liest known specimen of this kind of composition, is the Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, already alluded to, composed by Thomas Sackville, afterwards Earl of Dorset, and by Thomas Norton, and played before Queen Elizabeth, at Whitehall, by the members of the Inner Temple, in January, 1561. It is founded on a fabulous incident in early British history, and is full of bloody murders and civil broils. It is written, however, in regular blank verse, consists of five acts, and observes some of the more useful rules of the classic drama of antiquity, to which it bears resemblance in the introduction of a chorus-that is, a group of persons whose sole business it is to intersperse the play with moral observations and inferences, expressed in lyrical stanzas. It may occasion some surprise that the first English tragedy should contain lines like the following:

Acastus. Your grace should now in these grave years of yours,
Have found ere this the price of mortal joys;
How short they be, how fading here in earth,
How full of change, how little our estate,

Of nothing sure save only of the death,

To whom both man and all the world doth owe
Their end at last: neither should nature's power
In other sort against your heart prevail,

Than as the naked hand whose stroke assays

The armed breast where force doth light in vain.

Gorboduc. Many can yield right sage and grave advice

Of patient sprite to others wrapped in woe,

And can in speech both rule and conquer kind,*

Who, if by proof they might feel nature's force,
Would show themselves men as they are indeed,
Which now will needs be gods.

mon.

Not long after the appearance of Ferrex and Porrex, both tragedies and comedies had become not uncomDamon and Pythias, the first English tragedy upon a classical subject, was acted before the queen at Oxford, in 1566; it was the composition of Richard Edwards, a learned member of the University, but was inferior to Ferrex and Porrex, in as far as it carried an admixture of vulgar comedy, and was written in rhyme. In the same year, two plays respectively styled the Supposes and Jocasta, the one a comedy adapted from Ariosto, the other a tragedy from Euripides, were acted in Gray's Inn. A tragedy called Tancred and Gismun

*The ties of blood.

da, composed by five members of the Inner Temple, and presented there before the Queen in 1568, was the first English play taken from an Italian novel. Within the ensuing twenty years, comedies, tragedies, histories (as expressly historical plays were called), and morals, were acted in great numbers, and several regular theatres were established in the metropolis for their performance. Among the most popular dramatic writers of that age, may be mentioned Jasper Heywood, Robert Greene, John Lylly, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nash, all of whom, however, rank much beneath CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, who is almost the only predecessor of Shakspeare worthy of being classed with him. Marlowe (1562–1592), though educated at Cambridge, entered life as an actor, and thus was led to employ his poetical talents in dramatic composition. During his short life he produced eight plays, besides miscellaneous poems, and wrought a great improvement in theatrical literature. In his Tamburlain, which was first acted in 1587, he broke through the old prejudice in favour of rhyme, which, notwithstanding the instance of Ferrex and Porrex, still kept possession of the public stage. The play is in lofty and sounding blank verse, which, beyond doubt, is alone qualified to give full effect to dramatic sentiment. In his Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, supposed to have been produced in the ensuing year, he writes with a force and freedom unknown previously in our infant drama; and, calling in the aid of magic and supernatural agency, produces a work full of power, novelty, and variety. Marlowe delighted in delineating the strong and turbulent passions. His Faustus was designed to depict ambition in its most outrageous form; his Jew of Malta, on the other hand, exhibits every good and humane feeling under the subjection to the love of money. His plays contain many passages of the highest poetic excellence.

