Page:Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller.djvu/23

Rh they tried to impress upon her mind and heart by examples drawn from the history of Gorboduc and his sons, and by maxims and exhortations presented in the most authoritative form known to them, the form of Senecan tragedy. The occasion chosen was a great festival given by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, one of the most important and influential of the inns of court referred to above.

Classical tragedy had, then, as we can readily see, a prestige to which hardly anything in literature corresponds at the present day. The statesman who should today wish to influence his sovereign to an important course of action would doubtless be puzzled to find any form of literature—academic or unacademic—appropriate to the task in dignity and authority.

It is not strange, therefore, that classical tragedy, the tragedy of the schools and the learned societies, must be taken seriously into account in estimating the forces which shaped the drama of the popular stage. It is true that the English tragedies in classical or Senecan form were none of them written for the public stage. It is even probable that they would not have been successful upon it. It is a mistake to treat them historically and critically, as if they belonged to the direct line of development which resulted in Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy and Macbeth and Lear and Othello. But none the less the influence of these academic plays was very real and very important.

The ways in which this influence was exercised may be noted, as having some bearing upon the nature and extent of the influence. In the first place, there was in the early days no very rigid line between the academic and the popular performers. The Children of the Chapel Royal were at one time the leading theatrical company in London. When the queen visited Oxford in 1566, there were among the several plays presented by the university, not only the Latin tragedy, Progne, of Dr. James Calfhill, but also the English Palamon and Arcite of Richard Edwards, Master of Her Majesty's Children and the most popular dramatist of his day. Edwards himself trained the students who produced his play, and it was a great success; according to a contemporary report, "certain courtiers said that it far surpassed Damon and Pythias, than which they thought nothing could be better; likewise some said that if the author did any more before his death, he would run mad." Any impressions made upon Edwards by Dr. Calfhill's Progne were doubtless lost to art, as Edwards died before the end of the year; but this was probably not the first occasion on which the Master of the Chapel Children had visited the university in behalf of the drama, and Edwards himself had been both a scholar and a probationary