abours of the stage, more
successful even in the secular and bloodless business of a field neither
clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite party to
that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall and Silenus Still. These twin
pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on
the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model
of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking and
cracking under the jingling canter of _Cambyses_ or the tuneless tramp of
_Gorboduc_. This one play which the charity of Sidney excepts from his
general anathema on the nascent stage of England has hitherto been
erroneously described as written in blank verse; an error which I can
only attribute to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that whatever
is neither prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse.
But the measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of
_Gorboduc_ is by no means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse
it assuredly is not. There can be no verse where there is no modulation,
no rhythm where there is no music. Blank verse came into life in England
at the birth of the shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardless
lips, and the high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to
sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowd
of rhyming shadows that waited in death on the noble nothingness of its
patrician shade.

These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays whose names recur to
the memory of the general reader when he thinks of the English stage
before Marlowe; but there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then
current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a
sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The
poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the
cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed
and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen
weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling
lines which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre some credit may be due
to these obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for the second epoch of our
stage: if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose that this reform, such as
it was, had begun before the time of Marlowe; otherwise, no doubt, little
credit would be due to men who wi