THE FIRST PLAYS--RESISTANCE TO CLASSIC INFLUENCE--ADVANTAGES
OF THIS--AND THE LIMITATIONS--THE DRAMATIC QUALITY--CLASSIC,
SPANISH, AND FRENCH DRAMA--UNITY IN THE ENGLISH PLAYS--‘RALPH
ROISTER DOISTER’--‘GAMMER GURTON’S NEEDLE’--‘GORBODUC’--FORMATION
OF THE THEATRE--LYLY--GREENE--PEELE--KYD--MARLOWE--CHARACTER OF
THESE WRITERS--SHAKESPEARE--GUESSES ABOUT HIS LIFE--ORDER OF HIS
WORK--ESTIMATES OF SHAKESPEARE--DIVISIONS OF HIS WORK--THE POEMS--THE
DRAMAS--THE REALITY OF SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS.
[SN: _The first plays._]
Three plays stand at the threshold of the Elizabethan drama--_Ralph
Roister Doister_, _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, and _Gorboduc_, or _Ferrex
and Porrex_. None of the three indicate the course which that dramatic
literature was destined to take. _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ is a spirited
farce of low life, holding if from anything, then from the mediæval
comedy as it flourished in France. _Ralph Roister Doister_, as became
the work of a schoolmaster, is full of reminiscences of the Latin
comedy. _Gorboduc_ is an open imitation of the Senecan tragedy.
[SN: _Resistance to the classic influence._]
When the great and natural authority of the classic models is allowed
for--when we remember how many writers for the stage, not only here but
wherever the theatre nourished, were university wits--when the taste
of the time for moralising is taken into account, it is rather to be
wondered at that this pattern proved so unattractive as it did. The
predominance of the French drama of the seventeenth century must not
lead us into overestimating the rarity of the independence required
to reject the classic model in the time of the Renaissance. Corneille
and Racine did indeed establish a “correct” form of tragedy, largely
constructed on classic lines. But this was part of a general, and far
from inexcusable, reaction towards order, measure, and restraint in
literature. During the Renaissance the influence of the classic drama
was confined to producing a false dawn of the French tragedy. Italy
achieved no considerable drama. The classics, both the great Greek
and the lesser Latin, were presented to Spain in translations, and
by scholarly critics, only to be rejected. The _Nise Lastimosa_ of
Gerónimo Bermudez, with here and there a tentative effort in early
plays, is all that remains of the teaching of translators and men of
learning. Among ourselves _Gorboduc_ had little immediate following,
and when Daniel in the very early seventeenth century tried to succeed
where Sackville had failed, he wrote for the literary coterie of the
Countess of Pembroke and for nobody else. Between the two there is
Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s _Cornelia_ or so, and that is all.
[SN: _Advantages of this._]
For this we have undoubtedly reason to be thankful, and so have the
Spaniards. Both nations had the spirit to be themselves on their stage,
which is something; and then we have had a freer Shakespeare, a more
spontaneous Lope, than would have been possible if the three unities
and the complete separation of tragedy from comedy had been accepted
in the two countries. Yet we may be thankful with more moderation
than we commonly show. It is not to be taken for granted that the
choice lay between freedom and a convention. It was rather between
one convention and another. The Spanish stage is not unconventional.
It has a different convention from the French--that is all. Ours made
its own rules, less precise than the Spanish or the classical, but
none the less real. “Tanto se pierde por carta de mas, como por carta
de menos,” says the Spanish proverb. The card too much is a loss as
much as the card too little; and a convention which says “You shall”
is no less tyrannical than the convention which says “You shall not.”
[SN: _And the limitations._] A drama which will allow no mixture of
comedy with tragedy is unquestionably limited, and is condemned to give
no full picture of life. But a drama which is forced to insert comic
scenes is equally under an obligation. The clown who figures as porter
in _Macbeth_ is not necessarily more in place than the murder of a
king would have been in _The Taming of the Shrew_. To say that you may
fairly keep your comedy unmixed by tragedy, but must never allow your
tragedy to be unrelieved by comic scenes, is as arbitrary a rule as any
other. Undoubtedly the reaction from the strained emotion of tragedy
to lighter feeling is natural--and that is the sufficient artistic
justification for the jests of Hamlet. But this just observation does
not excuse the insertion into a tragic action of independent comic
scenes which have no necessary connection with the main personages and
action.
The history of the Elizabethan drama is the history of the formation of
an English dramatic convention. The questions are what it was, and what
were its merits. These questions are not settled by the answer that
Shakespeare was the greatest of dramatists. That he would have been
in any case. What is greatest in him--his universal sympathy with all
nature and his unerring truth to life--was wholly personal. He shared
it with nobody. If the Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare, and a ring of
men whom we are content to know wholly by “beauties,” which beauties,
again, are lyric poetry and not drama, then it is quite superfluous to
treat it as dramatic literature at all. The Bible does not belong to a
class, and neither does Shakespeare in those qualities which raise him
above all others. We must look at him as standing apart; and as for
the others, if that for which they are worth studying is their lyric
poetry, or their mighty line, or this or that touch of genuine pathos
or fine interpretation of character in flashes, it is unnecessary to
consider them as writers of plays. If there was an Elizabethan dramatic
literature in any other sense than this, that many poets wrote for the
stage and put noble poetry into a machinery not essentially dramatic,
it must be studied apart from what was purely Shakespeare. And that is
not difficult to do. On his predecessors he could have no effect, and
it is only necessary to turn from him to any contemporary or successor
to see how little they shared with him in all that was not mere
language and fashion of the time.
