MARLOWE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
The growing national consciousness that reached its triumphant culmination
in the defeat of Spain made itself felt in the drama, specifically in
efforts to present the glories of English history, and still more potently
in an awakened responsiveness to the new fields and new incentives for
artistic ambition. The beginning of the greatness of the national drama is
significantly coincident with the victory over the Armada. By that time the
spirit of noble endeavor had found lodgment in every worthy breast. It
animated Marlowe no less than Drake, and the author of the least successful
chronicle play as well as admiral or counselor. The extraordinary
achievements that had been contributing to the might of England as a
political power were, indeed, but one expression of the freedom and
eagerness of individual initiative that characterized this English
Renaissance and found other expression in the activities and
accomplishments of literature. In comparison with the men of preceding
generations, the Elizabethan Englishman faced a world of new horizons, new
ideas, boundless opportunities, and alluring rewards. Every career was open
and promised an untrod pathway and unworn laurels. He might win fame as a
pirate, philosopher, or poet; or in the new excitement of living he might
crowd not one but many careers into the span of life. The versatility of a
Raleigh only typifies the excitement and energy of deed, the lively
movement of thought which quickened mind and body, and resulted, now in a
voyage to Virginia, now in a conspiracy, now in a sonnet, and now in a
history of the universe. And this feverishness to make trial of thronging
opportunities was symptomatic not only of vigor of intellect, celerity of
emotion, and independence of will, but also of an imaginative idealism that
enlightened the daily living of many a sorry citizen, and was destined to
live resplendent in the verses of Spenser and Shakespeare. In the stir of
free ideas, the surprise of discovery, and the glow of accomplishment, life
grew heroic, attainment seemed easy, and no ideals too lofty for the
scaling ladders of human aspiration. Men achieved much and they dreamt of
more. The apprentice went to the theatre to don Fortunatus's cap or to
triumph with Tamburlaine; every one had his El Dorado distant only a short
voyage; and, with the new world before them, poets and playwrights set sail
in blithe confidence of splendid discovery. Never before, or perhaps since,
have so many new things seemed within grasp, whether in literature or in
life; never has all living so throbbed with a sense of the nearness of the
unattainable, the kinship of the real and the ideal.
In non-dramatic literature the incentives of the classics and of the
Italians from Petrarch to Tasso had led on from translations and imitations
to experiments and inventions. In the dozen years before the Armada, lyric
poetry, criticism, and prose fiction had felt the stir of successful
English innovation, and the time was almost ripe for the vast projects of
Spenser, Hooker, and Bacon. In comedy the development had been earlier and
more rapid than in tragedy, and had already in Peele and Lyly reached the
stage of dexterous expression and varied innovation. Whether presenting a
story of classical mythology or of medieval romance, whether farcical,
Plautian, pastoral, sentimental, satirical, or spectacular, comedy was by
the time of Marlowe ready with its examples to offer instruction to any
writer attempting tragic themes. Tragedy could hardly remain longer in the
stage of translation, imitation, and feeble experiment which we have been
considering.
Still further, a stimulus for tragedy was exercised by the daily events of
that active era. These stirred men's imagination and ambition, and must
almost inevitably have directed artistic impulse toward the heroic, the
passionate, and the terrible. The abundance of bloodshed in Elizabethan
tragedy may find some interpretation in the fact that Ben Jonson killed his
man in a duel and that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. The time was
one of bloodshed, violence, quick and brutal passion; a time in which the
torture of a Gloster or the revenge of a Shylock was far closer to life, to
the life at least of poets and dramatists, than such stories are to-day.
Drake in his cabin drinking and praying with the unmoved lieutenant whom he
was to hang the next day is a bit of fact that rivals in horror the
devilries of a Barabas. Even if Seneca's example had not already approved
themes of adultery, murder, blood-vengeance, the atrocities of tyranny, and
the deadly strife of father and son, such themes must have stirred men's
minds in the days of the Massacre of St. Bartholemew and the career of Mary
Stuart. If tradition had not already selected the falls of princes as the
especial field for tragedy, the history of monarchical Europe in the
sixteenth century must have given such stories a power of appeal hardly to
be appreciated now. In that strenuous generation the dramatist must have
found artistic impulses from bloody and gruesome deeds, and no less from
daring ambition, heroic struggle, and indomitable greatness of mind.
The summons, however, which the tragic muse heeded came directly from the
public theatres and the professional actors. The university men who at this
time were writing for the theatre under the lash and loans of a
slave-driving theatrical manager may have been tempted to forget that their
sordid and Bohemian existence offered a means for triumphant artistic
expression. The London theatres were now well established, patronized by
the courtiers, and secured in prosperity by the motley audiences that
crowded their performances. They had become important centres in the social
life of the time, comparable to the newspaper offices of a
twentieth-century city in their close touch with the daily life about them;
and in their task of affording amusement and information fulfilling in part
the functions of periodicals and novels as well as of the drama at
present. The stage, without scenery, was still in a transition state
between the medieval and modern, and, to our view, almost unrealizably
crude. Places were sometimes indicated by signs; properties, beds, tables,
or trees were brought on or off as occasion required; or, a heavier
property, like a cave, might remain whether the scene was in cave-land or a
counting-room. There was no drop curtain; actors went off, others came on,
and the place changed from a seacoast to the palace; or, the actors merely
moved across the platform, and it transpired that they had passed from "a
fair and pleasant green" to a room in the house of Faustus. At the close of
a tragedy all the survivors might be needed to bear off the bodies of the
dead. A balcony in the rear of the stage stood in stead of a castle wall or
the deck of a ship, while a curtained space below might represent an inner
room or a dungeon vault. A curtain extending across the stage seems at
times to have been used in managing a change of scene. Spectacular elements
were not lacking: fireworks, ascents and descents of gods, armies,
coronations, and battles delighted the eye. On costume, anachronistic but
elaborate, the manager lavished his money and ingenuity. Cleopatra tightly
laced, Tamburlaine in scarlet copper breeches are recorded facts, but
Venuses, Apollos, mermaids, devils, satyrs, and nymphs leave something for
fancy to conceive, as does the "gown to go invisible in" which perhaps
shielded Ariel or Puck. Of the acting we have little information. Female
parts were played by boys; clowns with their jigs were great favorites,
but a considerable skill in acting must be supposed,--less subtle, less
occupied with stage business than to-day, more declamatory possibly, and
more attentive to the spoken word. Any superiority in the appreciation
possessed by the audiences over those of to-day must be attributed not to
their superior intelligence, but to their long training in listening to
plays. They probably differed from uneducated audiences in the cheaper
theatres of to-day chiefly, if at all, in spontaneity of emotions, a desire
for emotional incongruity, and a cultivated delight in verbal fireworks or
felicities. It is certain that in the time of Marlowe they were gaping for
sensation and joyed in a comedy of beatings, a tragedy of murders, and a
mixture of jigging and villany. For such audiences, for such a stage, under
stress of immediate demand requiring hasty and collaborative work, Marlowe
and his contemporaries wrote. They were hack writers, and so viewed by the
literati of their day. Every one of them, Shakespeare included, had in the
first place to satisfy the demands of the public theatres. This needs to be
remembered no less than the fact that the plays of nearly all, of the
meanest hack as well as Shakespeare, seem to have felt the stir and thrill
of the effort to express thought in enduring words.
In the course of the six or seven years ending with Marlowe's death in
1593, tragedy experienced a rapid and multiform development. The various
influences already noticed in the last chapter as at work were developed
by the ingenuity and innovation of a dozen writers, and translated into the
expression of individual genius by Marlowe and Shakespeare. No theory of
tragedy ruled the theatres; no school of dramatists adopted any code of
principles; the plays which we class as tragedies were mostly known as
histories and were written in violence to the accepted literary conception.
Nevertheless, tragedy was establishing itself as a popular species of
drama, was separating its themes and their treatment clearly from those of
comedy, and was defining the course which it was to follow until the
Puritan revolution.
The impossibility of determining a precise chronology of the stage history
of the period renders the exact appraisal of indebtedness, or the tracing
of any certain evolution, very insecure. The changes in the companies in
1594 and the consequent publication of a large number of plays in the same
year enable us to fix on a number of tragedies acted before Marlowe's
death, and we may safely add a few others as not later than 1595. Among
these extant tragedies and in the names of those that have not survived
there are representatives of various types,--biblical plays, tragedies
dealing with romantic love, domestic tragedies telling stories of
contemporary crimes. In any one of these plays, indeed, various types may
be combined; the writers were concerned with telling stories, not with
_l'evolution des genres_. But the most salient and pervasive forces working
in tragedy may be roughly denominated as (1) the chronicle history play,
(2) the revenge type of tragedy, (3) the type of tragedy created by
Marlowe. To these should perhaps be added romantic comedy with its
idealized love story and its element of averted tragedy. But the first
three types, though overlapping and not distinct, were of marked importance
in the history of tragedy and need especial consideration in connection
with the most important dramatists of this period, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, and
Shakespeare.
The chronicle history play may claim attention first, not because it was
demonstrably earlier in appearance than the others, but because it engaged
the efforts of nearly every dramatic writer of the period, and because in
its disregard of foreign influence or parallel in its methods and
structure, and in its devotion to the demands of the London theatres, it is
most typical of the drama of the period. The prime essential of a play was
that it should tell a story. A playwright took his material from _novella_,
poem, or chronicle, and strove to translate it into an interesting and
varied series of scenes. In the chronicles he found material peculiarly
suited to such translation. Everything was there,--battles, coronations,
counsels, conspiracies, amours, speeches, characterization, and sentiments.
