earlier
French followers, and then of the greater tragedy of Corneille and Racine
(which was only the Senecan model strengthened and improved) was repeatedly
tried by fine gentlemen and by needy hacks, by devotees of the unities, and
by devotees of court fashion. I hardly know any other instance in literary
history of a similar resistance offered to a similar tide of literary
influence in Europe. We have little room here for fanciful comparisons, yet
might the dramatic events of 1560-1590 in England well seem a literary
battle of Tours, in which an English Charles Martel stemmed and turned back
for ever and ever the hitherto resistless march of a literary invader and
spread of a literary heresy.

To the modern reader _Gorboduc_ (part of which is attributed to Thomas
Norton, and which was acted on 18th January 1561, published piratically in
1565, and authoritatively under the title of _Ferrex and Porrex_ in 1571?)
is scarcely inviting, but that is not a criterion of its attractiveness to
its own contemporaries. Perhaps the most curious thing about it is the
violence done to the Horatian and Senecan theories, or rather the _naif_
outwitting of those theories, by an arrangement of dumb shows between the
acts to satisfy the hunger for real action which the model refused to
countenance. All the rest is of the most painful regularity: and the
scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a
counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with
similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that
Gorboduc was not provided with two queens--a good and a bad. Such action as
there is lies wholly in the mouths of messengers, and the speeches are of
excessive length. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the
modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in
the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there, there
are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the "Induction"; but
for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin
afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of
cadence which is inexpressibly tedious, as will be seen in the following:--

(_Videna soliloquises._)

"Why should I live and linger forth my time
In longer life to double my distress?
O me, most woeful wight, whom no mishap
Long ere this day could have bereaved hence.