Chapter V. The Drama until Shakespeare, from 1580 to 1592 (1)
(1) General works: A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (1899); F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 2 vols. (1908); F. G. Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 2 vols. (1891); A Chronicle History of the London Stage (1890). For all Shakespeare's predecessors see Mézières, Prédécesseurs et Contemporains de Shakespeare (1863); E. S. Boas, Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896); J. A. Symonds, Shakespeare's Predecessors (1884); A. Symons, Studies in the Elizabethan Drama (1920). Many plays critically edited in the Belles-Lettres Series, G. P. Baker, general editor (Boston).
I. Fertility of the Drama. The Difficulty of Tracing Its Tradition.
Rich as are all the manifestations of the English literature of the Renascence, the highest glory and the most direct and original expression of the national genius are domestic. Elsewhere imitation and artifice play a part; aristocratic sentiment or an ephemeral fashion is a check on spontaneity, ruling out whatever is of the people, or colouring style or subject to make it archaic, euphuistic, Arcadian, or pastoral. On occasion, the greatest authors pride themselves on exclusiveness. Spenser writes with his eyes on the court, especially on its lords and ladies. Shakespeare, dazzled by the friendship of the young Earl of Southampton, heads Venus and Adonis with two arrogant lines from Ovid: 'Let the mob admire what is vile; to me may fair Apollo serve cups filled with water of Castalia.' The influence of antiquity and of foreign countries, especially Italy, is everywhere so noticeable, that only rarely do we receive an immediate and broad impression of the English genius. Everything bears a little the mark of a restricted public, a set or a coterie. The sonneteers, the anacreontic poets, and the various humanists do not wholly belong to their country, but owe allegiance also to foreign writers who inspire them and whose rivals they are.
The theatre was open to all: the whole town was attracted by it and enthusiastic for it. It was truly national. For many it took the place of the church they neglected; to most, in this time of no newspapers and few and little-read novels, it was the only source of intellectual pleasure. A secular temple, it provided from time to time a communion of patriotism instead of the old communion of faith. For while the insatiable curiosity of the public did indeed make a constant demand for stories of foreign countries, all they wanted of them was to be astonished, amused, or scandalized. In order to please the English, the playwright had to produce scenes constructed for the English alone. He had to please every one in his public, but his pubic was purely English. Never has any other audience been so stimulating to writers, who received their immediate reward in tears or laughter, noisy and multitudinous applause. And niggardly though the payment for plays might be, the demand for them was incessant. Whenever an author found his pocket empty, he knew that his best chance of filling it promptly was on the stage. Therefore all the authors wrote or tried to write for the theatre. There is hardly a poet or novelist of this period who did not at some time turn his attention to drama, not to speak of those who gave almost all their energies to it. Certain of them who, like Daniel and Drayton, had little gift for dramatic composition, attempted it only passingly and withdrew before their lack of success. But the number of those who never tried their hand at a play is small. Even Spenser wrote nine comedies, unfortunately lost; Sidney, indeed, produced no more than a court masque, but he gave such a large place in his Defence of Poesie to the popular drama which he despised as to prove its importance to the life of this century.
This is therefore the subject which the historian of the literature of the Renascence must study principally. It is also the most difficult to consider. The sixty-two years from 1580 to 1642 seem to present an inextricable confusion of plays, such a jungle of dramatic production as is very difficult to light up with ideas. It is a puzzle to find a principle of classification applicable to the thousand or so plays extant. To trace an unbroken evolution would be infinitely desirable, but a careful examination leaves no certainty that such exists. None but inevitable changes can be perceived. It may be that there was at the beginning greater freshness and artlessness, and that the dramatist then pulled his strings more awkwardly than when practice had taught him technical sill and given him both more ease and less conviction. But many exceptions would have to be made even to these cautious generalizations. Nothing is certain but the progress and the decline of blank verse. Stiff at first, it gradually became pliable, then as free as was compatible with its rules, and finally from liberty it passed to nothingness. But there is on the whole no such passage from youth to middle age, and thence to decadence, as can from a thread for the history of the great ages of literature. The Renascence drama did not die a natural death. It was executed when it was still very much alive, so much so that the executioner was unequal to his task, and that twenty years later the alleged corpse was resuscitated, and promptly resumed, under the Restoration, a singularly active life.
The critic is, further, without the data and dates which would enable him to follow an evolution. He has to base his arguments on the extant plays without knowing how many have been lost. Thomas Heywood alone, who claimed to have written 220 plays, left only thirty-five to posterity. The chronology of numerous dramatic works is purely conjectural. The life and character of the authors are almost entirely unknown. Many of them are no more than names, and there is no psychological certainty on which to rest the study of their works. The authorship of plays is very often uncertain. The habit of repeating and rearranging earlier works, that of the collaboration of playwrights—who worked at a play simultaneously or successively, or at one time simultaneously and at another successively: these factors complicate investigation over and over again. Will it ever be possible to unravel the tangle of Fletcher's work and Massinger's, Middleton and Rowley's, Dekker's and Webster's?
It is impossible to follow with certainty the individual history of each playwright, or each company of actors who had a repertory, or each theatre which had a public. In spite of the considerable efforts which have been made, the unknown remains vaster than the known.
It would be tempting to make the classification by genres, to divide the plays into tragedies and comedies with their subsections, pure tragedy and tragi-comedy, historical drama, romantic and realistic comedy, pastoral comedy and comedy of manners and of character. But the distribution would have little correspondence with the realities of this drama which was wont purposely to mingle genres in one play, aiming at variety rather than harmony.
We are brought back to search for a centrla figure, and to group about Shakespeare, incontestably the greatest of all, the constellation of his rivals—his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. While, however, there is much to be gained by subordinating everything to the master, it cannot be forgotten that several critics have claimed this central place for Ben Jonson, whose attitude to his fellow-dramatists is better known, whose theory of the drama is more clearly enunciated, and whose production was spread over a longer time, thirty-six years, from 1597 to 1633, as against the twenty-three years, from 1590 to 1613, for which Shakespeare wrote.
Whatever method be adopted, it is important to realize the swarming confusion which has to be reduced to order. On almost every day of these sixty years performances were simultaneously fiven in the London theatres of the most dissimilar plays belonging to the most various genres, plays already old, and plays which, more often by their subject or plot than by the really fresh mental attitude or change of method they indicated, were new. What the public desired up to the end was to feel again at each performance the emotions they knew or others like them , and if possible to have dished up for them a story which had not yet been staged.
2. The Public Theatre. The State. The Actors. (1)
(1) E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (1924); J. Q. Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses (1920); A. Feuillerat, Le Bureau des Menus Plaisirs et la mise en scène à la cour d'Elizabeth (1910).
It has been possible to eluciate the conditions of the tangible stage and those in which actors and playwrights lived better than the dramatic evolution. We have stated that the first public theatre was built on the confines of the city in 1576; by the end of the century there were some eight of them on the north and south sides of the Thames, a surprising number for a town of hardly 200,000 inhabitants and a proof of the singular popularity of dramatic representations. These took place, for lack of means of lighting, in the afternoons, generally in buildings which externally were round or hexagonal. Within, the disposition of their space seems almost always to have been the same. A courtyard, open to the sky, was the pit; around this were two or three tiers of covered galleries; and in front of the pit a large projecting platform on trestles formed the stage. Two pillars in the middle of the platform upheld the ceiling; at the back, between two doors used by the actors for their exits and entrances, another scene was overlooked by a balcony with windows, and before this back stage there was a movable curtain.
There were no wings and no back-scenery, and only the simplest accesories—table, chairs, shrubs—to indicate or rather symbolize the place of the action. Sometimes it was merely intimated on a placard to such as could read. The front stage served almost all purposes so long as it was not necessary to represent a special place. Many scenes in Elizabethan plays pass in a vague, indeterminate place, in a street or public square, before a house or in an unspecified room.
The back stage was used for places which had a special and distinct character. The curtain at the back rose to discover persons in a particular attitude, for instance Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess in Prospero's cell.
