for the stage, he might have given us a series of spirited naturalistic comedies. As it is, _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ stands alone. The facts that it contains the capital drinking-song, “Back and side go bare, go bare,” and that it is written in the prevailing seven-foot metre, are all that connect it with the later comedy.[71] [SN: Gorboduc.] We have seen that the Latin comedy had much to do with _Ralph Roister Doister_. The Latin tragedy is directly responsible for a much more ambitious effort, the play variously named _Gorboduc_, or _Ferrex and Porrex_, generally attributed to Sir Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, though a claim is made for the part-authorship at least of Thomas Norton. If it had been the intention of the author to establish a prejudice against the regular tragedy in the minds of his audience, he could hardly have done better than write this painfully dull play. The very metre, which is the heroic couplet, moves by jerky steps of the same length, and is inexpressibly wooden. Nor is that by any means all. _Gorboduc_ has all the faults and none of the possible merits of its kind. The “regular” tragedy on the classic model needs the concentration of the interest on one strong situation. But _Gorboduc_ is a long story of how the king of that name divides his kingdom between his sons; how they quarrel, and one kills the other; how the mother slays the slayer; how the people kill her and her husband, and are then killed by the nobles. It is all told in speeches of cruel length, and is necessarily full of repetitions. A very curious feature of the play is the insertion between the acts of dumb shows intended to enforce the excellence of union, the evils of flattery or of anarchy, which have a decided flavour of the morality. The _Induction_ to _The Mirror of Magistrates_ and _The Complaint of Buckingham_ remain to show that Sir T. Sackville was a poet; but _Gorboduc_ is the very ample proof that he was no dramatist. The play, which one thinks must have bored her extremely, was given before the queen by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple in 1561.[72] [SN: _Formation of the theatre._]