makes children men, men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and bringeth gods from Heaven, and fetcheth devils from Hell.  And, that which is worst, many times, to make mirth, they make a clown companion with a king; in their grave counsels they allow the advice of Fools; yea, they use one order of speech for all persons,—­a gross indecorum.”—­In 1581, Stephen Gosson published a tract in which he says:  “Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from country to country for the love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster made of brown paper; and at his return so wonderfully changed, that he cannot be known but by some posy in his tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkerchief, or a piece of cockle-shell.”  And in another part of the same tract he tells us that “The Palace of Pleasure, The Ethiopian History, Amadis of France, and The Round Table, comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked, to furnish the play-houses in London.”  Which shows very clearly what direction the public taste was then taking.  The matter and method of the old dramas, and all “such musty fopperies of antiquity,” would no longer do:  there was an eager though ignorant demand for something wherein the people might find or fancy themselves touched by the real currents of nature.  And, as prescription was thus set aside, and art still ungrown, the materials of history and romance, foreign tales and plays, any thing that could furnish incidents and a plot, were blindly pressed into the service.

Whatever discredit may attach to the foregoing extracts on the score of prejudice or passion, nothing of the sort can hold in the case of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Defence of Poesy, though not printed till 1595, must have been written before 1586, in which year the author died.  “Our tragedies and comedies,” says he, “are not without cause cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry.  You shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.  Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must-believe the stage to be a garden:  by-and-by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place; then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock.  Upon the back of that, comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave; while in the mean time two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?  Now, of time they are much more liberal; for ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses she is delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and all this in two hours’ space:  which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified.  But, besides these gross absurdities, all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion.”