accompanied with music. About the middle of the sixteenth century,
rose the English drama,--comedy, tragedy, and historical plays. The
chief among the group of dramatists who attained fame before
Shakespeare began to write were Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Ben
Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare among his
contemporaries, and among the other dramatists of the period were
Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Ford, and Massinger.]

[Footnote 532: At the time when, etc. Probably about 1585.]

[Footnote 533: Tale of Troy. Drama founded on the Trojan war. The
subject of famous poems by Latin and Greek poets.]

[Footnote 534: Death of Julius Cæsar. An account of the plots which
ended in the assassination of the great Roman general.]

[Footnote 535: Plutarch. See note on _Heroism_(264). Shakespeare, like
the earlier dramatists, drew freely on Plutarch's _Lives_ for
material.]

[Footnote 536: Brut. A poetical version of the legendary history of
Britain, by Layamon. Its hero is Brutus, a mythical King of Britain.]

[Footnote 537: Arthur. A British King of the sixth century, around
whose life and deeds so many legends have grown up that some
historians say he, too, was a myth. He is the center of the great
cycle of romances told in prose in Mallory's _Morte d'Arthur_ and in
poetry in Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_.]

[Footnote 538: The royal Henries. Among the dramas popular in