Although Elizabethan poets, from patriotic and courtly motives, were so much interested in the early British legends as presented to them by the English chroniclers of their time, it is somewhat strange that these legends, and Arthurian story in particular, did not appeal strongly to the imagination of the playwrights of our greatest dramatic period. The only Arthurian drama of any consequence written during the Elizabethan period was _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ by Thomas Hughes, which was acted before the Queen in February 1588; and the plot of that play is derived, in the main, not from Malory, but from Geoffrey. In one important detail, however, Hughes departs from Geoffrey’s narrative, and, like many of the later romancers, represents Modred as Arthur’s son; and he is in touch with Malory in making the tragedy of Arthur’s doom the nemesis that comes upon him for his sin. The drama, as a whole, is a standard example of the Senecan type of tragedy, so much in vogue at the time of its production, and action and characterisation are altogether subordinated in it to narration. Some life, however, is given to the characters of the two protagonists, Arthur and Modred; and the introduction of the ghost of Gorlois at the beginning and at the end of the play adds not a little to its general dramatic effect. In his final speech the Ghost, exulting over the ruin of the sinful house of Uther, is made to pay an adroit compliment to Queen Elizabeth, “That virtuous Virgo, born for Britain’s bliss, That peerless branch of Brute,” and gives utterance to the hope that she “Shall of all wars compound eternal peace.” We are still without a great English drama based upon a theme drawn from Arthurian story; but what the Elizabethan dramatists, and most of their successors, rejected as either too unreal or too intractable for their purposes, continued even down to the Victorian age to haunt and challenge the imagination of the poets. “The mightiest chiefs of British song Scorn’d not such legends to prolong”[118]; and yet we possess no great Arthurian epic in English verse any more than a drama. Milton and Dryden both cherished the ambition of writing one, but both, in different ways, found the pressure of circumstances too strong for the accomplishment of their design. When Milton, after the turmoil of the Civil Wars and his entanglement in public controversy, once more turned his attention to poetry, he had need of higher argument for his long-projected ‘heroic poem’ than “to dissect With long and tedious havoc fabl’d knights In battles feign’d.”[119] Arthurian memories, however, lingered with him to the last, for even in _Paradise Regained_ he cannot help referring to what once charmed him in stories “Of fairy damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.”