r of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre might be, all the
world was there. The stage was crowded with nobles and courtiers.
Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The
rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid
transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and
confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the
sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar
bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the
intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developements of human
temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama represented
"the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." The people
itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards. No stage
was ever so human, no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of
all past tradition, of all conventional laws, the English dramatists
owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, but the people
itself.

[Sidenote: The early dramatists.]

Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise
of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre was erected only in
the middle of the Queen's reign. Before the close of it eighteen
theatres existed in London alone. Fifty dramatic poets, many of the
first order, appeared in the fifty years which precede the closing of
the theatres by the Puritans; and great as is the number of their works
which have perished, we still possess a hundred dramas, all written
within this period, and of which at least a half are excellent. A glance
at their authors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age
had now reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new
playwrights were fairly educated, and many were university men. But
instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser sort we see the
advent of the "poor scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as Nash,
Peele, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the most part poor, and
reckless in their poverty; wild livers, defiant of law or common fame,
in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, "atheists" in
general repute, "holding Moses for a juggler," haunting the brothel and
the alehouse, and dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their
appearance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which have reached
us of an earlier date are either cold imitations of the classical and