The arrangement was in its outline taken from the medieval stage, which included a vague place (platea) and others which were defined (sedes, domus, loca). The progress of the theatre in the seventeenth century brought the back curtain more and more forward until it finally reached the front of the stage and the undefined part of the platform disappeared. Then it became possible to supersede the slight scenery of the back stage with scenery which was erected behind the front curtain and became increasingly multifarious, large and complicated.
On this almost naked stage the actor's person had a double importance. His costume was as rich as the stage was poor. Attention was entirely concentrated on his tragic gestures or grimaces. His declamation, in particular, was important, emphasizing the value of the numerous monologues, the multiplied tirades of the plays of the period. His art was therefore carried to a high pitch. English actors had at this time a reputation which reached the Continent, whither they were invited and where some of them made long tours. There were no actresses: women's parts were played by boys. All the prestige which belongs to an actress went to the actors, and more than one citizen's wife was fascinated by them. Members of the Inns of Court and great gentlemen were proud of their intercourse with the profession, nad in the taverns an actor cut a fine figure.Although they were almost outcasts from society, actors not only enjoyed popularity, but also were cultivated by persons whose acquaintance was most flattering to their vanity. They had a good chance to make their fortunes if, amid the dangerous temptations of their calling, they lived an orderly life and preserved a practical point of view. If they had a share in the ownership of their theatre, they were prosperous and important men, enjoying much more consideration than the frequently half-staved playwrights who tried to sell their plays to the companies.
Such an actors' company as that to which Shakespeare belonged, wihch was patronized in turn by Leicester, by Ferdinando, Lord Strange, who became Lord Derby in 1593, and by the Lord Chamberlain, and which became the King's Company at the accession of James I, was a veritable institution. We find it playing at the Bull's Inn, at the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Rose, and at the Globe, built by this company for its own use in 1599. Under James I it owned two playhouses, the Globe in Southwark, which was used in summer, and the Blackfriars, almost within the city liberties, a covered theatre in which there were performances in the winter. This company was directed by the Burbages, father and son; by Richard Burbage, one of the most famous actors of the day, from 1597 to 1619. It had its struggles, some of them sharp, in particular with the Lord Admiral's Company and with the children of the Chapel Royal, who captivated London for a time. But it triumphed over all rivals and retained its supremacy until the theatres were closed.
As for individual actors, the famous Edward Alleyn (1566-1626), who created the leading parts in Marlowe's plays, made his fortune so effectively as director of the Lord Admiral's Company, that he became master of the royal games and of the king's 'bears, bulls, and mastiff dogs,' which were baited in the several rings, bought a manor from Lord Francis Calton for ten thousand pounds, very munificently founded on it Dulwich College which he endowed largely, and founded other charities also.
The passion for the theatre, which attracted money to it, gave rise to speculation. Thanks to his diary for the years from 1592 to 1603, we can follow in detail the investments of Philip Henslowe, Alleyn's father-in-law, a dealer and pawnbroker. As shrewd as he was illiterate, this capitalist bought plays from authors and sold them to actors. The price of a play varied from four to tend pounds. He advanced money to necessitous playwrights and sold stage-properties to the theatres. He built the Rose Theatre, and then the Fortune and the Hope theatres. Under Elizabeth he directed the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's companies, and under James I, when actors were no longer protected by noblemen and the surviving companies were under the patronage of the members of the royal family, he was at the head of the Queen's and the Prince's companies.
The Plays. The Public. (1)
In 1580 the theatres possessed a repertory of plays already studied and others like them. Because these disregarded rule, they provoked the ridicule or indignation of the literate, who compared them with the works of antiquity and blushed for the national barbarism. It was deplored as early as 1578 by George Whetstone, for all that he himself was the author of sufficiently romantic play, Promos and Cassandra. Sidney repeated his strictures three or four years later in his Defence of Poesie, and added force and brilliance to them. He passed sentence as a humanist on Gothic and popular productions, for although at heart he was, as his Arcadia proves, an extreme romantic, but no sooner became a critic than he was the docile disciple of Scaliger, Minturno, Castelvetro, and their like. He confronted a drama which knew nothing of decorum wit hthe law of the unities nad the law which separates the tragic and the comic, and he energetically rediculed the absurdities entrailed by changes of scene and time.(1) C. J. Sisson, Le Goût public et le théatre élisabethain (Dijon, 1922).
You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africk of the other, and so many other kingdoms, that the player when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. No you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. Buy and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock, Upon the back of that, comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, while in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now of time, they are much more liberal. For ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love, after many traverses she is got with child, deliverd of a fair boy: he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours' space.
Sidney has the penetration to perceive the law by which the English playwrights were unconsciously governed. They believed themselves to be historians, and followed events step by step, forgetting the prerogatives of art which does not obey literal truth and which has the task of rearranging, eliminating, combining, constructing.
In this Sidney goes straight to the root of the matter. Quite artlessly, like the authors of the mysteries, the popular playwrights made it their business to distribute a story in scenes and to stage it. They had no conception of the necessity of a special plot, and in a large number of plays they did without one, and were thus able to produce a truly historical drama.
Sidney's condemnation would probably have been modified had he found artistic qualities of style in the drama which existed about 1580. The plays he had in mind were often ludicrous in form; the formula to which the pots conformed, one which masterpieces were soon to justify, suffered from this awkwardness. It was at the moment when Sidney was condemning contemporary drama that works were first performed which show, in spite of their defects, the evident signs of artistic labour. The capital contribution of humanism to the drama was the generalization of the use of blank verse, the sole great innovation which the Renascence induced a conservative public to adopt universally.
More than the conscious will of the playwrights, the nature of their public decided the dramatic system—if the word may be applied to the almost unconscious work of tradition—which prevailed in England. The audiences who crowded into the Elizabethan playhouses represented every class and every trade. Noblemen might, on occasion, be seen attending a performance at Blackfriars, where the most fashionable audiences gathered. But to all the playhouses there was an affluence of the great and the lowly, the gentlemen and the people, the literate and the ignorant, the exquisites and the boors. Standing in the pit, the people pressed against the stage, intervening between it and the rich citizens and lords in their seats in the galleries. Mannerless coxcombs, arrogant as a Molière marquis, sat on the rushes on the stage, chaffing the actors and getting in their way. The playwright's duty was, like that of the author of a mystery, to provide food for every palate.
Thus it was that no play was written for performance on a public stage which did not combine contraries, pass from extreme coarseness to extreme refinement. There were exquisites among the audience who piqued themselves on their poetry and distilled subtle sonnets, and there were the groundlings, mainly attracted by the clowns and pronounced by Shakespeare to be 'for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise.' The great mass of the audience was, however, made up of simple folk, desirous of amusement yet willing to be edified or instructed, endowed with a curiosity at once ingenuous and ardent, and with imagination which easily moved them to tears or shouts of laughter. Neither squeamish nor sceptical, they blindly admired flights of lyricism which went beyond their comprehension, readily submitted to illusion, and did not grudge their enjoyment. Such is a mixed popular audience in every country. It is an ideal, a grateful audience, perhaps the best fitted to appreciate the essentials of drama, namely the life and the human truth of its pictures.
It was the necessity of satisfying it which determined the character of the English drama of the Renascence. Its extreme variety gave birth to the profound difference which henceforth distinguished this drama from that of France.
Hitherto much has been attributed to race as a factor determining this divergence. Men have liked to show English drama leading to Shakespear as an inevitable effect of the national genius, of the need for vehemence, movement, variety, imagination, and also brutality which was in the blood of the English. France is represented as having advanced in an opposite direction towards Racine, because the French race was in love with beautiful proportions, harmony, fine analysis, and nobility. To this theory there is the objection that these two contrasting nations, which seem at this time to turn their backs on each other, shared throughout the Middle Ages a drama which differed for each of them only in points of detail. Both peoples were impassioned amateurs of the mysteries which in both their countries not only had the same religious subjects, but were also closely akin in form and in the spectacles they provided. Moreover, France in the Middle Ages seems to have taken the lead in this matter, and to have supplied the earliest dramatic models. How could she evolve out of herself what was less fitted to her own genius than to that of neighbouring nation, England, which accepted and kept what she gave? How could she, analogously, build for centuries the most marvellous of all the Gothic cathedrals before she recognized that her natural destiny was to repreat the peristyles and colonnades of Graeco-Roman architecture?
