understand how naturally their parts would be played by his boy-actors.
Their repartee, when it is not pulling to pieces some Latin quotation
familiar to them at school, or ridiculing a point of logic, is often
really witty. One of them, overhearing the hungry Manes at strife with
Diogenes over the matter of an overdue dinner, exclaims to his friend,
"This is their use, nowe do they dine one upon another." Diogenes again,
in whom we may see the prototype of Shakespeare's Timon, is amusing
enough at times with his "dogged" snarlings and sallies which
frequently however miss their mark. He and the pages form an underplot
of farce, upon which Lyly improved in his later plays, bringing it also
more into connexion with the main plot. In passing, we may notice that
few of Shakespeare's plays are without this farcical substratum.

Leaving the question of dramatic construction and characterization for a
more general treatment later, we now pass on to the consideration of
Lyly's allegorical plays. The absence of all allegory from _Campaspe_
shows that Lyly had broken with the _morality_: and we seem therefore to
be going back, when two years later we have an allegorical play from his
pen. But in reality there is no retrogression; for with Lyly allegory is
not an ethical instrument. I have mentioned examples of plays before his
day which employed the machinery of the _morality_, for the purposes of
political and religious satire. The old form of drama seems to have
developed a keen sensibility to _double entendre_ among theatre-goers.
Nothing indeed is so remarkable about the Elizabethan stage as the
secret understanding which almost invariably existed between the
dramatist and his audience. We have already had occasion to notice it in
connexion with Field's parody of Kyd. The spectators were always on the
alert to detect some veiled reference to prominent political figures or
to current affairs. Often in fact, as was natural, they would discover
hints where nothing was implied; and for one Mrs Gallup in modern
America there must have been a dozen in every auditorium of Elizabethan
England. Such over-clever busybodies would readily twist an innocent
remark into treason or sacrilege, and therefore, long before Lyly's
time, it was customary for a playwright to defend himself in the
prologue against such treatment, by denying any ambiguity in his
dialogue. In an audience thus susceptible to innuendo Lyly saw his
opportunity. He was