hastily glanced--folk-plays, mummings and disguisings, secular pageants,
Mystery plays, Moralities, and Interludes--have little but a historical
importance. But besides demonstrating the persistence of the popular demand
for drama, they exerted a permanent influence in that they formed certain
stage traditions which were to modify or largely control the great drama of
the Elizabethan period and to some extent of later times. Among these
traditions were the disregard for unity, partly of action, but especially
of time and place; the mingling of comedy with even the intensest scenes of
tragedy; the nearly complete lack of stage scenery, with a resultant
willingness in the audience to make the largest possible imaginative
assumptions; the presence of certain stock figures, such as the clown; and
the presentation of women's parts by men and boys. The plays, therefore,
must be reckoned with in dramatic history.




CHAPTER V

PERIOD IV. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REIGN OF
ELIZABETH [Footnote: George Eliot's 'Romola' gives one of the best pictures
of the spirit of the Renaissance in Italy. Tennyson's 'Queen Mary,' though
it is weak as a drama, presents clearly some of the conditions of the
Reformation period in England.]


THE RENAISSANCE. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the period of
the European Renaissance or New Birth, one of the three or four great
transforming movements of European history. This impulse by which the
medieval society of scholasticism, feudalism, and chivalry was to be made