THE FIRST DRAMATIC PERIOD
It does not belong to the plan of this division of the present book to
trace the earliest beginnings of the English theatre, or those intermediate
performances by which, in the reigns of the four first Tudors, the Mystery
and Morality passed into the Interlude. Even the two famous comedies of
_Ralph Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ stand as it were only
at the threshold of our period in this chapter, and everything before them
is shut out of it. On the other hand, we can take to be our province the
whole rise, flourishing, and decadence of the extraordinary product, known
somewhat loosely as the Elizabethan drama. We shall in the present chapter
discuss the two comedies or rather farces just mentioned, and notice on the
one hand the rather amorphous production which, during the first thirty
years of Elizabeth, represented the influence of a growing taste for
personal and lively dramatic story on the somewhat arid soil of the
Morality and Interlude, and, on the other, the abortive attempt to
introduce the regular Senecan tragedy--an attempt which almost immediately
broke down and disappeared, whelmed in the abundance of chronicle-play and
melodrama. And finally we shall show how the two rival schools of the
university wits and the actor playwrights culminated, the first in Marlowe,
the second in the earlier and but indistinctly and conjecturally known work
of Shakespere. A second chapter will show us the triumph of the
untrammelled English play in tragedy and comedy, furnished by Marlowe with
the mighty line, but freed to a great extent from the bombast and the
unreal scheme which he did not shake off. Side by side with Shakespere
himself we shall have to deal with the learned sock of Jonson, the proud
full style of Chapman, the unchastened and ill-directed vigour of Marston,
the fresh and charming, if unkempt grace of Dekker, the best known and most
remarkable members of a crowd of unknown or half-known playwrights. A third
division will show us a slight gain on the whole in acting qualities, a
considerable perfecting of form and scheme, but at the same time a certain
decline in the most purely poetical merits, redeemed and illustrated by the
abundant genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Middleton, of Webster, of
Massinger, and of Ford. And the two latest of these will conduct us into
the fourth or period of decadence where, round the voluminous work and
still respectable fame of James Shirley, are grouped names like Brome,
Glapthorne, Suckling, and others, whose writing, sometimes remarkable and
even brilliant, gradually loses not only dramatic but poetical merit, till
it drops into the formless plots, the unscannable verse, the coarseness
unredeemed by passion, the horrors unlit by any tragic force, which
distinguish the last plays before the closing of the theatres, and reappear
to some extent at a period beyond ours in the drama (soon to be radically
changed in almost every possible characteristic) of the Restoration. The
field of survey is vast, and despite the abundant labour which has been
bestowed upon it during the nineteenth century, it is still in a somewhat
chaotic condition. The remarkable collection of old plays which we owe to
Mr. A. H. Bullen shows, by sample only and with no pretence of being
exhaustive, the amount of absolutely unknown matter which still exists. The
collection and editing of texts has proceeded on the most widely different
principles, and with an almost complete absence of that intelligent
partition of labour which alone can reduce chaos to order in such a case.
To give but one instance, there is actually no complete collection, though
various attempts have been made at it, which gives, with or without
sufficient editorial apparatus to supplement the canon, all the dramatic
_adespota_ which have been at one time or another attributed to Shakespere.
These at present the painful scholar can only get together in publications
abounding in duplicates, edited on the most opposite principles, and
equally troublesome either for library arrangement or for literary
reference. The editions of single authors have exhibited an equal absence
of method; one editor admitting doubtful plays or plays of part-authorship
which are easily accessible elsewhere, while another excludes those which
are difficult to be got at anywhere. It is impossible for any one who reads
literature as literature and not as a matter of idle crotchet, not to
reflect that if either of the societies which, during the nineteenth
century, have devoted themselves to the study of Shakespere and his
contemporaries, had chosen to employ their funds on it, a complete Corpus
of the drama between 1560 and 1660, edited with sufficient, but not
superfluous critical apparatus on a uniform plan, and in a decent if not a
luxurious form, might now be obtainable. Some forty or fifty volumes at the
outside on the scale of the "Globe" series, or of Messrs. Chatto's useful
reprints of Jonson, Chapman, and other dramatists, would probably contain
every play of the slightest interest, even to a voracious student--who
would then have all his material under his hand. What time, expense, and
trouble are required to obtain, and that very imperfectly, any such
advantage now, only those who have tried to do it know. Even Mr. Hazlitt's
welcome, if somewhat uncritical, reprint of Dodsley, long out of print, did
not boldly carry out its principle--though there are plans for improving
and supplementing it.
Nevertheless, if the difficulties are great so are the rewards. It has been
the deliberate opinion of many competent judges (neither unduly prejudiced
in favour of English literature nor touched with that ignorance of other
literature which is as fatal to judgment as actual prejudice) that in no
time or country has the literary interest of a short and definite period of
production in one well-defined kind approached in value the interest of the
Elizabethan drama. Other periods and other countries may produce more
remarkable work of different kinds, or more uniformly accomplished, and
more technically excellent work in the same kind. But for originality,
volume, generic resemblance of character, and individual independence of
trait, exuberance of inventive thought, and splendour of execution in
detached passages--the Elizabethan drama from Sackville to Shirley stands
alone in the history of the world. The absurd overestimate which has
sometimes been made of its individual practitioners, the hyperbole of the
language which has been used to describe them, the puerile and almost
inconceivable folly of some of their scholiasts and parasitic students,
find a certain excuse in this truth--a truth which will only be contested
by those who have not taken the very considerable trouble necessary to
master the facts, or who are precluded by a natural inability from
savouring the _gout du terroir_ of this abundant and intoxicating wine.
There are those who say that nobody but an enthusiast or a self-deceiver
can read with real relish any Elizabethan dramatist but Shakespere, and
there are those who would have it that the incommunicable and
uncommunicated charm of Shakespere is to be found in Nabbes and Davenport,
in Glapthorne and Chettle. They are equally wrong, but the second class are
at any rate in a more saving way of wrongness. Where Shakespere stands
alone is not so much in his actual faculty of poetry as in his command of
that faculty. Of the others, some, like Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, had
the art without the power; others, like Chapman, Dekker, Webster, had
flashes of the power without the art. But there is something in the whole
crew, jovial or saturnine, which is found nowhere else, and which, whether
in full splendour as in Shakespere, or in occasional glimmers as in
Tourneur or Rowley, is found in all, save those mere imitators and
hangers-on who are peculiar to no period.