[SN: _The dramatic quality._]
I trust it will not be thought superfluous to attempt a definition of
what we ought to look for in judging dramatic literature. Dryden, whose
example cannot well be followed too closely in criticism, acknowledges
the need for a definition of a play early in his _Essay of Dramatic
Poesy_. Lisideius, one of the interlocutors in the conversation,
gives this, with the proviso that it is rather a description than a
definition: “A just and lively image of human nature, representing
its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is
subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Now this is
neither definition nor description of a play. There is not a word in
it which does not apply to _Gil Blas_. Dryden was himself well aware
of its insufficiency, for he makes Crites raise “a logical objection
against it”--that it is “only a _genere et fine_, and so not altogether
perfect.” Yet he leaves the matter standing there. That he, who
was himself a playwright, should have been content to do this when
dealing with the drama is one proof how much English literature had
lost “the sense of the theatre.” If Lisideius had not been thinking
of literature, but of literature as adapted to the stage, he would
have said (but in Dryden’s incomparably better way) something like
this: “A play is an action, put before an audience by dialogue and
representation, forming a coherent whole, in which all the parts
subserve a general purpose, and are dramatically good only in so far as
they do.” Lyric beauty, good moral reflection, vigorous deliveries of
human nature, are, however good in themselves, as little able to make a
good play as the most beautiful ornament is to make a fine building.
[SN: _Classic, Spanish, and French drama._]
It is the unity of the action which constitutes the good play, and it
may be obtained by different methods. A dramatist may obtain unity
by means of the passion or by the working out of a single situation.
Of the great Greek dramatists I cannot speak with expert authority,
but as far as they are visible in translations as in a glass darkly,
they appear to have achieved unity in this way to the full. The
chorus, which in inferior hands offers irresistible temptations for
wandering talk, always carries on the action, while what we see is
the outward and visible sign of some terrible force working behind.
This ever-present sense of the something reserved driving before it
what we are allowed to see, with an undeviating directness of aim,
gives by itself an awful unity of interest to the tragedy. The Spanish
dramatist gains his unity by artful construction of his story, and by
subordinating passion and character to the mere action. The French
stage in its great days aimed at using the same resources as the Greek,
though with certain mechanical changes, such as the dropping of the
chorus, and the division of its work among the personages, which in
itself was no great gain.
[SN: _Unity of the English play._]
Our own drama adopted neither device. It neither concentrated its
attention on the one situation or passion, nor did it subordinate
all to the march of an action. There remained to it to do this--to
secure unity by giving to the play the unity of life itself--by
showing us human nature working in all its manifestations, of love
and hate, heroism and cowardice, laughter and tears. Every rule
suffers exceptions. There are many pure comedies in our dramatic
literature, while Ben Jonson showed at least a strong leaning to accept
the unnecessary unities of time and place in order to attain more
effectually the indispensable unity of action. Yet the distinguishing
feature of our great dramatic literature on its constructive side is
that it threw tragedy and comedy together, and that it relied for its
unity on an inner binding force of life. This is the greatest skill of
all, but it is for that very reason the most difficult of attainment.
It presupposes in the dramatist a sympathy with all humanity from
Lear to Parolles, and with that a power of creation and construction
incomparably greater than is needed to build by the classic rules, or
to put together an artful story worked out by stock-figures on the
Spanish model. Its dangers are obvious. When the dramatist had no
natural tragic power he would be in constant peril of falling into
fustian. When he was deficient in a sense of humour, he would be
tempted to fall back for his comedy on mere grossness. His action,
being free to wander in time and space, would have a constant tendency
to straggle, and the play would become a mere succession of scenes
following one another “like geese on a common.” The strict following
of the classic rules, which work for concentration, helps to preserve
the dramatist from these errors, at the cost of limiting his freedom.
To Shakespeare they would have been a slavery, but it is not certain
that they would not have been a support to Marlowe or Middleton, who
stood much less in need of freedom than of discipline and direction.
So while feeling duly thankful for that resistance to the authority of
the classics which helped to give us Shakespeare, we may remember that
it also helped to give us many comic scenes which it is hardly possible
to read without feeling ashamed for the men who wrote them, and many
so-called plays which are only shapeless combinations of scenes, bound
together by no other nexus than thread and paper.
[SN: Ralph Roister Doister.]
_Ralph Roister Doister_, the earliest known English comedy, was written
apparently about 1530, and printed some fifteen or sixteen years later.
The date of the printing of a play is notoriously no test of its date
of composition or acting, but only of the time when the actors had no
further motive for keeping it in their own hands in manuscript--that
is, when it ceased to be popular on the stage. _Ralph Roister Doister_
was the work of Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton and Westminster,
and is full of reminiscences of Plautus. Ralph Roister Doister himself
is our old friend the _miles gloriosus_ adapted to the conditions of
London life in the time of Edward VI. Matthew Merrygreek, described
as a “needy humorist,” is our no less familiar friend the parasite.
