e schools and universities, touched by renaissance influences; as
where Bishop Still produced _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ for school use, the
first English comedy; or from court folk, as when Lord Buckhurst with
his associate, Sackville, wrote the frigid _Gorbudoc_ based on the
Senecan model and honorable historically because it is the first English
tragedy. The play of Plautian derivation, _Ralph Roister Doister_, our
first comedy of intrigue, is another example of cultural influences
which came in to modify the main stream of development from the folk
plays.

This was in the sixteenth century, but for over two centuries the
genuine English play had been forming itself in the religious nursery,
as we saw. Now these other exotic and literary influences began to blend
with the native, and the story of the drama becomes therefore more
complex. The school and the court, classic literature and that of
mediaeval Europe, which represented the humanism it begot, fast qualified
the product. But the straightest, most natural issue from the naive
morality and miracle genre is the robustious melodrama illustrated by
such plays as Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ and Marlowe's _Edward II_; which
in turn lead directly on to Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_, _Hamlet_
and chronicle history drama like _Richard III_; and on the side of
farce, _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, so broadly English in its fun, is in
the line of descent. And in proportion as the popular elements of
rhetoric, show and moralizing were retained, was the appeal to the
general audience made, and the drama genuinely English.

Up to 1576 we are concerned with the history of the drama and there is
no public theater in the sense of a building erected for theatrical
performances. After the strolling players with their booths, plays were
given in scholastic halls, in schools and in private residences; while
the more democratic and direct descendant of the pageants is to be seen
in the inn yards where the stable end of the courtyard, inclosed on
three sides by its parallelogram of galleries, is the rudimentary plan
for the Elizabethan playhouse, when it comes, toward the end of the
sixteenth century. But with the year 1576 and the erection in Shoreditch
of the first Theater on English soil--so called, because it had no
rivals and the name was therefore distinctive--the proper history of the
institution begins. It marks a most important forward step in dramatic
progress.

There is signif