This remarkable quality, however, does not show itself in the dramatic work
of our present period until quite the close of it. It is true that the
period opens (according to the traditional estimate which has not been much
altered by recent studies) with three plays of very considerable character,
and of no inconsiderable merit--the two comedies already named and the
tragedy of _Gorboduc_, otherwise _Ferrex and Porrex_. _Ralph Roister
Doister_ was licensed and is thought to have been printed in 1566, but it
may have been acted at Eton by 1541, and the whole cast of the metre,
language, and _scenario_, is of a colour older than Elizabeth's reign. It
may be at least attributed to the middle of the century, and is the work of
Nicholas Udall, a schoolmaster who has left at two great schools a repute
for indulgence in the older methods of instruction not inferior to Busby's
or Keate's. _Ralph Roister Doister_, though a fanciful estimate may see a
little cruelty of another kind in it, is of no austere or pedagogic
character. The author has borrowed not a little from the classical
comedy--Plautine or even Aristophanic rather than Terentian--to strengthen
and refine the domestic interlude or farce; and the result is certainly
amusing enough. The plot turns on the courtship of Dame Christian Custance
[Constance], a widow of repute and wealth as well as beauty, by the gull
and coxcomb, _Ralph Roister Doister_, whose suit is at once egged on and
privately crossed by the mischievous Matthew Merrygreek, who plays not only
parasite but rook to the hero. Although Custance has not the slightest
intention of accepting Ralph, and at last resorts to actual violence,
assisted by her maids, to get rid of him and his followers, the affair
nearly breeds a serious quarrel between herself and her plighted lover,
Gawin Goodluck; but all ends merrily. The metre is the somewhat unformed
doggerel couplet of twelve syllables or thereabouts, with a strong caesura
in the middle, and is varied and terminated by songs from Custance's maids
and others. Indeed the chief charm of the piece is the genuine and unforced
merriment which pervades it. Although Merrygreek's practices on Ralph's
silliness sometimes tend a little to tediousness, the action on the whole
moves trippingly enough, and despite the strong flavour of the "stock part"
in the characters they have considerable individuality. The play is,
moreover, as a whole remarkably free from coarseness, and there is no
difficulty in finding an illustrative extract.
_C. Custance loquitur._
"O Lord! how necessary it is now o' days,
That each body live uprightly all manner ways;
For let never so little a gap be open,
And be sure of this, the worst shall be spoken.
How innocent stand I in this frame o' thought,
And yet see what mistrust towards me it hath wrought.
But thou, Lord, knowest all folks' thoughts and eke intents;
And thou art the deliverer of all innocents.
Thou didst keep the advoutress,[19] that she might be amended;
Much more then keep, Lord,[20] that never sin intended.
Thou didst keep Susanna, wrongfully accused,
And no less dost thou see, Lord, how I am now abused.
Thou didst keep Hester, when she should have died,
Keep also, good Lord, that my truth may be tried.
Yet, if Gawin Goodluck with Tristram Trusty speak,
I trust of ill-report the force shall be but weak;
And lo! yond they come talking sadly together:
I will abide, and not shrink for their coming hither."
[19] Adulteress.
[20] Understand "me."
Freedom from coarseness is more than can be predicated of the still more
famous _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, attributed to, and all but certainly known
to be, by John Still, afterwards bishop. The authorship, indeed, is not
quite certain; and the curious reference in Martin Marprelate's _Epistle_
(ed. Arber, p. 11) to "this trifle" as "shewing the author to have had some
wit and invention in him" only disputes the claim of Dr. Bridges to those
qualities, and does not make any suggestion as to the identity of the more
favoured author. Still was the son of a Lincolnshire gentleman, is supposed
to have been born about 1543, was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge,
and after a course of preferment through the positions of parish priest in
London and at Hadleigh, Dean of Bocking, Canon of Westminster, Master
successively of St. John's and Trinity, and Vice-Chancellor of his own
University, was at the beginning of 1593 made Bishop of Bath and Wells, an
office which he held for fifteen years. His play (taking it as his) was his
only work of the kind, and was the first English play acted at either
university, though later he himself had to protest officially against the
use of the vernacular in a piece performed before the Queen. _Gammer
Gurton's Needle_, as has been said, is, despite the subsequent history of
its author and the academic character of its appearance, of a much lower
order of comedy than _Ralph Roister Doister_, though it is also more
spontaneous, less imitative, and, in short, more original. The best thing
about it is the magnificent drinking song, "Back and Side go Bare, go
Bare," one of the most spirited and genuine of all bacchanalian lyrics; but
the credit of this has sometimes been denied to Still. The metre of the
play itself is very similar to that of _Ralph Roister Doister_, though the
long swinging couplet has a tendency to lengthen itself still further, to
the value of fourteen or even sixteen syllables, the central caesura being
always well marked, as may be seen in the following:--
_Diccon._ "Here will the sport begin, if these two once may meet,
Their cheer, [I] durst lay money, will prove scarcely sweet.
My gammer sure intends to be upon her bones,
With staves, or with clubs, or else with cobble stones.
Dame Chat on the other side, if she be far behind,
I am right far deceived, she is given to it of kind.
He that may tarry by it a while, and that but short,
I warrant him trust to it, he shall see all the sport.
Into the town will I, my friends to visit there,
And hither straight again to see the end of this gear.
In the meantime, fellows, pipe up your fiddles; I say, take
them,
And let your friends hear such mirth as ye can make them."
As for the story, it is of the simplest, turning merely on the losing of
her needle by Gammer Gurton as she was mending her man Hodge's breeches, on
the search for it by the household, on the tricks by which Diccon the
Bedlam (the clown or "vice" of the piece) induces a quarrel between Gammer
and her neighbours, and on the final finding of the needle in the exact
place on which Gammer Gurton's industry had been employed. The action is
even better sustained and livelier than in Udall's play, and the swinging
couplets canter along very cheerfully with great freedom and fluency of
language. Unfortunately this language, whether in order to raise a laugh or
to be in strict character with the personages, is anything but choice.
There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kind
generally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language of
common folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in the
Rabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a little
less of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is,
it is a capital example of farce, just as _Ralph Roister Doister_ is of a
rather rudimentary kind of regular comedy.
