S i6 THE DRAMA. 



Guillaume Bouchet, and Lazare de Bail translated Sophocles and Euripides ; 

 Octavian de St. Gelais, Bonaventure des Periers, and Charles Estienne 

 translated Terence into prose and verse ; and Eonsard had scarcely terminated 

 his university studies when he translated into verse the Plutus of Aristophanes, 

 and he and several of his fellow-students played at the Boncourt College, 

 where he had been a student. This is a favourable opportunity for pointing 

 out that with this new kind of dramatic pieces there appeared a new class of 

 actors ; for the university students, under the direction of their teachers, 

 played in the improvised theatres of their colleges, and were even admitted 

 occasionally to play before the court. The same thing occurred in England, 

 as is shown by a passage in Hamlet ; and there were university theatres in 

 Germany, upon which were represented the Latin comedies of Reuchlin and 

 Conrad Celtes, imitations of the Farce de Pathelin and other French soties. 



Tradition and imitation successively held the upper hand, and tragedy 

 was at first, and for a considerable time, preferred far above comedy. The 

 authors of the first classic tragedies Etienne, Jodelle, Jacques de la Taille, 

 Charles Toustain, and Jacques Grevin minutely observed the traditions of the 

 Greek drama, conforming themselves to the rules as to unity of time and 

 place, interspersing the dialogues with lyric choruses, and resisting, so to 

 speak, every kind of innovation, as from Robert Gamier (Fig. 391), who 

 produced the first piece in 1573, down to Rotrou, who definitely marked the 

 starting-point of modern tragedy, the ideas of the tragic poets are framed 

 after the same pattern, just as their Alexandrines are cast in the same 

 mould. For two centuries the French were all for tragedy, though the 

 tragic writers, when inventing a subject of their own, did not limit them- 

 selves to Greece and to Rome. Pierre Mathieu's Esther and Vashti, and 

 P. Bardou's St. Jacques, remind one, so far as the subject is concerned, of the 

 mysteries; but the composition and form of these pieces did not outstep 

 the rules of rhetoric, and French tragedy not unfrequently introduced upon 

 the stage, within the limit of these well-defined rules, French subjects and 

 personages even while living, as, for instance, Joan of Arc, Coligny, the 

 Guises, the League, &c. 



The old comic plays, which were cultivated with more or less success at the 

 Hotel de Bourgogne by Pierre Leloyer, Remy Belleau, Honore d'TJrfe, Pierre 

 Larivey, and others, developed into comedies, tragi-comedies, pastorals, fab/i* 

 bocageres (fables of the gross), saui pkrisants tier is (waggish sayings). Some of 



