law is: The same new species is produced in a large number of individuals. Does this occur with literary forms? Surely; the same movement that produced the earliest form of the drama which we discussed, the liturgical play, or dramatic trope, of the beginning of the tenth century, produced other dramatic tropes of precisely the same species, but with different subject-matter;' and it is not probable that all miracle-plays or all moralities are derived by imitation from one original individual, or that only one man ever independently thought of dramatizing a fabliau and thus producing a farce. The seventh law is that mutations take place in nearly all directions. This was certainly the case when the dramatic trope came into being. It was an age of troping. Tropes—that is, insertions in the authorized liturgy—were composed by the hundreds, and of all conceivable varieties. Most of them had no such characteristic feature as to constitute a new form of art, and these perished without being recognized as anything but tropes; but some, as we have seen, became drama.

In connection with this law DeVries teaches us that natural | selection acts, not as a directing, propulsive force, but as a sieve. It certainly does so in literature. The path of literary history is strewn with variations that left no progeny. It is even true that occasionally very beautiful forms stand absolutely isolated, because the conditions were not favorable for their reproduction. Such are, I believe, the plays of Adam de la Hale and the famous Sponsus. In these particular cases the unfavorable condition seems to have been the lack of other writers of sufficient skill and power to do the same sort of thing; for the moment you cease to deal with the kind of literature that any man and every man can produce, you have to take account of the presence or absence of genius.

Another interesting feature of the development of new species by mutation is the fact that particular species seem to have special periods of mutation. During these periods, variations, mutations resulting in new species, are produced in great abundance. other times the species seems to be quiescent, producing no new

At

1 The Christmas trope, "Quem quaeritis in praesepe," is the most interesting and important; cf. Anz, op. cit.

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species, but only the normal fluctuating variations which diverge from the original type only to return to it immediately. For this phenomenon, as indeed for the phenomenon of mutation itself, the botanists are not yet ready to assign a cause. In the field of literature we find an analogous phenomenon, and the cause of it almost suggests itself, it is so obvious. The age in which the drama originated from the liturgical trope was, as we have seen, an age of unexampled variation in the service of the church; the age in which the miracle-play originated saw the development of other new forms of treating the legends of the saints; the age which gave us the morality produced other types distinct from it, but carelessly grouped with it; in like manner the farce, the history-play, the pastoral, romantic comedy and tragedy were not isolated phenomena. And in each case we can find a probable cause of the period of productiveness, of variability, in the fact that each follows hard upon, and is part of, a great intellectual or artistic movement. The liturgical play originated, as we have seen, in the first intellectual revival of the Middle Ages, in the renaissance begun by Charlemagne and Alcuin. The miracle-play appears immediately after the great intellectual revival of the eleventh century; the morality originates not more than a generation after the fourteenth-century renaissance of France and England; the pastoral, the history, and the other species cited, all connect themselves with various phases of the dawn of modern culture.

These and other generalizations and theories of sciences may be suggestive and valuable to us, if we use them only to stimulate our own thought and our perception of the facts in our own field; if we are careful not to substitute analogy for explanation of process, the application of a formula for real mastery of the phenomena; if we remember that the new combinations of literature are not strictly analogous to those of biology, for they are combinations of previously existing elements; nor to those of chemistry, for they always betray their components; nor to those of physics, for they are after all not merely mixtures of the old elements, but new substances with new qualities and characters.

Bearing these warnings in mind, we might consider other laws

for literary forms drawn up in imitation of the seven given by DeVries for plants; but this paper is already too long. Moreover, its purpose has been fully accomplished if the analogies we have been discussing have aided us at all in freeing ourselves from the unconscious influences which distort our vision and our thought.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

JOHN MATTHEWS MANLY

THE INFLUENCE OF ITALIAN ON EARLY ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

The influence of Italian drama on the beginnings of regular tragedy and comedy in England has long been accepted as a general principle, but few attempts have yet been made to determine its precise extent and character. The problem is not an easy one, for English drama developed under complex conditions, and it may be difficult, or even impossible, to decide whether a particular element was suggested by a foreign model (and if so, by which) or arose independently. The comfortable view of a previous generation of scholars, that each nation created its own type of tragedy or comedy, and eschewed the dramatic experiments made by its neighbors, falls to the ground in the light of fuller knowledge. English drama followed in the main the same phases of development which had been previously gone through in Italy and France. We need not, of course, conclude from this that English dramatists merely imitated their predecessors on the Continent, but it seems worth while to inquire what progress the modern drama had made in Italy where it had its birth, and how far English drama was directly indebted to its example. So far as this article goes, I shall restrict the inquiry to tragedy and comedy; as to the Italian origin of the Masque I have already spoken in another place;' and the Pastoral Drama seems also to call for separate treatment.

I. ITALIAN TRAGEDY

The early history of Italian, as of English, tragedy includes on the one hand the Latin drama, and on the other the loosely knit popular plays in the vernacular made on the plan of the Sacre Rappresentazioni; but it would be difficult to establish any connection between Italian and English tragedy at this early stage. It was the later developments of Italian drama with which English courtiers and scholars came into contact. It has been usual to date the beginning of Italian tragedy based on classical models 1 Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. xxii (1907) pp. 140 ff.