his other plays, its general
atmosphere is so different (displaying, indeed, at times distinct errors
of taste) that I should be inclined to assign it to a friend or pupil of
Lyly, were it not bound up with Blount's _Sixe Court Comedies_[122], and
therein said to be written by "the onely Rare Poet of that time, the
wittie, comical, facetiously quicke, and unparalleled John Lilly master
of arts." It is clever in construction, but undeniably tedious. It shows
that Lyly had learnt much from Udall, Stevenson, and Gascoigne, and
perhaps its chief point of interest is that it links these writers to
the later realists, Ben Jonson, and that student of London life, who is
surely one of the most charming of all the Elizabethan dramatists,
whimsical and delightful Thomas Dekker. _Mother Bombie_ was an
experiment in the drama of realism, the realism that Nash was employing
so successfully in his novels. It has been labelled as our earliest pure
farce of well-constructed plot and literary form, but, though it is
certainly on a much higher plane than _Roister Doister_, it would only
create confusion if we denied that title to Udall's play. Yet, despite
its comparative unimportance, and although it is evident that Lyly is
here out of his natural element, _Mother Bombie_ is interesting as
showing the (to our ideas) extraordinary confusion of artistic ideals
which, as I have already noticed, is the remarkable thing about the
Renaissance in England. Here we have a courtier, a writer of allegories,
of dream-plays, the first of our mighty line of romanticists, producing
a somewhat vulgar realistic play of rustic life. There is nothing
anomalous in this. "Violence and variation," which someone has described
as the two essentials of the ideal life, were certainly the
distinguishing marks of the New Birth; and the men of that age demanded
it in their literature. The drama of horror, the drama of insanity, the
drama of blood, all were found on the Elizabethan stage, and all
attracted large audiences. People delighted to read accounts of
contemporary crime; often these choice morsels were dished up for them
by some famous writer, as Kyd did in _The Murder of John Brewer_. The
taste for realism is by no means a purely 19th century product.
Moreover, the Elizabethans soon wearied of sameness; only a writer of
the greatest versatility, such as Shakespeare, could hope for success,
or at least financial success; and it was, perhaps, in order to revive