ies her. The characters of the play, which is
written in rime, are of the English middle class.

_Gammer Gurton's Needle_, the work of William Stevenson, a
little-known pre-Shakespearean writer, was acted at Christ's College,
Cambridge, shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century. This
play borrows hardly anything from the classical stage. Most of the
characters of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ are from the lowest English
working classes, and its language, unlike that of _Ralph Royster
Doyster_, which has little to offend, is very coarse.

Gorboduc and the Dramatic Unities.--The tragedy of _Gorboduc_, the
first regular English tragedy written in blank verse, was acted in
1561, three years before the birth of Shakespeare. This play is in
part the work of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), a poet and diplomat,
the author of two powerful somber poems, the _Induction_ and
_Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham_. In spite of their heavy
narrative form, these poems are in places even more dramatic than the
dull tragedy of Gorboduc, which was fashioned after the classical
rules of Seneca and the Greeks. _Gorboduc_ requires little action on
the stage. There is considerable bloodshed in the play; but the
spectators are informed of the carnage by a messenger, as they are not
permitted to witness a bloody contest on the stage.

[Illustration: THOMAS SACKVILLE.]

If Gorboduc had been taken for a model, the English drama could never
have attained Shakespearean greatness. Our drama would then have been
crippled by following the classical rules, which prescribed unity of
place and time in the plot and the action. The ancients held that a
play should not represent actions which would, in actual life, require
much more than twenty-four hours for their performance. If one of the
characters was a boy, he had to be represented as a boy throughout the
play. The next act could not introduce him as one who had grown to
manhood in the interval. The classical rules further required that the
action should be performed in one place, or near it. Anything that
happened at a great distance had to be related by a messenger, and not
acted on the stage.

Had these rules been followed, the English drama could never have
painted the growth and development of character, which is not the work
of a day. The genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare taught them to
disregard these dramatic unities. In _As You Like It_, the action is
now at the court, and now in the f