It is perhaps in the field of playmaking that the utility of the pattern is most obvious. Sophocles modeled himself on Aeschylus, and then modified the formula in his own favor. Calderon took over the pattern that Lope de Vega had developed and the younger playwright departed from it only infrequently. Racine modeled himself upon Corneille; and then transformed the formula he borrowed in obedience to his own genius. Victor Hugo took the theatrically effective (but psychologically empty) pattern of contemporary Parisian melodrama and draped its bare bones with his glittering lyrism. Maeterlinck took the traditional formula of the fairy-play, the _féerie_, and endowed it with the poetic feeling which delights us in the ‘Blue Bird.’ Oscar Wilde took the framework of Scribe and Sardou; and he was thus enabled adroitly to complicate the situations of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan.’ Then there is Ibsen, whose skilful construction has demanded the praise of all students of the art and mystery of playmaking. He started where Scribe and Sardou left off. The earliest of his social dramas, the ‘League of Youth,’ is in accord with the pattern of Augier and the younger Dumas. The next, the ‘Doll’s House,’ might have been composed by Sardou—up to the moment in the final act when husband and wife sit down on opposite sides of the table to talk out their future relation. Thereafter Ibsen evolved from this French pattern a pattern of his own which was exactly suited to his later social dramas and which has in its turn been helpful to the more serious dramatists of to-day. As Shakspere had been content to take the verse-forms of his predecessors and contemporaries, so he never hesitated to employ their playmaking formulas. Kyd had developed the type of play which we call the tragedy-of-blood; and Shakspere borrowed it for his ‘Titus Andronicus’ (if this is his, which is more than doubtful) and even for his ‘Hamlet,’ wherein it is purged of most of its violence. Marlowe lifted into literature the unliterary and loosely knit chronicle-play; and Shakspere enlarged this formula in ‘Richard III’ and ‘Richard II.’ It was in his youth that Shakspere trod in the trail of Kyd and Marlowe; and in his maturity he followed in the footsteps of his younger friends, Beaumont and Fletcher, taking the pattern of their dramatic-romance for his ‘Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Due perhaps to the fact that the state of the art did not provide him with a pattern for what has been called high-comedy, Shakspere did not attempt any searching study of Elizabethan society,—altho, of course, this may have been because Elizabethan society was lacking in the delicate refinements of fashion which are the fit background of high-comedy.