No enlargement was necessary as in the case of a _novella_, no
considerations of consistency of characterization, few incidents in
addition to those in the highway or the byways of the narrative, and only a
minimum of invention. The interest of a distinct plot was superseded by
that of historical persons, events, and spectacles, and these compelled
only such unity as might be secured by taking the reign of one monarch as
the basis of a play, or sometimes of several plays. The presentation of
history involved a large number of persons on the stage, many changes of
place, a long stretch of time, and an incongruity of matter, all this
loosely organized into scenes themselves often long and varied and
admitting some change of place and lapse of time within their bounds.
Though the scene, rather than the act, was the unit in popular drama, it
had almost no structural value. A play was really a continuous performance,
the actors coming and going, a battle intervening, and now and then a
withdrawal of all the actors and the appearance of a new group presaging a
marked change of place or the beginning of an entirely different action. In
the arrangement of scenes, however, some attention to parallel, contrast,
and climax soon became manifest; and some integration of the confused
material from the chronicles, particularly in the separation from scenes
abounding in action of those purely narrative or expository and those
purely lyrical, chiefly lamentations. In spite of such beginnings of
system, the early chronicle plays, "The Famous Victories of Henry V," "Jack
Straw," "Leir," "Edward I," and "The Troublesome Reign" are less coherent
in structure, more incongruous in material, and less regardful of any clear
fable, tragic or comic, than are other contemporary plays.
To determine criteria to define these plays and their successors as a class
is by no means easy. They were usually based on the chronicles, but the
method of composition just described was applied to legend or poem with
similar results, and there were also plays based on chronicles of
contemporary events. They had for their main purpose the presentation of
history, but this was shared by plays on French and Roman as well as
English history, and there were historical plays that had no marks of the
chronicle method of structure. The English chronicle plays usually show a
pronounced patriotic temper, but this is often subsidiary and neglected in
the desire for farce or sensation. The spectacular features are a
characteristic element, a battle-scene being perhaps the most indispensable
element or ingredient of a chronicle play, but this again fails to supply
even more than a superficial criterion. In the popularity of the
presentations of historical facts, all kinds of stories were worked over
into a likeness to "true chronicle history," and the genuine historical,
legendary, and biographical plays are hardly distinguishable from the
pretenders. An illuminating illustration of the characteristics of the
national drama about 1590 can be found in a comparison of two dramatic
versions of a romance in Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," one by Cinthio himself,
the other by Robert Greene. The Italian play is a tragicomedy in strict
Senecan form, in which Arrenopia (Greene's Dorothea) appears as a
declamatory queen confiding her troubles to the attendant nurse. Greene
took the romantic comedy, added some pseudo-historical events, patriotic
sentiments, and a pitched field for the finale, and called the whole "The
Scottish Historie of James IV, slaine at Flodden." For our purpose the
chronicle plays are to be regarded less as a distinct type than as
representing a set of practices in vogue at this period and widely
influential on the drama's development. They possessed the following
characteristics and imposed some or all of them on very different forms of
drama: subjects drawn from English history, the presentation of historical
and political events, an incongruous mixture of material, a narrative
structure almost as unorganized as the chronicles themselves, patriotic
sentiments, and the stage pageantry of court and camp.
From their earliest appearance, however, the chronicle plays offered
opportunities for developments later consummated by Shakespeare. Comic
scenes were freely interspersed to enliven the tedium of royal
declamations, and in these lay the possibility of the combination of
history and comedy in the Falstaff plays. On the other hand, the history of
a doleful fall of a prince or the retribution visited on some tyrant gave
the plays a tragic tone and opened the way for "Macbeth" and "Lear." "The
Troublesome Reign of King John,"[9] the basis of Shakespeare's play, is the
best example of an early chronicle play presenting undeveloped
possibilities for tragedy. It is written partly in blank verse, partly in
rhyme, and partly in prose. It does not follow the chronicles with any
fidelity, but twists history, adds fiction, and proclaims throughout a
vigorous protestant patriotism. Battles, embassies, farce, orations, death,
and much else mingle together, each scene being treated like another and no
discernible method being followed in their arrangement or proportion,
except that of a loose adherence to the scheme of "a life and death." The
first part closes with John crowned and assured of the miscarriage of his
intended murder of Arthur; in the second part, as the address to the reader
declares,
"First scenes shows Arthur's death in infancie,
And last concludes John's fatall tragedie."
"The Troublesome Reign" indicates what little advance had been made toward
tragedy when Marlowe's first play appeared. The prologue to that play was a
declaration of reform and innovation.
"From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."
The doggerel rhyme favored in the popular drama was to give place to blank
verse, and the jigging clowns to heroic themes and "high astounding terms."
Marlowe came to the theatre,[10] fresh from the university, his fancy
aflame with the beauty of Latin verse and story, his mind storming with the
problems and ambitions of adolescent genius. He threw aside Senecan
traditions and devoted himself to meeting the demands of the professional
stage. When a few years later he died, English tragedy had been created
anew largely through his achievement.
His independence and initiative are shown in his choice of subjects.
Although in "Dido" he took a standard theme of humanistic tragedy, and in
the Henry VI plays and "Edward II" followed the prevailing taste for
English history, and in "The Massacre of Paris" another fashion for the
dramatization of current atrocities; yet in "Tamburlaine" he chose the
story of a world conqueror, in "Faustus" a legend that had just entered
print in the German "Volksbuch" of 1587, and in "The Jew of Malta" he
worked over unknown sources into a tragedy of revenge with evident freedom
of invention. All three stories present notable contributions to tragic
themes, and the last two disregard both the fashion for historical subjects
and the requirement that tragedy deal only with princes. These new and
varied themes gave a chance for a considerable revolution in the content of
tragedy. Revenge, murders, battles, intrigue, physical horrors are still
prominent; but the Senecan round of incest and adultery disappears, and the
"Mirror for Magistrates" no longer represents the epitome of tragic action.
Marlowe's choice and treatment of plots seem, indeed, dictated by a new
conception of tragedy, as dealing not merely with a life and death, or a
bloody crime, or a reversal of fortune, but with the heroic struggle of a
great personality, doomed to inevitable defeat. "Tamburlaine" is scarcely a
tragedy at all, but rather a chronicle of the hero's greatness; but in
"Faustus" and "The Jew" heroes with ambitions boundless and passionate like
Tamburlaine's are overwhelmed in the end by the inexorable destiny of human
weakness. In "Edward II," where the hero is less dominant over the action,
the study of historical facts results in a more restrained, more human
presentation of the same theme, a ruling passion drawing the protagonist to
pitiful defeat.
In the structure of his plots Marlowe forsook the Senecan models and began
with the methods of the chronicle play. "Tamburlaine" is a chronicle
history, presenting the story of the events of a life and ending with
death. Originally the play contained comic scenes, omitted in the published
form and evidently of no value in structure or conception. Without these
there is enough of a medley, though the amazing succession of conquests,
defiances, murders, harangues, battles, funerals, wooings, and horrors is
arranged with considerable skill. There is manifest regard for contrast in
the alternating exhibitions of Tamburlaine's power and his enemies'
weakness; his love for Zenocrate, an addition to the source, is integrated
with the main story of conquest; and in Part I the climactical arrangement
is emphasized by the division into acts. Each act comprises an important
stage in Tamburlaine's career, act v presenting the culmination in the
suicide of the Turkish emperor and empress, the conquest of Arabia,
Zenocrate's former betrothed, and the submission of her conquered father to
her marriage with Tamburlaine. Part II, the prologue implies, was an
afterthought due to the popularity of Part I. The climax is carried on
somewhat loosely up to the harnessing of the jades of Asia; but the
reversal of fortune, though developed in the death of Zenocrate, the
unworthiness of the eldest son, and the approach of death to Tamburlaine,
is not given effective emphasis. Tamburlaine's death is merely the end of
the play, not a tragic catastrophe. Epical and crude though their structure
is, the two plays possess a firmer organization and a greater unity than
any preceding popular tragedy. Everything centres in the protagonist; he
keeps the middle of the stage; his towering passion and incessant
declamation fix one's attention; episodes like the deaths of the Turks or
of Olympia hardly divert the mind from his titanic personality.
A similar unity governs the structure of "Faustus" and "The Jew." In each
there are many actions, some comic, instead of one serious action, and the
history of a lifetime instead of a great emotional crisis; but in each the
dominant figure and the course of his controlling passion impose a certain
unity of structure. Both begin with soliloquies, revealing the protagonists
at the height of fortune and about to face crises in their careers; and it
is significant of the increased importance given to inner conflict that
reflective soliloquies, neglected in "Tamburlaine," play a considerable
part, especially in "Faustus." In both plays there is also advance in the
clear conception of catastrophe, which now controls the structure. In "The
Jew" his thwarted lust for gold drives him through a series of villanous
triumphs over difficulties until he is melodramatically hoist with his own
petard. In "Faustus" the choice of the devilish magic leads through
apparent success, past opportunities for repentance, to final remorse and
damnation. In both plays, the domination of the protagonist by a passion,
its conflicting joys and sorrows, and its final failure become points for
emphasis. The history of a life thus becomes organized into a tragedy.
