is often Petrarchan, he often emphasizes also the English note of
independence, taking as a favorite theme the incredible fickleness of
woman.

In spirit Donne belongs much less to Elizabethan poetry than to the
following period, in which nearly half his life fell. Of his great
influence on the poetry of that period we shall speak in the proper place.




CHAPTER VI

THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642


THE INFLUENCE OF CLASSICAL COMEDY AND TRAGEDY. In Chapter IV we left the
drama at that point, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when the
Mystery Plays had largely declined and Moralities and Interlude-Farces,
themselves decadent, were sharing in rather confused rivalry that degree of
popular interest which remained unabsorbed by the religious, political, and
social ferment. There was still to be a period of thirty or forty years
before the flowering of the great Elizabethan drama, but they were to be
years of new, if uncertain, beginnings.

The first new formative force was the influence of the classical drama, for
which, with other things classical, the Renaissance had aroused enthusiasm.
This force operated mainly not through writers for popular audiences, like
the authors of most Moralities and Interludes, but through men of the
schools and the universities, writing for performances in their own circles