"The Gammer," though low, is lively; not so is "Gorboduc"; it is a tragedy of unspeakable dullness composed in blank verse which has no merit except that of regularity, the sense usually, though not always, ending at the close of each line. The author, Thomas Sackville, later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and High Treasurer under James VI and I, was born at Buckhurst, Sussex, in 1536. His grandmother was aunt of Anne Boleyn, so he was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth. At the Inner Temple, as a young man, he met Thomas Norton, and the pair composed "Gorboduc," which was acted in the Inner Temple in 1561. The authors were inspired by no other Muse than that of Seneca, the moral philosopher, Roman tragedian, and tutor of the Emperor Nero. The play tells how Gorboduc, a mythical King of Britain, abdicated, and, dividing his realm into two parts, gave the country north of the Humber to the younger, and the portion south of the Humber to the elder of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Each had a kind of tutor, and each had a favourite. They were both discontented, the younger slew the elder son, and the mother of both avenges the elder on the younger of her children. The result was national ruin, in which "Fergus Duke of Albany" (apparently King of Scotland is meant) took an active part. There are very long speeches, no action; a messenger brings the news of the distressing occurrences, and a Chorus moralizes on them. Carried away by grief when his wife murders his surviving boy, Gorboduc pronounces the name of Eubulus with the penultimate syllable short, and expires with decency behind the scenes. Eubulus then utters a political forecast in more than a hundred lines, and the drama concludes. "Gorboduc" was printed in 1565: translations of Seneca's plays were also being written: George Gascoigne translated a piece named "Jocasta" (the wife of Œdipus) from the Italian, and a prose comedy, "The Supposes" from Ariosto. This great Italian poet and his countrymen adapted to Italian manners the plots and characters which the ancient comic dramatists of Rome, Terence and Plautus, derived from late Greek comedy of everyday life. Thus an element of orderliness in comedy was introduced in England from adaptations of Italian adaptations of Roman copies of late Greek plays. Such stock characters as the austere father, the spendthrift son, the cunning servant, the boastful soldier, the nurse, soft of heart and loose of tongue, invaded the comedy of France, and, to a slighter degree, that of England.