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 relation to the scene," soon disclosed itself in the Italian theatres; and even such poets as Ariosto and Tasso failed to create a real and lifelike drama within the shell of the classical form. In half a century the appearance of the Pastoral drama, based on the Theocritean dramatic idyll, and in less than a century that of the Opera, showed how poets were turning (as Agathon and Chæremon had turned) from the dramatist's function—creation of individual character—to physical nature and the embellishments of music.

But though the Italian drama was not destined to do great things in its own country, its influences on other countries were powerful. In England and Spain, indeed, corporate and individual being met and produced dramatic originality as striking as the same conscious conflict had struck out in Athens. Here the development of the drama from the social figures of the early spectacles to subtle displays of individual personality was unbroken. In Shakspere himself the marks of the old spectacles are evident. Beside his many real fictions, which so wonderfully unite the breadth of a general type with the deepest individual personality, we find figures such as Rumour in the Induction to the Second Part of Henry IV., reminding us of many a symbolical character in the Mysteries; the half-mythical, half-divine Hymen in As You Like It stands side by side with characters so carefully individualised as Rosalind and Celia; Shakspere's clowns clearly present a transition from typical personages like the old Vice to such a marked individuality as that of Touchstone; moreover, the allegorical personage Time, who, "as chorus" at the opening of Act IV. in Winter's Tale, apologises for sliding over sixteen years, reminds us that Shakspere's disregard of the "unities," as well as his mixture of tragic with comic scenes, was largely due to