[129.] See Jusserand, A Literary History of the English People, I, iii, vi. For our earliest plays and their authors see Gayley, Plays of Our Forefathers.
[130.] These three periods are not historically accurate. The author uses them to emphasize three different views of our earliest plays rather than to suggest that there was any orderly or chronological development from Miracle to Morality and thence to the Interludes. The latter is a prevalent opinion, but it seems hardly warranted by the facts. Thus, though the Miracles precede the Moralities by two centuries (the first known Morality, "The Play of the Lord's Prayer," mentioned by Wyclif, was given probably about 1375), some of the best known Moralities, like "Pride of Life," precede many of the later York Miracles. And the term Interlude, which is often used as symbolical of the transition from the moral to the artistic period of the drama, was occasionally used in England (fourteenth century) as synonymous with Miracle and again (sixteenth century) as synonymous with Comedy. That the drama had these three stages seems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to fix the limits of any one of them, and all three are sometimes seen together in one of the later Miracles of the Wakefield cycle.
[131.] In fact, Heywood "cribbed" from Chaucer's Tales in another Interlude called "The Pardoner and the Frere."
[132.] Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, I, 86.
[133.] That these gallants were an unmitigated nuisance, and had frequently to be silenced by the common people who came to enjoy the play, seems certain. Dekker's Gull's Hornbook (1609) has an interesting chapter on "How a Gallant should behave Himself in a Playhouse."
[134.] The first actors were classed with thieves and vagabonds; but they speedily raised their profession to an art and won a reputation which extended far abroad. Thus a contemporary, Fynes Moryson, writes in his Itinerary: "So I remember that when some of our cast despised stage players came ... into Germany and played at Franckford ... having nether a complete number of actors, nor any good aparell, nor any ornament of the stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a worde they sayde, both men and wemen, flocked wonderfully to see their gesture and action."
[135.] Schelling, Elizabethan Drama.
[136.] Baker, in his Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist, pp. 57-62, takes a different view, and shows how carefully many of the boy actors were trained. It would require, however, a vigorous use of the imagination to be satisfied with a boy's presentation of Portia, Juliet, Cordelia, Rosalind, or any other of Shakespeare's wonderful women.
[137.] These choir masters had royal permits to take boys of good voice, wherever found, and train them as singers and actors. The boys were taken from their parents and were often half starved and most brutally treated. The abuse of this unnatural privilege led to the final withdrawal of all such permits.
[138.] So called from Euphues, the hero of Lyly's two prose works, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579), and Euphues and his England (1580). The style is affected and over-elegant, abounds in odd conceits, and uses hopelessly involved sentences. It is found in nearly all Elizabethan prose writers, and partially accounts for their general tendency to artificiality. Shakespeare satirizes euphuism in the character of Don Adriano of Love's Labour's Lost, but is himself tiresomely euphuistic at times, especially in his early or "Lylian" comedies. Lyly, by the way, did not invent the style, but did more than any other to diffuse it.