The strangeness of the contrast which these two plays offer when compared
with the third is peculiar in English literature. Elsewhere it is common
enough. That tragedy should be stately, decorous, and on the whole somewhat
uneventful as far as visible action goes,--comedy bustling, crammed with
incident, and quite regardless of decorum,--might seem a law of nature to
the audience of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Plautus and Pacuvius, even to
the audience of Moliere and Racine. But the vast and final change, the
inception of which we have here to record, has made tragedy, tragi-comedy,
comedy, and farce pass into one another so gradually, and with so little of
a break in the English mind, that _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ and _Gorboduc_,
though they were presented to the same audiences, and in all probability
written within ten years of each other at furthest, seem to belong to
different worlds of literature and society. The two comedies just noticed
are framed upon no literary model at all as wholes, but simply upon the
model of human nature. _Gorboduc_ is framed, though not with absolute
fidelity, on the model of the tragedies of Seneca, which had, during the
early years of the sixteenth century, mastered the attention of the
literary playwrights of Italy, France, and even to some extent Germany, and
which determined for three hundred years, at any rate, the form of the
tragedy of France. This model--which may be briefly described as the model
of Greek tragedy, still further pruned of action, with the choruses
retained, but estranged from their old close connection with the dialogue,
and reduced to the level of elaborate lyrical moralisings, and with the
tendency to such moralising in dialogue as well as in chorus largely
increased--was introduced in England with hardly less advantage than
abroad. Sackville, one of the reputed authors of _Gorboduc_, was far
superior to Jodelle, both as poet and as versifier, and the existence of
the two universities in England gave a support, to which nothing in France
corresponded, to the influence of learned writers. Indeed, till nearly the
close of our present period, the universities had the practical control of
literary production. But the genius of the English nation would have none
of Seneca. It refused him when he was first introduced by Sackville and
others; it refused him once more when Daniel and the set of the Countess of
Pembroke again attempted to introduce him; it refused him again and again
in the later seventeenth century, when imitation, first of his earlier
French followers, and then of the greater tragedy of Corneille and Racine
(which was only the Senecan model strengthened and improved) was repeatedly
tried by fine gentlemen and by needy hacks, by devotees of the unities, and
by devotees of court fashion. I hardly know any other instance in literary
history of a similar resistance offered to a similar tide of literary
influence in Europe. We have little room here for fanciful comparisons, yet
might the dramatic events of 1560-1590 in England well seem a literary
battle of Tours, in which an English Charles Martel stemmed and turned back
for ever and ever the hitherto resistless march of a literary invader and
spread of a literary heresy.
To the modern reader _Gorboduc_ (part of which is attributed to Thomas
Norton, and which was acted on 18th January 1561, published piratically in
1565, and authoritatively under the title of _Ferrex and Porrex_ in 1571?)
is scarcely inviting, but that is not a criterion of its attractiveness to
its own contemporaries. Perhaps the most curious thing about it is the
violence done to the Horatian and Senecan theories, or rather the _naif_
outwitting of those theories, by an arrangement of dumb shows between the
acts to satisfy the hunger for real action which the model refused to
countenance. All the rest is of the most painful regularity: and the
scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a
counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with
similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that
Gorboduc was not provided with two queens--a good and a bad. Such action as
there is lies wholly in the mouths of messengers, and the speeches are of
excessive length. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the
modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in
the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there, there
are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the "Induction"; but
for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin
afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of
cadence which is inexpressibly tedious, as will be seen in the following:--
(_Videna soliloquises._)
"Why should I live and linger forth my time
In longer life to double my distress?
O me, most woeful wight, whom no mishap
Long ere this day could have bereaved hence.
Might not these hands, by fortune or by fate,
Have pierc'd this breast, and life with iron reft?
Or in this palace here where I so long
Have spent my days, could not that happy hour
Once, once have happ'd in which these hugy frames
With death by fall might have oppressed me?
Or should not this most hard and cruel soil,
So oft where I have press'd my wretched steps,
Some time had ruth of mine accursed life,
To rend in twain and swallow me therein?
So had my bones possessed now in peace
Their happy grave within the closed ground,
And greedy worms had gnawn this pined heart
Without my feeling pain: so should not now
This living breast remain the ruthful tomb
Wherein my heart yielden to death is graved;
Nor dreary thoughts, with pangs of pining grief,
My doleful mind had not afflicted thus."
There is no blame due to Sackville in that he did not invent what no single
man invented, and what even in England, where only it has been originally
attained, took some thirty years of the genius of the nation working
through innumerable individual tentatives and failures to bring about. But
he did not invent it; he did not even make any attempt to invent it; and
had this first English tragedy been generally followed, we should have been
for an unknown period in the land of bondage, in the classical dungeon
which so long retained the writers of a nation, certainly not, at the time
of the appearance of _Gorboduc_, of less literary promise than our own.
In describing these tentatives and failures it will be impossible here to
enter into any lengthened criticism of particular works. We shall have to
content ourselves with a description of the general lines and groups, which
may be said to be four in number: (1) The few unimportant and failing
followers of Sackville; (2) The miscellaneous farce-and-interlude-writers,
who, incult and formless as their work was, at least maintained the
literary tradition; (3) The important and most interesting group of
"university wits" who, with Marlowe at their head, made the blank verse
line for dramatic purposes, dismissed, cultivated as they were, the
cultivation of classical models, and gave English tragedy its Magna Charta
of freedom and submission to the restrictions of actual life only, but who
failed, from this cause or that, to achieve perfect life-likeness; and (4)
The actor-playwrights who, rising from very humble beginnings, but
possessing in their fellow Shakespere a champion unparalleled in ancient
and modern times, borrowed the improvements of the University Wits, added
their own stage knowledge, and with Shakespere's aid achieved the master
drama of the world.
A very few lines will suffice for the first group, who are the merest
literary curiosities. Indeed the actual number of Senecan dramas in English
is very small indeed, though there may possibly be some undiscovered in MS.
The _Tancred and Gismund_ of Robert Wilmot (acted 1568, and of some merit),
the _Cornelia_ of Garnier, translated by Kyd and printed in 1594, the
curious play called _The Misfortunes of Arthur_, acted before the Queen in
the Armada year, with "triumphs" partly devised by Francis Bacon, the two
plays of Samuel Daniel, and a very few others, complete the list; indeed
_Cornelia_, _Cleopatra_, and _Philotas_ are almost the only three that keep
really close to the model. At a time of such unbounded respect for the
classics, and when Latin plays of the same stamp were constantly acted at
the universities, such a paucity of examples in English can only testify to
a strong national distaste--an instinctive feeling that this would never
do.
The nondescript followings of morality and farce are infinitely more
numerous, and perhaps intrinsically more interesting; but they can hardly
be said to be, except in bulk, of much greater importance. Their real
interest to the reader as he turns them over in the first seven or eight
volumes of Dodsley, or in the rarer single editions where they occur, is
again an interest of curiosity--a desire to trace the various shiftings and
turnings of the mighty but unorganised genius which was soon to find its
way. Next to the difficulty of inventing a conveniently plastic form seems
to have been the difficulty of inventing a suitable verse. For some time
the swinging or lumbering doggerel in which a tolerably good rhyme is
reached by a kind of scramble through four or five feet, which are most
like a very shuffling anapaest--the verse which appears in the comedies of
Udall and Still--held its ground. We have it in the morality of the _New
Custom_, printed in 1573, but no doubt written earlier, in the Interlude
of _The Trial of Treasure_, in the farcical comedy of _Like Will to Like_,
a coarse but lively piece, by Ulpian Fulwell (1568). In the very curious
tragi-comedy of _Cambyses_ this doggerel appears partly, but is alternated
with the less lawless but scarcely more suitable "fourteener" (divided or
not as usual, according to printer's exigencies) which, as was shown in the
last chapter, for a time almost monopolised the attention of English poets.
