cted at court so early as the end of 1565 or the
beginning of 1566, the Latin _Sapientia Solomonis_, which generally
follows the biblical narrative, but introduces a comic element in the
sayings of the popular Marcolph, who here appears as a court fool.

Influence of Seneca.

It was under the direct influence of the Renaissance, viewed primarily,
in England as elsewhere, as a revival of classical studies, and in
connexion with the growing taste in university and cognate circles of
society, and at a court which prided itself on its love and patronage of
learning, that English tragedy and comedy took their actual beginnings.
Those of comedy, as it would seem, preceded those of tragedy by a few
years. Already in Queen Mary's reign, translation was found the readiest
form of expression offering itself to literary scholarship; and Italian
examples helped to commend Seneca, the most modern of the ancient
tragedians, and the imitator of the most human among the masters of
Attic tragedy, as a favourite subject for such exercises. In the very
year of Elizabeth's accession--seven years after Jodelle had brought out
the earliest French tragedy--a group of English university scholars
began to put forth a series of translations of the ten tragedies of
Seneca, which one of them, T. Newton, in 1581 collected into a single
volume. The earliest of these versions was that of the _Troades_ (1559)
by Jasper Heywood, a son of the author of the _Interludes_. He also
published the _Thyestes_ (1560) and the _Hercules Furens_ (1561); the
names of his fellow-translators were A. Neville, T. Nuce, J. Studley and
the T. Newton aforesaid. These translations, which occasionally include
original interpolations ("additions," a term which was to become a
technical one in English dramaturgy), are in no instance in blank verse,
the favourite metre of the dialogue being the couplets of
fourteen-syllable lines best known through Chapman's _Homer_.

Earliest English tragedies.

The authority of Seneca, once established in the English literary world,
maintained itself there long after English drama had emancipated itself
from the task of imitating this pallid model, and, occasionally,
Seneca's own prototype, Euripides.[162] Nor can it be doubted that some
translation of the Latin tragic poet had at one time or another passed
through Shakespeare's own hands. But what is of present importance is
that to the direct influence of Seneca is to be ascribe