At the close of the Middle Ages, the mimetic instinct, deep-rooted in the psychology of the folk, had reached the third term of its social evolution. After colouring the liturgy of the Church and the festival celebrations of the municipal guilds, it had attached itself, in an outgrowth of minstrelsy, to the household of the sovereign, which had now definitely become, with the advent of the Tudors, the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of the country. It will be manifest, in the course of the present treatise, that the palace was the point of vantage from which the stage won its way, against the linked opposition of an alienated pulpit and an alienated municipality, to an ultimate entrenchment of economic independence. On the literary side the milieu of the Court had its profound effect in helping to determine the character of the Elizabethan play as a psychological hybrid, in which the romance and the erudition, dear to the bower and the library, interact at every turn with the robust popular elements of farce and melodrama. It is worth while, therefore, to attempt to recover something of the atmosphere of the Tudor Court, and to define the conditions under which the presentation of plays formed a recurring interest in its bustling many-coloured life.
In every court the personality of the sovereign is naturally a dominant factor. Who shall say with what bitter discretion learnt in the hard school of adversity, or with what burden of secret policy for the shaping of the nation's destiny in critical hours, Elizabeth mounted the steps of her throne when her summons came in 1558. Our concern, at least, is with externalities. Elizabeth, at twenty-five, was a young and attractive queen, with her full share of the sensuous Tudor blood, and of her father's early gust for colour and foramusement, for jewels and for pageantry. 'Regina tota