In "Edward II," Marlowe's masterpiece in structure as in other respects,
there is an absence of comedy, for which he seems to have had no aptitude,
and adherence to the chronicles is governed by his maturing sense of the
structural principles which should proportion the tragic story. Twenty
years of confusion are condensed into five acts which attain dramatic
organization not only under the direction of the central personality and
the inevitable catastrophe, but also from the skillful handling of the
counter-force. The play begins with a salient manifestation in the recall
of Gaveston of the passion which is to be the king's downfall. The
hazardous combination of the two similar careers of Gaveston and Spenser is
adroitly managed; it develops the central theme of Edward's weakness and
brings into active conflict the counter-force of the barons under the
leadership of Mortimer. The alternating triumph and discomfiture of the
king in his struggle with the barons leads to the climax of their
humiliation at the end of act iii; and thus the turning-point of the action
is given an emphasis not found in earlier plays. Henceforth the
counter-force is in the ascendant, and the catastrophe is realized with a
tremendous power that justifies Lamb's extravagance: "the death scene of
Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or modern
with which I am acquainted." The play, to be sure, has many faults of
structure. It is the product of an immature period of the drama and of
crude theatrical conditions; but it indicates clearly how Marlowe was
developing tragic movement out of the confused narratives of the
chronicles, and was giving to a presentation of diverse and crowded actions
principles not altogether unlike those that Aristotle had found in the
Attic drama.
It should be added that the manifest excellences of the dramatic treatment
lie less in the structure of any one play as a whole than in the handling
of the separate scenes. These have, of course, the peculiarities of the
popular stage and the chronicle plays. Events are sometimes reported by an
intercalary narrative like scene ii, act i, of "Edward II," which consists
of four lines by Gaveston, announcing that the nobles have gone to Lambeth,
and four words of reply by Kent. Soliloquies are often used to explain
action or character. In the task of translating incident into dramatic
situation, however, Marlowe had the advantages of centuries of dramatic
practice and the traditions of tragic acting, and his genius often worked
with facility and power. These qualities are most manifest in the death
scenes. Olympia, Bajazeth, Zabina, Zenocrate, all die with at least stage
effectiveness; and in the deaths of Faustus and Edward, Marlowe's dramatic
power reached its highest mark. Death, synonymous with tragic catastrophe,
was revealed to future dramatists as something more than physical horror or
the end of existence. Death became the loss of active and glorious living,
the negation of individual power, the expiring struggle of the drama of
life, its last defiance and its most irresistible appeal to pity and
terror.
Characterization, like conception and structure, in Marlowe's tragedy is
largely an affair of the protagonist. Minor figures are for the most part
mere sketches without any sustained and consistent delineation. Only in
"Edward II" does the antagonist receive much attention, and only in that
play is the character of the tragic hero free from lapses into caricature
and absurdity. The protagonists, as in many tragedies before and since, are
evil men intent on evil deeds. They appeal to our sympathy only in
misfortune and disaster; in more fortunate circumstances they run counter
to moral laws and excite a mixture of admiration, horror, and even
contempt. Tamburlaine the atheist and Faust the dealer in magic invited a
greater condemnation in every Christian then than now. Barabas is
conceived, under the inspiration of Machiavelli and perhaps also of stage
practice, as an intriguing villain with all the accompaniments ever since
familiar in drama and fiction. He is the source of all evil and utterly
without conscience; he avows his villany to the audience and he works by
crafty intrigue with the aid of an equally conscienceless accomplice.
Edward II, on the other hand, is of the type of tyrants, weak, vacillating,
and self-indulgent, and he offers the difficult dramatic problem of a
protagonist who is sometimes contemptible and must sometimes be heroic and
pitiful. Marlowe's conception of a tragic hero, however, transcended any
outlines furnished by his sources or any stage types such as villain and
tyrant. He conceived his heroes first of all as men capable of great
passions, consumed by their desires, abandoned to the pursuit of their
lusts, whether they led to glory, butchery, loss of kingdom, or eternal
damnation. This intensity of emotion gives them an elevation and a heroic
interest that outlasts contemptibility or pathos. Nor are they without
representational value. They linger in the mind as men, absurd,
exaggerated, monstrous at times, but appealingly human in moments when
their passion rings true, and impressively typical of the eternal struggle
of passion and desire against the fixed limits of human attainment. It is
in the realization of their emotions that the plays secure their great
impressiveness. Tragedy has become not the presentation of history, myth,
or events of any sort, but the presentation of the passionate struggle and
pitiful defeat of an extraordinary human being.
Genuine human passion and a vital conception of life's tragedy found
expression in verse, sometimes inspired, sometimes absurd, but always
spontaneous and unfaltering. Blank verse, borrowed from Italy and adopted
in English Senecan plays, now became a new instrument, and its preeminent
adaptability for tragic poetry henceforth long remained unquestioned. If it
has had many greater masters since, it had none comparable before, and, in
spite of stiffness, monotony, and great unevenness, it rises now and again
to remarkable technical excellence. It is _sui generis_, without known
models, though it gathers to itself many of the prevailing characteristics
of Renaissance poetry. It has plenty of Senecan hyperbole, but curiously
little of Senecan antithesis or aphorism; it abounds in rant and bombast;
it is over-adorned with classical allusion; it delights in ornament and
sonority; and in the main it is declamatory and lyrical rather than
dramatically suited to character and situation. Again, it is mannered and
often monotonous, especially in "Tamburlaine," where the repetition of
names and the recurrence of polysyllabic words at the ends of lines give
the familiar swing:--
"To ride in triumph through Persepolis"....
"Soft ye, my lords, and sweet Zenocrate"....
"Then shall my native city, Samarcanda."
Yet the lover of romantic poetry will find delight in the very impetuosity
of the rant, the thunder of the declamation, the roll of the proper names,
the color and pageantry of the descriptions, the occasional loveliness of
the luxurious classicism, and yet more in the splendid surges of the verse
to reveal the turmoil and anguish of passionate death. From the first
moment Marlowe was an undoubted poet; and to his tremendous facility of
words and rhythm he was adding, as "Edward II" reveals, a moderation of
ornament, an evenness of power, and a dramatic consistency, while still
retaining the potentiality of dazzling dramatic flash. He brought not only
blank verse but poetry to the English drama, and the greatness of its style
dates from his achievement.
We must not, however, in the poet forget the playwright, or lose sight of
Marlowe's contributions to the purely theatrical side of the drama.
"Tamburlaine" set a standard in stage effects as well as in poetry. Kings
and sultans appear in droves, crowns are handed about like toys, treaties
are torn, cities stormed, battles fought. Frequently eight or ten
chieftains crowd the stage with their trains. The tents of the conqueror
are pitched and changed from white to red and then to black as the
beleaguered city continues to withstand his power. An emperor and empress
dash out their brains against the bars of their cages. Tamburlaine drives
the bridled monarchs harnessed to his chariot. Two bodies are burnt; there
are murders by the dozen; and there is a solemn funeral scene where the
hearse advances in the light of a burning town. The popular stage had
probably never seen such a spectacle before. In "Faustus" new and even more
surprising stage effects are supplied to illustrate the wonders of magic.
In "The Jew of Malta" there is a display of plots and atrocities which the
plays of the next thirty years strove in vain to surpass. Apart from these
spectacular elements, it is obvious that the characterization and
declamation, in fact the very structure of the plays, were designed to
supply full opportunity for the acting of Edward Alleyn. He was nearly
seven feet tall, we are told, the greatest actor of his day, and especially
skilled in majestic parts. So to him, perhaps, as well as to Marlowe's
conception of tragedy, was due the one-part play, the sonorous lines, and
the passionate protagonists.
Such considerations recall the double purpose, hardly separable from the
drama and particularly manifest in the Elizabethan dramatists, the two
desires, to please their audiences and to create literature. The spectacle,
bombast, and horrors, the new and startling stories of Marlowe's plays were
certainly intended to win his public, and they probably caused no twinges
to his artistic conscience. On the other hand, while hardly an element of
the dramas is without the influence of theatrical conditions, and while of
deliberate artistic theories there is little evidence, yet the study of
character, the underlying conceptions, the maturing power of structure, as
well as the beauty and wisdom of separate passages, reveal a mind of
intellectual and emotional profundity seeking to give noble expression to
the things in life that impressed him most vividly. In the traffic of the
stage the young poet found a chance to study men and their motives, to seek
"the immortal flowers of poetry," and to utter something of his own
experience and view of life. Into the rapid translation of stories for the
stage he threw his own conception of the rewards and defeats of an
overmastering passion, of the glory of struggle, and the pity and terror of
failure. In the further development of the drama, his influence continued
not only in his series of tragedies forming a fairly definite type, but
also as that of an inspiring personality.
"Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clere;
For that fine madnes still he did retaine,
Which rightly should possess a poet's braine."
DRAYTON: _Epistle to Henry Reynolds._
The influence upon the drama of Marlowe's whilom friend, Thomas Kyd, was
not due to his personality, concerning which recently discovered documents
create no very favorable impression, or to any remarkable poetic genius,
but to a single play and the type of tragedy which it fathered. "The
Spanish Tragedy,"[11] entered in the Stationers' Register, 1592, and
probably acted at about the same time as "Tamburlaine," and earlier than
Marlowe's other plays, was the first representative of this type of revenge
tragedies, and it gained an immediate and lasting popularity, though after
a time encountering the ridicule of Jonson and later dramatists. The story
of revenge had already appeared in "Horestes" and in Latin plays at the
universities; and theme, ghost, treatment, and structure were derived from
Seneca by Kyd and adapted with great originality to the popular drama. At
least, no other dramatist has as good a claim to be considered the creator
of a species of tragedy that had a long series of representatives even
after its culmination in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."