The same mixture appears to some extent, though the doggerel occupies the
main text, in the _Damon and Pythias_ of Richard Edwards, the editor of
_The Paradise of Dainty Devices_. In _Appius and Virginia_ (a decidedly
interesting play) the fourteener on the contrary is the staple verse, the
doggerel being only occasional. Something the same may be said of a very
late morality, _The Conflict of Conscience_. Both doggerel and fourteeners
appear in the quaint productions called _Three Ladies of London_, etc.; but
by this time the decasyllable began to appear with them and to edge them
out. They died hard, however, thoroughly ill-fitted as they were for
dramatic use, and, as readers of _Love's Labour Lost_ know, survived even
in the early plays of Shakespere. Nor were the characters and minor details
generally of this group less disorderly and inadequate than the general
schemes or the versification. Here we have the abstractions of the old
Morality; there the farcical gossip of the _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ class;
elsewhere the pale and dignified personages of _Gorboduc_: all three being
often jumbled together all in one play. In the lighter parts there are
sometimes fair touches of low comedy; in the graver occasionally, though
much more rarely, a touching or dignified phrase or two. But the plays as
wholes are like Ovid's first-fruits of the deluge--nondescripts incapable
of life, and good for no useful or ornamental purpose.
It is at this moment that the cleavage takes place. And when I say "this
moment," I am perfectly conscious that the exact moment in dates and years
cannot be defined. Not a little harm has been done to the history of
English literature by the confusion of times in which some of its
historians have pleased themselves. But even greater harm might be done if
one were to insist on an exact chronology for the efflorescence of the
really poetical era of Elizabethan literature, if the blossoming of the
aloe were to be tied down to hour and day. All that we can say is that in
certain publications, in certain passages even of the same publication, we
find the old respectable plodding, the old blind tentative experiment in
poetry and drama: and then without warning--without, as it seems, any
possible opportunity of distinguishing chronologically--we find the
unmistakable marks of the new wine, of the unapproachable poetry proper,
which all criticism, all rationalisation can only indicate and not account
for. We have hardly left (if we take their counterparts later we have not
left) the wooden verse of _Gorboduc_, the childish rusticity of _Like Will
to Like_, when suddenly we stumble on the bower--
"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams"--
of George Peele, on the myriad graceful fancies of Lyly, on the exquisite
snatches of Greene, on the verses, to this day the high-water mark of
poetry, in which Marlowe speaks of the inexpressible beauty which is the
object and the despair of the poet. This is wonderful enough. But what is
more wonderful is, that these lightning flashes are as evanescent as
lightning. Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe himself, in probably the very next
passages, certainly in passages not very remote, tell us that this is all
matter of chance, that they are all capable of sinking below the level of
Sackville at his even conceivably worst, close to the level of Edwards, and
the various anonymous or half-anonymous writers of the dramatic
miscellanies just noted. And then beyond these unequal wits arises the
figure of Shakespere; and the greatest work of all literature swims slowly
into our ken. There has been as yet no history of this unique phenomenon
worthy of it: I have not the least pretension to supply one that shall be
worthy. But at least the uniqueness of it shall here have due celebration.
The age of Pericles, the age of Augustus, the age of Dante, had no such
curious ushering-in unless time has dealt exceptional injustice to the
forerunners of all of them. We do not, in the period which comes nearest in
time and nature to this, see anything of the same kind in the middle space
between Villon and Ronsard, between Agrippa d'Aubigne and Corneille. Here
if anywhere is the concentrated spirit of a nation, the thrice-decocted
blood of a people, forcing itself into literary expression through mediums
more and more worthy of it. If ever the historical method was justified (as
it always is), now is its greatest justification as we watch the gradual
improvements, the decade-by-decade, almost year-by-year acquisitions, which
lead from Sackville to Shakespere.
The rising sap showed itself in two very different ways, in two branches of
the national tree. In the first place, we have the group of University
Wits, the strenuous if not always wise band of professed men of letters, at
the head of whom are Lyly, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and
probably (for his connection with the universities is not certainly known)
Kyd. In the second, we have the irregular band of outsiders, players and
others, who felt themselves forced into literary and principally dramatic
composition, who boast Shakespere as their chief, and who can claim as
seconds to him not merely the imperfect talents of Chettle, Munday, and
others whom we may mention in this chapter, but many of the perfected
ornaments of a later time.
It may be accident or it may not, but the beginning of this period is
certainly due to the "university wits." Lyly stands a good deal apart from
them personally, despite his close literary connection. We have no kind of
evidence which even shows that he was personally acquainted with any one of
the others. Of Kyd, till Mr. Boas's recent researches, we knew next to
nothing, and we still know very little save that he was at Merchant
Taylors' School and was busy with plays famous in their day. But the other
five were closely connected in life, and in their deaths they were hardly
divided. Lodge only of the five seems to have freed himself, partly in
virtue of a regular profession, and partly in consequence of his adherence
to the Roman faith, from the Bohemianism which has tempted men of letters
at all times, and which was especially dangerous in a time of such
unlimited adventure, such loose public morals, and such unco-ordinated
society as the Elizabethan era. Whatever details we have of their lives
(and they are mostly very meagre and uncertain) convey the idea of times
out of joint or not yet in joint. The atheism of Marlowe rests on no proof
whatever, though it has got him friends in this later time. I am myself by
no means sure that Greene's supposed debauchery is not, to a great extent,
"copy." The majority of the too celebrated "jests" attributed to George
Peele are directly traceable to Villon's _Repues Franches_ and similar
compilations, and have a suspiciously mythical and traditional air to the
student of literary history. There is something a little more trustworthily
autobiographical about Nash. But on the whole, though we need not doubt
that these ancestors of all modern Englishmen who live by the gray goose
quill tasted the inconveniences of the profession, especially at a time
when it was barely constituted even as a vocation or employment (to quote
the Income Tax Papers), we must carefully avoid taking too gloomy a view of
their life. It was usually short, it was probably merry, but we know very
little else about it. The chief direct documents, the remarkable pamphlets
which some of them have left, will be dealt with hereafter. Here we are
busied only with their dates and their dramatic work, which was in no case
(except perhaps in that of Kyd) their sole known work, but which in every
case except those of Nash and perhaps Greene was their most remarkable.
