SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON AND ON THE STAGE.

SHAKESPEARE left his native town of Stratford in the year 1586, or at the latest in 1587. He was then between twenty-two and twenty-three years old. Whether he did so to obtain a better lot for his needy family by the exercise of his talents; or, as one tradition tells us, to escape the prosecution of Sir Thomas Lucy; or, as another asserts, out of love for poetry and dramatic art, is not to be determined. Nothing seems more natural than that all three motives co-operated in calling forth the determination so decisive for his future life.

That in a man of this rapid maturity of mind the gift as well as the love of poetry and the drama was early awakened, is a matter of course. Food and nurture for it he found without difficulty in his native town and county. Since 1569-thus from the time of his earliest youth-companies of Players belonging to the Earls of Leicester, Warwick, Worcester, and others, performed almost yearly at Stratford, in the course of their travels through the kingdom. But what might have still more prompted Shakespeare's resolve to become an actor, was the fact that several of the players, with whom he was afterwards acquainted, came originally from Warwickshire. One (Thomas Greene) of the Earl of Leicester's company was from Stratford itself; Heminge, the friend of Shakespeare and the editor of his works; Slye, Tooly, and probably also Thomas Pope, were from the same county. James Burbage, the builder of the Blackfriars Theatre, left this county for Londona man who, in the history of the English drama, has the significance of our own Koch, Ackerman, and similarly enterprising talents in Germany; and his famous son Richard was the literary confidant of Shakespeare. How easily may he not thus have early formed a connection with one or other of these

men; how easily may not his poetic talent even in Stratford have excited their attention, and even there opened the way to the early fame and rapid success which followed immediately on his bold resolve to settle in the capital?

We must here interrupt our account of Shakespeare's life and literary career, in order to learn the circumstances by which he was surrounded in London on his entrance upon his new calling. As briefly as possible, that we may not leave the poet too long, we will show when and how dramatic poetry was developed in England, how the stage arose and progressed, in what state Shakespeare found both the poetic and histrionic art, how the company which he entered stood in relation to other dramatic concerns, and what position he himself at first and afterwards occupied in the same.

DRAMATIC POETRY BEFORE SHAKESPEARE.

It is far from our intention to treat the history of the English drama before Shakespeare in a comprehensive manner. Even with the greatest prolixity it would afford no clear picture to the German reader, because all history of literature suffers from the disadvantage of being intelligible only when the main sources are studied side by side with it, and this in the present case cannot be demanded from the German public. We will therefore only consider dramatic poetry before Shakespeare from the one point of view; namely, what it afforded to our poet, what his dramatic art owes to the poetry of earlier times, and could or must have borrowed from it. In so doing we shall perceive that only in the most general sense, but in this to a great extent, could he have obtained anything from the past history of the English stage. There was not either before or in his time, a single dramatist of decided value, to whom he could have looked as a model. He learned the profession from numbers of existing plays; essentially his own teacher, he conceived the true idea of the art from the striving efforts of scholars, among whom there was no master. We shall therefore be spared the trouble of burdening our readers with many names; we shall arrange the performance of dramatic art before and during the time of Shakespeare, in distinct

groups, and seek to draw from each the result which mere tradition and habit imposed upon the poet. By this means we shall perceive throughout a connecting link uniting Shakespeare's poetry with those different groups, and while we gain explanations with regard to Shakespeare, a light may thus be cast by the poet, well known as he is to the reader, upon those matters connected with his art which are unknown to him.

The drama has everywhere had a religious origin. As in ancient times it arose from the sacred chorus, so in Christian ages it sprung principally from the Easter festival. The Catholic passion-rites with which Good Friday was celebrated, the representation of the Crucified laid in the grave, and again on Easter Sunday raised for the feast of the Resurrection, were called Mysteries. During the Middle Ages this name was given to the sacred plays which in all parts of Europe formed the commencement of the modern drama; their primitive subject was always the representation of the passion, sufferings, and death of Christ, and their origin thus essentially belonged to those religious rites. Thus in St. Peter's in Rome, at the present day, on Good Friday the history of the Passion taken from the Gospel is sung in recitative in allotted parts, and the performance carries the mind back to the commencement of the later drama. The cloister and the church were therefore the first theatres, priests were the first actors, the first dramatic subject was the Passion. The first dramas were the Mysteries. These representations extended in time over manifold subjects; sometimes a Miracle-play would be performed in honour of the Saints on their feast-days; sometimes, at the greater Christian festivals, such as Whitsuntide and Corpus Christi, a more comprehensive mystery-comprising the mysterious relations of the Creation and the Fall to the life and death of Jesus, combined into one great picture of perhaps 30 to 40 single plays— would unite a series of Old Testament scenes with the representation of the work, sufferings, and death of Christ, into one immense whole, requiring three, four, or even eight days, for its performance. Soon these sacred dramas found their way from the church to the street; from the clergy to the laity; and even to artisans, who would perform a Miracle-play for the feast of their patron saint, or would select separate pageants from the Mysteries, according as their purport referred to their trade. Subsequently actors and jugglers by profession took possession

