VARIETY OF THE EARLY DRAMA. The thirty years between our first regular English plays and Shakespeare's first comedy[144] witnessed a development of the drama which astonishes us both by its rapidity and variety. We shall better appreciate Shakespeare's work if we glance for a moment at the plays that preceded him, and note how he covers the whole field and writes almost every form and variety of the drama known to his age. First in importance, or at least in popular interest, are the new Chronicle plays, founded upon historical events and characters. They show the strong national spirit of the Elizabethan Age, and their popularity was due largely to the fact that audiences came to the theaters partly to gratify their awakened national spirit and to get their first knowledge of national history. Some of the Moralities, like Bayle's _King Johan_ (1538), are crude Chronicle plays, and the early Robin Hood plays and the first tragedy, _Gorboduc_, show the same awakened popular interest in English history. During the reign of Elizabeth the popular Chronicle plays increased till we have the record of over two hundred and twenty, half of which are still extant, dealing with almost every important character, real or legendary, in English history. Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven dramas, ten are true Chronicle plays of English kings; three are from the legendary annals of Britain; and three more are from the history of other nations. Other types of the early drama are less clearly defined, but we may sum them up under a few general heads: (1) The Domestic Drama began with crude home scenes introduced into the Miracles and developed in a score of different ways, from the coarse humor of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ to the Comedy of Manners of Jonson and the later dramatists. Shakespeare's _Taming of the Shrew_ and _Merry Wives of Windsor_ belong to this class. (2) The so-called Court Comedy is the opposite of the former in that it represented a different kind of life and was intended for a different audience. It was marked by elaborate dialogue, by jests, retorts, and endless plays on words, rather than by action. It was made popular by Lyly's success, and was imitated in Shakespeare's first or "Lylian" comedies, such as _Love's Labour's Lost_, and the complicated _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. (3) Romantic Comedy and Romantic Tragedy suggest the most artistic and finished types of the drama, which were experimented upon by Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and were brought to perfection in _The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet_, and _The Tempest_. (4) In addition to the above types were several others,--the Classical Plays, modeled upon Seneca and favored by cultivated audiences; the Melodrama, favorite of the groundlings, which depended not on plot or characters but upon a variety of striking scenes and incidents; and the Tragedy of Blood, always more or less melodramatic, like Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_, which grew more blood-and-thundery in Marlowe and