In noticing _Euphues_ an account has already been given of Lyly's life, or
rather of the very scanty particulars which are known of it. His plays date
considerably later than _Euphues_. But they all bear the character of the
courtier about them; and both in this characteristic and in the absence of
any details in the gossipping literature of the time to connect him with
the Bohemian society of the playhouse, the distinction which separates Lyly
from the group of "university wits" is noteworthy. He lost as well as
gained by the separation. All his plays were acted "by the children of
Paul's before her Majesty," and not by the usual companies before Dick,
Tom, and Harry. The exact date and order of their writing is very
uncertain, and in one case at least, that of _The Woman in the Moon_, we
know that the order was exactly reversed in publication: this being the
last printed in Lyly's lifetime, and expressly described as the first
written. His other dramatic works are _Campaspe_, _Sappho and Phaon_,
_Endymion_, _Galathea_, _Midas_, _Mother Bombie_, and _Love's
Metamorphosis_; another, _The Maid's Metamorphosis_, which has been
attributed to him, is in all probability not his.
The peculiar circumstances of the production of Lyly's plays, and the
strong or at any rate decided individuality of the author, keep them in a
division almost to themselves. The mythological or pastoral character of
their subject in most cases might not of itself have prevented their
marking an advance in the dramatic composition of English playwrights. _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_ and much other work of Shakespere's show how far
from necessary it is that theme, or class of subject, should affect merit
of presentment. But Lyly's work generally has more of the masque than the
play. It sometimes includes charming lyrics, such as the famous _Campaspe_
song and others. But most of it is in prose, and it gave beyond
doubt--though Gascoigne had, as we have seen, set the example in drama--no
small impetus to the use and perfectioning of that medium. For Lyly's
dramatic prose, though sometimes showing the same faults, is often better
than _Euphues_, as here:--
_End._ "O fair Cynthia, why do others term thee unconstant, whom
I have ever found immovable? Injurious time, corrupt manners,
unkind men, who finding a constancy not to be matched in my sweet
mistress, have christened her with the name of wavering, waxing,
and waning. Is she inconstant that keepeth a settled course,
which since her first creation altereth not one minute in her
moving? There is nothing thought more admirable, or commendable
in the sea, than the ebbing and flowing; and shall the moon, from
whom the sea taketh this virtue, be accounted fickle for
increasing and decreasing? Flowers in their buds are nothing
worth till they be blown; nor blossoms accounted till they be
ripe fruit; and shall we then say they be changeable, for that
they grow from seeds to leaves, from leaves to buds, from buds to
their perfection? then, why be not twigs that become trees,
children that become men, and mornings that grow to evenings,
termed wavering, for that they continue not at one stay? Ay, but
Cynthia being in her fulness decayeth, as not delighting in her
greatest beauty, or withering when she should be most honoured.
When malice cannot object anything, folly will; making that a
vice which is the greatest virtue. What thing (my mistress
excepted) being in the pride of her beauty, and latter minute of
her age, that waxeth young again? Tell me, Eumenides, what is he
that having a mistress of ripe years, and infinite virtues, great
honours, and unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might
grow tender again? getting youth by years, and never-decaying
beauty by time; whose fair face, neither the summer's blaze can
scorch, nor winter's blast chap, nor the numbering of years breed
altering of colours. Such is my sweet Cynthia, whom time cannot
touch, because she is divine, nor will offend because she is
delicate. O Cynthia, if thou shouldest always continue at thy
fulness, both gods and men would conspire to ravish thee. But
thou, to abate the pride of our affections, dost detract from thy
perfections; thinking it sufficient if once in a month we enjoy a
glimpse of thy majesty; and then, to increase our griefs, thou
dost decrease thy gleams; coming out of thy royal robes,
wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes, down into thy swath clouts,
beguiling our eyes; and then----"
In these plays there are excellent phrases and even striking scenes. But
they are not in the true sense dramatic, and are constantly spoilt by
Lyly's strange weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks in
antitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of
imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in _Euphues_
itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the
general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other
men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone,
of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only
problematically. He was an Oxford man, and most of them were of Cambridge;
he was a courtier; if a badly-paid one, and they all lived by their wits;
and, if we may judge by the very few documents remaining, he was not
inclined to be hail-fellow-well-met with anybody, while they were all born
Bohemians. Yet none of them had a greater influence on Shakespere than
Lyly, though it was anything but a beneficial influence, and for this as
well as for the originality of his production he deserves notice, even had
the intrinsic merit of his work been less than it is. But, in fact, it is
very great, being almost a typical production of talent helped by
knowledge, but not mastered by positive genius, or directed in its way by
the precedent work of others.
In the work of the University Wits proper--Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge,
Nash, and Kyd, the last of whom, it must again be said, is not certainly
known to have belonged to either university, though the probabilities are
all in favour of that hypothesis--a very different kind of work is found.
It is always faulty, as a whole, for even _Dr. Faustus_ and _Edward II._,
despite their magnificent poetry and the vast capabilities of their form,
could only be called good plays or good compositions as any kind of whole
by a critic who had entirely lost the sense of proportion. But in the whole
group, and especially in the dramatic work of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and
Kyd (for that of Lodge and Nash is small in amount and comparatively
unimportant in manner), the presence, the throes of a new dramatic style
are evident. Faults and beauties are more or less common to the whole
quartet. In all we find the many-sided activity of the Shakesperian drama
as it was to be, sprawling and struggling in a kind of swaddling clothes of
which it cannot get rid, and which hamper and cripple its movements. In all
there is present a most extraordinary and unique rant and bombast of
expression which reminds one of the shrieks and yells of a band of healthy
boys just let out to play. The passages which (thanks chiefly to Pistol's
incomparable quotations and parodies of them) are known to every one, the
"Pampered jades of Asia," the "Have we not Hiren here," the "Feed and grow
fat, my fair Callipolis," the other quips and cranks of mine ancient are
scattered broadcast in their originals, and are evidently meant quite
seriously throughout the work of these poets. Side by side with this mania
for bombast is another mania, much more clearly traceable to education and
associations, but specially odd in connection with what has just been
noticed. This is the foible of classical allusion. The heathen gods and
goddesses, the localities of Greek and Roman poetry, even the more
out-of-the-way commonplaces of classical literature, are put in the mouths
of all the characters without the remotest attempt to consider propriety or
relevance. Even in still lesser peculiarities the blemishes are uniform and
constant--such as the curious and childish habit of making speakers speak
of themselves in the third person, and by their names, instead of using "I"
and "me." And on the other hand, the merits, though less evenly distributed
in degree, are equally constant in kind. In Kyd, in Greene still more, in
Peele more still, in Marlowe most of all, phrases and passages of blinding
and dazzling poetry flash out of the midst of the bombast and the tedium.
