those days, who greatly preferred farce. Often they must have been written only for readers. Their sole merit was as literature. The beautiful choruses—of Garnier especially—were universally admired, and were imitated in England by Daniel, in Holland by Hooft.
The popular stage had still to be content with the moribund mediæval drama. The performance of sacred Popular Drama. mysteries had been forbidden in Paris in 1548, but they seem to have lingered under other names; and there were still the "histoires" and "romans," the "moralités," tending to become more concrete and secular, as well as the ever-popular farces. The general trend of this decaying mediæval drama, wherever it was not displaced by classical tragedy and comedy, was towards simply dramatised stories—drawn from the novelle and other sources—in which the story interest is paramount. In Spain, where classical dramatic influence was most successfully resisted, this interest of story subordinated in the work of Lope de Vega almost every other consideration. In England Marlowe, the other university wits to a less degree, and Shakespeare pre-eminently, in virtue of their genius, but not uninfluenced by Seneca, superinduced upon this interest of story vivid dramatic portrayal of character and poetic beauty. Alexandre Hardy[1] was neither a Lope de Vega nor a Christopher Marlowe, yet the work he did was of the
- ↑ Le Théâtre d'Alexandre Hardy, Erster Neudruck, &c., von E. Stengel, 5 vols., Marburg, 1883-84. The most exhaustive critical study is that by Rigal cited above.
