Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/239

 of individualism in England produced the thoroughly individualised drama of Marlowe, Shakspere, and their followers; just as its inferior development in Spain allowed the allegorical personages of Calderon's autos sacramentales to retain their intense interest for a Catholic audience; so its rapid development in Athens made mere types of character more and more grotesque, and less and less in keeping with serious thought. In this way, far more than through any sense of restriction, the habit of taking dramatic personages from the early Greek myths aided the fall of Attic tragedy; for though, as has been often observed, the tragedians were by no means tied down to any one view of a mythical character, their use of these types must have strongly militated against the seriousness of tragedy as soon as individualism of character came to be expected by the audience. Comedy, accordingly, after a time stepped into the shoes of tragedy, and applied to its own purposes the worn-out properties of the tragic stage. But the farther progress of Athenian individualism (much like the same progress in modern Europe) failed to find even a comic interest in typical and allegorical personages at all to be compared with the ridiculous little units of everyday life, and so the new comedians made their own kith and kin the puppets of their stage.