es. _Twelfth Night_ is
suited to any stage, but _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Pericles_ are
hardly conceivable except on the Elizabethan. Despite such variations,
however, Shakespeare's relations to the contemporary drama were
manifestly constant and immediate. If it was rarely a question with him
what the ancients had written, it was always a question what was being
acted and what was successful at the moment. His own growth in dramatic
power goes step by step with the rapid and varied development of the
drama, and the measure for comparison must be, not by decades, but by
years or months.

[Page Heading: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries]

A study of the Elizabethan drama may help to excuse some of the faults
and limitations of Shakespeare, but it also enforces his merits. Both
faults and merits are often to be understood in the efforts of lesser
men to do what he did. We admire his triumphs the more as we consider
their failures. Yet they often had admirable success, and their triumphs
as well as his are due in part to the dramatic conditions which gave the
freest opportunity for individual initiative in language, verse, story,
and construction. Noble bursts of poetry, richness and variety of life,
an intense interest in human nature, comic or tragic--these are the
great merits of that drama. That in a superlative degree they are also
the characteristics of Shakespeare is not due solely to his exceptional
genius, but to the fact that his genius worked in a favorable
environment.

[Illustration: A TYPICAL SHAKESPEREAN STAGE

From Albright's _Shaksperian Stage_]

CHAPTER VI

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER

In 1576, James Burbage, father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, and
himself a member of the Earl of Leicester's company, built the first
London playhouse, the Theater in Shoreditch. In the next year a second
playhouse, the Curtain, was erected nearby, and these seem to have
remained the only theaters until 1587-1588, when probably the Rose, on
the Bankside, was built by Henslowe. In 1599 Richard and Cuthbert
Burbage, after some difficulty over their lease, demolished the old
Theater and used the timber for the Globe, near the Rose, on the
Bankside. The Swan, another theater, had been built there in 1594,
somewhat to the west; and in 1614 the Hope was erected hard by the old
Rose and the new Globe, which in 1613 had replaced the old Globe.
Meantime the Fortune had been built by Henslowe and Alleyn in 1600