The difference between the dramatic art of the two countries must be explained less ambitiously and more certainly. The fact is that France at the time of the Renascence had disinherited the old religious drama, the only really native and popular drama, while England still preserved almost all its elements. The difference was rather in the public of the theatre in the two countries than in the national temperaments. The English theatre was still open to all men and made for them all. But the drama of the French Renascence took form after a police regulation, intended to check disorder, had in 1548 forbidden in France any popular performance of the mysteries,, and therefore it was both new and a thing apart. It was subject to no influences except those of antiquity, and its appeal was to a select public of humanists and literates, with a due admixture of pedants. Nothing was left to the people but the farces and the clowning of the fairs. What was at its origins shared indiscriminately by all the people of both countries, was in France cut for a long period in two halves, with the result that the court and the literate class, the men bred on Greek and Latin, engrossed all that was noblest, while the people had the rest. For it is improbable that there was ever a large number of workmen who understood Cinna and acclaimed Mithridate. It is no more than just to credit accident with what accident mainly accomplished.
Nor can it be doubted that in England there were velleities towards a break between the art of the aristocracy and of the people. The court was greedy of dramatic representation, and some playwrights addressed themselves to satisfying the more refined tastes of the queen and the courtiers. It was naturally at the court or before the court that truly artistic drama was first attempted. The popular theatre, left to itself, threatened to persevere in disorder and coarseness, and could still be careless of elegance and style. It is in plays written for the court that these qualities, without which drama can be intensely alive but cannot survive as literature, are first plainly discernible. Since there was at this time constant intercourse between the court and the city, actors passed from the one to the other, and the same play was often given before the queen and the people in turn, so that progress stimulated by one audience was soon afterwards enjoyed by the other also. The benefit soon became general, but the search for the beautiful manifestly originated in the more cultured of the two spheres.
4. The Plays of John Lyly. (1)
(1) Complete works edited by R. W. Bond, 3 vols. (1902). Campaspe is printed in Manly's Specimens, vol. ii. For critical study see A. Feuillerat's important John Lyly (1910).
John Lyly's plays were the first to provide models of refinement, or at least the first of all that have come down to us. For Lyly was not the first to date of the court purveyors. It is calculated that from the time of Elizabeth's accession seven plays were, on an average, given before her every year, and that about one hundred and fifty had been thus performed before Lyly's advent. Almost all of them have been lost except Gorboduc (1562), Damon and Pythias (1564) and Tancred and Gismunda (1586). We know of the rest only from the records of the Office of the Revels, the master of the revels having the duty of providing masques, dances, and plays for the queen's diversion. He had to examine plays which were to be performed in her presence, whether written on purpose for her or chosen among such as had had success with the public. Of the subsisting titles of the lost plays, so many are classical or mythological that their habitual subjects are reveealed.There are synopses of masques which must have been mythological allegories of the same kind as most of Lyly's plays.
Lyly's success as author of Euphues and creator of euphuism seems immediately to have made him the accredited purveyor of court plays. His first play was indeed performed at Blackfriars Theatre before it was given in the Queen's presence on 31st December 1581, but it seems to have been written with a view to Elizabeth's pleasure, as were most of his later plays. Lyly writes as a wit catering for an audience which likes what is witty, a man of letters appealing to cultivated people, a courtier flattering his sovereing. He seems entirely regardless of any larger public. As a refined, even a mannered, writer, he addresses himself to fine lords and fine ladies. He gives them the treat of hearing, on the stage, the antithetic style and decorative similes of that prose which was, and which remained for some ten years, the admiration of the fashionable world. No work ever bore its author's imprint more plainly than Lyly's. Each of his plays has a harmony ande atmosphere proper to himself.
The most decided improvement due to him arose from his choice of prose as a medium, and a prose which, for all its artificiality, aimed at beauty. In face of the prevailing anarchy in the matter of literary form, he chose this one of the two solutions possible to him. He wrote too well, too elaborately, and by too factitious methods, but in witty dialogue he attained to true art. His drama consistes, for that matter, almost entirely of dialogue, for his plots are usually insignificant. His first known play, Campaspe (1581) is the work of a humanist whose matter is almost wholly taken from antiquity, but who remains independent in his construction. If precedents were to be found for it, they certainly would not be the comedies of the ancients, but rather the witty dialogues of Erasmus, and Lyly's pretext for writing dialogues is a plot intended to eulogize Queen Elizabeth.
Alexander's love for his captive, the Theban Campaspe, is in conflict with his desire for glory and his consciousness of his royal duty. His love is crossed by that of Campaspe for the artist Apelles whom Alexander has commissioned to paint her portrait, and who, as he traces her features, falls in love with her. Some pretty sentimentalism, relieved by mythology, is occasioned.
Round about Alexander are argumentative soldiers and philosophers who give Lyly an opportunity for having certain historic aphorisms repeated on the stage. Alexander is confronted with Diogenes, the cynic, who rejects his advances and tells him some hard truths. Their conversations are real duels in which, amid the clash of swords, we hear almost all the famous retorts with which antiquity credits Diogenes.
These scenes are in pleasing juxtaposition to arguments between the slaves of the principal characters—Diogenes, Plato, and Apelles—who meet in the market-place. The slaves' jokes are, it is true, mainly plays on words, which betray the grammarian, yet they have a sufficient correspondence with the slaves' masters.
The play is witty and graceful and no more, but it is so in a high degree and consistently. Its euphuism, properly so called, is concentrated in the monologues, which are an exposition of Stoic morality, surprising in this ornate dress. Alexander, standing for Elizabeth, sacrifices his love to his duty as a sovereign and marries Campaspe to Apelles. There is little construction and no passion, only a series of fine-Drawn conversations. Lyly wrote nothing wittier. In itself, as an example of an artificial genre, this play is exquisite, the only perfect thing produced before Shakespeare.
In the subsequent comedies the wit persists, but it is mingled with more fancy, and also, although the scene is again laid in antiquity, with some dreamy romanticism. In Sapho and Phao there is again an allegory which flatters the queen and more directly than before. Elizabeth's courtship by the Duke of Alençon is probably figured. Phao, a poor boatman of Syracuse, is endowed, by a caprice of Venus, with unmatched beauty and rendered at the same time insensible to love. On the other hand, the goddess has pierced with an arrow the heart of the chaste Princess Sapho, of whose beauty she is jealous and whose chastity angers her. Sapho, crossing the water in the handsome ferryman's boat, falls deeply in love with him, and his heart is also touched in spite of his insensibility. he consults the Sibyl, who instructs him in the art of winning a woman's heart, and whose speech anticipates Shakespeare's Rosalind when she teaches Orlando how to court his beloved.
Sapho, languishing with love for Phao, has him brought to her room on the pretext that he possesses a remedy which will cure her. The interview between the lovers is curious, endlessly mannered, yet charming in its concealment of a declaration beneath transparent play on words.
Yet Sapho laments. If Phao loves her, she must lower herself; if he is indifferent to her, she must die. She is saved by Venus, who too is captivated by Phao and who deprives her of feeling. But the goddess fails to win the boatman's love. Her own child Cupid abandons her for Sapho, who inherits her power. And there is nothing left for poor Phao to do but to leave Sicily taking with him his cult of Sapho (Elizabeth) and his eternal love for her who is impervious to love, who has triumphed over Venus and is the mistress of Cupid.