The main theme of the play is revenge of a father for a son, superintended
by a ghost; and this theme attaches to itself other motives important both
here and in their later developments. The revenge is delayed by hesitation
on the part of Hieronimo, who finds his task a difficult one and requires
much proof and superabundant deliberation to spur his irresolution into
activity. Madness is another accompaniment of the main theme; the second
title of the 1602 quarto, "Old Hieronimo mad againe," indicating how
important it was in the stage presentation. Hieronimo pretends madness, and
his pretended madness often passes into real melancholy and distraction.
Isabella, his wife, is driven by insanity to suicide. Intrigue used both
against and by the avenger is another important element; the villain is a
machinator and Hieronimo finally accomplishes his revenge by means of
dissimulation and trickery. According to both Senecan and national
precedents, vengeance moves in a pathway of blood; ten of the _dramatis
personae_, innocent and guilty alike, pass to "the loathsome pool of
Acheron," and the final slaughter leaves five bodies to be borne from the
stage. Intrigue and slaughter characterize most of the tragedies of this
period, notably "The Jew of Malta," but the ghost-directed revenge,
hesitation, insanity, and the meditative soliloquies distinguished more
specifically the Kydian species. In spite of the medley of intrigue and
carnage, there is introduced, after Senecan fashion, much philosophizing
and introspection. Meditations on fate, revenge, suicide, and similar
subjects play a large part in the development of the story and are most
frequently given the form of soliloquies. Hieronimo's inner struggle is
revealed in lonely communings, now in defense, now in bitter condemnation
of his delay.
The structure is an interesting adaptation of Senecan and popular
characteristics. The play does not confine itself to the last phase of an
action, and it introduces various actions introductory or subsidiary to
that of the revenge, and a mixture of comedy. Moreover, everything is
represented on the stage with the freedom established in the popular drama.
On the other hand, there is much exposition by means of narrative, and
Revenge and the ghost of Andrea appear, after Senecan fashion, as a
prologue, and after each act as a sort of vestigial chorus. While there is
a surplus of violent and external action, the epic, lyric, and reflective
scenes picture an inner conflict and supply both aphorisms and a searching
psychology. When late in the play Hieronimo's revenge for his son is
finally started, it has to contend with both his own hesitation and the
intrigues of the villain. Its development, in comparison with "Hamlet," is
absurdly faulty because of Kyd's failure to make clear from the start the
character of the avenger; but, if it is studied as a first attempt to give
structure to a complex theme, the vicissitudes of Hieronimo's irresolution
and frenzy will seem carefully designed and strikingly prophetic of the
course of Hamlet's struggle.
Kyd's skill in devising stage situations is shown by the dramatic value and
lasting effect on the public of the scene in which Hieronimo is called from
his naked bed to discover the body of his son hanging in the arbor, or of
the scene in which, offering a handkerchief to the weeping Senex, he draws
forth the bloody napkin which he has kept as a reminder of his son's death.
The play within the play, used here as a means of revenge; the scenes in
which Isabella "runs lunatick"; the laments and final exultation of the
ghost; the exhibition of the body of Horatio after the mock play, found
later imitators and became usual accessories of revenge tragedies. Indeed,
minor bits of stage business, as the wearing of black, the swearing by the
cross of the sword, the capture of the accomplice by the watch, the reading
of a book before a soliloquy, the falling on the ground as an expression of
grief, though not the inventions of Kyd, were given their later vogue
partly through the popularity of this play.
Some of the types of character represented also appear again and again in
later plays. Lorenzo is the villain par excellence; his accomplice is
grotesque as well as evil; and Bel Imperia, both prettily sentimental and
desperately revengeful, is of a type not uncommon in later tragedy. The
character of Hieronimo, rudely as it is drawn, is not without subtlety of
conception. This type of tragic hero, very different from Marlowe's,
naturally good and noble, meditative by temperament, driven to melancholy
and madness by the responsibility forced on him by crime, and at length
accomplishing direful revenge through trickery and irony, is manifestly a
precursor of Hamlet. Kyd's style justifies Nash's description, "whole
handfulls of tragical speeches" and "a blank verse bodged up with ifs and
ands." It displays the rhetorician rather than the poet and, like his
conception and structure, gives evidence of an ingenious innovator adapting
Seneca. It abounds in artificial balance, parallelism, antitheses,
word-play, strained figures, and it harrows hell for its tragic vocabulary;
but its love scenes have a verbal prettiness and its tirades and
soliloquies helped to confer on subsequent tragic style sententiousness and
elevation as well as rant. Far inferior to "Tamburlaine" as an artistic
achievement, "The Spanish Tragedy" can no more than that play be pushed
aside as a mere blood and thunder tirade. Beneath its absurdities there
lies the conception of an inner struggle against overwhelming
responsibility, and of the conflict of the individual against evil and
fate.
From the success of such a play Kyd may very naturally have turned to the
similar story of revenge embodied in Belleforest's "Historie of Hamblet."
From contemporary references we infer that the old "Hamlet" was a tragedy
of blood, written under Senecan influence, and containing a ghost that
cried "revenge." If, as seems undoubted, it was used by Shakespeare, traces
of it must be found in the German version of Hamlet, in the corrupt first
quarto, and even in Shakespeare's final version; but there is as yet no
agreement among scholars as to what can be attributed to Shakespeare's
borrowing rather than to his invention and transformation. It seems
entirely probable, however, that the early play was a companion-piece to
"The Spanish Tragedy," containing the motives of revenge, hesitation,
insanity, intrigue, and slaughter, with the addition of the murderer's
passion for the wife of the murdered. On the now established theory that
the play was by Kyd, we may infer a protagonist like Hieronimo, much
meditating and soliloquizing, a dramatic structure like that of "The
Spanish Tragedy," a play within a play, a mad Ophelia, and an intrigue
culminating in slaughter. There are evidences in Marston and later
contributors to the revenge type that the original "Hamlet," fully as much
as "The Spanish Tragedy," served as their model; while doubtless like "The
Spanish Tragedy," Kyd's "Hamlet" must have borne a much closer resemblance
than even that play to Shakespeare's masterpiece.
"Soliman and Perseda," if not by Kyd, at least shows many evidences of his
influence and is itself an interesting combination of the tragedy of
revenge and romantic comedy. Love, Fortune, and Death make up a Kydian
chorus and debate for supremacy until the close, when Death, like the
Ghost, exults in an enumeration of the dead. The love story furnishes a
clearly defined plot. The course of true love, despite the heroine's
jealousy, an unintended murder by the hero, his banishment, the sack of
Rhodes by the Turks, and the Sultan's passion for the heroine, ascends
through the first four acts to the reunion and prospective happiness of the
lovers. The fifth act proceeds to their separation and death through the
Sultan's wickedness. Some of the incidents are those of romantic comedy,
such as the use of the chain as a symbol of loyal love, its loss, the
resulting jealousy, and the donning of boy's clothes by the heroine in
order to receive death from the sword of the hated suitor. The fun of the
piece is furnished by a _miles gloriosus_, Basilisco, and the extraordinary
merit of his characterization furnishes the chief reason for doubting Kyd's
authorship. Over lyric love, fortune, and fun, however, Death reigns
supreme. This is his favorite tragedy, for eighteen persons are actually
killed on the stage, and at the close not one of the _dramatis personae_ is
left to bear off the bodies of the slain.
The successes of Marlowe and Kyd gave tragic stories a new popularity with
actors and audiences, and the stage was occupied with fiercely declaiming
Asiatic conquerors, deep-dyed villains, and shrieking ghosts. Marlowe's
themes, characters, and blank verse found many imitators, while Kyd's plays
encouraged the presentation of stories of ghosts and revenge similar to
those in Seneca and his English imitators. Direct imitations of Seneca in
technic and language are also common. The abundance of bloodshed is
invariable. A wide range of material was drawn upon, including Asiatic
story, Italian _novelle_, Plutarch, Xenophon, and the Bible, although the
English chronicles remained the favorite source, and the majority have at
least the semblance of a historical setting. Many have a mixture of comic
material, but they show in general a preponderance of tragic events and
emotions far greater than in the early popular tragedies. There seems to
have been a general effort in conformity with an address to the audience
placed in the second act of "The Wars of Cyrus," acted by the Children of
the Revels, which announces that they have "exiled from our tragicke stage"
"needlesse antickes," and promises "mournfull plaints writ sad, and
tragicke tearmes." The gentle reader will not linger long over any of these
plays or discover in them signs of nascent genius, but they have a
considerable interest in illustrating further the development of chronicle
history toward tragedy, the influence of the Senecan tradition, and the
dominating power of Marlowe's example. They also inform us of the
conditions governing tragedy when Shakespeare began his career. In their
many resemblances one to another we have evidence not so much of direct
borrowings as of the close relations then existing among the few theatrical
playwrights and companies. Any successful innovation was bound to have its
immediate imitations, and on the other hand the keen rivalry for success
was likely to result in innovation and novelty.
Of these plays perhaps "Locrine"[12] has the most diverse indebtedness. It
presents a story of a bloody family feud, but it is also of the chronicle
history order, with a mixture of battles, patriotism, and farce. It
exhibits borrowings from Spenser, imitations of "Tamburlaine," Ate as a
chorus, dumb shows requiring a menagerie, two ghosts, one of whom takes
part in the action, and a story of double revenge. The hero is occupied
with revenge number one until the fourth act, when his infidelity makes him
the object of a return revenge that culminates in his death. Among the
plays mainly indebted to Marlowe are: Greene's "Alphonsus of Aragon," a
comedy that is almost a travesty on the first part of "Tamburlaine";
"Selimus," ascribed to Greene, which also shows Senecan structure and
philosophy; "The Wounds of Civil War, or the Tragedies of Marius and
Sylla," the first extant play based on Plutarch; "The Wars of Cyrus," in
part romantic comedy; and Peele's "Battle of Alcazar," which has a
presenter, dumb shows, three ghosts, and a Moorish villain of the same
class as Marlowe's Barabas and Aaron in "Titus Andronicus."