Merrygreek feeds on the vanity and credulity of Ralph Roister Doister,
who is made up of conceit, bluster, and cowardice--who thinks that
every woman who sees him falls in love with him, and is of course
baffled and beaten in the end. It is written in sufficiently brisk
lines of no great regularity; and there are much duller plays. Ralph’s
courtship of Dame Christian Custance, who will have none of him,
is lively. On the whole, the play leaves the impression that Udall
was more than a mere imitator of Plautus, but it is only the school
exercise of a clever man.[70]
[SN: _Gammer Gurton’s Needle._]
“The right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, entitled _Gammer Gurton’s
Needle_,” is believed, on good evidence, to have been written by John
Still (1543?-1608), a churchman, who died Bishop of Bath and Wells. It
was played at his college, Christ’s, Cambridge, in 1566, but may have
been written three years earlier. However that may be, it was certainly
written in his youth. Nothing could well be less academic or clerical.
Though divided into five acts, it is, in fact, a farce not unlike much
mediæval French comedy. The plot is one of a familiar class which
will always hold the stage under new forms, and the working out is of
the simplest. Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and then finds it, just
where she ought to have looked for it, after upsetting the house by
searching in unlikely places, and disturbing the village by unjustly
suspecting her neighbours of theft. It is unquestionably too long, but
it is very far from dull. There is a directness of purpose in Still
which is decidedly dramatic, and with it a power of characterisation by
no means contemptible. All the personages, and notably the wandering
beggar, Deccon the Bedlam, have a marked truth to humble human nature.
They are coarse, but not wilfully and unnecessarily coarse. There are
none of those strings of mere nasty words and images which serve as
foil to the poetry of the true Elizabethan comedy. Still is honestly
naturalistic, neither toning down the truth of the rough talk of rude
people, nor lavishing bad language from an apparent wish to startle. If
he had not entered the Church, which made it indecent for him to work
for the stage, he might have given us a series of spirited naturalistic
comedies. As it is, _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ stands alone. The facts
that it contains the capital drinking-song, “Back and side go bare, go
bare,” and that it is written in the prevailing seven-foot metre, are
all that connect it with the later comedy.[71]
[SN: Gorboduc.]
We have seen that the Latin comedy had much to do with _Ralph Roister
Doister_. The Latin tragedy is directly responsible for a much more
ambitious effort, the play variously named _Gorboduc_, or _Ferrex and
Porrex_, generally attributed to Sir Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord
Buckhurst, though a claim is made for the part-authorship at least of
Thomas Norton. If it had been the intention of the author to establish
a prejudice against the regular tragedy in the minds of his audience,
he could hardly have done better than write this painfully dull play.
The very metre, which is the heroic couplet, moves by jerky steps of
the same length, and is inexpressibly wooden. Nor is that by any means
all. _Gorboduc_ has all the faults and none of the possible merits
of its kind. The “regular” tragedy on the classic model needs the
concentration of the interest on one strong situation. But _Gorboduc_
is a long story of how the king of that name divides his kingdom
between his sons; how they quarrel, and one kills the other; how the
mother slays the slayer; how the people kill her and her husband, and
are then killed by the nobles. It is all told in speeches of cruel
length, and is necessarily full of repetitions. A very curious feature
of the play is the insertion between the acts of dumb shows intended to
enforce the excellence of union, the evils of flattery or of anarchy,
which have a decided flavour of the morality. The _Induction_ to _The
Mirror of Magistrates_ and _The Complaint of Buckingham_ remain to show
that Sir T. Sackville was a poet; but _Gorboduc_ is the very ample
proof that he was no dramatist. The play, which one thinks must have
bored her extremely, was given before the queen by the gentlemen of the
Inner Temple in 1561.[72]
[SN: _Formation of the theatre._]
The suspension--not, indeed, of activity but of growth--in literature
which marks the first years of the queen’s reign was as marked in drama
as in pure poetry. Udall, Still, and Sir T. Sackville had no following
to speak of, and it was not until a new generation had grown up that
the first signs of the real Elizabethan drama became visible. The
production of pieces for the theatre did not cease, but they belong to
the past not to the coming time. The taste for shows was strong, and
it was served. But the pieces of this interval are the descendants of
the morality, not the ancestors of Shakespeare’s drama. We can leave
them aside, for they had no following. There is no _Auto Sacramental_
in English literature. Before that could come it was first necessary to
have a theatre, in the sense of a place of public amusement, managed
by professional actors, and not only an occasional stage on which
corporations and societies performed from time to time. The formation
of the theatre in the material sense was the work of these earlier
years; but this, which is, moreover, very obscure, does not belong
properly to the history of literature. It is enough to note that a body
of men working together did here what Lope de Rueda did in Spain. A
class of actors was formed. Like him, they often wrote themselves. In
both countries the theatre was thoroughly popular, which was not, it
may be, altogether an advantage. At least the fact that the same man
might be manager of a theatre and keeper of a bear-garden--as Alleyn
was--points to the existence of influences which did not visibly work
for the production of good literature in the theatre. In England, as
in Spain, much was inevitably written to please what may be called the
bear-garden element of the audience. In Spain this tended to separate
itself into the _pasos_, _mojigangas_, _entremeses_, dances, and so
forth, which were given between the three _jornadas_ of the _comedia_.
With us all was thrown into the five acts of the play, and this
difference in mechanical arrangement was not without its influence on
literary form.
The flowering of the Elizabethan drama dates from the middle years of
the queen’s reign. By this time the theatre was formed, and the taste
for it was strong. It naturally attracted many writers, if only because
it was the most direct and effective way in which they could make
themselves heard, to say nothing of the fact that it was by far the
most certainly lucrative of all forms of literature, and therefore had
an intelligible attraction for all who lived by their pens. Among them
it was inevitable that there should be not a few who had no natural
faculty for dramatic literature--Lodge, for instance, and Nash. Both
lived much about the theatre, and their relations with it, and the
writers for it, figure largely in the gossiping pamphlets of the time.