Endymion (1586) has the merit that Lyly stages in it one of the most poetic of ancient myths which he does not rob of all its original grace. Manifestly this is another eulogy to Elizabeth, to be identified with Cynthia whom Endymon loves respectfully. The allegory is, however, more complicated than those of the earlier plays and more difficult to elucidate. It has been too much a subject of discussion to allow the several suggested interpretations to be given here. Endymion, by the enchantment of Tellus, who is jealous of Cynthia, is owverpowered by sleep. One of the most romantic scenes of Elizabethan drama is that in which his friend Eumenides arrives in Thessaly, the land of enchantments, in search of the charm which will awaken him. He reaches the banks of a prophetic spring of which the bed is visible only to faithful lovers, for they alone can read on it the word which will win them their heart's desire. Eumenides, who is the faithful and unfortunate lover of Semele, a lady of Cynthia's court, hesitates long. Shall he ask for the love of Semele or for the deliverance of Endymion? At last frienship and duty prevail over love, and he learns that a kiss from Cynthia will give back life to Endymion. Awakened after a sleep of forty years, Endymion, thanks to the kiss, recovers his youth and the right to continue his respectful courtship.
When about 1590 Lyly wrote Midas, he abandoned flattery for satire. The play is inspired by the disaster which had recently overtaken the Spanish Armada. Midas, having obtained from Bacchus that all he touches shall turn to gold, prefers Pan's song to Apollo's and by Apollo is afflicted with asses' ears. It is not difficult to read in all this a parable of Philip II, ruined by his very wealth, rashly daring to rival Lesbos, or England, and beaten in his contest with the enemy island. The allusions are very plain. The play is hardly suited to the stage, since it lacks a plot, and its value depends mainly on the skilfulness of the allegory.
In Gallathea (1587), Lyly had emancipated himself from the necessity to be either flattering or satirical, and merely amused himself by playing variations on the theme of love. The play has two heroines, both disguised. Each has a father who passes her off as a man to save her from the Minotaur to whom the fairest maiden is offered every five years. So charming are these maidens in their pages' guise that they are loved by all Diana's nymphs. But they love only each other, each believing the other to be a boy. Venus unravels the tangle by changing one of them into a man.
The play has some very pretty motifs and certain elements of poetry. The scene in which Cupid, masquerading as a nymph, uses his disguise to awaken love in all Diana's train, and is discovered by the angry goddess, who obliges him to undo his mischief, is aatractive. That in which each of the two fathers assures the other that he has the most beautiful daughter is amusing, as is that in which young Hebe, momentarily threatened by the Minotaur, is saved because her beauty is judged inadequate, and does not know whether to rejoice at her safety or to mourn it.
But Lyly, as often happens with him, stops short in his best scenes. He goes only half-way, makes no more than a sektch. His work lacks movement, and hwat construction it has is too artificial, frozen by an excess of symmetry.
His last plays are pastorals like his Gallathea. Love's Metamorphosis shows three nymphs of Ceres, unmoved by the love of three shepherds and metamorphosed by Cupid, the first into a stone for her cruelty, the second into a flower for her coyness, and the third into a bird for her inconstancy. Cupid would restore them, at the prayer of Ceres, to their proper forms, but at first they refuse this service because they prefer ignorance of the ills of love and the unfaithfulness of man. They yield only to the boy-god's terrible threats, and even as they warn their lovers that the stone, the flower, and the bird still live in their hearts.
In The Woman in the Moone, his only play in verse, Lyly reaches the point of satirizing woman unreservedly. He repeats the ancient legend in his own way, imagining that when Pandora is created she receives from each of the seven planets something of its own nature: melancholy from Saturn, ambition and disdain from Jupiter, a warlike temper from Mars, kindness from the Sun, an amorous nature from Venus, falseness from Mercury, and madness from the Moon. Then Lyly amuses himself by showing Pandora influenced by each of these planets in succession. She ends within the sphere of the moon, where she is stationed at her own desire, all women being essentially 'foolish, fickle, franticke, madde.'
While Lyly usually drew on mythology and ancient history for his plays, once, in Mother Bombie (1587-9?), he tried his hand at a modern comedy in the Italian manner which has a much complicated plot. In spite of some pleasing passages, it is a wek work, without any of the necessary swing. It is in his court dramas that Lyly's characteristics must be sought.
Nothing else so artistic had yet been produced on the English stage. Lyly's composition has defects: there are weak moments in his plays and ineffective complications, a mingling of the serious and comic which connects him with the popular drama but proves his inability to blend these opposites in one plot. While, however, there is a general lack of force, depth and true passion in his work, his language is invariably careful; his dialogue is artificial but pointed; retorts depend mainly on play on words, but are lively and well turned and have a courtliness in his tone and mannerisms, originality in his subjects, even grace and fancy in his conceptions; and his work, exactly because of its artifice and its pedantry, is well fitted to the fashionable society for which it was written.
Lyly is a long way below Shakespeare, but none the less he anticipates him, the Shakespeare of Love's Labour's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing and especially As You Like It. He anticipates him yet more clearly if the charming songs of his comedies are not denied him. They appeared only in a posthumous edition of his works, and recent critics refuse to attribute them to him.
5. George Peele (1)
(1) Complete works ed. by A. H. Bullen, 2 vols. (1888). Study by P. Cheffaud (Paris, 1913).
Like Lyly, the prose-writer, George Peele, the poet (1558-98), began his career as a courtier. Like Lyly, he had a taste for ornament and cared for fine language. Although he acquired a reputation for wildness, became known for an incorrigible Bohemian, his upbringing is good. he went to Oxford and for some time he wrote for the court as a man of letters and refinement and a graceful poet.
The work which was apparently his first may be called a mythological pastoral. The Arraignment of Paris, which was played in 1580 before the queen, whom it greets in a concluding apotheosis. Diana revises the judgment of Paris in honour of Elizabeth, to whom she wards the apple. This pastoral has hardly any construction, but is very pleasing. Peele is a less witty and more poetic Lyly. No style was ever more bestrewed with flowers than his. In his play we see Flora causing nature to blossom on the spot where Diana is about to appear and painting with flowers the portrait of Juno in yellow, Pallas in red, and Venus in blue. Peele, who had lately read Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar, mingles mythological personages with rude, realistic shepherds. His taste is not infallible: Helen, by whose maens Venus seeks to tempt Paris, is a real farm-girl, a fact which does not keep her from singing an Italian song.But these vagaries do not much spoil this fantasy. It is fragant, lyrical, light, and melodious.
The same love of decoration appears even in those of Peele's plays which were not written directly for the court. His David and Bethsabe is curious in this respect. Its subject gives it a place apart from other works as a link with the old religious plays. But it is differentiated from these by the spirit which animates it. Peele ignores the marvellous, knows neither God nor devil. He stages literally a passage from the Bible—2 Samuel xi-xx—on the pattern of the new historical dramas, treating Scripture as Shakespeare afterwards treated the chronicles.
The construction is awkward. Two stories, that of Bethsabe and that of Absalom, are developed side by side but without connection between them. The drama moves slowly. The play is cold, but the style is very careful. Peele's imagery is inspired by the Psalms and the Song of Songs, but all that in the Bible is great and strange becomes, when he handles it, pretty, decorative, precious, often commonplace, and often unreal. Peele's descriptions are profusely flowery. It is tempting to apply to him the pretty line in his Arraignment of Paris:
For the rest, he is so slavishly faithful to his source that he puts nothing into his characters which he does not find in the Old Testament. He neither explains them nor gives them life. His authorship of the other plays which have been ascribed to him is uncertain. It is most probable that he wrote Edward the First, one of the plays on national history, and The Old Wives' Tale, a parody or satire on romantic comedies in which Milton found hints for his Comus. The weakness of his dramatic sense is yet more apparent in these plays. He was a poet little fitted to write anyting for the stage except masques and lyrical pieces.Ye may ne see for peeping flowers the grass.
Neither Peele nor Lyly nor any one else had achieved striking success on the public stage when suddenly, at some months' distance, the playhouses rang with the verse of Kyd and Marlowe. In swift succession, Kyd in 1586 produced his Spanish Tragedie, Marlowe in 1587 his Tamburlaine, an unknown author his Arden of Feversham, and a certain Hughes his Misfortunes of Arthur, the best tragedy on the classical model which had appeared since Gorboduc.