The English chronicle plays also felt Marlowe's influence, most notably in
Shakespeare's early historical plays, to be considered in a moment, but
also in several plays almost contemporary with "Edward II" and the first
versions of "Henry VI." "The True Tragedy of Richard III" (1594), by an
unknown author or authors, seems to have preceded Shakespeare's play and to
have followed the third part of "Henry VI." It presents a combination of
chronicle play with Marlowesque protagonist and a Kydian apparatus of
revenge. The ghost of Clarence appears at the beginning crying, "Vindicta,"
and Truth and Poetry supply the necessary exposition. The revenge element
becomes prominent toward the end of the play, when the ghosts of Richard's
victims appear to him in a dream, not visible as in Shakespeare, and the
remorseful villain declares that not merely his victims but all the forces
of nature, sun, moon, and planets, cry revenge:--
"The birds sing not, but sorrow for revenge.
The silly lambs sit bleating for revenge."
Richard is a man of powerful will carried away by ambition and evidently
modeled on Tamburlaine; but unlike the Scythian and like Faustus, he is
conscience-smitten, and his punishment comes in remorse as well as death.
This conception, based on the chronicle, is treated with power, but in the
main the play is a hodge-podge. More worthy examples of chronicle history
are "Edward III," often ascribed to Marlowe and not unworthy of him, and
the anonymous "Tragedy of Woodstock."[13] The latter shows frequent
resemblances to "Edward II" and apparently preceded Shakespeare's "Richard
II," leaving off at the point where that play begins. The events of half a
reign are focused about the central personalities of Richard and Woodstock,
a weak king beset by flatterers and an honorable and patriotic leader of
the nobles. The construction is skillful in its integration of comedy with
the main action and its alternation of tragic and comic, action and
counsel, force and counter-force; and the characterization is remarkably
well individualized. Woodstock, especially, has human appeal and is notable
as a tragic hero, or at least the central figure of a history, who meets
misfortune and death through no fault of his own but solely through the
wickedness of others.
Holinshed's chronicle is also the source of "Arden of Feversham" (1592),
sometimes ascribed on very insufficient grounds to Shakespeare, the
earliest extant domestic tragedy. The play deals with a notorious murder of
some forty years before, and follows the crude dramaturgy of the earliest
chronicle plays. The stage presentation of notably brutal murders is common
to-day and was to be expected on the Elizabethan stage, but the play seems
also to represent reaction from the royalties, marvels, and unrealities of
the contemporary tragedy. The epilogue, indeed, offers a defiance of
romanticism and the since well-worn creed of the realist.
"Gentlemen, we hope youle pardon this naked tragedy,
Wherein no filed points are foisted in
To make it gratious to the eare or eye;
For simple truth is gratious enough,
And needes no other points of glosing stuffe."
Notwithstanding this protestation, occasional monologues reveal the common
stylistic decorations. The play is tediously detailed and artlessly
realistic, though it has some vigorous blank verse and several powerful
scenes; the most powerful, when Michael in the middle of the night is
awaiting the murderers of his master, recalling a well-known passage in
"The Spanish Tragedy." But the greatest merit of the play lies in the
portrait of Alice Arden, absorbed in a despicable passion, but cunning and
unabashed, incomparably the most lifelike evil woman up to this time
depicted in the drama.
Peele's "The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, with the Tragedie of
Absalon," acted about 1591, has, unlike "Arden," many "filed points to make
it gratious to the eare and eye." It gains a unique interest as the only
extant tragedy of this period based on the biblical narrative. The bible
story is treated just as a historical chronicle would have been; and the
play, divided by choruses into three "discourses," offers no advance in
conception, structure, or characterization on the average tragedy of the
period. Yet it is the masterpiece of one of the most active among
Shakespeare's predecessors and illustrates his most distinctive
contribution to the drama's development. As the author of "Alcazar,"
"Edward I," and possibly "Locrine," as well as "David and Bethsabe,"
Peele's contribution deserves some note. His dramatic career began at
Oxford, where he made a version of one of the "Iphigenias" of Euripides,
which was acted at Christ Church, and where he also aided in the production
of Dr. Gager's Latin plays. In London he became the friend of Nash, Greene,
and Marlowe, and the versatile adopter of the latest dramatic modes,
whether in comedy, pastoral, history, or tragedy. In his best work,
however, and especially in "David and Bethsabe," there are graces of style
which justify Nash's eulogy of his friend as "primus verborum artifex." The
great innovation of this early drama was, after all, in poetic style; and
in furthering this Peele may claim a place only second to Marlowe. If
Marlowe gave sweep and grandeur to blank verse, Peele brought a sweetness
of cadence and, as Professor Ward observes, "a vivacity of fancy and a
variety of imagery." As Marlowe turned everything into sonorous phrase, now
bombastic, now superb, so Peele turned every thought to music and fancy,
sometimes banal, sometimes lovely. "David and Bethsabe," with its oriental
setting, though treated with careless dramatic art, proved an inspiration
to the stylist. The excess of verbalism, indeed, gives the play a sugary
and monotonous effect, and its poetry loses connection with character or
situation. Absalon plays with conceits for twenty-five lines while hanging
by his hair, and laments melodiously for fifteen lines more after being
stabbed. But there is charm and gracefulness everywhere, in the choruses,
in the defense of Hamon, and in the parables, and now and again the very
allurement and luxury of words, as in the famous,
"Now comes my lover tripping like the roe
And brings my longings tangled in her hair."
While this operatic verbalism with its faults and merits cannot of course
be assigned wholly to Peele, he seems to have been in the drama one of its
earliest and most influential purveyors.
The dozen plays just noticed furnish departures from, as well as
adaptations of, the Kydian and Marlowean types of tragedy, but they reveal
no marked advance in conception or structure. In characterization, however,
there is a development in various ways; thus, a hack play like "The True
Tragedy" has considerable power in its conception of a conscience-smitten
villain, in "Woodstock" there is clear individualization, and in Alice
Arden and the Countess of "Edward III" female character becomes lifelike
and impressive. Still more salient is the attention paid to style. The
Elizabethan theatregoer was used to the spoken and not to the written word,
and expected at the theatre to be delighted by verbal display. Dramatic
style then had functions which have since been relegated to other arts. It
was to be declamative, taking the place of oratory; descriptive, supplying
in part the place of scenery; and operatic in its word-play and decorative
phrasing, and in its lyric interludes and laments. Moreover, medieval
tradition and Senecan models alike enforced the necessity in tragedy of a
heightened style; and many dramatists doubtless agreed with Gosson in
placing first among dramatic requirements "sweetness of words, fitness of
epithets with metaphors, allegories." Still further, along with the
excesses resultant from this delight in words, there was manifest a growing
mastery of language to represent truthfully situation and character.
"Arden" gave crude expression to this reaction toward realism in style;
"Woodstock" much more effectively; and colloquial directness was mingled
with the artificialities of "The Spanish Tragedy" and the beauties of
"Edward II." Henceforth the Elizabethan drama exhibits a conflict between
dramatic suitability of language and its declamatory, operatic, or
aphoristic decorativeness, promoting on the one hand a realistic
presentation of life, and on the other fantastic absurdity and imaginative
idealism.
The preceding discussion of Marlowe and his contemporaries must have made
it apparent that Shakespeare cannot be treated as outside of the circle,
although his plays have for convenience been reserved until now. The young
actor and poet learned to meet successfully the demands of the stage
through an apprenticeship of hack-work, collaboration, and revision, and
progressed in his art by means of adaptation and imitation. He wrote in
association and rivalry with his fellow playwrights, responding like them
to theatrical fashions, and feeling like them the spur of current artistic
impulses. The dramatic activity that we have been discussing bears at every
point upon his early work. He shared both the limitations and the
incentives, bowed to the commanding influences, and rose to the
opportunities for initiative which characterize this period. His dramatic
career probably began two or three years later than Marlowe's, and of the
plays now to be considered several were probably not written until the
years following Marlowe's death. "Titus Andronicus" and the three parts of
"Henry VI" belong to the early nineties and should be classed with the
tragedies of blood and the chronicle histories of those years. "King John,"
"Richard III," and "Richard II" came somewhat later and form a part of the
more advanced development of chronicle history variously represented by
"Edward III," "Woodstock," and Marlowe's "Edward II." "Romeo and Juliet,"
in its final form perhaps still later, is a great and original masterpiece,
but one still very characteristic of the dramatic period of which it is the
crown and flower.
How much of "Titus Andronicus" is to be regarded as Shakespeare's remains a
debated question, a recent and plausible theory being that it was his
revision and combination of two old plays.[14] The play, which was coupled
by Jonson with "The Spanish Tragedy" as popular twenty years after its
first appearance, is mainly an imitation of Kyd, though the phrasing and
rhythm frequently show an advance over that author's work. In situations
and various specific passages the imitation is pronounced and the motives
of the Kydian type are in the main repeated. The revenge of a father for
his son is opposed by villanous intrigue, involves a play within the play,
and leads the hero into madness. Kyd's finer conception of a tragic hero
hesitating in the face of fearful responsibility is, however, lacking; the
combination of the two revenge stories--Tamora for her child murdered by
Titus, and Titus in return for the murder of his children--resembles
"Locrine"; and the black Aaron is, like the negro-Moor in "Alcazar," one of
the many Marlowesque villains. The play surpasses current revenge plays
chiefly in its unapproached orgy of mutilation, murder, and horror.
