The Growth of English Drama — Themes and Context

Wynne's Method: Plot and Verse as Evidence

Wynne distinguishes his approach from predecessors like Ward and Symonds by offering sustained attention to individual plays. In the chapter on Greene, for instance, he devotes several paragraphs to Looking Glass for London and England, detailing the drunken blacksmith Adam, the vainglorious Rasni, and the incestuous Ramilia. He quotes Adam's prose at length—the blacksmith's complaint about fasting, his hidden food in his slops, and his comic confrontation with searchers. Wynne uses such excerpts not merely as illustration but as proof of Greene's skill with low characters. The reader can see the verbal play: Adam's pun on 'slop' as both garment and castle, his mock-legal protest that searching his hose is 'burglary.' This method recurs throughout: Wynne lets the text speak before he comments.

Voice and Register in Greene's Prose

The excerpt from Looking Glass shows Wynne's interest in how Greene shifts register between high and low characters. Adam's prose is colloquial, full of physical comedy: he calls himself 'a lean rib of roast beef' and prefers 'a short hanging than a long fasting.' The searchers speak in a more formal, moralizing tone—'How devoutly he sits at his orisons!'—which Adam undercuts by hiding food in his clothing. Wynne notes that Adam is 'perhaps the most amusing of all Greene's clowns,' but he also traces the character's arc to the gallows, where he dies 'with a stout heart and a full stomach.' This attention to voice and fate typifies Wynne's criticism: he treats comic characters as seriously as tragic ones, analyzing their language for clues to Greene's dramatic craft.

Pace and Structure in the Early Drama Survey

Wynne's book moves at a deliberate pace, often pausing to summarize plots in detail. The chapter on miracle plays, for example, covers the continental background before turning to English cycles. In the Greene chapter, he shifts from plot summary to character analysis to quoted dialogue, then back to judgment. This rhythm gives the reader time to absorb the material. Wynne also varies his sentence length: short assertions ('No better example is needed') alternate with longer descriptive passages. The effect is a scholarly but readable tone, one that avoids the 'superabundant literature of exposition' he criticizes in his preface. By focusing on specific plays and their language, Wynne keeps the narrative grounded in evidence rather than abstraction.

Wynne's book rewards readers who want to see the raw material of Elizabethan drama—the plots, characters, and verse that critics often summarize but rarely quote. His method of presenting evidence before judgment makes the volume useful both as a reference and as a guide to forming one's own assessments. The careful attention to lesser-known plays, from moralities to University Wit comedies, fills a gap that earlier studies left open. Readers approaching this text should expect detailed summaries and generous excerpts, not sweeping theories of dramatic development.

I keep thinking about how Wynne’s old book made me feel those early plays breathing—rough, alive, unfinished. That quiet ache for forgotten voices stayed with me. Five Little Plays — Story, Setting & Ideas has a similar warmth, like finding a letter you’d forgotten you wrote. There’s comfort in pieces that don’t try to be perfect, just true.