If then the artistic drama of the court had its beginning in 1580, it was in the years 1586 and 1587 that the drama of the public stage began its famous career, in which the most diverse genres had part. Arden of Feversham remained one of the best examples of the realistic and moral plays given in the city theatres. The Spanish Tragedie was for years the most popular of the gloomy, bloodthirsty romantic dramas of these theatres, while Tamburlaine was their surpassing heroic play, impressive by its sublimity and fitted to inspire admiration for the superman. If it be remembered that Lyly's Endymion was being performed at the same time, it must be acknowledged that English drama had shown even then not only her strength, but also her diversity.
6. Arden of Feversham (1586) (1)
At this early date it is a surprise to come upon a play which bears all the marks of dramatic maturity. The unknown author of Arden of Feversham was no great poet, but he had to an extraordinary extent a sense of the stage, the modern stage. He was in no degree a romantic. He dramatized a real and recent crime chronicled by Holinshed. His play is, in subject and form, a typical citizens' drama, in spite of its fitful use of language, its inclusion of some triades which are characteristic of the Renascence, and its use of blank verse. Its merit lies in its psychological truth and its character-drawing.(1) Printed by C. F. T. Brooke in The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908).
Alice, wife of the wealthy gentlemen Arden of Feversham, has become the mistress of Mosbie, a countryman of low birth and coarse nature, who inexplicably fascinates her. The two of them plot to murder her husband, she that she may belong only to Mosbie, he out of avarice. After several failures they contrive the murder successfully, but their crime is immediately discovered, and they and their accomplices are duly executed.
The play is fundamentally moral. It really makes adultery and murder odious, embellishing neither life nor vice. But it reaches this effect not by sermonizing, but by insight into the souls of the guilty, the tortures they undergo, and their meanness.
The husband is indeed drawn with a rather hesitating hand: he vacillates between jealousy and credulity, passes from just anger at the shamelessness of the lovers to a blind confidence inspired by his wife's blandishments. He seems to be aware of Mosbie's treachery and yet he takes him back into favour and declares him innocent. He speaks like an honourable man, and yet there is an episode in which, in order to round off his estate, he gets possession of a poor man's land. This indecision weakens the emotional effect in that it withdraws some sympathy from the victim, but it is also a signal proof of the realism of this playwritght, who refused to create a hero, to make a rude contrast between vice and virtue.
In Mosbie's vileness there is no contradiction. He has not passion for an excuse. Throughout his love-making with Alice he slyly nurses a grudge against her, never loses his class-hatred, which she inflames by rash words when she is suffering twinges of remorse.
Alice is a prey to an irresistible passion which, in lucid moments, she vaguely suspects to be the effect of witchcraft. She is the soul of the play: her will leads to action, decides on the murder and plans it, because she wishes to belong unshared to Mosbie. But no sooner is the crime accomplished than the spell is broken. Alice is horrified by her own deed and dies repentant.
There are whole scenes between the two lovers which grip us by their truth and their forcible portrayal of the soul. In Act III, scene v, Mosbie is shown uneasy about the consequences of the contemplated crime. He has been drinking to dull his faculties, but his anxiety persists. He realizes that he is much less happy than he used to be, yet knows that the affair is in train and he cannot draw back, and so looks to the future. He must, he tells himself, get rid of his accomplices, Alice as well as the others, since he never could trust a woman who had betrayed her husband.
At this point Alice, just recovered from an access of remorse and religious feeling, arrives on the scene, carrying a prayer-book and irritated against her lover. She recalls her love for Arden in the days of her innocence, begs Mosbie to forget her, whishes again to be a faithful wife. When he protests she overwhelms him with contempt, upbraiding him as a base artificer who has bewitched and corrupted her. He answers her insults with curses, tells her that for her sake he has lost his character, that instead of falling in love with a 'wanton giglote' he might have married an honest maid 'whose dowry would have weyed down all thy wealth.' It is he who has been bewitched, but he has done with her. He sees her as she is, without beauty; he is maddened by the thought that he ever though her fair. And thereupon Alice abuses herself, supplicates him, declares herself ready to burn her prayer-book, appeals to his love. Mortified and filled with mean resentment, he at first answers her ironically, thoughts of money mingling with all his thoughts of love:
O no, I am a base artificer;Yet he gives in because it is in his interest to do so.
My winges are feathered for a lowly flight.
Mosby? fy! no, not for a thousand pound.
Make love to you? why, 'tis unpardonable;
We beggars must not breathe where gentiles are.
Even in the painting of the secondary characters there are powerful strokes. There is for instance a scene which depicts one of the nights for which the crime is planned. Arden is in a friend's house in London, and his servant Michael is to open the door to two murderers while his master is asleep.
Michael is no vulgar wretch to be bought fo money, but Alice has promised him that if he kills arden or lets him be killed he shall marry Susan whom he loves. It happens, however, that he imagines the murder: he sees the assassins entering the house, slaying Arden, then saying to each other that it would be well to get rid fo the servenat who might betray them, and so preparing to stab him also. Upon this Michael utters in the darkness a terrible cry; his master is awakened, comes down to see what is the matter, and shuts the door which has been left open purposely. By Michael's cry he is saved for this time.
This dramatic force and truth of characterization have led some to attribute the play to Shakespeare, assigning it to his early period. But it has a vulgarity of sentiment and atmosphere which cannot be reconciled with Shakespeare's work. None the less, it is a remarkable production, and stands first in a line of succession which was lost for some twelve years and then reappeared in vigorous abundance. The Elizabethan drama, generally romantic, could be unromantic also. There was a section of its public whose preference was for modern and topical subjects, and there were playwrights to satisfy these tastes.
7. Thomas Kyd (1)
The majority, however, expected and desired romantic melodrama, and the first writer who supplied this demand was Thomas Kyd (1558-94) with his Spanish Tragedie. Nothing is known of Kyd save that he was the son of a London scrivener and studied law, and that Seneca's tragedies were his habitual reading. He bled Seneca white, and he translated Garnier's Cornélie which was modelled on Seneca.(1) The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. Boas (Oxford, 1901). The Spanish Tragedie is printed in Manly's Specimens, vol. ii.
So much can, at least, be deduced from a diatribe of Nashe's written in 1589. Seneca's influence on Kyd cannot be questioned, yet it did not cause his masterpiece to confine to the rules, as Thomas Hughes's Misfortunes of Arthur which was played at Gray's Inn at the same time, did conform, a play as tragic and grave as could be desired and full of sententious dialogue. What Kyd learnt from Seneca was how to produce terror—by the ghost of his prologue who relates past events, by atrocious circumstance, and by speeches heightened with striking lyrical expressions. He makes no attempt to simplify the construction of the popular drama, and he cares nothing for the unities. He takes from the Latin poet only what he thinks an English audience will assimilate, and leaves the loose, facile construction of the national drama intact. He owes to Seneca's Thyestes his theme of vengeance, one capable of producing the most pathetic and most fearful effects. He learns from him to envelop his whole work with an atmosphere of gloom, and adds the use of the most powerful stage expedients known to his own experience.
Young Horatio, son of the marshal Hieronimo and valiant as the Cid, is treacherously slain by Prince Balthazar and the perfidious Lorenzo at the very moment of exchanging love-vows with Bel-Imperia, daughter of the Duke of Castile. Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo swear to discover the murderers and avenge the deed. When the old father, who feigns madness in order to reach his ends and is indeed half-mad with grief, feels certain that he knows the murderers, he conceives the idea of having a play acted at the wedding of Bel-Imperia, who is obliged to marry her lover's murderer. This tragedy becomes a real one: every one at the wedding kills himself or is killed.
Another story of revenge is a frame for this one. Before the action of the play begins, Don Andrea, Bel-Imperia's first lover, has been treacherously slain in the war with Portugal. His ghost opens the play, calling for vengeance on Prince Balthazar, who has put him to death.
A synopsis can give, however, only a poor idea of the horrors of this melodrama and of the skill which made it triumph. The fearfulness of crime is intorduced into ardent, passionate scenes, making a contrast as violent as that between light and darkness. Horatio and Bel-Imperia are suddenly struck by love as he, the young warrior, is about to tell her of the death of Don Andrea, her betrothed. At once she gives him her heart. The lovers make a nocturnal assignation in the gardens of old Hieronimo, and there is a scene passionate as that between Hernani and Doña Sol, which is interrupted by the arrival of masked assassins who stab Horatio and hang his body in an arbour.
