that vanished at his advent, we think usually of the rhyming plays
written wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen syllables--of the
_Kings Darius_ and _Cambyses_, the _Promos and Cassandra_ of Whetstone,
or the _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_ of George Peele. If we turn from
these abortions of tragedy to the metrical farces which may fairly be
said to contain the germ or embryo of English comedy (a form of dramatic
art which certainly owes nothing to the father of our tragic stage), we
find far more of hope and promise in the broad free stretches of the
flagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells;
and must admit that hands used to wield the crosier or the birch proved
themselves more skilful at the lighter labours of the stage, more
successful even in the secular and bloodless business of a field neither
clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite party to
that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall and Silenus Still. These twin
pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on
the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model
of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking and
cracking under the jingling canter of _Cambyses_ or the tuneless tramp of
_Gorboduc_. This one play which the charity of Sidney excepts from his
general anathema on the nascent stage of England has hitherto been
erroneously described as written in blank verse; an error which I can
only attribute to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that whatever
is neither prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse.
But the measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of
_Gorboduc_ is by no means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse
it assuredly is not. There can be no verse where there is no modulation,
no rhythm where there is no music. Blank verse came into life in England
at the birth of the shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardless
lips, and the high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to
sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowd