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English tragedy makes its appearance at the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign. In the Middle Ages nearly all knowledge of the drama of the Greeks and Romans was lost, and the medieval drama developed without aid from classical precedents or models. It resulted in various forms, of which the miracles and the moralities were the most important, but it produced nothing either in form or matter closely resembling classical tragedy or comedy, and manifested no evolution toward corresponding divisions of the drama. The Renaissance gave to the world the plays of Seneca, Plautus, and the Athenian dramatists, and, after a time, some knowledge of the classical theatre and dramatic art; then, through the imitation of these models and also through the innovations and experiments which they suggested, the influence of humanism came in conflict with that of medievalism throughout Europe, in the drama as in other fields of literature. In England this conflict was still active at the middle of the sixteenth century. Miracle plays were still performed after long established fashion, and moralities continued the most important and numerous species of drama; but in Latin imitations of the classical drama, in the theatrical activity of the schools and universities, and in the various developments of moralities, interludes, school-plays, and pageants, there were signs of a breaking away from old courses and of the adoption of new models, of the emergence of English comedy and tragedy as definite dramatic forms. Tragedy in England as elsewhere developed later and more slowly than comedy, but two years after Elizabeth's accession the first English tragedy that has been preserved was performed, and "Gorboduc" thus becomes the starting-point for a history of English tragedy.

Modern tragedy, born in the Renaissance, the product of the germinating conflict of medieval and humanistic ideas and models, has never altogether lost the marks of its heritage from both lines of ancestry. Elizabethan tragedy, in particular, reveals in every lineament, in its scenic presentation, its methods of acting, its themes, structure, characters, style, theory, and artistic impulses, the influences both of the long centuries of medieval drama and also of the inspiration of the classics and the freer opportunity for individual effort which resulted from humanism. At the beginning we must attempt to separate and define these dominant influences.

The contribution from the Middle Ages came largely from the religious drama. The folk games and plays and the performances of entertainers of various sorts contributed to the development of the drama principally on the side of comedy, and only incidentally to tragedy. Nor need the early centuries of the religious drama detain us. Its origin in the church service, its early liturgical forms, its growth and service in the hands of the church, and its gradual secularization are of importance for us only as leading to its culmination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; in England notably in the great cycles of vernacular plays performed by the guilds. It should be remembered, however, that the miracle plays never felt the least influence from the drama of the Greeks and Romans. Knowledge of the classic drama was long confined mainly to the plays of Terence, and suggested even to the most learned no idea of relationship to the familiar miracle plays; and, on the other hand, the medieval stage gave no clue to a conception of the classical theatre. As late as Erasmus the curious notion survived that the classic plays were read by the author or a "recitator" from a pulpit above, while below the actors illustrated his lines by pantomime. Almost to the middle of the fifteenth century the miracle plays comprised all that was known of stage presentation in connection with serious drama. They were still performed through the sixteenth century; the boy Shakespeare may have been a spectator at a performance by the guilds; his father and grandfather and remoter forebears had seen them or perchance taken part in them. It was this abundant dramatic practice and ancient dramatic tradition that gave to Elizabethan England its fondness for play-acting, its recourse to the theatre for both amusement and edification, and the acceptance of the drama as an important factor in its daily life.

A glance at some of the most notable differences of the miracles from classical plays reveals traits that remained potent in later drama. The miracles took their material from the Bible or from some saint's life, and their purpose was to make this material significant and impressive. They were, in fact, essentially translations of prose narratives into dramatic dialogue. Renaissance drama sought different material, but it found classical authority for basing tragedies on history, and so gave support to the medieval method of translation. In the Elizabethan period, dramatists rarely attempted the invention of their plots, but adopted and adhered to narrative sources. While they never suffered from the narrow conventionality imposed upon the authors of the miracles by the authority of the holy writ, yet something of the medieval subjection to sources was long manifest both in form and content. It is necessary to view the dramas of Shakespeare and all his predecessors as translations into dramatic form of stories already told in verse or prose.