The sequel is even more horrible. Old Hieronimo, who has been awakened by Bel-Imperia's cries, comes through the shadows clad only in his shirt. He gropes his way, strumbles upon the corpse, and at this moment is joined by his wife, old Isabella. They mingle their tears and their vows for revenge. Hieronimo's final oath is in thirteen Latin hexameters and it must have sounded like and incantation and have been as terrifying as it was incomprehensible.
Old Hieronimo's madness, whether true or feigned, overtakes him in strange accesses. He goes to demand justice of the king, and before all the court plunges his poniard in the ground. Since he is a judge, citizens petition him for justice, among them an old man who desires that his son's murder may be avenged. The judge is thereupon beside himself, draws from his breast a napkin stained with Horatio's blood, tears the plaintiff's petitions to pieces, and finally rushes from the room, crying 'Run after, catch me, if you can'. Almost at once he returns and mistakes the old father for his Horatio. Persuaded from this error, he believes the old man is a Fury exciting him to avenge, then recognizes the old father's true identity and goes out with him, arm in arm. Certainly no one could be madder.
In the last scene, in which every one is killed, Hieronimo confesses to the king what he has done. When the king threatens him with extreme torture, he bites out his tongue in order not to speak again. Then he beckons for a knife with which to mend his pen, and therewith adds to the bloodshed by stabbing the father of one of his son's murderers and killing himself. Don Andrea's ghost, which appears several times over to demand revenge, may well declare itself well satisfied.
It was difficult to go much farther in melodrama. This one was so good that, in spite of all ironies and parodies, there was still a demand for it fifteen years after its first performance. Ben Jonson, the classicist, made additions to it, possibly those which have come down to us and which are certainly remarkable. They consist of new touches added to Hieronimo's madness and give the play the benefit of the improvement in dramatic psychology that had been made in the interval.
The play in its original form is emphatic, declamatory, and often ridiculous, yet such as to grip a simple public. The motives for action are not made clear; the characters are alive yet hardly have character. It is the element of the pathetic which veils all defects. Of all the parts in Renascence drama, that of Hieronimo was the most grateful to actors and the most popular with the public. Morover, the play supplies the poetry of place and scenery. It respects neither the unity of place nor that of time, yet preserves, on the whole, unity of action, and it also has unity of motive, for it all centres round revenge.
This excellent and most popular motive recurs in several of the great plays. The Spanish Tragedie foreshadows Hamlet. If the principal object of literary history were to determine starting-points, more space would be given to Kyd's play than to any of the great Shakespearian tragedies. Critics admit to-day that Kyd, whose other work is less interesting and is not certainly his, may have written an early and lost version of Hamlet. Such a play unquestionably existed in 1589, and it is likely that its author was the creator of old Hieronimo.
8. Marlowe. (1)
(1) His collected works have been edited by F. Cunningham, I vol. (Chatto and Windus), by A. H. Bullen in The English Dramatists, 3 vols. (1884-5); by Havelock Ellis in the Mermaid Series (1887); and by C. T. F. Brooke (Oxford, 1910).
Annotated edition: Doctor Faustus, ed. Ward, and Esward II, ed. Tancock (Clarendon Press).
Critical Studies: C. P. Baker, Dramatic Technique in Marlowe (1913); Danchin, 'Études critiques sur C. Marlowe,' in Revue germanique (Jan.-Feb. 1912, Nov.-Dec. 1913, Jan.-Feb. 1914); C. Marlowe, by Miss Ellis-Fermor (London, 1927).
Tamburlaine, in its two parts, of which the first appeared in 1587 and the second in 1588, astonished the public with quite other reasons than The Spanish Tragedie. Its author was Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), a young man of twenty-three, who had just left Cambridge. He was entirely without experience of the stage, but he compensated for this lack by the extraordinary spirit of defiance and revolt which animated his dramatic work. Novel though Arden of Feversham and The Spanish Tragedie were, they were plays which bore the imprint of the traditional morality. From beginning to end they denounced and condemned crime; their murders cried out for vengeance. But the new playwright dared to claim admiration for the most bloodthirsty of men, to make of him a sort of demigod.
Nothing is more characteristic of Marlowe than his choice of his first hero. He had read a translation of Tamerlane's life by the Spaniard Pedro Mexia and another life of him by Perondinus of Florence. His imagination was inflamed by the story of the career of this unmatched adventurer who from a mere shepherd became the most powerful man in all the world. There was no need to invent: to follow history was enough. What were Alexander and Caesar beside this fourteenth-century Tartar, the conqueror of Persia and Muscovy who laid Hindustan and Syria waste, vanquished the Ottomans, and died at last as he was flinging himself upon China at the head of two hundred thousand warriors? What cruelty did not seem mildness beside his, who strangled a hundred thousand captives before the walls of Delhi, and set up before Baghdad an obelisk built of ninety thousand severed heads? What symbol could strike more terror than the white tents and banners which stood, in sign of friendship, before a town on the first day of one of Tamerlane's sieges, the red tents and the second flags which were there on the second day, in sign of pillage, and the banners and tents, all black, which beset it on the third day, in sign of extermination?
All this was so grandiose that Marlowe was dazzled. The man capable of so prodigious a destiny, of such unbridled contempt for human life, seemed to him a superior being, a superman to whom the petty rules of morality did not apply. His Tamburlaine massacres wholesale, women and children as well as men, laughs at the blood he sheds, imprisons the vanquished Emperor Bajazet in a cage, has his chariot drawn by kings whom he insults, burns a town in honor of the funeral of his wife, Zenocrate, and all the while remains entirely admirable, outside and above human judgment. He is the despiser of men and gods. Marlowe endows him with the boundless arrogance of an emancipated virtuoso and philosopher of the Renascence. Tamburlaine is the great victor, the conqueror of the world. Therefore he is in the right.
Marlowe transfigures him, not by omitting or weakening any of his atrocities, but by exalting them. He sees in him the triumph of the will to power and thinks that nothing could be finer. To glorify his Tamburlaine he goes to the romances of chivalry in search of heroes moved by an unbridled appetite for glory, and there finds the poetry a mere exterminator would lack. Like those extravagant knights, Tamburlaine is capable of extraordinary love. He lays the earth at the feet of his Zenocrate and when death takes her from him he threatens heaven with his rage.
This play, which is simply Tamburlaine's life divided into scenes, expresses the strange ardours of a young scholar who had cut himself irrevocably adrift from all restraint. A libertine in both senses of the word, Marlowe prided himself on his paganism, his rebellion, not against the dogma of the Trinity only, but against the very spirit of Christianity. His ideal was the man freed from all morality who seeks the maximum of strength and enjoyment by way of impiety, sensuality and crime. What he could not declare to the public directly, he makes his Tamburlaine proclaim upon the stage. It was to the quest of the impossible that he himself aspired, and Tamburlaine is vowed to it at his first meeting with Zenocrate. She has come to him, all dishevelled and disconsolate, to ask him to pardon her father, the Sultan of Egypt. At this moment the man who had, an instant before, slaughtered the suppliant virgins of Damascus and had their corpses hoisted on pikes, utters the most lyrical of all appeals to absolute beauty, a cry of grief because he knows and declares that what he calls upon is beyond his reach.
The like exaltation had already been felt by Tamburlaine at the thought of being king. on the precedent of Jupiter, who ousted his father Saturn from the throne in order to reign himself, Tamburlaine regards ambition as the spontaneous act of human nature:
Still climbing after knowledge
infinite,
And
always moving as the restless spheres.
