No woman might appear at a playhouse, unless masked; on the stage, down to the Restoration, women's parts continued to be acted by boys. It is futile to take no account of such outward circumstances as these and many which cannot here be noted in surveying the progress of the literature of the Elizabethan drama. Like that of the Restoration--and like that of the present day--it was necessarily influenced in its method and spirit of treatment by the conditions and restrictions which governed the place and circumstances of the performance of plays, including the construction of theatre and stage, as well as by the social composition of its audiences, which the local accommodation, not less than the entertainment, provided for them had to take into account. But to these things a mere allusion must suffice. It may safely be said, at the same time, that no dramatic literature which has any claim to rank beside the Elizabethan--not that of Athens nor those of modern Italy and Spain, nor those of France and Germany in their classic periods--had to contend against such odds; a mighty inherent strength alone ensured to it the vitality which it so triumphantly asserted, and which enabled it to run so unequalled a course. Lyly. Kyd. Marlowe. Peele. Greene. Among Shakespeare's predecessors, John Lyly, whose plays were all written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul's, holds a position apart in English dramatic literature. The euphuism, to which his famous romance gave its name, likewise distinguishes his mythological,[172] quasi-historical,[173] allegorical,[174] and satirical[175] comedies. But his real service to the progress of English drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his imagery--though to his fondness for fairylore and for the whole phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a stimulative precedent, and though in his _Endimion_ at all events he excites curiosity by an allegorical treatment of contemporary characters and events. It does not even lie in the songs interspersed in his plays, though none of his predecessors had in the slightest degree anticipated the lyric grace which distinguishes some of these incidental efforts. It consists in his adoption of Gascoigne's innovation of writing plays in prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and pretentious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious dialogue--an example to which even such successors as Shakespeare and Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd, the author of the _Spanish Tragedy_ (preceded or followed by the first part of _Jeronimo_), and probably of several plays whose author was unnamed, possesses some of the characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is