a year later. Thus, Judith Shakespeare would have said she
was baptized in 1584, while by our reckoning her baptism came in 1585.

[3] "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide." This line is also in
the source of Shakespeare's play. See p. 133.

[4] Printed first in 1596, but written shortly before Greene's death in
1592.

[5] Registered Dec., 1592, but printed without date.

[6] These may be seen, as well as all others up to 1700, in the
re-edited _Shakespeare Allusion Book_, ed. J. Munro, London, 1909.

[7] See p. 48.

[8] See the _New York Times_ for October 3, 1909.

{20}

CHAPTER II

ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE

The history of the drama includes two periods of supreme achievement,
that of fifth-century Greece and that of Elizabethan England. Between
these peaks lies a broad valley, the bottom of which is formed by the
centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ. From its
culmination in the tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and
in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the
brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical
tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay of culture, the barbarian
invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater
decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were
kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the drama, as a
literary form, had practically disappeared from western Europe before
the middle of the sixth century. For this reason the modern drama is
commonly regarded as a new birth, as an independent creation entirely
distinct from the art which had preceded it. A new birth and an
independent growth there certainly was, but it must not be forgotten
that the love of the dramatic did not disappear with the literary
drama, that the entertainment of mediaeval {21} minstrels were not
without dramatic elements, that dialogues continued to be written if
not acted, and that the classical drama of Rome, eagerly studied by the
enthusiasts of the Renaissance, had no slight influence upon the course
which the modern drama took. If we make these qualifications, we may
fairly say that the old drama died and that a new drama was born.

+The Beginnings of Modern Drama+.--When we search for the origin of the
modern drama, we find it, strangely enough, in the very institution
which had done so much to suppress it as an invention of the devil; for
it made i