The same wild rapture is sustained through ten acts, for two dramas are consecrated to this one hero Tamburlaine, who is almost always on the stage and by himself is nearly the whole of either play. It is appalling to reflect on the task of Alleyn, the actor who created the part and who had to utter all this character's declamatory violence and repeated lyrical tirades. Nothing could be less dramatic or more monotonous: the same theme and same tone of passionate emphasis recur endlessly. It is true that, to captivate the sight, there are some scenes which haunted men's memories: Bajazet dying of hunger in his cage while a banquet is served to Tamburlaine, who tenders him a mouthful or two on the point of his sword; Bajazet, at the end of his endurance, braining himself against the iron bars which imprison him; his wife, Zabina, seized by madness when she sees him dead and taking her own life; above all that famous spectacle of Tamburlaine, whip in hand, drawn by two kings harnessed to his chariot to whom he cries:
Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia!
What,
can ye draw but twenty miles a day?
It was never necessary to parody Tamburlaine: to mention it was enough. On the whole, its spectacular extravagances are dispersed, but the declamation is continuous. That men listened to this play from end to end can be exclaimed only by supposing that the fire in the heart of the young poet caught his audience. They too must have been in a state of half-delirious exalatation. The distraught rhetoric is sustained by verse of which the unfailing sonority was as new as the subject. Marlowe began his career with a superb contempt for the popular rhymesters. He makes blank verse, hitherto without brightness or ring, thunder and echo through his play like a drum that never ceases. Other heroes, from the Herod of the mysteries downwards, had already uttered fearful blasphemies and unending rodomontade, but they had had to express them in slight stanzas or frail couplets. The verse for which men had been waiting, completely formed verse, now sounded on the stage for the first time. It was a thing too enchanting to be withstood. The wits might mock at this 'spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasyllabon,' at this 'bragging blank verse,' but, whether they would or no, they had soon, in deference to the public, themselves to beat the drum as well as they could.
The madcap was in truth a great poet whose very extravagance was justified because it expressed his nature. He produced play after play, all continuations of his first. They were perhaps less purely the expression of his temperament, but they gained by his increasing knowledge of the stage, which did not prevent them from being stil mainly lyrical and oratorical. He was, however, leading a life of intense dissipation which hardly ever left him time to produce a complete work like Tamburlaine. He became the improviser who flings a couple of powerful scenes into a botched play.
Such was the composition of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588), for which he drew on one of the most fruitful of legends, but merely built an admirable framework about scenes hardly written, and clowning which reads as though the actors had been invited to fill it in as they chose.
Once more faithful to the custom of his country's stage, Marlowe divided the German legend of Faust, as he had read it, into scenes. His forceful egoism is projected into the character of the necromancer who vows himself to the devil in return for sovereign knowledge and sovereign power, and who is thus able for twenty-four years to satisfy his appetites. They are poor and coarse enough in the legend, leading him mainly to play practical jokes on the great ones of his day, the pope and the cardinals, and to make poor wretches the butt of his magic. Marlowe takes little interest in these distractions, which he barely outlines. But when Faustus evokes the spirits of the past and obtains a vision of the Greek Helen, the poet, imagining her supreme beauty, is rapt to incomparable lyricism.
Retribution follows: Faustus has to keep his bargain with Lucifer, and tremblingly awaits death and hell. Marlowe, the atheist, alone in a Christian world, must also, at times, have felt to the full the horror of his denials and his blasphemies. He was too near faith to be indifferent. The very vehemence of his professions of impiety was a sign that his emancipation was incomplete. He shook his fist at heaven and feared at the same moment that heaven might fall and crush him. The last scenes of Faustus are among the most pathetic and most grandiose in Renaissance drama. They stand by themselves, distinct from all the rest of the drama. They are insurpassable, even by Shakespeare. Marlowe, incapable of a complete masterpiece, yet had genius to reach, here and there, the sublime beauty which had no degrees. When Goethe took the same legend for the basis of one of the chief accomplishments of modern poetry, he could not eclipse the poignant greatness of his forerunner's scenes. He, who did not know how the impious tremble, could not recapture that anguish of horror.
Marlowe never again found a plot which gave him so much scope [as Dr. Faustus], but even in The Jew of Malta (1589) he sometimes reveals his lyrical power. He was doubtless led to write this melodrama by the success of The Spanish Tragedie and other tragedies of atrocious vengeance. His Jew, Barabas, is unjustly deprived of his goods by Christians, and by an extraordinary series of crimes avenges himself on them, and also, becoming a monomaniac, on mankind in general. Obliged to use cunning to attain his object, he is Machiavellism incarnate. His crimes must have made the hair of audiences stand on end. They accumulate until, having first delivered Malta to the Turks and then the Turks to the Christians, he falls into a cauldron of boiling water into which he had schemed to throw his last enemies.
There is only one other character who counts in this play, and he is yet more terrible, the Moorish slave Ithamore who is Barabas's tool and and incarnation of the lust of extreme cruelty.
This melodrama opens grandly, and before the Jew becomes a criminal maniac he has, like Tamburlaine, dignity and greatness. Enormously rich, we see him first in his counding-house, with heaps of gold before him, a poet intoxicated by the immensity of his own wealth and the immense power which is its consequence. As he enumerates the countries whence his treasures come, his exaltation has a mystical greatness. Something of this remains to him when he hears the governor's order that half his estate and that of the other Jews shall be confiscated to pay the tribute to the Turks, and when only he of all his co-religionists keep his pride, remaining indignant and inflexible. It has often been said that Shakespeare dared to defy contemporary prejudice by attracting sympathy intermittently to Shylock. Yet Shakespeare's Shylock is as avaricious as he is cruel, and ridiculous through his avarice. The only true rehabilitation of the Jew is that which Marlowe attempted in his first act, where the haughty, intrepid Barabas, facing the hypocritical governor, is really a splendid figure. That he subsequently appears as a frenzied wretch is of little consequence. For a time the poet identified himself with the Jew, who may even, by the very enormity of his later crimes, have retained the strange sympathy of his creator.
Besides an unfinished play, The Massacre at Paris, on the massacre of St. Bartholomew, a subject which gave Marlowe his fill of horrors and attracted him by the boundless ambition of the Duke of Guise whom he made his hero, he wrote a Dido, which was finished by Nashe and in which he dramatized the fourth book of the Aeneid. This play is less sombre in colour than his earlier work, but is marred in places by the worst lapses of taste.
Marlowe was also able, before he died at the age of twenty-nine, to write the best of the tragedies on national history which preceded Shakespeare, his Edward the Second, first acted in 1592.
Whether because Marlowe's genius had developed, or because the exigencies of historical drama obliged him to self-effacement, this play has qualities which are properly dramatic and are found in none of its predecessors. The lyrical declamation is under a new restraint. The tirades are shorter and the dialogue is better distributed in speeches. The blank verse is less strained and more pliable, nearer to the tones of human voice. Progress in character-study is also evinced, over a numerous and diversified cast.
The subject is the veracious history of a king who is dominated by his favourites, first Gaveston and then young Mortimer. Mortimer reaches an understanding with Queen Isabella, who becomes his mistress. The betrayed king is cast into prison and put to death by the order of the two accomplices, who are in their turn executed by their victim's son.
Edward II stands for sentimental weakness, the royal baseness which cowardice can make bloodthirsty. In Mortimer, with his unbridled ambition, Marlowe returned to one of his favourite types, and it is Mortimer who connects the play with its predecessors.
Except the death of Faustus, nothing in Marlowe's plays is more poignantly pathetic than the scene of the murder of Edward II in Killingworth Castle by two ruffians. The end of the bad king is so miserable that he becomes an object of pity.
Edward the Second is better constructed than Marlowe's other plays, free from his habitual extravagance, less inhuman and less removed from hte normal drama of the time. But it shows the author's dramatic weakness the more clearly because of its very merits. This tragedy has not the lucidity necessary to character-drawing, to the weaving of a plot, and to the distribution of sympathy. it also lacks variety and dramatic progression. Of the plays developed to natinal history, it was, until Shakespeare, the most artistic, but a long distance separates it fromm the least of Shakespeare's historical dramas. The spirit of patriotism necessary to work of the kind does not breathe in it, possibly because Marlowe, a rebel against the religion and morality of his fellow-countrymen, did not share their political passions either. Again in this play, he shows himself in revolt against the common morality, when, with lyrical exaltation, he paints the unnatural love of Edward II for his favourite Piers Gaveston.
