186 THE CHESTER MYSTERIES. 
festive season, so that Prospero arranging a masque to cele- 
brate his daughter’s betrothal,—Bottom and his companions 
getting up their rustic play to please Duke Theseus,—Julia, 
in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” telling about the dressing 
up that went on at Pentecost, ‘‘when all their pageants of 
delight were played,” are nothing else but pictures drawn from 
life,—the every-day life of ‘Merry England” in the 16th 
Century. Now, one special note of that great epoch, which 
we call the Renaissance, was the awakening into extraordinary 
vitality of the individual capacities and characteristics of each 
nation that it touched. We might, therefore, naturally expect 
that in England, amongst other results, it would give birth to 
some new and striking development of dramatic art and genius; 
and everyone who knows anything of the history of English 
literature. knows that just such a development is exactly what 
we do find, holding a high place among the splendours of the 
age of Elizabeth. 
It has been said that in every great age there are always to be 
found a group of eminent men who express what may be called 
the idea of the age, with more or less felicity, and amongst 
them one or two who express it perfectly. Thus Shakespeare 
shines not alone, but rather as a star of the first magnitude, 
whose brilliance hides a multitude of lesser lights. For the 
Elizabethan dramatists were many, and not a few of them men 
of true poetic gifts, and not without touches of greatness. 
Though scarcely any of their plays would bear being acted now, 
as Shakespeare’s are, yet his and theirs all belong to the same 
school, and in their general framework, choice of subjects, and 
method of treatment, they resemble each other as much as they 
all differ both from the 17th Century drama of Corneille and 
Racine, and from the antique drama of the Greeks and 
Romans. 
Where, then, did this so-called Romanisic drama originate ? 
(for in course of time a new name was found for the new 
school, which, in its first imperfect beginnings, seemed to a 
classical scholar like Sir Philip Sidney, a mere chaos of 
irregularity)—a drama which knows nothing of the unities, and 
presents to the imagination a series of what may be called 
dramatic pictures, in the course of which plot and characters 
develop themselves, somewhat after the fashion of a chronicle 
or history, and not at all after the fashion of the old-world idea 
of dramatic propriety. 
Well! The question is not difficult to answer. It is quite 
certain, indeed it is one of the commonplaces of literary 
knowledge, that the English drama of the Elizabethan age— 
the drama of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson—is 
the direct heir and representative of the old mysteries and 
miracle plays, and that every point in which our drama differs 
from the classical drama—and the difference is as great, and 
