y or theatrical
antecedents, but in the imitation, more or less direct, of classical
models. This cardinal fact, unmistakable though it is, has frequently
been ignored or obscured by writers intent upon investigating the
_origines_ of our drama, and to this day remains without adequate
acknowledgment in most of the literary histories accessible to the great
body of students.

It is true that in tracing the entrance of the drama into the national
literature there is no reason for seeking to distinguish very narrowly
between the several tributaries to the main stream which fertilized this
as well as other fields under Renaissance culture. The universities then
still remained, and for a time became more prominently than ever, the
leading agents of education in all its existent stages; and it is a
patent fact that no influence could have been so strong upon the
Elizabethan dramatists as that to which they had been subjected during
the university life through which the large majority of them had passed.
The corporate life of the universities, and the enthusiasms (habitually
unanimous) of their undergraduates and younger graduates, communicated
this influence, as it were automatically, to the students, and to the
learned societies themselves, of the Inns of Court. In the Tudor, as
afterwards in the early Stuart, times, these Inns were at once the
seminaries of loyalty, and the obvious resort for the supply of young
men of spirit desirous of honouring a learned court by contributing to
its choicer amusements. Thus, whether we trace them in the universities,
in the "bowers" or halls of the lawyers, or in the palaces of the
sovereign, the beginnings of the English academical drama, which in
later Elizabethan and Jacobean literature cannot claim to be more than a
subordinate species of the national drama, in an earlier period served
as the actual link between classical tragedy and comedy and the
surviving native growths, and supplied the actual impulse towards the
beginnings of English tragedy and comedy.

The earlier academical drama.

The academical drama of the early years of Elizabeth's reign and of the
preceding part of the Tudor period--including the school-drama in the
narrower sense of the term and other performances of academical
origin--consisted, apart from actual reproductions of classical plays in
original Latin or in Latin versions of the Greek, in adaptations of
Latin originals, or of Latin or English plays