The Elizabethan age, which always thought of literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his rhetoric appealed to men for whom words and great passages of verse were an intoxication that only a few to-day can understand or sympathize with; his bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink from horrors.

Tragedies early began to be written on the strictly Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca's, with some ulterior intention.

Sackville's _Gorboduc_, the first tragedy in English, produced at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession.

To be put to such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical tragedy of the learned societies and the court.

None of the pieces composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and indeed they could not have been a success on it.