First in importance, or at least in popular interest, are the new Chronicle plays, founded upon historical events and characters.  They show the strong national spirit of the Elizabethan Age, and their popularity was due largely to the fact that audiences came to the theaters partly to gratify their awakened national spirit and to get their first knowledge of national history.  Some of the Moralities, like Bayle’s King Johan (1538), are crude Chronicle plays, and the early Robin Hood plays and the first tragedy, Gorboduc, show the same awakened popular interest in English history.  During the reign of Elizabeth the popular Chronicle plays increased till we have the record of over two hundred and twenty, half of which are still extant, dealing with almost every important character, real or legendary, in English history.  Of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven dramas, ten are true Chronicle plays of English kings; three are from the legendary annals of Britain; and three more are from the history of other nations.

Other types of the early drama are less clearly defined, but we may sum them up under a few general heads:  (1) The Domestic Drama began with crude home scenes introduced into the Miracles and developed in a score of different ways, from the coarse humor of Gammer Gurton’s Needle to the Comedy of Manners of Jonson and the later dramatists.  Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Merry Wives of Windsor belong to this class. (2) The so-called Court Comedy is the opposite of the former in that it represented a different kind of life and was intended for a different audience.  It was marked by elaborate dialogue, by jests, retorts, and endless plays on words, rather than by action.  It was made popular by Lyly’s success, and was imitated in Shakespeare’s first or “Lylian” comedies, such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the complicated Two Gentlemen of Verona. (3) Romantic Comedy and Romantic Tragedy suggest the most artistic and finished types of the drama, which were experimented upon by Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and were brought to perfection in The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. (4) In addition to the above types were several others,—­the Classical Plays, modeled upon Seneca and favored by cultivated audiences; the Melodrama, favorite of the groundlings, which depended not on plot or characters but upon a variety of striking scenes and incidents; and the Tragedy of Blood, always more or less melodramatic, like Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which grew more blood-and-thundery in Marlowe and reached a climax of horrors in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.  It is noteworthy that Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth all belong to this class, but the developed genius of the author raised them to a height such as the Tragedy of Blood had never known before.