The three parts of "Henry VI"[15] are certainly only in part Shakespeare's
and represent the complex form of collaboration not infrequently found in
the drama. It is likely that Marlowe and Greene were concerned in the
plays, and that Shakespeare's share was mainly in revision. The three plays
were at all events very popular and occupy an important place among the
early chronicle histories. The contention between the houses of York and
Lancaster becomes an epic theme, uniting the three parts, and affords
manifold opportunity for battles, defiances, coronations, usurpations, and
patriotism. The structure as well as the material is of the chronicle,
without any approach to tragic unity or coherence; but the plays do in some
ways invade the field of tragedy. Comedy is practically excluded except in
the Cade scenes; and the last two parts, as their titles indicate, present
a series of "falls of princes"--"the death of the good Duke Humphrey; And
the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the tragicall end of
the proud cardinall of Winchester" and "The true Tragedie of Richard Duke
of Yorke, and the death of good King Henry the Sixt." With themes of
bloodshed and battle, material at least full of tragical possibilities, and
under the schooling of Marlowe, Shakespeare served his apprenticeship for
historical tragedy.
In "King John" Shakespeare still followed chronicle history methods without
any clear advance toward tragedy. He was engaged in rewriting the old
"Troublesome Reign," and he followed its plot with great closeness, scene
after scene with entrances and exits being the same in both plays. But here
his indebtedness practically stops. He seems to have made out a careful
scenario, following the old play with only such alterations and omissions
as were necessary for the condensation of its two parts into a single
play, and then to have thrown aside the old text and almost forgotten it.
His improvements consequently coincide with the developments which we have
found common in the tragedies of the period in that they concern
characterization and style. Faulconbridge and Constance become incomparably
more vital and impressive than in the old play and win our interest away
from the battles and arguments of the rapid scenes. The style, almost never
reminiscent of the early play, is mainly rhetorical, though always vigorous
and usually surpassing the models which it frequently recalls. It often
displays the conflict between the ornamental and naturalistic tendencies;
as, for example, when Arthur, facing the murderer, quibbles for ten lines
over the red-hot iron which is to put out his eyes, and then, as the
attendants enter, forgets his rhetoric in words whose sincerity and
simplicity have touched every reader.
"Richard III" and "Richard II," though possibly earlier than "King John,"
show the imitator and adapter rather than the reviser, and represent
independent efforts to give tragic unity to the material of the English
chronicles. While all the tragedies and histories so far considered have
long since proved unfitted for the stage, "Richard III" has maintained its
first popularity and continued to attract the greatest actors and to win
the liking of the patrons of the theatre of each generation. Yet, though it
has for three centuries exercised a profound impression on the popular
imagination, it shows in the opinion of all critics a great indebtedness
to Marlowe, and is so evidently imitative of current models that critics
writing from such different points of view as Mr. Fleay and James Russell
Lowell have been led to doubt Shakespeare's authorship. External and
internal evidence both contradict such doubts emphatically, but the close
relationship of the play to "Henry VI" makes it improbable that Shakespeare
turned to the theme solely of his own initiative. "Richard III" is the
fourth play of a tetralogy manifestly planned before the earlier members
were completed. Margaret appears in all four plays; the character of
Shakespeare's Richard is distinctly outlined in Part III; and it was
evidently meant to end the contention of York and Lancaster with the
triumph of the Tudor dynasty, and the long series of falls of princes with
the tragedy of the villanous Gloster. The chronicle of Richard's reign had
indeed been given a tragic unity in the history by Sir Thomas More and in a
long saga of chronicle and literature which had developed still further the
conception of this masterful and dreadful villain. The suitability of this
material to current forms of tragedy was obvious. Dr. Legge had found in
this saga the material for a Senecan play; the unknown author of "The True
Tragedy" had discovered there a ready-made tragedy of blood and revenge;
and there are indications of non-extant plays on the same theme. For either
Marlowe or for Shakespeare working with him on the history of the struggle
between York and Lancaster, the opportunity for a tragedy with a central
hero of the type of Tamburlaine, Faustus, or Barabas must have been
apparent.
Shakespeare found in the chronicles a full-length portrait of Richard and a
detailed outline of the events of his career, while "The True Tragedy"
supplied a few hints. His most notable omission of matter in the chronicle
is his neglect of the pangs of conscience, dwelt on in More's history and
made salient in "The True Tragedy," and suggesting such a dramatic
presentation of remorse as he later created in "Macbeth." His most notable
addition is the wooing of Anne, the betrothed but not the wife of Prince
Edward, which has no historical foundation and is somewhat extraneous to
the main action, though dramatically one of the most effective scenes in
the play.[16] In dramatizing the chronicle he manifestly followed Marlowe,
making the protagonist the dominating force everywhere in the action, and
the other persons foils to set off the hero's villany. But he adopted only
with skillful and essential modifications the prevailing methods of the
tragedies of blood and revenge. The idea of Nemesis, made clear in Polydore
Virgil's account of Richard, must have suggested a Senecan tragedy, or at
least a ghost overseeing the course of the villain and finally triumphing
in his defeat. Shakespeare, however, personified Nemesis in Margaret, and
gave her the various functions of a supervising ghost and of a
chorus,--curses, laments, and exultations. Moreover, with a tact unique at
that time and not displayed by him in "Titus Andronicus," he perceived that
the presentation of many murders on the stage would detract from rather
than add to the terror and horror centred in Richard, and so removed all
the murders from view excepting that of Clarence. To compensate in a way
for this lack of stage sensation, he developed Richard's dream of ghosts
into the highly spectacular presentation of the spirits of the eleven
victims in their nocturnal appearance between the two opposing camps.
An abundance of theatrical effects, already familiar on the stage, is
indeed supplied. The murder of Clarence, with its prolonged dialogue
between the murderers, the victims led away to execution, the orations
before the battle, the funeral cortege, the battle scenes, the laments and
curses, now multiplied and expanded beyond the verge of absurdity, all
reflect current stage practices. The structure, still over-dependent on the
chronicle sources, indulges after the current fashion in the retention and
prolongation of undramatic material: such as the feeble forebodings of the
citizens (ii, 3), the prolongation of Hastings's warning of death (iii, 2),
and the useless soliloquy of the scrivener (iii, 6). Yet, in comparison
with contemporary plays, there is great superiority both in dramatic
construction and theatrical effectiveness. The main action progresses with
rapidity and coherence to the moment of Richard's reversal of fortune (iv,
4), thirteen years being condensed into a few days; and the interest from
this climax to the catastrophe is maintained by startling melodramatic
effects. But the great dramatic merit of the play lies in the use of
contrast, surprise, and particularly of dramatic irony in the separate
scenes and in their masterly integration to display the character of
Richard himself.
Following closely the character outlined in the chronicle, borrowing
conception and treatment from Marlowe's protagonists, and mindful of the
host of stage villains that had proved so popular in tragedy, Shakespeare
constructed a cacodemon who remains not only a great stage figure but also
alive and human in our imaginations. That he is the source of all evil in
the play; that he is absurdly and impossibly diabolic; that he informs the
audience of all his nefarious schemes; that he has a Machiavellian skill in
intrigue; that he is in intellect and will easily the superior of all whom
he encounters; that he is possessed by an egoism superhuman in its
audacity; that he is an accomplished and ironical hypocrite; that he is
conscienceless except when half asleep and dreaming; that from the
beginning to the end he is a masterful and relentless pursuer of his
ambition, uninfluenced by persons or events, alike subjects of his
contempt,--all this indicates a skillful adaptation and continuation of
sources and models. But Richard is more. He is dramatically immensely
effective; he is always at hand at the right moment; he is never
nonplussed; a murder is hardly over when he appears smiling and ironically
repentant; he can ask for strawberries with murder in his heart, or play
with the children or woo the woman whom he has already marked for doom.
That these theatrical fascinations were the results of a consistent
conception based on a profound ethical and psychological study can hardly
be maintained. It may indeed be doubted whether in this respect there is
much advance over Marlowe's villains, or even those of his contemporaries,
to say nothing of an approach to Macbeth and Iago. Richard is sometimes a
human being, sometimes a monster, and always a stage villain. But the very
fact that critics have delighted to analyze and moralize over his traits is
proof that Shakespeare, in spite of the monstrosities of his conception,
gave to its dramatic presentation not only a stage effectiveness but also
plausibility.
This plausibility must be accredited largely to the vigorous colloquialism
of his speeches. The play manifests the usual conflict of artificial and
natural styles; the elaborate stichomythia and the wailing and cursing
queens furnish examples of the common affectations of tragic style; and the
rhetorical display appears not infrequently in Richard's speeches. But in
the main he speaks with a naturalness and directness far greater than was
usual in tragic heroes, and the natural-speaking Richard often makes
plausible and convincing the theatrical and rhetorical villain. Thus, after
the opening soliloquy he drops his rhetoric for the conversational tone of
his conference with Clarence; and thus, the procession of ghosts remains
still impressive on our stage because it is followed by a soliloquy that
surpasses all except a few of Marlowe's in power and naturalness.
Throughout the play, while others declaim, wail, and curse, the most
impossible figure of them all becomes the only convincing human being, very
largely because of the realism of his speech.
