these two ideals struggling to master the English drama,
two schools of writers arose. The University Two Schools Wits, as men of
learning were called, generally of Drama upheld the classical ideal, and
ridiculed the crude-ness of the new English plays. Sackville and Norton
were of this class, and "Gorboduc" was classic in its construction. In the
"Defense of Poesie" Sidney upholds the classics and ridicules the too
ambitious scope of the English drama. Against these were the popular
playwrights, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and many others, who recognized
the English love of action and disregarded the dramatic unities in their
endeavor to present life as it is. In the end the native drama prevailed,
aided by the popular taste which had been trained by four centuries of
Miracles. Our first plays, especially of the romantic type, were extremely
crude and often led to ridiculously extravagant scenes; and here is where
the classic drama exercised an immense influence for good, by insisting
upon beauty of form and definiteness of structure at a time when the
tendency was to satisfy a taste for stage spectacles without regard to
either.

In the year 1574 a royal permit to Lord Leicester's actors allowed them "to
give plays anywhere throughout our realm of England," and this must be
regarded as the beginning of the regular drama. Two years later the first
playhouse, known as "The Theater," was built for these actors by James
Burbage in Finsbury Fields, just north of London. It was in this theater
that Shakespeare probably found employment when he first came to the city.
The success of this venture was immediate, and the next thirty years saw a
score of theatrical companies, at least seven regular theaters, and a dozen
or more inn yards permanently fitted for the giving of plays,--all
established in the city and its immediate suburbs. The growth seems all the
more remarkable when we remember that the London of those days would now be
considered a small city, having (in 1600) only about a hundred thousand
inhabitants.

A Dutch traveler, Johannes de Witt, who visited London in 1596, has given
us the only contemporary drawing we possess of the interior of one of these
theaters. They were built of stone and wood, round or octagonal in shape,
and without a roof, being simply an inclosed courtyard. At one side was the
stage, and before it on the bare ground, or pit, stood that large part of
the audience who could afford to pay only