Many of these are known, by the hundred books of extract which have
followed Lamb's _Specimens_, to all readers. Such, for instance, is the
"See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament"
of Marlowe, and his even more magnificent passage beginning
"If all the pens that ever poets held;"
such Peele's exquisite bower,
"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams,"
which is, with all respect to Charles Lamb, to be paralleled by a score of
other jewels from the reckless work of "George Pyeboard": such Greene's
"Why thinks King Henry's son that Margaret's love
Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time?"
such even Kyd's
"There is a path upon your left hand side
That leadeth from a guilty conscience
Unto a forest of distrust and fear."
But the whole point of the thing is that these flashes, which are not to be
found at all before the date of this university school, are to be found
constantly in its productions, and that, amorphous, inartistic, incomplete
as those productions are, they still show _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_ in embryo. Whereas the greatest expert in literary embryology may
read _Gorboduc_ and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ through without discerning
the slightest signs of what was coming.
Nash and Lodge are so little dramatists (the chief, if not only play of the
former being the shapeless and rather dull comedy, _Will Summer's
Testament_, relieved only by some lyrics of merit which are probably not
Nash's, while Lodge's _Marius and Sylla_, while it wants the extravagance,
wants also the beauty of its author's companions' work), that what has to
be said about them will be better said later in dealing with their other
books. Greene's prose pieces and his occasional poems are, no doubt, better
than his drama, but the latter is considerable, and was probably his
earliest work. Kyd has left nothing, and Peele little, but drama; while
beautiful as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ is, I do not quite understand how
any one can prefer it to the faultier but far more original dramas of its
author. We shall therefore deal with these four individually here.
The eldest of the four was George Peele, variously described as a Londoner
and a Devonshire man, who was probably born about 1558. He was educated at
Christ's Hospital (of which his father was "clerk") and at Broadgates Hall,
now Pembroke College, Oxford, and had some credit in the university as an
arranger of pageants, etc. He is supposed to have left Oxford for London
about 1581, and had the credit of living a Bohemian, not to say
disreputable, life for about seventeen years; his death in 1597(?) being
not more creditable than his life. But even the scandals about Peele are
much more shadowy than those about Marlowe and Greene. His dramatic work
consists of some half-dozen plays, the earliest of which is _The
Arraignment of Paris_, 1581(?), one of the most elaborate and barefaced of
the many contemporary flatteries of Elizabeth, but containing some
exquisite verse. In the same way Peele has been accused of having in
_Edward I._ adopted or perhaps even invented the basest and most groundless
scandals against the noble and stainless memory of Eleanor of Castile;
while in his _Battle of Alcazar_ he certainly gratifies to the utmost the
popular anti-Spanish and anti-Popish feeling. So angry have critics been
with Peele's outrage on Eleanor, that some of them have declared that none
but he could have been guilty of the not dissimilar slur cast on Joan of
Arc's character in _Henry VI._, the three parts of which it has been the
good pleasure of Shakesperian commentators to cut and carve between the
University Wits _ad libitum_. I cannot myself help thinking that all this
has arisen very much from the idea of Peele's vagabondism given by the
untrustworthy "Jests." The slander on Queen Eleanor was pretty certainly
supplied to him by an older ballad. There is little or nothing else in
Peele's undoubted writings which is at all discreditable. His miscellaneous
poems show a man by no means given to low company or low thoughts, and one
gifted with the truest poetic vein; while his dramas, besides exhibiting a
greater command over blank verse than any of his predecessors and than any
except Marlowe of his contemporaries can claim, are full of charming
passages. _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which has been denied to him--an
interesting play on the rare basis of the old romance--is written not in
blank verse but in the fourteener. The _Old Wives' Tale_ pretty certainly
furnished Milton with the subject of Comus, and this is its chief merit.
_Edward I._ and _The Battle of Alcazar_, but especially the latter, contain
abundance of the hectoring rant which has been marked as one of the
characteristics of the school, and which is half-excused by the sparks of
valour that often break from its smoke and clatter. But Peele would
undoubtedly stand higher, though he might not be so interesting a literary
figure, if we had nothing of his save _The Arraignment of Paris_ and _David
and Bethsabe_. _The Arraignment_ (written in various metres, but mainly in
a musical and varied heroic couplet), is partly a pastoral, partly a
masque, and wholly a Court play. It thus comes nearest to Lyly, but is
altogether a more dramatic, livelier, and less conceited performance than
anything by the author of _Euphues_. As for _David and Bethsabe_, it is
crammed with beauties, and Lamb's curiously faint praise of it has always
been a puzzle to me. As Marlowe's are the mightiest, so are Peele's the
softest, lines in the drama before Shakespere; while the spirit and humour,
which the author also had in plenty, save his work from the merely cloying
sweetness of some contemporary writers. Two of his interposed or occasional
lyrics will be given later: a blank verse passage may find room here:--
_Bethsabe._ "Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes
That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love,
And stroke my bosom with thy silken fan:
This shade, sun-proof,[21] is yet no proof for thee;
Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring,
And purer than the substance of the same,
Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce:
Thou, and thy sister, soft and sacred Air,
Goddess of life, and governess of health,
Keep every fountain fresh and arbour sweet;
No brazen gate her passage can repulse,
Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath:
Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes,
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes,
To play the wanton with us through the leaves."
[21] Cf. Milton's "elms star-proof" in the _Arcades_. Milton evidently knew
Peele well.
