In 1903 I explained the origin of The Mediaeval Stage out of preliminary investigations for a little book on Shakespeare. That little book is still unwritten, and perhaps it was only a mirage, since working days have their term, and all that I can now offer, after an interval of twenty years, is another instalment of prolegomena. It has been in hand, more or less, throughout that period, which now ends felicitously with the tercentenary of the First Folio. But it has often been laid aside for other literary diversions, and still more often through the preoccupations of a life mainly concerned with activities remote from letters. As a result, I have constantly had to take account of new material furnished by the research or the speculations of others; and I only hope that in the process of revision I have succeeded in achieving a reasonable completeness of statement and a reasonable consistency in the conclusions of chapters drafted at very different dates.
Much in these volumes is of course mere archaeology, but the historian may find some interest in the development of the stage as an institution, and in the social and economic conditions which made such a development possible. My First Book is devoted to a description, perhaps disproportionate, of the Elizabethan Court, and of the ramifications in pageant and progress, tilt and mask, of that instinct for spectacular mimesis, which the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages, and of which the drama is itself the most important manifestation. The Second Book gives an account of the settlement of the players in London, of their conflict, backed by the Court, with the tendencies of Puritanism, and of the place which they ultimately found in the monarchical polity. To the Third and Fourth belong the more pedestrian
