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yet see what mistrust towards me it hath wrought.
But thou, Lord, knowest all folks' thoughts and eke intents;
And thou art the deliverer of all innocents.
Thou didst keep the advoutress,[19] that she might be amended;
Much more then keep, Lord,[20] that never sin intended.
Thou didst keep Susanna, wrongfully accused,
And no less dost thou see, Lord, how I am now abused.
Thou didst keep Hester, when she should have died,
Keep also, good Lord, that my truth may be tried.
Yet, if Gawin Goodluck with Tristram Trusty speak,
I trust of ill-report the force shall be but weak;
And lo! yond they come talking sadly together:
I will abide, and not shrink for their coming hither."

[19] Adulteress.

[20] Understand "me."

Freedom from coarseness is more than can be predicated of the still more famous Gammer Gurton's Needle, attributed to, and all but certainly known to be, by John Still, afterwards bishop. The authorship, indeed, is not quite certain; and the curious reference in Martin Marprelate's Epistle (ed. Arber, p. 11) to "this trifle" as "shewing the author to have had some wit and invention in him" only disputes the claim of Dr. Bridges to those qualities, and does not make any suggestion as to the identity of the more favoured author. Still was the son of a Lincolnshire gentleman, is supposed to have been born about 1543, was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, and after a course of preferment through the positions of parish priest in London and at Hadleigh, Dean of Bocking, Canon of Westminster, Master successively of St. John's and Trinity, and Vice-Chancellor of his own University, was at the beginning of 1593 made Bishop of Bath and Wells, an office which he held for fifteen years. His play (taking it as his) was his only work of the kind, and was the first English play acted at either university, though later he himself had to protest officially against the use of the vernacular in a piece performed before the Queen. Gammer Gurton's Needle, as has been said, is, despite the subsequent history of its author and the academic character of its appearance, of a much lower order of comedy than Ralph Roister Doister, though it is also more spontaneous, less imitative, and, in short, more original. The best thing about it is the magnificent drinking song, "Back and Side go Bare, go Bare," one of the most spirited and genuine of all bacchanalian lyrics; but the credit of this has sometimes been denied to Still. The metre of the play itself is very similar to that of Ralph Roister Doister, though the long swinging couplet has a tendency to lengthen itself still further, to the value of fourteen or even sixteen syllables, the central cæsura being always well marked, as may be seen in the following:—

Diccon.   "Here will the sport begin, if these two once may meet,
Their cheer, [I] durst lay money, will prove scarcely sweet.
My gammer sure intends to be upon her bones,
With staves, or with clubs, or else with coble stones.
Dame Chat on the other side, if she be far behind,
I am right far deceived, she is given to it of kind.
He that may tarry by it a while, and that but short,
I warrant him trust to it, he shall see all the sport.
Into the town will I, my friends to visit there,
And hither straight again to see the end of this gear.
In the meantime, fellows, pipe up your fiddles; I say, take them,
And let your friends hear such mirth as ye can make them."

As for the story, it is of the simplest, turning merely on the losing of her needle by Gammer Gurton as she was mending her man Hodge's breeches, on the search for it by the household, on the tricks by which Diccon the Bedlam (the clown or "vice" of the piece) induces a quarrel between Gammer and her neighbours, and on the final finding of the needle in the exact place on which Gammer Gurton's industry had been employed. The action is even better sustained and livelier than in Udall's play, and the swinging couplets canter along very cheerfully with great freedom and fluency of language. Unfortunately this language, whether in order to raise a laugh or to be in strict character with the personages, is anything but choice. There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kind generally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language of common folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in the Rabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a little less of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is, it is a capital example of farce, just as Ralph Roister Doister is of a rather rudimentary kind of regular comedy.