Robert Greene, probably, if not certainly, the next in age of the group to
Peele, was born in 1560, the son of apparently well-to-do parents at
Norwich, and was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he took his
Master's degree in 1553. He was subsequently incorporated at Oxford, and
being by no means ill-inclined to make the most of himself, sometimes took
the style of a member "Utriusque Academiae." After leaving the university
he seems to have made a long tour on the Continent, not (according to his
own account) at all to the advantage of his morals or means. He is said to
have actually taken orders, and held a living for some short time, while he
perhaps also studied if he did not practise medicine. He married a lady of
virtue and some fortune, but soon despoiled and deserted her, and for the
last six years of his life never saw her. At last in 1592, aged only two
and thirty,--but after about ten years it would seem of reckless living and
hasty literary production,--he died (of a disease caused or aggravated by a
debauch on pickled herrings and Rhenish) so miserably poor that he had to
trust to his injured wife's forgiveness for payment of the money to the
extent of which a charitable landlord and landlady had trusted him. The
facts of this lamentable end may have been spitefully distorted by Gabriel
Harvey in his quarrel with Nash; but there is little reason to doubt that
the received story is in the main correct. Of the remarkable prose
pamphlets which form the bulk of Greene's work we speak elsewhere, as also
of the pretty songs (considerably exceeding in poetical merit anything to
be found in the body of his plays) with which both pamphlets and plays are
diversified. His actual dramatic production is not inconsiderable: a
working-up of the _Orlando Furioso_; _A Looking Glass for London and
England_ (Nineveh) with Lodge; _James IV._ (of Scotland), a wildly
unhistorical romance; _Alphonsus, King of Arragon_; and perhaps _The Pinner
of Wakefield_, which deals with his own part namesake George-a-Greene; not
impossibly also the pseudo-Shakesperian _Fair Em_. His best play without
doubt is _The History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, in which, after a
favourite fashion of the time, he mingles a certain amount of history, or,
at least, a certain number of historical personages, with a plentiful dose
of the supernatural and of horseplay, and with a very graceful and
prettily-handled love story. With a few touches from the master's hand,
Margaret, the fair maid of Fressingfield, might serve as handmaid to
Shakespere's women, and is certainly by far the most human heroine
produced by any of Greene's own group. There is less rant in Greene (though
there is still plenty of it) than in any of his friends, and his fancy for
soft female characters, loving, and yet virtuous, appears frequently. But
his power is ill-sustained, as the following extract will show:--
_Margaret._ "Ah, father, when the harmony of heaven
Soundeth the measures of a lively faith,
The vain illusions of this flattering world
Seem odious to the thoughts of Margaret.
I loved once,--Lord Lacy was my love;
And now I hate myself for that I loved,
And doted more on him than on my God,--
For this I scourge myself with sharp repents.
But now the touch of such aspiring sins
Tells me all love is lust but love of heaven;
That beauty used for love is vanity:
The world contains naught but alluring baits,
Pride, flattery [ ], and inconstant thoughts.
To shun the pricks of death I leave the world,
And vow to meditate on heavenly bliss,
To live in Framlingham a holy nun,
Holy and pure in conscience and in deed;
And for to wish all maids to learn of me
To seek heaven's joy before earth's vanity."
We do not know anything of Thomas Kyd's, except _The Spanish Tragedy_,
which is a second part of an extremely popular play (sometimes attributed
to Kyd himself, but probably earlier) called _Jeronimo_, and the
translation of _Cornelia_, though others are doubtfully attributed. The
well-known epithet of Jonson, "sporting" Kyd, seems to have been either a
mere play on the poet's name, or else _a lucus a non lucendo_; for both
_Jeronimo_ and its sequel are in the ghastliest and bloodiest vein of
tragedy, and _Cornelia_ is a model of stately dullness. The two "Jeronimo"
or "Hieronimo" plays were, as has been said, extremely popular, and it is
positively known that Jonson himself, and probably others, were employed
from time to time to freshen them up; with the consequence that the exact
authorship of particular passages is somewhat problematical. Both plays,
however, display, nearly in perfection, the rant, not always quite
ridiculous, but always extravagant, from which Shakespere rescued the
stage; though, as the following extract will show, this rant is by no means
always, or indeed often, smoke without fire:--
"O! forbear,
For other talk for us far fitter were.
But if you be importunate to know
The way to him, and where to find him out,
Then list to me, and I'll resolve your doubt.
There is a path upon your left hand side,
That leadeth from a guilty conscience
Unto a forest of distrust and fear--
A darksome place and dangerous to pass.
There shall you meet with melancholy thoughts
Whose baleful humours if you but uphold,
It will conduct you to despair and death.
Whose rocky cliffs when you have once beheld
Within a hugy dale of lasting night--
That, kindled with the world's iniquities,
Doth cast up filthy and detested fumes--
Not far from thence, where murderers have built
An habitation for their cursed souls,
There is a brazen cauldron fixed by Jove
In his fell wrath upon a sulphur flame.
Yourselves shall find Lorenzo bathing him
In boiling lead and blood of innocents."
But nothing, except citation of whole scenes and acts, could show the
extraordinary jumble of ghosts, blood, thunder, treachery, and horrors of
all sorts which these plays contain.
Now for a very different citation:--
"If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts,
Their minds, and muses, on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they 'still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein as in a mirror we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least
Which into words no virtue can digest."
It is no wonder that the whole school has been dwarfed in the general
estimation, since its work was critically considered and isolated from
other work, by the towering excellence of this author. Little as is known
of all the band, that little becomes almost least in regard to their chief
and leader. Born (1564) at Canterbury, the son of a shoemaker, he was
educated at the Grammar School of that city, and at Benet (afterwards
Corpus) College, Cambridge; he plunged into literary work and dissipation
in London; and he outlived Greene only to fall a victim to debauchery in a
still more tragical way. His death (1593) was the subject of much gossip,
but the most probable account is that he was poniarded in self-defence by a
certain Francis Archer, a serving-man (not by any means necessarily, as
Charles Kingsley has it, a footman), while drinking at Deptford, and that
the cause of the quarrel was a woman of light character. He has also been
accused of gross vices not to be particularised, and of atheism. The
accusation is certain; and Mr. Boas's researches as to Kyd, who was also
concerned in the matter, have thrown some light on it; but much is still
obscure. The most offensive charges were due to one Bame or Baines, who was
afterwards hanged at Tyburn. That Marlowe was a Bohemian in the fullest
sense is certain; that he was anything worse there is no evidence whatever.
He certainly was acquainted with Raleigh and other distinguished persons,
and was highly spoken of by Chapman and others.