But they wrote for it only by necessity or accident, and their dramatic
work is altogether subordinate. As much might be not unfairly said of
John Lyly; but his plays are so curious, and held so considerable a
place in the estimation of his time, that he cannot be put wholly aside.
[SN: _Lyly._]
Custom has ruled that the name of Lyly shall be followed by the words
“the author of _Euphues_.” Custom has in this case decided rightly.
Lyly was always the author of _Euphues_. This didactic tale falls to
be discussed with the prose of the time, but we may note that it is
composed of a very slight framework of story, from which blow out
clouds of words arranged in quaint and not inelegant patterns. No drama
can be made out of such materials, and, properly speaking, the plays
of Lyly are not dramatic.[73] Unlike most of his contemporaries, he
was attached to the Court, though, according to his own melancholy
summing-up of the results of his labours, he obtained nothing as a
reward. He was born in Kent about 1554, and was educated at Oxford.
It may be that he went on to Cambridge, according to what was then
a common custom. So little is known of the rest of his life that
biographers have been driven to make matter by identifying him with
a certain Mr Lilly, a bold, witty atheist, who harassed Hall in his
first living, and whose sudden death from the plague is recorded by
the satirist and future Bishop of Norwich, with pious satisfaction,
among the various examples of divine intervention on his own behalf.
If he sat in several Parliaments, Lyly cannot have altogether wanted
means and friends. He may have lived into the reign of James I., and
died in 1606. His plays were part of his service as a courtier. They
were not written for the vulgar theatre, but to be performed by the
“children of Paul’s” or “of the Queen’s Chapel” before the queen at
the New Year feasts. Here he would have an audience which already
admired his _Euphues_, published in 1580, and was well content to hear
him “parle Euphuism.” To this we may partly attribute the fact that,
while his contemporaries were making blank verse the vehicle of the
higher English drama, he showed a marked preference for the use of
prose, and also for mythological and classical subjects. The names of
his undoubted plays are _Alexander and Campaspe_; _Sapho and Phao_;
_Endimion, or The Man in the Moon_; _Gallathea_; _Mydas_; _Mother
Bombie_; _The Woman in the Moon_; and _Love’s Metamorphosis_. They were
written between 1584 and the end of the century. Lyly, as has been
said, was no dramatist. His plays do not advance in any coherent story.
They rotate or straggle. When, as in _Mother Bombie_, he did attempt
to construct a comedy of intrigue, the result is mere confusion.
The faults of his style have been made familiar to all the world by
Falstaff’s immortal address to Prince Hal: “For though the camomile,
the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it
is wasted the sooner it wears.... There is a thing, Harry, which thou
hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name
of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile,” and
so on. The antitheses work with the regularity of pistons; there is
a steady march past of similes, drawn as often as not from a natural
history worthy of Sir John Mandeville, and arranged in twos or threes.
His humour is of the kind which makes a reader imitate the example of
Sancho when he saw his master cutting capers in his shirt on the slope
of the Sierra Morena--retire in order to escape the spectacle of a
good gentleman making an exhibition of himself. Yet in his grave and
poetic moments there is a prim charm about Lyly, and a frosty moonlight
glitter which is attractive. His snatches of song are among the best
in an age of lyric poetry.
[SN: _Greene._]
Lyric poet tempted or driven by necessity on to the stage is the
description which must be given of two of his contemporaries, who in
other respects differed from him very widely--Robert Greene and George
Peele. If we are bound to take his own confessions, and the abuse
poured on his grave by that bad-blooded pedant Gabriel Harvey, quite
seriously, we are compelled to believe that Greene ended a thoroughly
despicable life by a very sordid death. But a little wholesome
scepticism may well be applied both to Greene’s deathbed repentance
and to the abuse of his implacable enemy. There was in the Elizabethan
time a taste for a rather maundering morality, and for a loud-mouthed
scolding style of abuse. The pamphleteers talked a great deal about
themselves, and conducted wit combats, which were redolent of the
bear-garden and backsword combats. La Rochefoucauld’s observation,
that there are men who would rather speak evil of themselves than
not speak of themselves at all, may also be kept in mind. A weak,
conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of lyric poetry and
of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate a summing up as can be given of
Greene. He was born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a Bohemian
life led in a very exuberant time. There seems to be no doubt that the
end was very miserable. Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety
on the strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, _The Groat’s Worth
of Wit_, in which he abuses Shakespeare. Everybody has heard of the
“only Shake-scene in the country,” the player adorned with the feathers
of Greene himself and other real poets. Historically it is of some
value as proving that Shakespeare was known and prosperous in 1592. It
also helps to give the measure of Greene, that while he was affecting
for the press all the agony of a deathbed repentance--partly no doubt
sincere enough--and was exhorting his friends to flee destruction,
he could break out, with all the venom of wounded vanity, against
the man who had succeeded where he himself had failed. If we had the
good fortune to know nothing of the life of Greene, he would rank
as a respectable writer who had a share in a time of preparation
for a far greater than himself or any of his associates. His prose
stories--largely adapted from the Italian--include one, _Pandosto_,
which had the honour in its turn to be adapted and made into poetic
drama by Shakespeare in _The Winter’s Tale_. His undoubted work for
the stage which survives was all published after his death with bad
or little editing. The first printed, _Orlando Furioso_, taken from
a passage in Ariosto, is hopelessly corrupt. The others are--_A
Looking-Glass for London and England_; _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_;
_Scottish Story of James IV._; the _Comical History of Alphonsus,
King of Aragon_; and the doubtful _George-a-Green, the Pinner of
Wakefield_.[74] With Greene we come to something at once very different
from Lyly, and quite new,--to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama,
which in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry and
passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths of rant, or runs to
the very madness of fustian. It is not the greater achievement that
we must look for in Greene. His heroics are “comical,” in a sense
not designed by the printer of _Alphonsus_. Drawcansir is hardly an
exaggeration of that hero, and is incomparably more coherent. His
comic scenes have too commonly the air of mere hack work put in to
supply parts for the clowns of the theatre, while his plots are mere
successions of events frequently unconnected with one another. But in
the midst of all is the undeniable vein of tenderness and lyric poetry.
