THE CHRONICLE-HISTORY PLAY. About twenty years before the end of the
century there began to appear, at first at the Court and the Universities,
later on the popular stage, a form of play which was to hold, along with
tragedy and comedy, an important place in the great decades that were to
follow, namely the Chronicle-History Play. This form of play generally
presented the chief events in the whole or a part of the reign of some
English king. It was largely a product of the pride which was being
awakened among the people in the greatness of England under Elizabeth, and
of the consequent desire to know something of the past history of the
country, and it received a great impulse from the enthusiasm aroused by the
struggle with Spain and the defeat of the Armada. It was not, however,
altogether a new creation, for its method was similar to that of the
university plays which dealt with monarchs of classical history. It partly
inherited from them the formless mixture of farcical humor with historical
or supposedly historical fact which it shared with other plays of the time,
and sometimes also an unusually reckless disregard of unity of action,
time, and place. Since its main serious purpose, when it had one, was to
convey information, the other chief dramatic principles, such as careful
presentation of a few main characters and of a universally significant
human struggle, were also generally disregarded. It was only in the hands
of Shakspere that the species was to be moulded into true dramatic form and
to attain real greatness; and after a quarter century of popularity it was
to be reabsorbed into tragedy, of which in fact it was always only a
special variety.

JOHN LYLY. The first Elizabethan dramatist of permanent individual
importance is the comedian John Lyly, of whose early success at Court with
the artificial romance 'Euphues' we have already spoken. From 'Euphues'
Lyly turned to the still more promising work of writing comedies for the
Court entertainments with which Queen Elizabeth was extremely lavish. The