Marlowe added nothing to dramatic technique except that he determined the victory of blank verse. His merit is that in his short career he set the stage on fire with the flame of his passion. Less versatile than the other prominent playwrights of his day, less able than they to conceive of multitudinous feelings distinct from his own emotions, less quick than some to catch the scenic side of things, surpassed not only by the masters, but also by mediocre playwrights, as an architect of drama and constructor of supple and nimble dialogue, without any sense of the comic or sense of humour or aptitude to draw a woman, Marlowe yet possessed a supreme quality which enabled him at once to lift drama to the sphere of high literature. He was a great poet, a lyrical, personal, violently egoistical poet, who carried with him his own unique conception of man and life. In spite of his atheism, he foreshadowed Milton from afar; a little of him was in the Byron who wrote Cain, a little in Shelley. His exclusiveness produced intensity, and the English stage was in great need of intensity. Grace, wit, and fancy had been scattered on it, mingled indeed with faults of every kind, but never hitherto had it known this dash, this vehemence, animating a whole play, this rapid march, as to victory, by which drama inspires the conviction hat thus to move is to be alive.
It is, after all, a mistake to suppose that every work written for the stage must have specially dramatic qualities. To give an audience an impression of greatness, to cause them to tremble with enthusiasm and feel the rush towards an end—any end: this does as well. The fact is proved by Marlowe's work as by part of Corneille's. His immediate success and his powerful influence are unquestionable. Even when his plays had come to seem extravagant they remained popular. They first made the English public feel the pride of strength, and persuaded or deluded English drama into the belief that it equalled the sublimity of the ancients. As did the Cid, Marlowe's plays, for all their lack of patriotism, made hearts swell with a new national pride. His characters, out of scale and unnatural as they are, can dispense with probability because they have the breath of life. Their passionate declaiming co-operated with the triumph over the Armada, one year after Marlowe's first play, and the pride in distant conquests, to make English hearts drunk and giddy with triumphant strength. Together with the discoveries of the great seafarers, these figures on the stage enlarged, in men's minds, the bounds of the possible. These plays were a paean to the infinity of military power, of knowledge and of wealth. The subjects Marlowe borrowed, the heroes he moulded, were no more than his mouthpieces, voicing his exorbitant dreams. Like him they sought the infinite and like him were never sated.
9. Robert Greene (1)
(1) Complete Works, ed. Grosart, 15 vols. (1881-6); Dramatic and Poetic Works of R. Greene and G. Peele, ed. A. Dyce, 2nd ed. (1879); Plays, ed. Dickinson (Mermaid Series, 1909); James IV, by R. Greene, printed in Manly's Specimens. T. Lodge, Complete Works (except translations), ed. Gosse (Glasgow, 4 vols. 1872-82); The Wounds of Civil War, in Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. vii; Thomas Nashe, Complete Works, ed. Grosart, 6 vols. (1883-5); Works, ed. McKerrow, 4 vols., 1904-8.
The success of The Spanish Tragedie and of Tamburlaine took the usual purveyors of the popular stage by surprise. Their astonishment and anger are attested by the young English Juvenal, Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), who from the age of twenty was one of the group of writers from the universities who did the actors the great honour of working for them. Lyly and Peele, who looked especially to the court, were somewhat loosely attached to this group. Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625) was rather connected with the public stage, which he had undertaken to defend against Gosson. He wrote about 1589 a mediocre play on the struggle between Marius and Sulla called The Wounds of Civil War. As for Robert Greene (1560?-1592), he was at this time turning all his energies from the novel to drama, and with Lodge he wrote, in the old didactic manner, a sort of miracle play called A Looking-Glass for London and England.
As an effect of the triumph of Marlowe and Kyd, Lodge was, before long, deflected from the stage, and bade it a disdainful farewell in 1589, resolved
To write no more of that whence shame doth grow,But Greene persisted and was obliged to conform to the altered taste. His Alphonsus and his Orlando Furioso are extravagant and declamatory enough to recall Tamburlaine, but bear no marks of genius. It is possible to doubt whether Alphonsus is an imitation of Marlowe's famous play or a parody on it.
[Nor] tie my pen to pennie-knaves delight.
Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is another Faustus, called into being by the success of that play. Greene's conformity to the changed demand is, however, only apparent. His personal vein subsists, with its charm, and forms an essential contribution to the preparation for Shakespeare's work.
This element, which is Greene's own, is manifest in two plays which, among those attributed to him, are certainly written by hism and which seem to have been his last workss fo the stage, Friar Bacon and James the Fourth.
The title of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is misleading, for it is applicable only to the secondary part of the play, in which Greene rivals Faustus in exhibiting the tricks played upon each other by two magicians. But side by side with this mediocre comedy there is an idyllic play on a romatic theme which often is very graceful.
Edward, Prince of Wales—a prince unknown to history—comes upon Margaret, a keeper's daughter and the belle of Fressingfield, in her dairy, and falls in love with her as she hands him a cup of milk. He commissions Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, to act as his go-between and win him the girl's heart that he may make her his mistress. Lcy dischrges his trust with so much goodwill that he himself comes to love Margaret and is loved by her. At first the prince is furious and would kill the traitor, but he ends by forgiving him and uniting the lovrs. The prince thus plays a part analogous to that of Alexander in Lyly's Campaspe. Lacy, however, wishing to try his peasant love, pretends that the king is obliging him to marry a Spanish lady. Margaret, in despair, is about to become a nun when Lacy reappears, conquers her for the second time, and marries his Griselda.
In spite of its abundant use of mythological figures, this idyll has much grace and freshness. Country air blows through it. The most charming scene is undoubtedly that in which the Prince of Wales relates how he has lost his heart to the dairymaid. He is a very young man, enthusiastic and cultivated, to whom mythological reminiscences are a natural aid to the expression of love. The character of Margaret, really a pure girl in love, has no precedent in drama. Nashe, with his usual verbal excess, calls his friend 'the Homer of women,' and certainly it was Greene who, first of playwrights, and before Shakespeare, had the qualities of tenderness and grace necessary to paint a pure, loving woman.
In his psudo-historical play, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, slain at Flodden, in truth a stage-version of an Italian story told in Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (fist novella in the third decade). Greene has drawn two very charming portraits of women. His James IV marries Dorothea, daughter of the king of England, but loves Ida, daughter of the Countess of Arran. Rejected by Ida, who is too virtuous to be his mistress, he tries to compass his wife's death. She is, however, not killed, only wounded, and instead of bearing malice, she intervenes in time to save her faithless husband at the moment when ruin threatens him through the war which the English king wages to avenge his daughter.
Another charming scene is that in which Ida is tempted by a certain Ateukin, the tool of James IV. he finds her sitting with her mother in the porch of their castle, both women busy with needlework. The conversation of the mother and daughter, before he arrives, is full of the honesty and simple happiness of pious, unambitious persons. Ida answers Ateukin's offers in words both candid and noble. Virtuous as she is, his revelation of vice astonishes her:
O, how he talks, as if he should not die!
As if they kill not me, who with him fight!This pathetic scene ends in charming fancifulness, Dorothea, disguised as a man, fleeing with her dwarf Nano, and smiling through her tears at her own strange figures. She reaches a wood, tired out, and is comforted by Nano, who is as faithful but not as sarcastic as Lear's fool. We think of Rosalind arriving with the fool Touchstone in the Forest of Arden.
As if his breast be touched, I am not wounded!
As if he wailed, my joys were not confounded!
We are one heart, though rent by hate in twain,
One soul, one essence doth our weal contain:
What, then, can conquer him, that kills not me?
Greene, by his taste for the romantic and his moments of tenderness, foreshadows Shakespeare, as does Lyly by his wit, the author of Arden of Feversham by his psychological sense, Kyd by his tragic atmosphere, and Marlowe by his lyrical eloquence. Those various gifts had yet to be united in one man and one work. Shakespeare was to gather them together and to enhance them.
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