All the scenes in his best play, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, in
which Margaret the Fair Maid of Fressingfield is introduced, are
charmingly fresh and natural. With more discipline, and no temptation
to serve the taste of the time for King Cambyses’ vein, Greene might
have been the author of pleasant little plays of a poetic sentimental
order written in a charming simple style.
[SN: _Peele._]
His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older man, and outlived
Greene a very few years. He was born about 1558, and was dead by
1598, in a very sordid way. Of his life very little is known except
that he was the son of the “clerk” of Christ’s Hospital, that he was
educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and that
he was a thorough Bohemian. His reputation in this respect was so
solidly founded that he was made the hero of a book of “jests,” which,
in fact, are tales of roguery mostly reprinted from older French
originals. Peele worked regularly for a company of actors, and no
doubt did much which cannot now be traced. Commentators, who have
striven hard to prove the unprovable in the history of the Elizabethan
Drama, have assigned him portions of the First and Second Parts of
_Henry VI._[75] His undoubted plays are--_The Arraignment of Paris_,
_The famous Chronicle of King Edward I._, _The Battle of Alcazar_,
_The Old Wives’ Tale_, and _David and Fair Bethsabe_. To these may
be added _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which is written in the old
seven-foot metre, and differs from the others greatly. But custom
has assigned it to Peele, who indeed uses the long line elsewhere.
Peele was a decidedly stronger man than Greene, but a writer of the
same stamp and limitations. What is best in him is the lyric note
and the tenderness. The first is well shown in not a few passages of
the _Arraignment of Paris_, a somewhat overgrown masque, written for
the Court and to flatter Elizabeth; and the second in the _David and
Bethsabe_. His chronicle play, _Edward I._, has a certain historical
value as illustrating the growth of the class, and it is notorious for
the hideous libel it contains on the character of Eleanor of Castile;
while _The Battle of Alcazar_ is interesting in another way, as an
example of the boyish “blood and thunder” popular at the time, of which
Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_ is the masterpiece. It is the equivalent to
Greene’s _Alphonsus_; but if not more sane it is more substantial, and
does really contain lines which are poetry and not rant, though the
rant is there in profusion.
[SN: _Kyd._]
Thomas Kyd need hardly be mentioned here except for the purpose of
leading on to the master of the school, Marlowe. He is a very shadowy
figure, who may have been born in 1557, and may have died in 1595.
His voice is still audible in _The Spanish Tragedy_, and perhaps in
_Jeronimo_. The first-named is a continuation of the second--if the
second were not written to supply an introduction to the first. They
too are “blood and thunder,” with the occasional flash of real poetry,
which is found wellnigh everywhere in that wondrous time.
Greene, Peele, and Kyd, in spite of the independent merit of parts of
their work, are mainly interesting because they were forerunners of
Shakespeare, and aided in the formation of the English drama. If it
had wanted _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, or _David and Bethsabe_,
it would no doubt have been the poorer, but by things not great in
themselves, and still less indispensable. [SN: _Marlowe._] If it had
wanted the author of _Doctor Faustus_, it would have been the poorer by
a very great poet. Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, in the same
year as Shakespeare and was the son of a shoemaker. Probably by the
help of patrons he was educated at the grammar-school of the town, and
went from it to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge. The other events
of his life are mainly matter of guesswork till we come to the fact
that he was stabbed in a tavern brawl at Deptford on the 1st June 1593.
He was accused of exceeding even the large Bohemian licence of life
of his contemporaries, and of atheism. The evidence is neither direct
nor good, but it is certain that a warrant for his arrest, and that
of several of his friends, on the charge of disseminating irreligious
opinions, was issued by the Privy Council about a fortnight before
he was killed. At a time when all the once accepted foundations of
religion were being called in question, sheer denial was naturally not
unknown. Given the vehement spirit of all his work, it is as probable
that Marlowe went this length as that he stopped short of it. The truth
is in this case of little importance, for Marlowe’s place is among the
poets, not the controversialists, of the sixteenth century.
As a poet Marlowe stands immediately below Spenser and Shakespeare, but
between them and every other contemporary. He fails to rank with them
because he wanted their range, and also because there was something
in him not only unbridled, but incapable of submitting to order and
measure. For a moment, and from time to time, he shoots up to the
utmost height of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for
a very brief space and then sinks out of view. In these happy passages
of inspiration he showed what could be done with English blank verse.
