Page:Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller.djvu/28

10 instead of Seneca had been its inspiration and its model is idle. The men of the Renaissance did not understand Sophocles; his stage, the mode of production of his plays, his aim, the whole nature of his art, were beyond the scholarship of their day. And it is doubtful whether they could in any event have made so successful a combination of the Greek and the national or mediaeval drama as they made of Senecan tragedy and the dramatic forms they already possessed.

In one thing, at any rate, the English drama was especially fortunate, that is, in the fact that its form and its content were so largely determined by two such remarkable men as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The conditions in France in the sixteenth century were strikingly similar to those in England, except for the number of public theaters. M. Petit de Julleville points out that France as well as England possessed every item of the motley list of dramatic types enumerated by Polonius; and he continues: "undefined"