DRAKE
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DRAMA
amount of shipping, which was being prepared for the Spanish Armada, a feat which he afterward called "singeing the king of Spain's beard. When the Spanish Armada attacked England in the following year, Sir Francis Drake was appointed vice-admiral under Lord Howard, and did gallant service. Some years later, in company with Sir John Hawkins, Drake led an expedition against the Spanish settlements in the West Indies; but, as the commanders did not agree, the expedition was not successful. His lack of success was the main cause of Drake's death, which took place in the West Indies in 1596. See Life by Barrow.
Drake, Joseph Rodman, American poet, born in New York City in 1795. James Feni-more Cooper and Fitz-Greene Halleck were his most intimate friends. Drake's longest poem is The Culprit Fay, his most popular short poem being The American Flag. Drake and Halleck formed a partnership, and together wrote many witty poems to the New York Evening Post, under the signatures, Crooker, Crooker, Jr. and Crooker & Co. Most of Drake's poems were written before he was 21. He died of consumption in 1820, at 25.
Drake University. Drake University is situated in Des Moines, Iowa. Founded in 1881, its attendance has increased steadily from 270 in 1882 to 1,843 in 1910. The university includes the colleges of liberal arts, law, medicine and the Bible. The graduates of Drake University have proved its worth. It is co-educational, and provides special facilities for courses peculiarly adapted to young women. Its endowment is about $342,000, and its income about $125,000. The value of the buildings is given as $307,000 and of the grounds, which include a fine stadium, $100,000. A Carnegie library, costing $50,000, has recently been completed. The president is Dr. Hill McClelland Bell.
Dram'a, a term applied to compositions designed to be acted on the stage. Dramas which are intended to cause laughter and good humor are called comedies, and those which rouse the deeper emotions, having a sad or terrible ending, are termed tragedies. There also are many dramas which strictly are neither one nor the other, but combine both elements. The drama probably had its origin in the union of dancing and singing, for most early nations have had rude methods of imitating actions on the stage. The people of India, China and Japan each had a drama of its own, but it is with the ancient Greeks that our real interest in the drama begins. It arose in Greece in connection with the worship of the gods, by hymns and dances and rites of various sorts. Soon, instead of a single person reciting a hymn or a comic song, a chorus, accompanied by instrumental music, with the aid of gestures and dancing, was used to reply to the single
actor; and later the actor, Instead of reciting to the chorus, who replied in song, addressed the leader of the chorus, who carried on a dialogue with him, the chorus coming in with songs at proper intervals. The most famous of Greek dramatic writers were the four dramatists, Jilschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, whose tragedies are among the finest the world has seen, and Aristophanes, the great comedy-writer. Nor must Menander the comedian be forgotten. The Roman drama was derived from the Greek, but was not nearly equal to it. Plautus and Terence were the most celebrated of its writers. Of modern European nations, nearly all have long made use of the drama. During the middle ages the Greeks of Constantinople preserved the drama, and introduced it into Sicily and Venice before the church-drama of western Europe had begun. In the i2th century it became common to introduce short performances at banquets, and about the same time mystery-plays, as they were called, became common; they were scenes from the Bible, acted by priests on a stage built in a church or church-environment. Later, the so-called morality-play became common. It consisted of a fable which was directed against vice in general. The nation deemed for a long time to have the best dramatic writers was France. Her great writers, Corneille and Racine, followed the models of the Greek dramatists very closely, and their dramas are among the best in any language. In the writing of comedies the French probably stand at the head of the great writers of the world. Moliere, their greatest comedy-writer, is unapproached in his best pieces by any writer except Shakespeare. In Germany the theater was simply an imitation of that at Paris until the time of Lessing. He was a writer of great originality, and taught his countrymen to develop their own literature. He was followed by a number of dramatists of the first rank, among whom Goethe and Schiller were far the greatest, Goethe being now considered by many critics to be, after Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist the world has seen. Italy and Spain have had many excellent dramatic writers, the most celebrated in Italy being Alfieri, Manzoni and Goldoni, and in Spain, Lope de Vega and Calderon. England has had fewer great dramatists than France, but her greatest, Shakespeare, is unapproached by any writer of any country, and Moliere alone is equal to him in the writing of comedies. Other great dramatists of Shakespeare's time were Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Green, Beaumont and Fletcher and, in later times, Dryden, Wycherly, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Sheridan, Goldsmith and Lytton. See English Literature by Henry Morley; Lectures on the Literature of the Elizabethan Age by William Hazlitt; and the authorities on the modern drama.