of these plays; they became, as it were, stationary in London but they were carried about in the country to all fairs and markets in all towns and villages, up to the time of Shakespeare.

If we consider that these Miracle-plays, undisturbed by every other kind of dramatic art, circulated among the people and took root among them for many hundred years-upheld by the delight of the masses in spectacles, and inwardly supported by their unapproachably sacred material-we augur at once that a habit so long fostered even in its early, rude, and artless beginning, would impose a law on the later drama even at the time of its artistic perfection; a law which the boldest genius would only cast aside, at the risk of frightening away the people whom he sought to attract. The epic character of the modern drama was determined by the early and for a long time exclusive matter of the sacred plays; the historical mode of treatment was enjoined, and the rich fulness of the material was required. The Greek drama arose in juxtaposition to the perfect epic of Homer, and could not have attempted to vie with it in the representation of lengthened, varied, polymythical action. The praise of the ancient drama could be no other than that which Aristotle gave it; with small means it produced the effect of the stately epos. It lay in the skilful contrast of the representation of simple actions and catastrophes. Modern times, on the contrary, when for centuries the elements of the drama remained unformed, had no imposing epos before them; the drama arose out of the gospel-story, and subsequently out of chivalric poems and historical chronicles full of facts and action; nothing, moreover, was to be abridged of the first sacred material of the Bible; not a crumb of this precious food was to be lost; the brief gospel narrative rather demanded amplification. All these sources in their nature, and condition, required the extent of form and the fulness of material which has become the property of the modern drama. This result was already long determined, when Shakespeare began to write. And he most certainly would not have wished to oppose this law, which the age and the nation had created, and which tradition and custom had sanctioned, when even a Lope de Vega, when even in a much more advanced age our own Schiller, had the discernment to perceive, that with an enforced imitation of the classic drama its effective power was destroyed; that every national character has its particular development, every age its

peculiarity, every tradition its right, and that a poet who would render himself worthy of being transmitted to posterity should have a careful regard for this right and for this course of development.

With this species of sacred drama, therefore, the history of the English stage begins; and until the fifteenth century, when it reached its greatest extent, it had met with no important competitor. About this period a second group of allegorical dramas, which had their origin in the schools, competed with the former and finally took its place. The so-called Moralities, in their original form of an essentially religious nature, bear the same relation to the Mysteries as the mystical allegories of the Middle Ages did to the allegorical interpretations of the poetical harmony of the Gospel, which preceded them; the substance of the Christian story, which the Miracle-play represents by delineating events, is treated by them in abstract precepts, and in metaphorical, allegorical, and scenic performances. In the Miracle-plays single allegorical figures took part in the play, such as Death, Truth, Justice, and others; in the Moralities these and other conceptions appear; human feelings, passions, crimes, and virtues are personified; and these form exclusively the acting or rather speaking personages of this lifeless drama. The central point of the Mysteries-the sacrifice of Christ and the redemption from the Fall-is in moral abstraction the struggle between good and evil; and this, in general, is the subject which these abstract pieces, the Moralities, touch upon. The strife of the powers of good and evil for influence over human nature is the uniform theme of the oldest Moralities which have been discovered in England. By degrees the subject of these pieces left the sphere of religion and approached nearer real life. The struggle between the good and evil principle is now rather viewed from the point of universal morality; the doctrine now turns against all worldliness, against all dependence on those outward blessings, which, in opposition to intellectual and moral possessions, appear as emanations from the principle of evil. If the Mysteries were only barren action, containing little infusion of reflection, on the other hand the moral lesson is the beginning, middle, and end of these plays, which without action and motion are drawn out in solemn stiff dialogues between lifeless phantoms. It is as if they seek to open the inner eye and to unfold thought, so that in the external framework of the drama a deep spiritual purport may be deposited. With this

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