But the interest of Marlowe's name has nothing to do with these obscure
scandals of three hundred years ago, though it may be difficult to pass
them over entirely. He is the undoubted author of some of the masterpieces
of English verse; the hardly to be doubted author of others not much
inferior. Except the very greatest names--Shakespere, Milton, Spenser,
Dryden, Shelley--no author can be named who has produced, when the proper
historical estimate is applied to him, such work as is to be found in
_Tamburlaine_, _Doctor Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward the Second_,
in one department; _Hero and Leander_ and the _Passionate Shepherd_ in
another. I have but very little doubt that the powerful, if formless, play
of _Lust's Dominion_ is Marlowe's, though it may have been rewritten, and
the translations of Lucan and Ovid and the minor work which is more or less
probably attributed to him, swell his tale. Prose he did not write, perhaps
could not have written. For the one characteristic lacking to his genius
was measure, and prose without measure, as numerous examples have shown, is
usually rubbish. Even his dramas show a singular defect in the
architectural quality of literary genius. The vast and formless creations
of the writer's boundless fancy completely master him; his aspirations
after the immense too frequently leave him content with the simply
unmeasured. In his best play as a play, _Edward the Second_, the
limitations of a historical story impose something like a restraining form
on his glowing imagination. But fine as this play is, it is noteworthy that
no one of his greatest things occurs in it. _The Massacre at Paris_, where
he also has the confinement of reality after a fashion, is a chaotic thing
as a whole, without any great beauty in parts. _The Tragedy of Dido_ (to be
divided between him and Nash) is the worst thing he ever did. But in the
purely romantic subjects of _Tamburlaine_, _Faustus_, and _The Jew of
Malta_, his genius, untrammelled by any limits of story, showed itself
equally unable to contrive such limits for itself, and able to develop the
most marvellous beauties of detail. Shakespere himself has not surpassed,
which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famous
and wonderful passages in _Tamburlaine_ and _Faustus_, which are familiar
to every student of English literature as examples of the _ne plus ultra_
of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. The tragic
imagination in its wildest flights has never summoned up images of pity
and terror more imposing, more moving, than those excited by _The Jew of
Malta_. The riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form
which characterises his version of _Hero and Leander_ has never been
approached by any writer. But Marlowe, with the fullest command of the
_apeiron_, had not, and, as far as I can judge, never would have had, any
power of introducing into it the law of the _peras_. It is usual to say
that had he lived, and had his lot been happily cast, we should have had
two Shakesperes. This is not wise. In the first place, Marlowe was totally
destitute of humour--the characteristic which, united with his tragic and
imaginative powers, makes Shakespere as, in a less degree, it makes Homer,
and even, though the humour is grim and intermittent, Dante. In other
words, he was absolutely destitute of the first requisite of
self-criticism. In the natural course of things, as the sap of his youthful
imagination ceased to mount, and as his craving for immensity hardened
itself, he would probably have degenerated from bombast shot through with
genius to bombast pure and simple, from _Faustus_ to _Lust's Dominion_, and
from _Lust's Dominion_ to _Jeronimo_ or _The Distracted Emperor_. Apart
from the magnificent passages which he can show, and which are simply
intoxicating to any lover of poetry, his great title to fame is the
discovery of the secret of that "mighty line" which a seldom-erring critic
of his own day, not too generously given, vouchsafed to him. Up to his time
the blank verse line always, and the semi-couplet in heroics, or member of
the more complicated stanza usually, were either stiff or nerveless.
Compared with his own work and with the work of his contemporaries and
followers who learnt from him, they are like a dried preparation, like
something waiting for the infusion of blood, for the inflation of living
breath. Marlowe came, and the old wooden versification, the old lay-figure
structure of poetic rhythm, was cast once for all into the lumber-room,
where only poetasters of the lowest rank went to seek it. It is impossible
to call Marlowe a great dramatist, and the attempts that have been made to
make him out to be such remind one of the attempts that have been made to
call Moliere a great poet. Marlowe was one of the greatest poets of the
world whose work was cast by accident and caprice into an imperfect mould
of drama; Moliere was one of the greatest dramatists of the world who was
obliged by fashion to use a previously perfected form of verse. The state
of Moliere was undoubtedly the more gracious; but the splendour of
Marlowe's uncut diamonds of poetry is the more wonderful.
The characteristics of this strange and interesting school may be summed up
briefly, but are of the highest importance in literary history. Unlike
their nearest analogues, the French romantics of the 1830 type, they were
all of academic education, and had even a decided contempt (despite their
Bohemian way of life) for unscholarly innovators. They manifested (except
in Marlowe's fortuitous and purely genial discovery of the secret of blank
verse) a certain contempt for form, and never, at least in drama, succeeded
in mastering it. But being all, more or less, men of genius, and having the
keenest sense of poetry, they supplied the dry bones of the precedent
dramatic model with blood and breath, with vigour and variety, which not
merely informed but transformed it. _David and Bethsabe_, _Doctor Faustus_,
_Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, are chaotic enough, but they are of the
chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that
marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the
shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to
the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one
knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a
child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no
doubt often been used before), were of the brood of Otus and Ephialtes, who
grew so rapidly and in so disorderly a fashion that it was necessary for
the gods to make an end of them. The universe probably lost little, and it
certainly gained something.
Side by side with this learned, extravagant, gifted, ill-regulated school,
there was slowly growing up a very different one, which was to inherit all
the gifts of the University Wits, and to add to them the gifts of measure
and proportion. The early work of the actor school of English dramatists is
a difficult subject to treat in any fashion, and a particularly difficult
subject to treat shortly. Chronology, an important aid, helps us not very
much, though such help as she does give has been as a rule neglected by
historians, so that plays before 1590 (which may be taken roughly as the
dividing date), and plays after it have been muddled up ruthlessly. We do
not know the exact dates of many of those which are (many of the plays of
the earlier time are not) extant; and of those which are extant, and of
which the dates are more or less known, the authors are in not a few most
important cases absolutely undiscoverable. Yet in the plays which belong to
this period, and which there is no reason to attribute wholly to any of the
Marlowe group, or much reason to attribute to them under the guidance, or
perhaps with the collaboration of practical actors (some at least of whom
were like Shakespere himself, men of no known regular education), there are
characteristics which promise at least as well for the future as the
wonderful poetic outbursts of the Marlowe school itself. Of these outbursts
we find few in this other division. But we find a growing knowledge of what
a play is, as distinguished from a series of tableaux acted by not too
lifelike characters. We find a glimmering (which is hardly anywhere to be
seen in the more literary work of the other school) of the truth that the
characters must be made to work out the play, and not the play be written
in a series of disjointed scenes to display, in anything but a successful
fashion, the characters. With fewer flights we have fewer absurdities; with
less genius we have more talent. It must be remembered, of course, that the
plays of the university school itself were always written for players, and
that some of the authors had more or less to do with acting as well as with
writing. But the flame of discord which burns so fiercely on the one side
in the famous real or supposed dying utterances of Greene, and which years
afterwards breaks out on the other in the equally famous satire of _The
Return from Parnassus_,[22] illuminates a real difference--a difference
which study of the remains of the literature of the period can only make
plainer. The same difference has manifested itself again, and more than
once in other departments of literature, but hardly in so interesting a
manner, and certainly not with such striking results.
[22] The outburst of Greene about "the only Shakescene," the "upstart crow
beautified with our feathers," and so forth, is too well known to need
extracting here. _The Return from Parnassus_, a very curious tripartite
play, performed 1597-1601 but retrospective in tone, is devoted to the
troubles of poor scholars in getting a livelihood, and incidentally gives
much matter on the authors of the time from Shakespere downward, and on the
jealousy of professional actors felt by scholars, and _vice versa_.