Because of their close adherence to sources and their distinctly expository purpose, the medieval dramatists made little or no distinction between what was suited for the stage and what was not. Their duty was primarily to present the narrative; and, though individual initiative might add something interesting or amusing, nothing in the Bible seemed unsuitable to presentation on the stage, and nothing that would aid its meaning seemed unsuitable for a drama. There was no thought of restricting a play to the presentation of one crisis or a single action, and there was consequently no possibility of an approach to anything like the structure of classical tragedy. The dramatist might take advantage of the dramatic value of a given situation like the sacrifice of Isaac, or he might make a series of plays lead up to the great events of the redemption, but he was blind to any opportunity to abstract from the narrative the events that dealt with an emotional crisis and to focus them upon that as the centre of a dramatic structure. There was no notion whatever of the difference between a narrative fable and a dramatic fable. Dramatic unity and values in a miracle play, on the tragic side at least, were usually the direct results of the narrative; unity on a larger scale in the cycle was the unity of history or of exposition, not of the drama. Such was the form which the Elizabethan drama inherited, and to the end the form of Elizabethan tragedy continued a development from medieval tradition and practice, not only in its failure to adopt the unities, the chorus, and other peculiarities of classical structure, but, more essentially, in its continued inability to restrict the story provided by a narrative source to the limits of a dramatic fable. Its final attainment of an organic structure, though promoted in part by the regularizing influence of classical theory and example, was in the main conditioned by the absence of dramaturgical restrictions, permitting an epic variety of events, the lack of which Aristotle had lamented in Greek tragedy, and by the consequent opportunity for a free and characteristic development.

From the medieval drama the Elizabethans inherited not only dramatic form, but an entire method of stage presentation different from the classical. The typical medieval stage, whether in the form of the procession of pageants or the inclosed place with the stations for the various actors, had, indeed, given way to something much more like the modern platform, even before the production of "Gorboduc"; but in most particulars, in the importance placed upon costume, the historical anachronisms, the crudity but frequency of spectacle, and especially in the entire liberty as to what should be presented, medieval ideas still prevailed. In the miracle plays, heaven, hell, God, the devil, Noah's flood, the fall of Lucifer, and the Maries at the cross were all acted. The Elizabethan theatre showed scarcely less temerity.

Another far-reaching inheritance from the miracle plays was derived from their treatment of tragic themes and situations and from their pervading seriousness of purpose. Their purpose was ethical and religious edification; their theme the tragedy of sin; their situations were derived from the stories of Cain, Lucifer, Judas, John the Baptist, the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Crucifixion. If no formal tragedy resulted, and if in inculcating the triumph of righteousness the stories of the worthies and the martyrdoms of the saints took rather the cast of tragicomedy, it was nevertheless of great significance for later tragedy that, generations before Seneca became known with his bloody stories and sententious philosophy, the drama had been the vehicle for ethical instruction and for the presentation of the most terrible and pitiful events. The miracle plays had long familiarized men with tragic action, tragic conceptions in the drama, and tragic power in the treatment of situation.

The tragic was often mingled with the comic. The dramatists mixed edification with amusement. The restraints of the sacred narrative were thrown aside for a moment, and in Herod, or Noah's wife, or the shepherds awaiting the announcement of the birth of the Messiah, opportunities were taken for the introduction of realistic portraiture of contemporary life. Horse-play and buffoonery or racy comedy often contrasted incongruously with events of momentous importance. This mixture of the comic and tragic survived in the popular drama despite the opposition of the humanists. It was indeed characteristic of medieval and Elizabethan manners and taste, and marks another important departure from classical precedent. We to-day are perhaps as near to the Athenians as to the Elizabethans in this respect. At all events, for the appreciation of Elizabethan tragedy, we sometimes need to reassert a childish and uncultivated disregard for the rapid changes of emotional tone, a liking for tears and laughter close together; or, perhaps there is ground for saying, we need to recognize the validity of the medieval taste for a comic contrast and relief in tragedy, and to accept in art the incongruities and grotesqueness of actual life.

