It was a step forward when allegory made way for concrete characters and manners, and the motives born of social intercourse; a further step when the dramatist ceased instructing and sought to amuse. But the final step implied the still rarer ability to create something integral and critical in one, something that should act what life means, and so unconsciously demonstrate that it is purposive, and more hopeful and amusing than we thought. Naturally enough, our earlier comic plots, when they were escaping from the symbolic, lacked sometimes in significance, and sometimes in sequence. The fables of Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton mark an advance in technical construction; but they do not escape the farcical, for their subjects are trivial. There were likewise many experiments to be made in the materials of intrigue and passion before Damon and Pithias and The Supposes could fulfil, even in part, the requirements of significant romance. And when, at last, the play with a plot had come to its own, it was long before it attained wisdom to suffuse the appearances of life with their illuminating characteristic, and imagination to colour the course of characteristic events.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In The Academy, January 11, 1890.
[2] Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, vol. I., p. xxvii; for examples of dramatic tropes from the Regularis Concordia Monachorum and the Winchester troper, see pp. [xix-xxvi].
[3] Non novo quidem instituto, sed de consuetudine, etc., says Bulæus, Hist. Univ., Par. II., 226 (edit. 1665); Collier, English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals of the Stage, I. 14.
[4] In his Lives of the Abbots of St. Albans.
[5] In the Household Book, Henry VII.; Collier, Hist., vol. I, p. 53 n.
[6] Gesch. des neueren Dramas, I. 141.
[7] See Wright's Early Mysteries, etc., Klein's Geschichte des Dramas, III. 638 et seq., Creizenach, Gesch. d. n. Dramas, I. 37 et seq. Quadrio speaks in his Storia, III. ii. 52, of a Pietro Babyone, an Englishman, who, according to Bale, wrote a Latin comedy in verse, c. 1366.
[8] Ward, I. 52.