other fields of literature. In England this conflict was still active at the middle of the sixteenth century. Miracle plays were still performed after long established fashion, and moralities continued the most important and numerous species of drama; but in Latin imitations of the classical drama, in the theatrical activity of the schools and universities, and in the various developments of moralities, interludes, school-plays, and pageants, there were signs of a breaking away from old courses and of the adoption of new models, of the emergence of English comedy and tragedy as definite dramatic forms. Tragedy in England as elsewhere developed later and more slowly than comedy, but two years after Elizabeth's accession the first English tragedy that has been preserved was performed, and "Gorboduc" thus becomes the starting-point for a history of English tragedy.

Modern tragedy, born in the Renaissance, the product of the germinating conflict of medieval and humanistic ideas and models, has never altogether lost the marks of its heritage from both lines of ancestry. Elizabethan tragedy, in particular, reveals in every lineament, in its scenic presentation, its methods of acting, its themes, structure, characters, style, theory, and artistic impulses, the influences both of the long centuries of medieval drama and also of the inspiration of the classics and the freer opportunity for individual effort which resulted from humanism. At the beginning we must attempt to separate and define these dominant influences.

The contribution from the Middle Ages came largely from the religious drama. The folk games and plays and the performances of entertainers of various sorts contributed to the development of the drama principally on the side of comedy, and only incidentally to tragedy. Nor need the early centuries of the religious drama detain us. Its origin in the church service, its early liturgical forms, its growth and service in the hands of the church, and its gradual secularization are of importance for us only as leading to its culmination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; in England notably in the great cycles of vernacular plays performed by the guilds. It should be remembered, however, that the miracle plays never felt the least influence from the drama of the Greeks and Romans. Knowledge of the classic drama was long confined mainly to the plays of Terence, and suggested even to the most learned no idea of relationship to the familiar miracle plays; and, on the other hand, the medieval stage gave no clue to a conception of the classical theatre. As late as Erasmus the curious notion survived that the classic plays were read by the author or a "recitator" from a pulpit above, while below the actors illustrated his lines by pantomime. Almost to the middle of the fifteenth century the miracle plays comprised all that was known of stage presentation in connection with serious drama. They were still performed through the sixteenth century; the boy Shakespeare may have been a spectator at a performance by the guilds; his father and grandfather and remoter forebears had seen them or perchance taken part in them. It was this abundant dramatic practice and ancient dramatic tradition that gave to Elizabethan England its fondness for play-acting, its recourse to the theatre for both amusement and edification, and the acceptance of the drama as an important factor in its daily life.

A glance at some of the most notable differences of the miracles from classical plays reveals traits that remained potent in later drama. The miracles took their material from the Bible or from some saint's life, and their purpose was to make this material significant and impressive. They were, in fact, essentially translations of prose narratives into dramatic dialogue. Renaissance drama sought different material, but it found classical authority for basing tragedies on history, and so gave support to the medieval method of translation. In the Elizabethan period, dramatists rarely attempted the invention of their plots, but adopted and adhered to narrative sources. While they never suffered from the narrow conventionality imposed upon the authors of the miracles by the authority of the holy writ, yet something of the medieval subjection to sources was long manifest both in form and content. It is necessary to view the dramas of Shakespeare and all his predecessors as translations into dramatic form of stories already told in verse or prose.

Because of their close adherence to sources and their distinctly expository purpose, the medieval dramatists made little or no distinction between what was suited for the stage and what was not. Their duty was primarily to present the narrative; and, though individual initiative might add something interesting or amusing, nothing in the Bible seemed unsuitable to presentation on the stage, and nothing that would aid its meaning seemed unsuitable for a drama. There was no thought of restricting a play to the presentation of one crisis or a single action, and there was consequently no possibility of an approach to anything like the structure of classical tragedy. The dramatist might take advantage of the dramatic value of a given situation like the sacrifice of Isaac, or he might make a series of plays lead up to the great events of the redemption, but he was blind to any opportunity to abstract from the narrative the events that dealt with an emotional crisis and to focus them upon that as the centre of a dramatic structure. There was no notion whatever of the difference between a narrative fable and a dramatic fable. Dramatic unity and values in a miracle play, on the tragic side at least, were usually the direct results of the narrative; unity on a larger scale in the cycle was the unity of history or of exposition, not of the drama. Such was the form which the Elizabethan drama inherited, and to the end the form of Elizabethan tragedy continued a development from medieval tradition and practice, not only in its failure to adopt the unities, the chorus, and other peculiarities of classical structure, but, more essentially, in its continued inability to restrict the story provided by a narrative source to the limits of a dramatic fable. Its final attainment of an organic structure, though promoted in part by the regularizing influence of classical theory and example, was in the main conditioned by the absence of dramaturgical restrictions, permitting an epic variety of events, the lack of which Aristotle had lamented in Greek tragedy, and by the consequent opportunity for a free and characteristic development.

From the medieval drama the Elizabethans inherited not only dramatic form, but an entire method of stage presentation different from the classical. The typical medieval stage, whether in the form of the procession of pageants or the inclosed place with the stations for the various actors, had, indeed, given way to something much more like the modern platform, even before the production of "Gorboduc"; but in most particulars, in the importance placed upon costume, the historical anachronisms, the crudity but frequency of spectacle, and especially in the entire liberty as to what should be presented, medieval ideas still prevailed. In the miracle plays, heaven, hell, God, the devil, Noah's flood, the fall of Lucifer, and the Maries at the cross were all acted. The Elizabethan theatre showed scarcely less temerity.

Another far-reaching inheritance from the miracle plays was derived from their treatment of tragic themes and situations and from their pervading seriousness of purpose. Their purpose was ethical and religious edification; their theme the tragedy of sin; their situations were derived from the stories of Cain, Lucifer, Judas, John the Baptist, the Slaughter of the