together in partnership, not very careful to claim their own, not very scrupulous about helping themselves to other people’s literary property: something like the mediaeval guilds who built the cathedrals; or the schools of Italian painters in the fifteenth century, where it is not always possible to determine whether a particular piece of work is by the master painter or by one of the pupils in his workshop. Instances of collaboration are not unknown in modern drama. Robert Louis Stevenson and W. E. Henley wrote several plays in partnership. Charles Reade in his comedy, “Masks and Faces,” called in the aid of Tom Taylor, who was an actor and practical maker of plays. But these are exceptions. Modern dramatic authorship is individual: Elizabethan was largely corporate. And the mention of Tom Taylor reminds me that Elizabethan drama was, in an important degree, the creation of the actor-playwright. Peele, Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, Munday, and Rowley certainly, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and many others probably, were actors as well as authors. Beaumont’s father was a judge, and Fletcher’s father was the Bishop of London, but they lodged near the playhouses, and consorted with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid or the Devil Tavern or the Triple Tun or the other old Elizabethan ordinaries which were the meeting places of the wits. In fact, it is evident that the university wits; the Bohemians and hack writers in Henslow’s pay; gentlemen and men with professions, who wrote on the side, such as Thomas Lodge who was a physician; in short, the whole body of Elizabethan dramatists kept themselves in close touch with the actual stage. The Elizabethan drama was a popular, yes, a national institution. All classes of people frequented the rude wooden playhouses, some of which are reckoned to have held 3000 spectators. The theatre was to the public of that day what the daily newspaper, the ten-cent pictorial magazine, the popular novel, the moving picture show, the concert, and the public lecture all combined are to us. And I might almost add the club, the party caucus, and the political speech. For though there were social convivial gatherings like Ben Jonson’s Apollo Club, which met at the Devil Tavern, the playhouse was a place of daily resort. And there were political plays. Middleton’s “A Game at Chess,” e.g., which attracted enormous crowds and had the then unexampled run of nine successive performances, was a satirical attack on the foreign policy of the government; in which the pieces of the game were thinly disguised representatives of well-known public personages, after the manner of Aristophanes. The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who figured as the Black Knight, remonstrated with the privy council, the further performance of the play was forbidden, and the author and several of the company were sent to prison. Similarly the comedy of “Eastward Ho!” written by Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Dekker, which made fun of James I’s Scotch