If Marlowe had no other claim to notice, he would be deserving of it, as having, by the changes he wrought in dramatic poetry, prepared the way for Shakspeare, whose writings might have otherwise wanted the freedom of blank verse, and many other excellencies. Born in Stratford on the Avon, in an humble rank of life,

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE (1564-1616), was early called to London, probably by his relation, Robert Greene, and induced to become a player. He appears, about the year 1571, to have begun to compose plays for the company to which he belonged, with hardly any expectation of their being applied to a more noble or extensive use. The classes of subjects chosen by him, are the same with those adopted by other writers of his own age; namely, the more striking parts of ancient and modern history, and the stories supplied by Italian novelists. His forms and modes of composition, with some degrading peculiarities of style, are also those of the age. Every thing else was his own. He possessed a power of depicting the characters of men in all their various shades, such as no writer of his own or any other age possessed; and his works abound with such strokes of wisdom, tenderness, fancy, and humour, as must still be pronounced unrivalled. After having lived for some years as a player, he became the manager of a theatre and company, and appears to have given up acting, for which, indeed, he is said to have not been highly qualified. In 1614, finding himself possessed of a small competency, he retired to his native town; and two years after, he died, and was buried in Stratford church. Little else is known of this wonderful man, whose modesty appears to have been as great as his genius. Though his writings were popular on the stage, he seems to have been hardly considered in his own age as a poet of any eminence; and it was not till about a century and a half after his death, that his transcendant merits were fully appreciated.

The plays of Shakspeare are thirty-five in number, some of them being ranked as tragedies, others as comedies, and some as historical dramas, though, in many of them, the characteristics of these classes are not very distinct. According to Mr. Malone, they were produced in the following order, between the years 1591 and 1614-Love's Labour Lost, King Henry VI. (three parts,) Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter's Tale, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, King John, King Richard II., King Richard III., Henry IV.

(first part,) Merchant of Venice, All's Well that Ends Well, King Henry IV. (second part,) King Henry V., Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Henry VIII., Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, King Lear, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Othello, The Tempest, What You Will. Eight other plays have been attributed to him, but, though received by German commentators, are rejected by the countrymen of the author. The most of the plays of Shakspeare were published in a detached form during his life time; but it was not till 1623, seven years after his death, that the first collected edition was published in one folio volume. This was thrice reprinted before the close of the seventeenth century, but without any attention being paid to the accuracy of the text. At length, in 1714, the poet Nicholas Row presented an editon in which an attempt was made to correct many words and phrases, which were either wrong or supposed to be so; now also was it thought, for the first time, necessary to gather a few particulars respecting the life of the author. The works of Shakspeare were subsequently edited by Pope, Theobald, Johnson, and other eminent persons of the eighteenth century, but without any great advantage to the text, till Mr. Isaac Reed, Mr. Steevens, and Mr. Malone, by a diligent search in contemporary literature, and an intimate acquaintance with the domestic history of the time, were finally able to restore the works of this illustrious person to the state in which they were probably written at first. No English author has engaged so much of the attention of learned commentators, nor were any writings ever the subject of so passionate an admiration, as his have now become with the English people.

The most remarkable peculiarities of the mind of Shakspeare were certainly his power of conceiving characters, and, after conceiving them, or adopting them from history, the readiness with which he could throw himself, as it were, into them, so as to bring from them a discourse which every one will pronounce to be exactly what they might be expected to speak under the sup

posed circumstances. In none of the persons of his dramas, is any thing of their author to be seen. Every one speaks and acts for himself, and as he ought to speak and act. Even where the character is a supernatural being, it conducts and delivers itself precisely according to the rules which might be conceived to affect it, and is as natural in its own way, as any other individual in the play. He not only had in himself the genius of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them intuitively into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought; and when he conceived a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say you see their persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decipher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the by-play, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet, paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the history of the persons represented. His plays are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters speak like men, not like authors. Passion with him is not some one habitual feeling or sentiment, preying upon itself, growing out of itself, and moulding every thing to itself; it is modified by all the other feelings to which the individual is liable, and to which others are liable with him; subject to all the fluctuations of caprice and accident. The dialogues in King Lear, in Macbeth, that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those in which the interest is wrought up to the highest pitch, afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion.'*

Shakspeare's imagination is of the same powerful kind as his conception of character and passion. It unites the most opposite extremes. He has a magic power

*The above quotation is a combination of detached passages in Mr. Hazlitt's Essay on Shakspeare.'