The progress made since the middle of the century was, of course, considerable. A pioneer performance, like _Apius and Virginia_, had the merit of pushing beyond the landmarks of the old Morality, and of bringing Roman story within the ken of English playgoers, but it did nothing more. It treated this precisely as it might have treated any other subject, and looked merely to the lesson, though, no doubt, it sought to make the lesson palatable with such dramatic condiments as the art of the day supplied. The Senecans, inspired by the _Octavia_, make a disinterested effort to detach and set forth the conception of old Roman greatness, as it was given that age to understand it, and these productions show no impropriety and much literary skill, but the outlines and colours are too vague to admit of reality or life. Lodge is realistic enough in his way, but it is by sacrificing what is significant and characteristic, and submerging the majesty of ancient Rome in the banalities and trivialities of his own time. No dramatist had been able at once to rise to the grandeur of the theme and keep a foothold on solid earth, to reconcile the claims of the ideal and the real, the past and the present. That was left for Shakespeare to do. CHAPTER II SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF HISTORY The turn of the centuries roughly bisects the dramatic career of Shakespeare. In the first half he had written many comedies and a few tragedies; in the second he was to write many tragedies with a few plays which, on account of the happy ending and other traits, may be assigned to the opposite class. But beyond these recognised and legitimate subdivisions of the Romantic Drama, he had also before 1600 busied himself with that characteristic product of the Elizabethan Age, the Historical Play dealing with the national annals. In this kind, indeed, he had been hardly less abundant than in comedy, the proportions being nine of the one to eleven of the other. Then suddenly he leaves it aside, and returns to it only at the close in _Henry VIII._, which moreover is but partially his handiwork. Thus, while the tragic note is not inaudible in the earlier period of his activity nor the comic note in the later, the third, that sounded so loud in the sixteenth century, utterly or all but utterly dies away in the seventeenth. Why this should be so it is impossible to say. It may be that the patriotic self-consciousness stirred by the defeat of the Armada and the triumph of England waned with the growing sense of internal grievances and the loss of external prestige, and that the national story no longer inspired such curiosity and delight. It may be that Shakespeare had exhausted the episodes which had a special attraction for contemporaries and himself. It may be that he found in the records of other lands themes that gave his genius freer scope and more fully satisfied the requirements of his art. Or all these considerations may have co-operated.