To the moralities, the second important species of drama in the later Middle Ages, the debt of English tragedy is more explicit than to the miracles, but not more essential. It is not more essential, because the moralities were in a way the successors and the substitutes for the miracles and contributed largely to the same effects. They were devoted to a serious purpose and presented tragic situations with a free admixture of comedy, and they continued many of the older traditions of stage performance and undramatic form. They differed from the miracles chiefly in that, like so much of medieval literature, they offered not a direct but a symbolic presentation of life. Instead of the Bible narrative, they presented the strife of vices and virtues; instead of real persons, personified abstractions. This change from individual characters to abstract qualities has usually been regarded as a retrogression by modern students, who deem the study of the motives of individual men and women as essential to the drama. But we have lately been reminded that on the stage it makes little difference whether an actor is called William or Everyman; and the attempt at the symbolization of life offered an opportunity for freedom of invention and freshness of emotional effect that in the miracles had been smothered by the stereotyped repetition of the Bible narrative. The temptation and suffering of the good, the temporary triumph of the evil, and the punishment that overtakes even the mighty were themes which the miracle had confused with many others. The morality gave them dramatic isolation and emphasis.

Moreover, in substituting for a translation of the Bible narrative the symbolization of life as a conflict between folly and wisdom, or the vices and virtues, or the body and the soul, the moralities gave importance to one of the most essential elements in tragedy, that of moral strife. The world is a battlefield, the soul is beleaguered, the play is a conflict; and with this element of conflict there arises the opportunity for dramatic structure. If the story is of strife, there is likely to be a moment when the victory hangs in the balance; a reversal of fortune is implied; there is a chance for a rise and fall, a definite beginning, middle, and end. The moral conflict, moreover, encourages a study of human motive, of cause and effect in human action. In some of these plays, as "The Pride of Life," "Everyman," "The Nice Wanton," the consequences of evil are clearly traced, and the action is representative not only of the conflict of good and evil in the universe, but of the battle of will in the individual. Evidently such plays are near relations of tragedy. They at least made plain to their successors the importance of the conflict of good and evil as a dramatic theme. Their text, the wages of sin are death, has continued to be an essential part of the conception of tragedy.

The moralities, however, on the whole, made little advance, either in escape from conventionality, or in creation of structure, or in dramatic expression of the conflicts of will. They clung in the main to the dominant and already conventionalized allegory of the Middle Ages, the presentation of life as a conflict of body and soul, although they made interesting excursions into the fields of pedagogy and religious controversy. This allegory they treated with intense didacticism, sacrificing all dramatic interest to enforce the lesson, though in their later days the sermons were very generously mixed with farce. Their importance and explicit contribution to English tragedy arose from their historical position just at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. They then served as a transition species, conforming, by a reduction in length and in the number of actors, to the conditions of performance which marked the change from the medieval stage to the Elizabethan theatre; amalgamating under humanistic influence now with this type of play, now with that; and imposing for a time their distinctive form and methods on the emerging types of comedy and tragedy. Some of the earliest tragedies, as we shall see, were direct developments from the moralities, and the influence of the peculiarities of the morality was for a while definite and considerable. But it soon disappeared under the demands of a new theatre and the innovations of a new art.

The inheritance of tragedy from the Middle Ages includes an important legacy from literature entirely apart from the drama. In the separation of the medieval world from the classic, the terms tragedy and comedy ceased to be connected with scenic presentation, and were extended to cover all forms of narrative, whether in dialogue or not. The distinction between the two, though varying somewhat in the different lexicographers and encyclopedists, gradually arrived at an agreement which continued to affect ideas throughout the Renaissance. There was some insistence on the restrictions that tragedy dealt with history, and comedy with fiction; tragedy with exiles, murders, important and horrible deeds, and comedy with more domestic themes or with love and seduction. There was more general agreement that tragedy dealt with persons of rank and importance, kings or great leaders, and comedy with persons of low or middle rank, and that tragedy required a more elevated and ornamented style than comedy. The most important difference, however, was held to lie in the distinction that comedy begins unhappily and proceeds to a happy conclusion, while tragedy begins prosperously and ends miserably and terribly. Thus Dante's poem was a Divine Comedy, and Chaucer in the Monk's Prologue summed up the accepted opinion of the scholarship of his day.