Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/106

86 eight years before Shakespeare, educated at Oxford, does not come before our notice as a poet until 1594, as a dramatist until 1595-96. How he spent the interval we do not know. There may be truth in Mr Swinburne's conjecture that he visited the Low Countries, with which he seems familiar, not, like Jonson, trailing a pike, but with the actors who went over in "Lecester's tijen," from which the peasants in Dutch comedy frequently date events, as the same comedies contain repeated reference to such companies. In 1598 he is mentioned by Meres as one of the best writers of comedies and tragedies, which would point to his being the author of plays now lost. Of plays certainly written before the close of the century we have only the worthless Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598) and A Humorous Day's Mirth (1599), with the fine, though exaggerated and grotesque, adaptation from Terence's Heautontimorumenos, the comedy of All Fools (1600), so eloquently praised by Mr Swinburne. The majority of the plays which have survived belong to the early years of the new century. They include the comedies The Gentleman Usher (1606), Monsieur D'Olive (1606), May Day (1611), and The Widow's Tears (1612), with the tragedies Bussy D'Ambois (1607), Byron's Conspiracy, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1613), to which falls to be added the later published tragedy of Cæsar and Pompey (1631) and The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France (1639). If Shirley had any hand in the latter, it was probably confined to the pathetic