It had been written before him, since it was first used by Surrey
in his translation of the _Æneid_, but Marlowe was its real creator
as an instrument of English poetry. This was his great achievement.
His fragment of _Hero and Leander_, though a beautiful poem of the
mythological and rather lascivious order popular at the time, and
full of a most passionate love of beauty, nowhere attains to the
height of the constantly quoted “purple patches” from the first part
of _Tamburlaine_, from _Dr Faustus_, or from _The Jew of Malta_. In
themselves they are unsurpassable, yet his plays cannot by any possible
stretch of charity be called good. What we remember of them is always
the passage of poetry, expressing in the most magnificent language
some extreme passion of ambition, greed, fear, or grasping arrogance,
or some sheer revel of delight in the splendour of jewels and the
possibilities of wealth. There are few scenes, in the proper sense of
the word, and there is much monotonous repetition. The second part
of _Tamburlaine_ is the same thing over and over. The first two acts
of _The Jew of Malta_ promise well, and then the play falls off into
incoherence and absurdity. Marlowe, though an incomparably greater
man, seems to have been as blind as Greene or Peele ever were to what
is meant by consistency. His Barabas, for instance, who is represented
as a wicked able man, is suddenly found putting his neck in the power
of a new-bought slave in a fashion hardly conceivable in the case of a
mere fool. _Dr Faustus_ holds together no better than Barabas. There
is something more astonishing still. A poet may be able to express
passion in splendid verse, and yet be able neither to construct a story
nor create a character, but we do not expect to find him dropping into
what, as mere language, is childishly inept. Now that is what Marlowe
did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth at his best and
his worst. It is the difference between Dryden and the bellman’s
verses--between poetry and rank fustian, or commonplace. His short
life, and the conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable
that the bulk of Marlowe’s work should be but little. _Tamburlaine_,
_Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._, and _The Massacre of
Paris_ sum up the list of the plays which we can be sure were wholly
his. _The Tragedy of Dido_ was written in collaboration with Nash.
Beyond this there is a supposition, supported by greater or less
probability, that he had a share in _Lust’s Dominion_ and in _Titus
Andronicus_ and _Henry VI._ To the plays are to be added the fragment
of _Hero and Leander_, _The Passionate Shepherd_, and the translations
from Ovid written in his earlier days.[76]
[SN: _Character of these writers._]
If the question is asked what this body of poets had done to advance
the development of the English drama, the answer must be that they had
done something to improve its language. More can hardly be claimed for
them. They certainly give no example of how to construct a dramatic
story, nor did they create a consistent interesting character, unless
Greene’s Fair Margaret be allowed as an exception. That you did very
well as long as you took care that something happened, whether it was
what the personage would have done, or what would follow from what went
before, or not, was apparently an accepted rule with all of them. It
was somewhat strange that it should have been so, for all were educated
men, and were deeply conscious of their learning. Even if they did not
take the classic model, which, as they were all far better qualified
to write a chorus than to construct a plot, it would have been to their
advantage to do, they might have learnt, without going beyond Horace,
to avoid their grosser faults. It must not be forgotten that none of
their surviving plays were published in favourable circumstances. All
may have been, and some certainly were, subject to manipulation while
in the hands of the actors. But even when allowance is made for this,
it is undeniable that the writers of the school of Marlowe, to use a
not very accurate but convenient expression, were totally wanting in
any sense of proportion. To judge by much that they were content to
write, they cannot have known the difference between good and bad. The
incoherent movement of their plays was perhaps partly due to the want
of scenery. When the audience would take a curtain for Syracuse, they
would also take it for Ephesus or for twenty different places, indoors
and out, in one act. There was, therefore, no check on the playwright,
who could move with all the licence of the story-teller. But then they
did not give their plays even the coherence of a story. As they were
all dependent on companies of actors, they may often have put in what
their employers told them was needed to please a part of the audience.
It is to this necessity that we may attribute the comic scenes of _Dr
Faustus_ if we wish to find an excuse for Marlowe--and if, indeed, they
were his, and not written in by others at the orders of Henslowe the
manager. But this does not account for all. When it is allowed for,
enough remains to show that all these predecessors of Shakespeare were
unable to see the difference between horseplay and humour, and were
almost equally blind to the immense distinction between the “grand
manner” and mere fustian. This last, indeed, had an irresistible
attraction for them, and not less for Marlowe than for the others. If
it had not he would never have put the rant of _Tamburlaine_ into the
mouth which spoke the superb lines beginning “If all the pens that ever
poets held,” nor would he have allowed Barabas to sink from the gloomy
magnificence of his beginning into a mere grotesque puppet Jew with a
big nose.
[SN: _Shakespeare._]
“All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare
is,--that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon--married and had children
there--went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and
plays--returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.”
This summary, which Steevens put in a note to the ninety-third sonnet,
is as true as when it was written in the last century. It is not quite
exhaustive, for we know that Shakespeare had the respect and affection
of his contemporaries from Chettle to Ben Jonson, and also that he
was a very prosperous man. Yet Steevens included nearly all that the
most extreme industry has been able to discover of Shakespeare’s life.
