t John's in 1597.[202] By far the most
interesting of the English plays of the later Cambridge series, and, it
may be averred, of the remains of the English academical drama as a
whole, are the Parnassus Plays (q.v.), successively produced at St
John's in 1598-1602, which illustrate with much truthfulness as well as
fancy the relations between university life and the outside world,
including the world of letters and of the stage. Upon a different, but
also a very notable, aspect of English university life--the relations
between town and gown--a partisan light is thrown by _Club-Law_, acted
at Clare in 1599--and in G. Ruggle's celebrated Latin comedy of
_Ignoramus_, twice acted by members of Clare at Trinity in 1615 before
King James I. On one of these occasions were also produced in English T.
Tomkis' comedy _Albumazar_ (a play absurdly attributed to Shakespeare),
and Phineas Fletcher's _Sicelides_, a "piscatory" (i.e. a pastoral drama
in which the place of the shepherds is taken by fishermen). Latin and
English plays continued to be brought out in Cambridge till the year of
the outbreak of the Civil War, T. Randolph and A. Cowley[203] being
among the authors of some of the latest so produced; and with the
Restoration the usage recommenced, the _Adelphi_ of Terence and other
Latin comedies being performed as they had been a century earlier. A
complete survey and classification of the English academical drama, for
which the materials are at last being collected and compared, will prove
of an importance which is only beginning to be recognized to the future
historian of the English drama.

The stage.

To return to the general current of that drama. The rivals against which
it had to contend in the times with which its greatest epoch came to an
end have in their turn been noticed. From the masks and triumphs at
court and at the houses of the nobility, with their Olympuses and
Parnassuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled with goddesses and nymphs
clad in the gorgeous costumes designed by his inventive hand, to the
city pageants and shows by land and water--from the tilts and
tournaments at Whitehall to the more philosophical devices at the Inns
of Court and the academical plays at the universities--down even to the
brief but thrilling theatrical excitements of Bartholomew Fair and the
"Ninevitical motions" of the puppets--in all these ways the various
sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. Foreign
perfo