In "Richard II," written at about the time of "Richard III," Shakespeare
was also writing under the influence of Marlowe, but now in direct
imitation and rivalry of "Edward II." The first part of the reign of
Richard II had already received treatment in "Jack Straw" and "Woodstock,"
and the theme of a weak king forced to abdicate had been presented in
"Henry VI" as well as "Edward II." Shakespeare followed, as always
hitherto, his source, Holinshed, very closely, and the historical material
determined the plot and characterization, but Marlowe's example led him to
an interpretation of the fifteen years' history as the tragedy of the
reversal of fortune of a king whose temperament made him contemptible in
prosperity but pitiable in adversity. Along with the story of the rise and
progress of the conflict between Richard and the barons under Bolingbroke,
there runs the story of "the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty," which
give a new pathos to that favorite theme of medieval tragedy and
Elizabethan history, the vanquishment of a prince by scornful Fortune. The
struggle within Richard's own heart, even more than in the case of Edward
II, absorbs the interest and points the moral, the hollowness and
uncertainty of earthly grandeur.
Structurally there is no advance on "Edward II" in exposition, integration
of action, or catastrophe. Adherence to the chronicle results in a long
drawn out and iterative first act, a virtual repetition of Richard's
struggle over the relinquishment of the crown in iii, 3, and iv, 1, and a
slight and melodramatic treatment of the catastrophe. On the other hand,
there are some changes from Marlowe's method of interest in connection with
later tragedy. Elegiac scenes with their lamenting women, also conspicuous
in "Richard III," are an addition to the historical source and an important
factor in the structure; their distribution through the play indicating
that they were employed to supply a relief from the scenes of much action
and high tension, more suitable to tragedy than the relief of comic scenes,
and also to take, as in "Richard III," the place of a chorus through their
lyrical reinforcement of the tragic emotions excited by the action. Again,
as the theme is Richard's reversal of fortune rather than his death, so the
emotional crisis receives a structural prominence not unlike that given to
Hamlet's, and the catastrophe of death is relegated to a postscript. The
passage from crisis to catastrophe is managed, as in "Hamlet," "Lear," and
"Macbeth," by the introduction of incidents extraneous to the main action,
here the episode of Aumerle's conspiracy.
The main departures from Marlowe, however, are to be found in those
elements of dramatic composition to which in this period the genius of
Shakespeare as well as the talent of his contemporaries most readily
responded, the characterization and the style. Not only the king himself
but many other persons in the play, and notably Bolingbroke, are presented
with consistency and subtlety. The historical narrative is transformed into
a gallery of full-length historical portraits that lead us to forget
history and drama in our study of their personalities. The euphuistic and
sentimental Richard gives a fair field for the stylist, but his example is
infectious, and the Queen, Gaunt, York, Bolingbroke, the gardener, and in
fact all the persons of the drama, employ word-play, periphrasis, and the
various flourishes of Elizabethan rhetorical style. If one accepts the
theory that tragedy is a game for rhetorical display, and further accepts
the conventionalities of Elizabethan style, there must be unmeasured
admiration for the extraordinary verbal skill displayed. Shakespeare
employs the current artificialities of diction with abounding facility and
zest, and often suits them skillfully to the delineation of character;
while his constant attention to expression results in a sustained
eloquence, which, if it blurs the outlines of reality, substitutes a haze
of fancy, and sometimes the glory of magnificent beauty. The miserable
years of Richard's downfall are forever associated in our minds with the
picturesqueness of the two entries into London and with the splendor of the
apostrophe to England and the recital of Norfolk's death.
In the three chronicle histories just considered, although the historical
material largely determines structure, tragic conception, and
characterization, and although all these are obviously under Marlowe's
influence, yet Shakespeare had reached a stage far more advanced than that
of mere imitator or adapter. In "Richard III" he had added his own impress
to the Marlowean type of tragedy, and in "Richard II" he had introduced
innovations foreshadowing his later conceptions. As a playwright he had
equaled any of his contemporaries in immediate popularity and outdone them
in permanent theatrical effectiveness. He had acquired a complete mastery
over the conditions and conventions of the stage, and had frequently, if
not always, outdone the best of his rivals in dramatic ingenuity and power.
Like his contemporaries, however, he was hampered by theatrical conditions
and intractable historical material; and his chief interest was in the
opportunities furnished by the chronicles for the delineation of character
and the exercise of his gift of tongues. In range and verisimilitude his
characters already far surpassed Marlowe's; and as a poet, whether in
lyric, descriptive, or purely dramatic passages, whether in sustained
treatment of situation or in splendid purple patches, he had shown himself
the peer of his master.
In "Romeo and Juliet" the same dramatic and poetic qualities are exhibited
as in the historical plays, but the happy choice of the already well-known
love story led Shakespeare outside of the direct range of Marlowe's
example, freed him from the limits of the historical material, and gave his
genius full scope. The importance of love as a motive in the Italian drama
of the Renaissance is one of the traits that distinguish it from its
classical models, and the influence of Italian drama and fiction was
important in turning Elizabethan dramatists to stories of romantic passion.
These had already been widely adopted in comedy and had formed the
principle plots of "Tancred and Gismunda" and "Soliman and Perseda," as
well as minor parts in other tragedies of the period. The story of Romeo
and Juliet, which Brooke speaks of having seen "lately (1562) set forth on
the stage with more commendation than I can look for," may have been made
into an English play before Shakespeare was born.[17] It had at least been
dramatized in France and Italy, where Luigi Groto's "Adriana" (1578)
surpassed all contemporary plays in the number of its editions.
Brooke's poem, "Romeus and Juliet" (1562), was the main source of the play
and provided a story eminently adapted to dramatic representation. The
plot, with its conflict between love and hate, the brief triumph of love,
the interference of feud and family authority, the separation and death of
the lovers, has been repeated in its essentials in thousands of stories,
and has played an enormous part in the imaginations of four centuries; but
it has hardly found a more effective scenario than that which lay imbedded
in Brooke's long-spun narrative. A lesser genius than Shakespeare might
have discovered it, but his powers of invention and construction are amply
apparent, especially up to the turning-point of the play. The brawl and the
love-sick Romeo of the first scene, dramatically expository and symbolic of
the whole action, the meeting of the lovers at the dance, the balcony
scene, the embassy and return of the nurse, the fatal fight with Tybalt,
are all executed with a wealth of incidental invention, a sureness of
technic, and a rapidity and directness of dramatic movement that relied but
little on Brooke's narrative or contemporary example. The second half of
the play, though skillfully condensed, follows the source more closely and,
perhaps for this reason, impresses the modern reader less vividly.
Shakespeare's dramatic skill is manifest in his departure from the current
methods of the tragedy of blood as well as in his treatment of the
narrative. What imitators of Seneca and of Kyd did with similar love
stories we have seen in "Tancred and Gismunda" and "Soliman and Perseda";
and "Romeo and Juliet" had an equal chance for ghosts, villany, and
physical horrors. Some traces of the prevailing fashion do survive, as in
the addition to Brooke of the murder of Paris and in the attention paid to
the horrors of the tomb. But many of the best scenes are of the sort that
occur in romantic comedy,--the repartee of gallants, the preparations for a
feast, the dance, the street affray, the meetings and partings of the
lovers,--and there is no villain, no figure of Nemesis, no ghost, no
warring armies, and no pomp of courts. No tragedy had yet appeared with
less theatrical sensationalism, and none which maintained the interest of
the spectators upon the story with comparable dramatic intensity.
The extraordinary advance over the historical plays in dramatic technic is,
however, overshadowed in our appreciation of the play by the irresistible
appeal made by the persons of the story. They are more closely realized
for us than the friends and foes of our daily life, yet they dwell forever
in the enchantment of idealized romance. To analyze Shakespeare's power to
portray and at the same time to exalt human nature would be to unlock the
very key to Shakespeare's heart; we may well be content to wonder and
exclaim. Yet, we may note that, while characterization, which had been
increasing in range and individualization in the historical plays, is here
triumphant, the means and methods are not unlike those already noticed. The
brilliant translation of prose narrative into monologue and dialogue gives
us the nurse; the vivacious amplification of a type familiar in comedy--the
garrulous old man--results in Capulet; and even the greatest creations
naturally retain traces of contemporary influences. Mercutio is the prince
of a throng of quick-witted quibblers, and Juliet is sometimes declamatory,
sometimes fantastic, like Brooke's heroine. But they are Shakespeare's own,
and the first representatives of two ways in which his imagination
characteristically and supremely manifested itself in later plays. Mercutio
is the first of those imaginative achievements that concentrate into a few
lines of blank verse the complete individualization of a human being;
Juliet is perhaps the first of the amazing series of idealized women. If
one considers how often the young girl in love has been the theme of
genius, and recalls Fielding, Scott, Browning, and Meredith, one may secure
some measure of Shakespeare's achievement. When one seeks comparison with
the naive and likable young animal of Brooke's doggerel, or the women of
preceding drama, even the charming heroines of Greene's comedies, the art
that produced Juliet must seem miraculous. The idealization of woman was,
to be sure, common in Renaissance art; and the union in her of wit and
beauty, power and charm, passion and purity, innocence and wisdom, was not
solely Shakespeare's conception; but the power to conceive such a being
with truth and to realize her dramatically, alive, human, and consistent,
was his alone.
