I have no wish to impose any unjust inferences on these facts, certainties being so numerous that there is happily no necessity to patch them with surmises. For the time being I content myself with a brief and essential statement of the paradox, entrusting its final solution to the future.

At whatever times I refer to "the dramatists" I would be understood to mean some of them. Much of the Elizabethan Drama is avowedly patchwork. It is customary to find several authors' names combined on the same title page, and few things are more bewildering than the manner in which trash and sublimity rub shoulders with each

other.

It is an impossibility nowadays for any student of Elizabethan literature to ignore the so-called Shakespeare-Bacon theory. I am uncertain what effect this book may have upon it. While on the one hand it tends to support the claims made on behalf of Bacon and much to enlarge them, on the other-especially as regards the arguments derivable from internal evidence-it reduces the subject, apparently ad absurdum. In any case, however, the additional light thrown upon it must be an advantage. As a modern scientist has said, Delusion and Error do not perish by controversial warfare. They perish under the slow and silent operations of changes to which they are unable to adapt themselves.

CHAPTER I.

LONDON'S PARNASSUS

UNIV. OF

VINNOJITVO

It was the opinion of Dr Johnson that a thousand years might elapse before the appearance of another poet with a power of versification equal to that of Pope. In his Discoveries Ben Jonson observes that " Every beggarly corporation affords the state a Mayor or two Bailiffs yearly; but solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur."

Within a few hundred years of the birth of Chaucer, that Morning Star of English song, London produced nearly simultaneously an outburst of poets whose minds were cast almost in the same mould as that of Shakespeare. Of this phenomenon, known vaguely as "The Elizabethan Drama, Swinburne observes, with Marlowe it rose at once with Shakespeare to heights inaccessible before, and since, and forever, to sink through bright gradations of glorious decline to its final and beautiful sunset in Shirley.

some

"Born

The appreciation of this literature entails knowledge of the moral and social conditions which environed it, and out of which it sprang. To appraise early writers by modern tastes is as disabling to judgment as the con

templation of a garden from the altitude of some remote eminence; one must descend and examine from the level. The student who looks deeper and investigates the quality and condition of the soil will find his wonder enhanced by the fact that it was obviously reclaimed from surrounding and ever encroaching swamp.

Whatever may be the opinion of critics as to the condition of learning and morality in the Elizabethan era, it is almost universally admitted that the London playhouses were places of abomination. As the Stage was the Parnassus whereon the choir of Elizabethan singing birds had their habitation, it is desirable to note a few facts in its connection.

The Englishman of to-day has little or no conception of the conditions of life prevailing in the Elizabethan period. London was a plague haunted little city of less than 200,000 inhabitants, most of them so illiterate that they were unable to read or write. It was an age "instinct with vast animal life, robust health and muscular energy; terrible in its rude and unrefined appetites." According to the author of The Arte of English Poesie, published in the year 1589, "In these dayes.... poets, as poesie, are despised, and the name become... subject to scorne and derision, and rather a reproch than a prayse. And this proceedes through the barbarous ignorance of the time, and pride of many gentlemen and others, whose grosse heads not being brought up or acquainted with any excellent arte.... they do deride and scorne it in all others. " 1

1 Arber reprints, No. 15, p. 35.

1

In the eyes of Europeans Englishmen were regarded as barbarians with whom it was impossible to associate as equals. It is recorded by travellers that our pleasures consisted of eating, drinking, and fighting. "The English," said a Frenchman in the last years of Queen Mary, "are great drunkards." Their conversation is continually interspersed with phrases such as these, "Drind iou, " "I plaigou, "Bigod sol drind iou agoud oin," (meaning thereby, "I drink to you, "I pledge you, By God I shall drink you a good wine." There is no kind of order: the people are reprobates and thorough enemies of good manners and letters, for they do not know whether they belong to God or the devil, and their manners are very impolite. The common people were inconceivably vicious and degraded, delighting in indescribable orgies and fierce open air sports. In the slums of the suburbs the rude and primitive playhouses formed nuclei for all that was vile, adventurous, and hazardous in the floating population. It is distinctly intimated by contemporaries that the theatres were centres of organised vice. In 1579 we find them described as "the nest of the devil and the sink of all sin." 2 In 1595 the Lord Mayor of London wrote to the Privy Council complaining that "Among other inconveniences [of the playhouses] it is not the least that the refuse sort of evil disposed and ungodly people about this City have opportunity hereby to assemble together and to make their matches for all their lewd and ungodly practices, being also the

I See A Short History o, Hampton Court. Law p. 126. 2 Arber reprint, No. 3, p. 10.