EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 35 



Here we have to turn aside and notice the influences of 

 the new learning and the Italian Renaissance, as these were 

 felt in England. Cultivated scholars and the court, critics 

 like Sydney, men of letters like the authors of ' Gorboduc ' 

 and the ' Misfortunes of Arthur,' threw the weight of their 

 precepts and their practice into the scale against the popular 

 type of drama, which was as yet only in its stage of infancy. 

 For a while it seemed as though the pseudo-classical principles 

 of the Italian stage, derived mainly from Seneca and the 

 Roman comic poets, might be imposed upon our theatre. 

 But the shoot of the Romantic Drama, which had risen 

 spontaneously from the crumbling masses of the Mediaeval 

 Miracle, possessed the vigour and assimilative faculty of 

 expansive life. A group of lettered poets, including Greene, 

 Peele, Nash, Lodge, and Kyd, took part precisely at this 

 juncture with the vulgar. They lent their talents to the 

 improvement of the type, which had already gained the 

 affections of the English people. They systematised the 

 amorphous matter of farce, history, and fable under the form 

 of a regular play, with an action divided into five acts. They 

 introduced classical learning and conceited diction. But they 

 did not alter the radically Romantic character of the type. 

 Some features, including the part of the Vice, which were 

 otiose survivals from the Miracle and the Morality, dropped 

 out at this stage of evolution. 



Marlowe, joining this band of cultured playwrights, who 

 had already turned the scale against the 'courtly makers,' 

 next claims our whole attention. Marlowe ennobled the 

 rough material of the Romantic Drama, and made it fit to 

 rank with the Classical Drama of Athens in her glory. This 

 he achieved by raising dramatic blank verse to a higher 

 power, and by his keen sense of what is serious and impas- 

 sioned in art. Without altering the type, he adopted so much 

 from humanism as it was capable of assimilating. In his 

 hands the thing became an instrument of power and beauty. 



Shakespeare was content to use the form refined and fixed 

 by Marlowe. He developed it fully in all its parts, according 

 to its own capacities. There is no process but one of gradual 



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