knights, gave great offense to the king, and was stopped and all hands imprisoned. The Earl of Essex had the tragedy of “Richard II,” perhaps Shakespeare’s,—or perhaps another play on the same subject,—rehearsed before his fellow conspirators just before the outbreak of his rebellion, and the players found themselves arrested for treason. The English drama was self-originated and self-developed, like the Spanish, but unlike the classical stages of Italy and France. Coming down from the old scriptural and allegorical plays, the miracles and moralities of the Middle Ages, it began to lay its hands on subject matter of all sorts: Italian and Spanish romances and pastorals, the chronicles of England, contemporary French history, ancient history and mythology, Bible stories and legends of saints and martyrs, popular ballad and folklore, everyday English life and the dockets of the criminal courts. It treated all this miscellaneous stuff with perfect freedom, striking out its own methods. Admitting influences from many quarters, it naturally owed something to the classic drama, the Latin tragedies of Seneca, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence, but it did not allow itself to be shackled by classical rules and models, like the rule of the three unities; or the precedent which forbade the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the same play; or the other precedents which allowed only three speakers on the stage at once and kept all violent action off the scene, to be reported by a messenger, rather than pass before the eyes of spectators. The Elizabethans favored strong action, masses of people, spectacular elements: mobs, battles, single combats, trial scenes, deaths, processions. The English instinct was for quantity of life, the Greek and the French for neatness of construction. The ghost which stalks in Elizabethan tragedy: in “Hamlet,” “Richard III,” Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” and Marston’s “Antonio and Mellida” comes straight from Seneca. But except for a few direct imitations of Latin plays like “Gorboduc” and “The Misfortunes of Arthur”—mostly academic performances—Elizabethan tragedy was not at all Senecan in construction. Let us take a few forms of drama, which, though not strictly peculiar to our sixteenth century theatre, were most representative of it, and were the forms in which native genius expressed itself most characteristically. I will select the tragi-comedy, the chronicle-history, and the romantic melodrama or tragedy of blood. In 1579 Sir Philip Sidney, who was a classical scholar, complained that English plays were neither right tragedies nor right comedies, but mongrel tragi-comedies which mingled kings and clowns, funerals and hornpipes. Nearly a century and a half later, Addison, also a classical scholar, wrote: “The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thoughts. An author might as