found in print;

"And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made

To mock herselfe, and truth to imitate

24 As to The First Part of King Henry the Sixth (which has not come down to us in any other form), the hand of Shakespeare is scarcely, if at all, to be traced in it. Yet the fact of its being inserted in the folio of 1623 warrants the belief that he improved it here and there.

25 See more concerning these two pieces, p. 54, and note 41.

26 Since this play is not only inserted in the folio of 1623, but is mentioned as Shakespeare's in a passage of Meres's Palladis Tamia, &c., 1598 (which will be afterwards quoted), I do not venture to say (what I would fain believe) that he had nothing to do with it.