points of contact. If the former was written for the 'Grand Christmas' of the Inner Temple, Gascoigne's plays were designed for a like festival in the hall of Gray's Inn. Moreover, as we have seen, each separate act of Gorboduc was ushered in with a masque, or dumb show, and Jocasta was furnished by its ingenious translator with similar inventions. Probably, too, the selection of the play was not made at random, and one of the reasons for it may well have been the resemblance of its subject to that of Gorboduc. For here again the staple of the composition is a quarrel between brothers, Eteocles and Polynices being the antagonists, instead of Ferrex and Porrex. Nor must it be forgotten that the metre of Gorboduc, as of Jocasta, is blank verse. Attached to the later play is an epilogue specially composed for it by Christopher Yelverton. In conclusion, it will be well to say something of the obstacles opposed to the progress of the drama. The court, as we have observed, was favourable to the art, but there was a large body of opinion irreconcileably hostile to all manner of theatrical exhibitions. Many of the clergy, for instance, detested plays, and when the plague attacked London in 1563, Sir William Cecil (afterwards Lord Burghley), the Secretary of State, was recommended Rout of the by Archbishop Grindal to prohibit them for a year, and, if he would, for ever. The Mayor and Corporation, also, subjected actors to harassing restrictions, so that Burbage and his confraternity fled from their jurisdiction, and the old familiar inn-yards were deserted for large new theatres built without the liberties. players. Stephen This was in 1576. In that very year there arrived in London from Christ Church, Oxford, a young Kentishman named Stephen Gosson, who was to distinguish himself as a severe and able censor of the stage, but in those days seemed more likely to shine as an ornament of the profession. In a short time he became known to the audience of the Curtain, where he was one of the actors. Gosson, however, was not only a player, but a playwright. He wrote a tragedy entitled Catiline's Conspiracies, a comedy, Captain Mario, and another piece, Praise at Parting, which he calls a 'moral.' Before he was twenty-four he had made a name for himself as a poet also; in pastoral verse, especially, he was regarded by contemporaries as excellent. Very little of his poetry has been preserved; but the two or three pieces that remain create an impression of amplitude and tuneableness. The School of Abuse. In 1579 Gosson suddenly turned his back upon his former aspirations, which he proceeded to vilify in a treatise the School of Abuse. The cause of this change can hardly be in doubt. It had become a regular practice of the preachers at St. Paul's Cross to inveigh against the evils of play-going. The new Puritan party was particularly displeased with the theatres, because acting took place on Sunday, and thus the attention of the people was diverted from the pious admonitions to which they might otherwise have listened. In his later treatise, Plays Confuted, Gosson thus illustrates at once the zeal and failure of the crusade. The abominable practices of plays in London,' he says, 'have been by godly preachers both at Paul's Cross and elsewhere so zealously, so learnedly, so loudly cried out upon to small redress, that I may well say of them, as the philosophers report of the moving of the heavens, we never hear them, because we ever hear them.' The popularity of his own play, to which he testifies, affords him no pleasure. He describes it as a 'pig of my own sow.' Gosson's new attitude naturally produced a ferment. among the actors, who answered it by bringing out his own productions-a fair revenge, if they stopped there, but there, Indiscretions. the indignant dramatist asseverated, they did not stop. 'These,' says he, they very impudently affirm to be written by me since I had let out my invective against them,' whereas, according to his own account, he had left London to read with pupils and withered in the country for want of sap.' In the meantime he was guilty of the remarkable folly of dedicating, without permission asked or obtained, the controversial School of Abuse to Philip Sidney, who, as appears from an early letter of Edmund Spencer, scantily appreciated the honour. Indeed, it seems probable that Sidney was provoked to pen his Apology for Poetry by the false position in which it placed him. Unaware of his victim's resentment, Gosson, still in his rustic retreat, dedicated to the poet another work, the Ephemerides of Phialo, the preface of which contains confident allusions to the distasteful publication and the dogs that barked at it. Probably, however, by the year 1582, when Gosson issued Plays Confuted in Five Actions, he had found out his mistake, for the work was inscribed to Sir Francis Walsingham. Gosson was a man of much learning and equal talent, and although a Puritan, was sufficiently An explanation. genial, while his wit and knowledge of the world, in spite of his singular blunder, are incontestable. In his Apology for the School of Abuse, published in 1579, he insists that he touches only the abuses of poetry, music, and the drama, not the arts themselves; but a dispassionate critic can hardly accept this account of the matter. In the School of Abuse itself he refuses to allow that the reformation of the drama, which he admits to have taken place, is an adequate reason for tolerating dramatic performances-the typical Puritan position. So far as his own conduct was concerned, Gosson was true to himself. He died, rector of St. Botolph's, in 1624, aged sixty-nine. THE PROSE WRITERS. CHAPTER I. LEADERS OF REFORM. THIS chapter will seek to connect the reform movement initiated by Wyclif, and never suppressed in spite of 'hangment,' the roasting of Lord Cobham, and similar judicial atrocities, with the ecclesiastical compromise in which the tenets of the Lollards obtained substantial recognition, though not absolute victory. The present work can concern itself only with the literary phases of that Titanic struggle, in which even the most moderate and cautious, even defenders of the faith, found it perilous to engage. The majority of the theologians betook themselves to Latin, but there emerges from the ruck of tractarians the impressive figure of a man who did not disdain the vulgar tongue, and handled it in such a way as to extort from us a measure of praise hardly less ample than is universally accorded to Wyclif as a master of prose. The position of Reginald Pecock corresponds exactly with that of neither of the contending parties, and this fact imparts a singular interest both to his work and to his career. Reginald This brave and very able clerk, a Welshman by birth, was elected Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in October, 1417, and four years later was ordained priest. Migrating |