The date of his birth was on or just before the 23rd April 1564, and
he died on that day in 1616. From the age of about twenty till he was
nearly forty he lived in London as actor or manager. In his youth
he wrote two poems in the prevailing fashion, _Venus and Adonis_
and _The Rape of Lucrece_. The sonnets published in 1609 belong to a
later period, but it is impossible to fix their date. His chief work
was always done for the company to which he belonged. For that he
recast old plays or wrote new ones. The poems alone were published by
himself. His sonnets appeared in a pirated edition during his life,
and his plays after his death, when his fellow-actors had no longer an
overpowering motive to keep them for themselves. On this very slight
framework there has been built a vast superstructure of guesswork of
which very little need be said here.
[SN: _Guesses about his life._]
It is not only the large element of sheer folly in these guesses,
the imbecile attempt to prove that the man of whom Ben Jonson spoke
and wrote the well-known words was not the author of his own plays,
which may be put aside. Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort
to find political journalism, or other things didactic, social, and
scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez, speaking of the very
similar race of Cervantistas, has said that this is the resource of
people, often respectable for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy
literature as literature, but being also conscious that they ought to
enjoy it, have been driven to look for something else in their author.
These good people have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled
on Molière in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some great names may be
quoted to give a certain authority to the supposition that Shakespeare
unlocked his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their sake we must
not dismiss this guess as unceremoniously as we may well turn out the
egregious Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not essentially
wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is proved except this, that
Shakespeare experienced some of the common fortunes of men of letters
and other men, and then this, that he carried the indelicacy of his
time to its possible extreme. We know that his “sugared sonnets” were
handed about among his friends so freely that they got into print.
So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart, and if the sonnet
beginning “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” did refer to
a particular person who must have been perfectly well known to many
of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist must have
been singularly destitute of the beginnings of a sense of shame, even
according to the standard of the sixteenth century. It is impossible
to prove that those who take this view are wrong--and if the word
evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to prove that they are
right. But be their belief right or wrong, the value of the sonnets is
not affected. They are valuable, not because they reveal the passing
fortunes of one man, however great, but because they express what is
permanent in mankind in language of everlasting excellence.
[SN: _Order of his work._]
The work by which Shakespeare was first known in his time were the
poems _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_, which appeared
respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the dates of composition and
order of succession of his plays are obscure, it is certain that he
was working for the stage before the first of these years. But as yet
he was rather redoing the work of others than producing for himself.
The sonnets were widely known by 1598, and were in all probability
inspired, as so many other collections of the same class, though of
very different degrees of merit, were, by the example of _Astrophel
and Stella_. The chronology of the plays is, it may be repeated,
difficult to settle, but on the whole they may be asserted to have
followed the order in which it would appear natural to assign them on
internal evidence. First come those in which his hand, though never to
be mistaken, is seen in least power--_Pericles_ and _Henry VI._ Then
come others in which we get most of the mere fashion of the time, its
euphuism and other affectations--_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _Love’s
Labour Lost_, &c. Next follow the long series of romantic plays and
chronicle plays, darkened by tragedy and irradiated by humour--_The
Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Henry IV._, _As You Like
It_. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps more accurate to call
the greater drama, _The Tempest_ and _The Winter’s Tale_, belong to the
later years.
[SN: _Estimates of Shakespeare._]
The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes to speak, after so
many others, of Cervantes, stands in an even more formidable shape on
the path of him who wishes to speak of Shakespeare. Most generations
have produced those who have spoken badly. When they were honest, and
were not also incapable of literature, which has sometimes been the
case, they were enslaved to some fashion, some pedantry of their own
time. With these have been the merely inept, and there has not been
wanting the buffoon, straining after singularity. The gutter and the
green-room have been audible. But by the side of these there has been
an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the greatest masters
of English literature. It began with Ben Jonson, and has lasted till
it has become wellnigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the
world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement of the competent
judges, this universal acceptance, are by themselves enough to dispense
us from proving that in him there was something more than was merely
national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, all the Elizabethans, belong
to us and to others only as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso,
Lope, Calderon, all the others of Spain’s great time, belong to the
Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes, though the first is very
English and the second very Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their
countrymen may understand them best, but there is that in them which
is common to all humanity. The one star differs from the other in
glory; for if Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece under
the “species of eternity,” he brought much less than Shakespeare, who
included everything except religion, and leaves us persuaded of his
power to deal with that. _Don Quixote_ is equivalent to one of the
great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme quality of universality. So
much can be said of only one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman
Montaigne, in whom also there was something which speaks to all men at
all times.
[SN: _Divisions of his work._]
The work of Shakespeare falls into two classes--the pure poetry and
the drama. The second is, indeed, intensely poetic, both in form and
spirit, so that the division becomes unintelligent if we push it too
far. But when his poetry is dramatic--when it is employed to set forth
an action by talk--it is used for another purpose, and is found in
combination with other qualities than are to be found in the pure
poems. These are the _Venus and Adonis_, _The Rape of Lucrece_, the
sonnets, and the lyrics, which are mostly to be found in the plays,
but can be detached from them. [SN: _The poems._] It is a sufficient
proof of the vast sweep of Shakespeare’s genius that if we had nothing
of him but these, the loss to the literature of the world would be
irreparable, but he would still be a great poet. The _Venus and Adonis_
and _The Rape of Lucrece_ are greater poems than Marlowe’s _Hero and
Leander_, more intense in passion, more uniformly magnificent in
expression. Marlowe may reach their level when he is speaking to the
full extent of his power, but he is not always there. Shakespeare
always leaves the impression that he is within the limit of what he
could do. The lyrics are the most perfect achievements of an age of
lyric poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones for the much
that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and Greene. But if their best is put
beside Shakespeare it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if
hung by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the comparison.
