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Updated: June 13, 2025
Why would Shakespeare's plays have been impossible if the evolution of the drama had stopped with Gorboduc? Pre-Shakespearean Dramatists. Selections from Lyly, Peele, Green, Lodge, Nashe, and Kyd may be found in Williams's Specimens. Morley and Oxford Treasury also contain a number of selections. Peele's The Arraignment of Paris and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy are in Temple Dramatists.
In 1581 Sir Philip Sidney praised the tragedy of Gorboduc, which he had seen acted by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, because it was "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases." A few years later the young poet, Christopher Marlowe, promised the audience of his initial tragedy that they should "hear the Scythian Tamburlaine threatening the world with high astounding terms."
But they have little skill in character- painting, and little interest in the story. Ten years later the earliest tragedy, known by two names, "Gorboduc" and "Ferrex and Porrex," was publicly played in the Lower Temple. It is founded on the traditions of fabulous British history, and is believed to have been written by Thomas Norton and Lord Buckhurst.
But after one other experiment the part-authorship of the first English Tragedy in blank verse, Gorboduc Sackville deserted the Muses, for public affairs; in his later years becoming a leading member of Elizabeth's Council.
Some of the Moralities, like Bayle's King Johan , are crude Chronicle plays, and the early Robin Hood plays and the first tragedy, Gorboduc, show the same awakened popular interest in English history.
His success with blank verse showed Shakespeare that this was the proper versification for the drama. Before Marlowe, rime or prose had been chiefly employed in writing plays. Sackville had used blank verse in Gorboduc, but his verse and Marlowe's are as unlike as the movements of the ox and the flight of the swallow.
These twin pillars of church and school and stage were strong enough to support on the shoulders of their authority the first crude fabric or formless model of our comic theatre, while the tragic boards were still creaking and cracking under the jingling canter of Cambyses or the tuneless tramp of Gorboduc.
But the author of the 'Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates' and of 'Gorboduc, had come to the Netherlands on a forlorn hope. To expostulate in favour of peace with a people who knew that their existence depended on war, to reconcile those to delay who felt that delay was death, and to, heal animosities between men who were enemies from their cradles to their graves, was a difficult mission.
In spite of their heavy narrative form, these poems are in places even more dramatic than the dull tragedy of Gorboduc, which was fashioned after the classical rules of Seneca and the Greeks. Gorboduc requires little action on the stage.
It was an allegory, written in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, and described, with a somber imaginative power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode in the "griesly lake" of Avernus, and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the first regular English tragedy Gorboduc; and it was at his request that Ascham wrote the Schoolmaster.
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