The strangeness of the contrast which these two plays offer when compared with the third is peculiar in English literature. Elsewhere it is common enough. That tragedy should be stately, decorous, and on the whole somewhat uneventful as far as visible action goes,—comedy bustling, crammed with incident, and quite regardless of decorum,—might seem a law of nature to the audience of Æschylus and Aristophanes, of Plautus and Pacuvius, even to the audience of Molière and Racine. But the vast and final change, the inception of which we have here to record, has made tragedy, tragi-comedy, comedy, and farce pass into one another so gradually, and with so little of a break in the English mind, that Gammer Gurton's Needle and Gorboduc, though they were presented to the same audiences, and in all probability written within ten years of each other at furthest, seem to belong to different worlds of literature and society. The two comedies just noticed are framed upon no literary model at all as wholes, but simply upon the model of human nature. Gorboduc is framed, though not with absolute fidelity, on the model of the tragedies of Seneca, which had, during the early years of the sixteenth century, mastered the attention of the literary playwrights of Italy, France, and even to some extent Germany, and which determined for three hundred years, at any rate, the form of the tragedy of France. This model—which may be briefly described as the model of Greek tragedy, still further pruned of action, with the choruses retained, but estranged from their old close connection with the dialogue, and reduced to the level of elaborate lyrical moralisings, and with the tendency to such moralising in dialogue as well as in chorus largely increased—was introduced in England with hardly less advantage than abroad. Sackville, one of the reputed authors of Gorboduc, was far superior to Jodelle, both as poet and as versifier, and the existence of the two universities in England gave a support, to which nothing in France corresponded, to the influence of learned writers. Indeed, till nearly the close of our present period, the universities had the practical control of literary production. But the genius of the English nation would have none of Seneca. It refused him when he was first introduced by Sackville and others; it refused him once more when Daniel and the set of the Countess of Pembroke again attempted to introduce him; it refused him again and again in the later seventeenth century, when imitation, first of his earlier French followers, and then of the greater tragedy of Corneille and Racine (which was only the Senecan model strengthened and improved) was repeatedly tried by fine gentlemen and by needy hacks, by devotees of the unities, and by devotees of court fashion. I hardly know any other instance in literary history of a similar resistance offered to a similar tide of literary influence in Europe. We have little room here for fanciful comparisons, yet might the dramatic events of 1560-1590 in England well seem a literary battle of Tours, in which an English Charles Martel stemmed and turned back for ever and ever the hitherto resistless march of a literary invader and spread of a literary heresy.

To the modern reader Gorboduc (part of which is attributed to Thomas Norton, and which was acted on 18th January 1561, published piratically in 1565, and authoritatively under the title of Ferrex and Porrex in 1571?) is scarcely inviting, but that is not a criterion of its attractiveness to its own contemporaries. Perhaps the most curious thing about it is the violence done to the Horatian and Senecan theories, or rather the naïf outwitting of those theories, by an arrangement of dumb shows between the acts to satisfy the hunger for real action which the model refused to countenance. All the rest is of the most painful regularity: and the scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that Gorboduc was not provided with two queens—a good and a bad. Such action as there is lies wholly in the mouths of messengers, and the speeches are of excessive length. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there, there are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the "Induction"; but for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of cadence which is inexpressibly tedious, as will be seen in the following:—

(Videna soliloquises.)

"Why should I live and linger forth my time
In longer life to double my distress?
O me, most woeful wight, whom no mishap
Long ere this day could have bereaved hence.
Might not these hands, by fortune or by fate,
Have pierc'd this breast, and life with iron reft?
Or in this palace here where I so long
Have spent my days, could not that happy hour
Once, once have happ'd in which these hugy frames
With death by fall might have oppressed me?
Or should not this most hard and cruel soil,
So oft where I have press'd my wretched steps,
Some time had ruth of mine accursed life,
To rend in twain and swallow me therein?
So had my bones possessed now in peace
Their happy grave within the closed ground,
And greedy worms had gnawn this pined heart
Without my feeling pain: so should not now
This living breast remain the ruthful tomb
Wherein my heart yielden to death is graved;
Nor dreary thoughts, with pangs of pining grief,
My doleful mind had not afflicted thus."

There is no blame due to Sackville in that he did not invent what no single man invented, and what even in England, where only it has been originally attained, took some thirty years of the genius of the nation working through innumerable individual tentatives and failures to bring about. But he did not invent it; he did not even make any attempt to invent it; and had this first English tragedy been generally followed, we should have been for an unknown period in the land of bondage, in the classical dungeon which so long retained the writers of a nation,

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