The age was rich in sonnets. It produced the passion and melody of
Sidney, the beauty of Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the
vigour of Drayton. Yet Shakespeare’s sonnets are no less distinctly
the greatest than his lyrics. It is even here that his pre-eminence is
the most marked, for he has triumphed over more. The lyric is free and
is brief. The sonnet is bound by rigid laws, and a cycle of sonnets
is peculiarly liable to become monotonous, to be redundant, to be
mechanical and frigid. But Shakespeare’s sonnets, whether or no they
be in the order in which he would have put them, or were written to
fall into any particular order, gave a varied yet consistent play of
thought and passion, overshadowed by the ever-present consciousness of
“the barren rage of death’s eternal cold.” In them, too, we always feel
the superiority of the faculty to the work done. There is no toil, no
struggle to express. What would have made another poet immortal, if
said with manifest effort, is all poured out in “a first fine careless
rapture.”
[SN: _The dramas._]
And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico lies the
far-spreading palace of the plays. The dramatic work of Shakespeare
is greater than the purely poetic, mainly because of its vastly
greater scope. It contains all that is in the poems, and so much more
that they are, as it were, lost in the abundance. In this stately
pleasure-house there are no doubt parts which diligent examination will
show to bear the traces of inexperience in the builder, fragments of
the work of others, and ornaments in the passing taste of the time.
Shakespeare laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock plays,
and now and then he passed what he found in them, not because it was
good but because it would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like
others, he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere playing
with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and the quibbles which
made Dr Johnson shake his head. In common with every other dramatist
from Sophocles downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his
audience. The mere man of letters writing “closet” plays can forget
the stage, and be punished by the discovery that his masterpiece
won’t act. Shakespeare aimed at being acted. His stage had no change
of scenery, and his audience loved action. Therefore he could put
in more words than can be admitted when time must be found for the
operations of the stage-carpenter and the scene-shifter. Therefore
also he could allow himself a licence in the change of scene, which
is impossible when it carries with it a change of scenery. But all
this is either easily separable or can be amended by rearrangement.
And therein lies the absolute difference between Shakespeare and his
contemporaries. _The Jew of Malta_ could not be made an acting play by
any process of manipulation. Take from the best of the others--even
from Ben Jonson--what was purely Elizabethan, and how much remains?
They are excellent to read, and were good to act before an audience
which accepted their convention, but before that only. For purely
stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The
_Dama Melindrosa_ would be easily intelligible and interesting to any
audience to-day, but not _Every Man in his Humour_, or _Epicene_. With
Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have
been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains--not
in all cases, indeed, but in most--a play--that is, a consistent
action--carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking
differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in
perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with
unchanging human nature.
[SN: _The reality of Shakespeare’s characters._]
It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare’s plays
their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the
faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo
or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of
Bardolph, “Would I were with him wheresome’er he is, either in Heaven
or in Hell,” are the outward and visible signs of this inward and
spiritual truth to nature. _Henry IV._ and _Henry V._ may seem to be
but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted
plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action
of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree is less trim and balanced
than the clipped yew. But it has a higher life and the finer unity. The
Henry V. who meets Falstaff with--
“I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”
is the same man as he who said--
“I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness....
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.”
Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him
with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both
worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility
for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the
council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father,
he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able
selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs
him nothing--a perfect portrait of the “unconscious hypocrite.” The
circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward
show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as
consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor
cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously,
and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity.
Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to
morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he
is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-loving
animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic,
grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the
green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made on the
model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and
true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused,
unnatural, or inconsequent.
The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of
some of Shakespeare’s characters is a tribute to their reality. We are
never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille
or Racine, or the _galanes_, _damas_, and jealous husbands of Lope and
Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations
of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain
themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even Molière,
who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and transparent, because
he also is, in comparison, narrow and arbitrary. We may differ as to
his purpose in writing _Don Juan_ or _Tartuffe_. Was he only drawing
infidelity and hypocrisy to make them hateful? Was he speaking for
the _libertins_ of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of the
philosophy of the eighteenth, who were in revolt against the claim
of religion to be a guide of life and to control conduct? But the
personages explain themselves. Again, when we meet one of those
sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently explained alterations of the
whole nature of a man or woman, so common with the other Elizabethan
dramatists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know it to be
false to life, and put it down at once as a clumsy playwright’s device.
But the characters of Shakespeare are like the great figures of
history, real, and yet not always to be understood at once, because
they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery of nature.
The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the last years of the
sixteenth century, and who outlived him, do not belong to our
subject. It is enough to point out how unlikely it was that they
would continue him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of
them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shakespearian drama
without Shakespeare, when he deliberately sacrificed character to the
convenient simplicity of the “humour,” and looked for the structural
coherence of his plays to the unities. Other men who were less wise
preferred to keep the freedom which they had not the strength to bear.
FOOTNOTES:
[70] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.
[71] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.
[72] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_, 1825.
[73] _Dramatic Works of John Lyly._ Edited by F. W. Fairholt, 1858.
[74] _Dramatic Works of Robert Greene._ Dyce, 1883.
[75] _Dramatic Works of George Peele._ Dyce, 1883.
[76] _Works of Christopher Marlowe._ Dyce, 1865.