itably called for as strong situations and strong characters.
Although the chief of these poets are marked off from one another by the
individual genius which impressed itself upon both the form and the
matter of their works, yet the stamp of the age is upon them all.
Writing for the stage only, of which some of them possessed a personal
experience and from which none of them held aloof, they acquired an
instinctive insight into the laws of dramatic cause and effect, and
infused a warm vitality into the dramatic literature which they
produced, so to speak, for immediate consumption. On the other hand, the
same cause made rapidity of workmanship indispensable to a successful
playwright. _How_ a play was produced, how many hands had been at work
upon it, what loans and what spoliations had been made in the process,
were considerations of less moment than the question _whether_ it was
produced, and whether it succeeded. His harness--frequently double or
triple--was inseparable from the lusty Pegasus of the early English
drama, and its genius toiled, to borrow the phrase of the Attic
comedian, "like an Arcadian mercenary."

Progress of tragedy and comedy before Shakespeare.

This period of the English drama, though it is far from being one of
crude effort, could not therefore yet be one of full consummation. In
tragedy the advance which had been made in the choice of great themes,
in knitting closer the connection between the theatre and the national
history, in vindicating to passion its right to adequate expression, was
already enormous. In comedy the advance had been less decisive and less
independent; much had been gained in reaching greater freedom of form
and something in enlarging the range of subjects; but artificiality had
proved a snare in the one direction, while the licence of the comic
stage, upheld by favourite "clowns," such as Kemp or Tarlton, had not
succumbed before less elastic demands. The way of escaping from the
dilemma had, however, been already recognized to lie in the construction
of suitable plots, for which a full storehouse was open in the popular
traditions preserved in national ballads, and in the growing literature
of translated foreign fiction, or of native imitations of it. Meanwhile,
the aberration of the comic stage to political and religious
controversy, which it could never hope to treat with Attic freedom in a
country provided with a strong monarchy and a dogmatic religion, seemed