This strong drama was the most popular of his works during his lifetime.

That Shakespeare thought little of his success and had no idea that his dramas were the greatest that the world ever produced seems evident from the fact that he made no attempt to collect or publish his works, or even to save his manuscripts, which were carelessly left to stage managers of the theaters, and so found their way ultimately to the ragman.

In fact, Elizabethan drama isn't really her touch.

In their plays they reënacted all the chief events in the history of the race, and as there was no written account, these dramas were, with the legends and stories they recited, the perpetuation of their archives and chronicles.

His best drama is the poetic comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

"The last drama to which Mr. Mac-Carthy introduces us is the famous 'Devotion of the Cross'.

To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention.

The drama is a mere réchauffé of Massinger's Fatal Dowry.

The Greek comedy which formed its basis was morally so far a matter of indifference, as it was simply on the same level of corruption with its audience; but the Roman drama was, at this epoch when men were wavering between the old austerity and the new corruption, the academy at once of Hellenism and of vice.

Nevertheless, the qualities of life and brightness displayed are sufficient to induce a belief that had the author begun writing at a moment more propitious than the eve of the civil war, and pursued his career on the practical London stage, our drama might have been the richer by, say, a second Shirley, an addition which those who know that writer best will probably rate most highly.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.

The drama, in the eyes of the Parisians, is almost a sacred rite, and not even the noisiest gamin would raise his voice above a whisper when the curtain is up.

The drama was the form into which were moulded the thoughts and desires of the best spirits of the time.

In the epic and the drama, interest, as a necessary quality of the action, is the matter; and beauty, the form that requires the matter in order to be visible.

The drama being an imitation of nature, the poet causes a composition of characters formed in his imagination to be represented by players; these characters charm, or displease, not only for what they do; during the representation of the fable, but we love, or hate them for what they have done before their appearance; and we dread, or warmly expect the consequences of their resolutions after they depart the stage.

In these he tries to prove that his own music-dramas are an outgrowth of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

[Sidenote: A World Drama or Process is a Human, not a Divine Aspect of Things.]

Thus it is that his dramas are the book of human life.

The second English drama was Gammer Gurton's Needle, by Mr. S. Master of Arts.

The pastoral drama of Italy is the immediate progenitor of that of England.

Byron's other Venetian Drama, the Two Foscari, composed at Ravenna, between the 11th of June and the 10th of July, 1821, and published in the following December, is another record of the same failure and the same mortification, due to the same causes.

These dramas (to enumerate them in their historic order) were "Harold," "Becket," and "Queen Mary."

The pastoral drama, born late in time, was the outcome of very especial circumstances, emphatically the child of its age, and little calculated to serve the artistic requirements of any other.

Yet these dramas are almost the only satisfactory expression of that historical faculty which I believe is latent in us.

If so, this lovely drama was Shakespeare's unconscious apostrophe to America, for in Arielseeking to be freecan be symbolized her awakening spirit, while Prospero, with his thaumaturgic achievements, suggests a constructive genius, which in a little more than a century has made one of the least of the nations to-day one of the greatest.