early Elizabethan period, however, an age when life itself was dramatically
intense and tragic, when everything classic was looked on with reverence,
and when standards of taste were unformed, it was natural enough that such
plays should pass for masterpieces.

A direct imitation of Seneca, famous as the first tragedy in English on
classical lines, was the 'Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex,' of Thomas Norton
and Thomas Sackville, acted in 1562. Its story, like those of some of
Shakspere's plays later, goes back ultimately to the account of one of the
early reigns in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History.' 'Gorboduc' outdoes its
Senecan models in tedious moralizing, and is painfully wooden in all
respects; but it has real importance not only because it is the first
regular English tragedy, but because it was the first play to use the
iambic pentameter blank verse which Surrey had introduced to English poetry
and which was destined to be the verse-form of really great English
tragedy. When they wrote the play Norton and Sackville were law students at
the Inner Temple, and from other law students during the following years
came other plays, which were generally acted at festival seasons, such, as
Christmas, at the lawyers' colleges, or before the Queen, though the common
people were also admitted among the audience. Unlike 'Gorboduc,' these
other university plays were not only for the most part crude and coarse in
the same manner as earlier English plays, but in accordance also with the
native English tradition and in violent defiance of the classical principle
of Unity, they generally combined tragical classical stories with realistic
scenes of English comedy (somewhat later with Italian stories).
Nevertheless, and this is the main thing, the more thoughtful members of
the Court and University circles, were now learning from the study of
classical plays a sense for form and the fundamental distinction between
tragedy and comedy.