s of inordinate length are made--three consecutive speeches in
Act I, Scene 2, occupy two hundred and sixty lines--the subject-matter
being commonly argumentative. Only through the reports of messengers and
eye-witnesses do we learn of the cold-blooded murder and many violent
deaths that take place. Everywhere hurried action and unreasoning
instinct give place to deliberation and debate. Between this play and
its predecessors no change can be more sweeping or more abrupt. In an
instant, as it were, we pass from the unpolished _Cambyses_, savage and
reeking with blood, to the equally violent events of _Gorboduc_, cold
beneath a formal restraint which, regulating their setting in the
general framework, robs them of more than half their force. Had this
severe discipline of the emotions been accepted as for ever binding upon
the tragic stage Elizabethan drama would have been forgotten. The truth
is that the germ of dissension was sown in _Gorboduc_ itself. Conscious
that the banishment of action from the stage, while natural enough in
Greece, must meet with an overwhelming resistance from the popular
custom in England, the authors, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton,
invented a compromise. Before each act they provided a symbolical Dumb
Show which, by its external position, infringed no classical law, yet
satisfied the demand of an English audience for real deeds and
melodramatic spectacles. It was an ingenious idea, the effect of which
was to keep intact the close link between stage and action until the
native genius should be strong enough to cast aside its swaddling
clothes and follow its own bent without hurt. As illustrating this
innovation--the reader will not have forgotten that both Dumb Show and
Chorus are to be found in _Pericles_--we may quote the directions for
the Dumb Show before the second act.

First, the music of cornets began to play, during which came in
upon the stage a king accompanied with a number of his nobility and
gentlemen. And after he had placed himself in a chair of estate
prepared for him, there came and kneeled before him a grave and
aged gentleman, and offered up unto him a cup of wine in a glass,
which the king refused. After him comes a brave and lusty young
gentleman, and presents the king with a cup of gold filled with
poison, which the king accepted, and drinking the same, immediately
fell down dead upon the stage, and so was carried thence aw