In non-dramatic literature the incentives of the classics and of the Italians from Petrarch to Tasso had led on from translations and imitations to experiments and inventions. In the dozen years before the Armada, lyric poetry, criticism, and prose fiction had felt the stir of successful English innovation, and the time was almost ripe for the vast projects of Spenser, Hooker, and Bacon. In comedy the development had been earlier and more rapid than in tragedy, and had already in Peele and Lyly reached the stage of dexterous expression and varied innovation. Whether presenting a story of classical mythology or of medieval romance, whether farcical, Plautian, pastoral, sentimental, satirical, or spectacular, comedy was by the time of Marlowe ready with its examples to offer instruction to any writer attempting tragic themes. Tragedy could hardly remain longer in the stage of translation, imitation, and feeble experiment which we have been considering. Still further, a stimulus for tragedy was exercised by the daily events of that active era. These stirred men's imagination and ambition, and must almost inevitably have directed artistic impulse toward the heroic, the passionate, and the terrible. The abundance of bloodshed in Elizabethan tragedy may find some interpretation in the fact that Ben Jonson killed his man in a duel and that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. The time was one of bloodshed, violence, quick and brutal passion; a time in which the torture of a Gloster or the revenge of a Shylock was far closer to life, to the life at least of poets and dramatists, than such stories are to-day. Drake in his cabin drinking and praying with the unmoved lieutenant whom he was to hang the next day is a bit of fact that rivals in horror the devilries of a Barabas. Even if Seneca's example had not already approved themes of adultery, murder, blood-vengeance, the atrocities of tyranny, and the deadly strife of father and son, such themes must have stirred men's minds in the days of the Massacre of St. Bartholemew and the career of Mary Stuart. If tradition had not already selected the falls of princes as the especial field for tragedy, the history of monarchical Europe in the sixteenth century must have given such stories a power of appeal hardly to be appreciated now. In that strenuous generation the dramatist must have found artistic impulses from bloody and gruesome deeds, and no less from daring ambition, heroic struggle, and indomitable greatness of mind.