passages best show the exquisite sensitiveness of Clifford's nature? What makes the situation pathetic?

CHAPTER XI. What, in this chapter, foreshadows events yet to take place? Does it develop any new phase of Clifford's experience?

CHAPTER XII. Explain how this chapter reverts to the main theme. Why is Holgrave so deeply interested in the Pyncheon traditions? What is the significance of the following words applied to Clifford :

"Possibly he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for the spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events, which passed as a perfect void to persons more practiced with the world.”

CHAPTER XIII. Why is this episode introduced? What has it to do with the plot?

CHAPTER XIV. In what significant way is this chapter connected with the preceding? Indicate the passages in which the beginning of love between Phoebe and Holgrave is delicately suggested. What passages foreshadow the future? In reply to Phoebe's remark, "You hold something back!" Holgrave remarked, "Nothing, no secrets but my own!" What did he mean? Why does Hawthorne insert the parenthesis, "hark, how Maule's well is murmuring!"

CHAPTER XV. Indicate passages where explanations of the plot, hitherto vaguely hinted at, are now more clearly emphasized. Notice the imagery by which the Judge's inner life is elaborately illustrated. What passages anticipate the Judge's retribution?

CHAPTER XVI. How is the element of suspense sustained and the premonition of something terrible developed? What is the effect of leaving unexplained the situation in the

parlor? How would you characterize the new development in Clifford?

CHAPTER XVII. Are the action and talk of Clifford plausible? What is Hawthorne's explanation of it? Has it been anticipated? Notice how the plot interest is being worked up to a climax.

CHAPTER XVIII. Hawthorne's imagination loves to play around a situation, viewing it from many angles and in various lights and shadows. Explain.

CHAPTER XIX. What effect has the bringing together of these common, trivial, and realistic incidents? What bit of philosophizing about life does Hawthorne make it suggest?

CHAPTER XX. Another study in contrasts. Gather other illustrations. What points in connection with the plot are here cleared up?

CHAPTER XXI. Enumerate the passages throughout the book which vaguely indicate that Holgrave is a descendant of Maule. Notice the method by which Hawthorne gradually makes it clearer. Examine in the same way the treatment of Clifford's supposed guilt.

TOPICS FOR ESSAYS AND REPORTS

1. Hawthorne a Lover of Contrasts.
2. Hawthorne's Use of the Supernatural.
3. The Plot of The House of Seven Gables.
4. Hawthorne's Methods of Description.

5. Hawthorne's Methods of depicting Character.
6. Witchcraft in New England.

7. Some Characteristics of Hawthorne as a Man.

CHAPTER III

THE DRAMA

THE English drama can never be understood without an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare. He did more than any one else to develop the art of playwriting and to fix dramatic standards. All the crude ideas of drama in the time before Shakespeare find in him their complete development; and the best writers since his time have looked back to him for their standards of excellence. He is the central figure in the history of the English drama.

To understand Shakespeare adequately, we must know something of the drama in the years before he began to write for the stage. The English drama developed from very small beginnings. To be sure, the Greeks and the Romans had long before developed an elaborate dramatic art; but the modern drama did not begin by building upon classical models. During the Middle Ages, the classical drama was practically swept away. No classical plays were publicly acted; they were not generally read. The manuscripts which had been preserved in the old monasteries were only occasionally read by some studious monk, and perhaps acted on rare occasions in the seclusion of the cloisters. As drama, they were not an active force. The only acted drama of the Middle Ages consisted of (1) the entertainments of the traveling showmen or jongleurs similar to the acts in our variety shows; (2) the pantomimic or dumb-show exhibitions of the mimes; (3) the popular dramatic customs such as the May-day games and

the Robin Hood plays and Sword plays; and (4) the Biblical plays performed in the church. Out of such crude performances grew the Interludes, the Miracle Plays, the Chronicle History Plays, and the Drama of Blood-the principal types of pre-Shakespearean drama. At the time of the Revival of Learning in England, classical plays began to influence the final forms of dramatic art; but the real origin of the modern drama is quite apart from classical traditions. The Shakespearean drama is, therefore, essentially English. (For a more detailed account, see Part II, pp. 209 ff., 223 ff.)

(a) THE CHRONICLE HISTORY PLAY

The Chronicle History play is perhaps the most strikingly English of all the Shakespearean dramatic types. It was modeled on the old Miracle plays. These were originally short Biblical scenes in dialogue introduced into the church service to make it more impressive. Gradually they grew into independent services, and at length came to take their chances as popular entertainments. Popular entertainments, to be sure, were for the most part comic dramatic song and dance and game, and the farcical scenes of the traveling showmen—and the Bible story was prevailingly serious, incapable indeed of comic treatment; but, since the medieval mind was not sensitive to incongruities, scenes of popular comedy were introduced into the Biblical plays even though they had nothing whatever to do with the Biblical story. In one of the Christmas plays, for instance, a famous sheep-stealing farce is introduced into the shepherd scene just before the Angel of the Lord appears to announce the birth of Christ. Such was a Miracle play, a strange incongruous combination of the serious and the comic; important, however, as an influence in the development of the English drama.

These plays furnished the model for the Chronicle History play. In the early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the whole nation was united and triumphant, when patriotism was strong and the people were eager to know more of their heroic past, the theater, which was at that time the center of the national life, met the popular demand by putting English history upon the stage. The playwrights, however, invented no new dramatic form. They constructed their plays after the old models, simply substituting English history for Biblical history. The result was a series of historical scenes interspersed with comic situations often totally unrelated to the historical narrative. Playwrights had not yet learned the dramatic art. They knew nothing of how to weave together serious and comic parts into a unity of interest. They had no clear idea of plot. Indeed, there was at first no successful effort to develop the story to a dramatic climax, or even to cut out the less dramatic material so that the story might move rapidly. Real dramatic dialogue was rare. There were long explanations and extended narratives, to which most of the characters listened without action. There was, therefore, very little acting drama in the Chronicle History play before the time of Shakespeare.

The same general characteristics appear in Shakespeare's Chronicle History plays, of which the most important are Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V. In these plays, the serious main plot and the comic underplot are not closely related. One treats the national wars of the fifteenth century; the other, the tavern life of London in the late sixteenth century. To be sure, the two plots are united in a general way by "link personages," like Prince Hal and Falstaff, who appear both in the serious and in the comic stories, and in Henry V the comic characters are soldiers in