Excerpt from The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama The first thing that strikes us in glancing at this summary is the great predominance of serious plays. The tragedies and conqueror plays in themselves number 28, and if we add 3 of the plays of travel and adventure, Stukeley, The Battle of Alcazar, and A Christian Turned Turk, which are also tragedies in a different form, we have 31 plays out of 47 which are essentially tragic in nature. Of the remaining third, 16 in number, 5 are tragi-comedies and 4 are plays of travel and adventure of a tragi-comic nature. Only 4 out of the whole number merit classification under the lighter head of dramatic romances, comedies, and masques. Even here, the tragi-comic ele ment in The Merchant of Venice, the only extant play of the group, hardly justifies us in separating it from the other tragi - comedies. And while it is probable that the three non-extant plays of this group were really in a somewhat lighter vein than the average tragi comedy, we know too little of them to justify us in concluding that we have here a group which, in any real sense, merits classification under the comic as opposed to the serious type of drama. Of three plays we know nothing of the type, though it is likely that Vayvode was a conqueror play or tragedy similar to Scanderbeg, treating of the long struggle between one Of the Vayvodes of Wallachia and the Ottoman Turks. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.