Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Minor Elizabethan Drama, Vol. 1: Pre-Shakespearean Tragedies
The dramas written during the first thirty years of Eliza beth's reign are not easily arranged in categories. They deal with many kinds of subjects, and they recall many di?erent models. Any single play, in fact, is sure to reveal in some measure the con?icting in?uences of the two great traditions that were then struggling for mastery. The mediaeval religious dram a, with its miracles and moralities, had been for centuries virtually the only dramatic tradition existing; but by I 559, in England, as elsewhere in europe, the new learning had brought to men's knowledge the tragedies and comedies of Greece and Rome. Although miracle plays had nearly ceased, their chief characteristics long survived: their epic structure, their adherence to the method of translation, their mixture of the terrible and the ludicrous, their medley of persons from all walks in life, and their readiness to exhibit anything whatever on the stage. And, although moralities were already losing their pro-eminence, abstractions figuring as characters in a symbolic presentation of life continued to be common until Shakespeare's time. The classical models, on the other hand, were winning imitators as well as admirers. By translations, by nee-latin or vernacular imitations, by adaptations of biblical story to Terentian or Senecan form, by dramatisation of classical story or myth, and by many other processes, they were becoming familiar to actors and play-goers at court, school, and even in public theatres. While, as Sir Philip Sidney complained, there were very few right comedies or right tragedies, there were an increasing number which showed that their authors had studied classical theory and practice.
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