The conception and expression of character cannot be separated; there lies
in the qualities of the poetic style some explanation of the impression we
receive of idealized humanity. While colloquial directness is not wanting
in the play, the prevailing style has the artificialities, the lyricism,
and the exuberance we have found prevailing elsewhere. It exhibits about
all the faults and affectations of the dramatic poetry of the time, but
these are the defects of an art that finds poetry in everything and ever
lingers to enjoy the beauty of words, whether over Queen Mab, or the
apothecary's shop, or Friar Laurence's herbs. It stops to display its
verbal ingenuity in a pun; it delights in lyric outbursts, sestette or
sonnet, morning-song or epithalamium; it riots in the refrains on
"banished," becomes grotesque in the wailing quartette, and finds its
supreme opportunity in the fancy and music and passion of the lovers
underneath the summer moon. It is this exuberance, this spontaneity, this
carelessness of incongruity, this delight in ornamentation, this abandon to
music and fancy that transfigures the Verona of brawls, dinners, nurses,
and deaths, and, forever ascendant over our fancies, like Romeo's blessed
moon, "tips everything with silver."
It is in part this poetic style which distinguishes the play from the later
tragedies, but the difference is everywhere manifest to our impressions.
The evil and gloom and pessimism that help to make up the tragic fact in
"Lear" and "Macbeth" are here scarcely felt. To joy comes sorrow, because
of evil and through accident,--this is the tragic theme. In the course of
its presentation one may find it suggestive of the passing of youth to age
or of passionate love to oblivion, but surely no one comes from the poem
with a dominant impression of the wickedness of family feuds, or of the
inevitable brevity of romantic passion, or of the dangers of youthful
precipitousness,--rather the mind glows with the beauty and joy revealed in
life.
In this impression the play has a kinship with the tragedies, even the poor
and the maimed, that had preceded it. Tragedies so far have been strangely
free from Christian teaching or sentiment. Compared with the medieval
drama, early Elizabethan tragedy seems not only secular but pagan. This is
partly because it followed its sources and treated of Romans, Moors,
Scythians, and heroes of myths and legends; partly because it derived stoic
and fatalistic sentiments from Seneca and other classical writers; but it
also represents an entire departure from the medieval point of view, a
departure necessarily emphasized in tragedy. In the medieval drama, death
had been a translation to final reward or punishment,--the portals of
heaven and hell were open on the stage. In the Renaissance conception of
tragedy death was the point and pith of tragic fact. Faith, forgiveness,
reliance on Providence, assurance of immortality are rarely alluded to.
Chance, mysterious fate, the emissaries of the devil, the powers of evil in
the mind of man are the forces to which tragedy must attend; and they lead
to a death terrible and pitiful, to be met bravely and defiantly, it may
be, but not peacefully and hopefully. And this emphasis of the gloom of
death required an equal emphasis on the glory and beauty of life. Tragedy
was the passing into darkness from under this majestic roof fretted with
golden fire, the loss of noble reason and infinite faculty; and it must
needs proclaim the beauty of the world as well as the quintessence of dust.
And so, although writers of tragedy dwelt on the horrors of death and its
accompaniments of blood and atrocity, and though they symbolized in their
villains their sense of the reign of evil, yet, in Marlowe's treatment of
an Asiatic conqueror or the ignoble fascination of Edward II, or in Peele's
fancy that made musical the amours of David; everywhere indeed, in the
Pantheas and Persedas, the Marii and Selimi, they were presenting human
life as removed from the commonplace, the sordid, the usual, and as the
abode of heroisms, splendors, and aspirations. Even evil deeds and
villains, even death itself sometimes partook of this glorification; and
tragic theory, moral purpose, and theological dogma were alike forgotten
in the fascination of human character, passion, and achievement. This
idealization of life was, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter,
characteristic of the national temper and of the artistic impulses in every
field of literature during its brief breathing spell between the Protestant
and Puritan revolutions. Its power is curiously illustrated in the effect
of the story of Romeo and Juliet upon Brooke in the course of his by no
means despicable attempt to turn it into a tragic poem. In his Address to
the Reader, he dilates with medieval propriety on the moral of the poem "to
raise in the reader an hatefull lothyng of so filthy beastlynes." "And to
this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written to describe unto
thee a coople of unfortunate lovers thralling themselves to unhonest
desire, neglecting the authorite and advice of parents and frendes,
conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and
superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of
unchastitie)"--and so on through all their evil doings until "finallye, by
all meanes of unhonest lyfe hastyng to most unhappye death." So wrote the
conscious Puritan; but the story charmed the artist. It enticed his meagre
art to a share in the joys of the lovers, it led him to a delight in
unhonest life, it dissolved his sermon into romance and poetry, and left
him enamored even of his "superstitious frier."
And so the tragedy of the lovers became for Shakespeare as for Brooke and
as other stories had become for Marlowe, Peele, and Greene, the spur and
the means to an idealization of life. It is not in the reconciliation of
the families, still less in the sense of a deserved punishment, that we
find an antidote for death and evil; but in the assurance that human
passion may be so lovely, human nature so full of strength and beauty. "The
sun for sorrow will not show his head," says Prince Escalus at the end, but
we believe with Romeo that
"Jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops."
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward, Fleay, and Schelling are the best general guides for this period. The
books already mentioned by Collier, Symonds, Jusserand, Cunliffe, Fischer,
and Churchill bear directly on the matter of this chapter. The sources for
documents and records are the same as for chapter iii, with the important
addition of _Henslowe's Diary_, vol. i, 1904, ed. by W. W. Greg. The
sources for lists of plays and bibliography are the same as in chapter
ii,--Greg, Fleay, Hazlitt, Schelling, and Bates. There is no satisfactory
and comprehensive treatment of Marlowe's work; J. H. Ingram's _Christopher
Marlowe and his Associates_ (1904) supplies a full bibliography. Marlowe
has been well edited by Dyce and by A. H. Bullen. Dyce's editions of Greene
and Peele have long been standard. Bullen has also a good edition of Peele.
The recent Clarendon Press editions of Greene, Lyly, Kyd supply careful
texts and full introductions. My article, _The Relations of "Hamlet" to
Contemporary Revenge Play_s (Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1902), has been drawn
upon for the discussion of Kyd; it furnishes references to the various
critical discussions of Kyd's work. Texts of the plays by minor writers are
to be found in Dodsley; W. C. Hazlitt's _Shakespeare's Library_ (6 vols.,
1875), containing old plays and other sources for Shakespeare's plays;
Delius, _Pseudo-Shakspere'sche Dramen_ (1874); the Tauchnitz edition of
_Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare_; and in the editions of several of the
pseudo-Shakespearean plays by K. Warncke and L. Proescholdt, Halle. This
last edition of _Arden of Feversham_ contains a valuable introduction. For
direction to the bibliography of Shakespeare, see chapter v. On the Henry
VI plays, Miss Jane Lee's paper, _New Shaks. Soc. Transactions_, 1875-76,
still offers the most exhaustive treatment of the question of authorship.
On _Titus Andronicus_, Mr. Harold DeW. Fuller's article, _Mod. Lang. Publ._
(1901), and Mr. J. M. Robertson's _Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus?_
(1905) are among the latest discussions. My review of Mr. Robertson's book,
_Journal of Eng. and Germ. Philology_ (1907), treats in detail some of the
discussion of this chapter. The latest studies of the Elizabethan theatre
are C. Brodmeier's _Die Shakespeare-Buehne_ (Weimar, 1904), which reduces
the "alternation" theory to an absurdity, and G. F. Reynold's _Some
Principles of Elizabethan Staging_ (Chicago, 1905), which disposes of
Brodmeier's theories, but goes a little too far in the other direction.
See, also, Baker's _Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist_ for a careful and
detailed account of the London theatres. Miss V. C. Gildersleeve's
_Governmental Regulation of the Shakespearean Drama_ (Columbia Univ.
Studies in English, in press) is an exhaustive treatment of its subject and
incidentally throws light on theatrical matters. Volume iv of Courthope's
_History of English Poetry_ is on the "Development and Decline of the
Poetic Drama," from Marlowe to 1642. Schelling's _The English Chronicle
Play_ (1902) is the best discussion of this species. W. Bang's series,
_Materialien zur Kunde des aelteren englischen Dramas_, includes reprints
and studies of interest in connection with this and the three following
chapters.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] It consists of two parts published 1591, and acted, as the prologue
indicates, shortly after _Tamburlaine_, perhaps in 1588. Its scenes cover
about the same ground as Shakespeare's play, with the addition of a ribald
account of the sack of a monastery, an explanation of the poisoning of John
in his treatment of the clergy, and a scene of some power in which Philip
obtains from his mother, Lady Fauconbridge, a confession that his father
was Richard.
[10] _Tamburlaine_ in two parts, certainly acted as early as 1588, gained
an immediate and long-continued popularity, and was followed by a number of
plays, all tragedies or histories. Without reckoning the numerous plays
that have been assigned to Marlowe on no sufficient grounds, he
collaborated on the _Tragedy of Dido_ (1594), perhaps an early work, and on
the three parts of _Henry VI_; and was the author of _The Tragicall History
of Dr. Faustus_, printed 1604, acted 1588 (?); _The Jew of Malta_, acted
about 1589, and long the most popular of Henslow's repertoire: _The
Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II_, printed 1594, acted
about 1591; and _The Massacre of Paris_, of an unknown date of acting.
[11] The only other play certainly by Kyd is a translation of Garnier's
_Cornelia_, 1595, which was doubtless never acted. His authorship of the
_First Part of Jeronimo_, 1605, is denied by recent critics, and at most
the text represents a very corrupt abridgment of his work. _Soliman and
Perseda_, S. R. 1592, is attributed to him solely on internal evidence, and
may have been by an imitator. The non-extant _Hamlet_, alluded to by Nash
in 1589, and not until twelve years later used by Shakespeare as the basis
of his play, is now generally assigned to Kyd.
[12] Printed 1594, "as newly set forth, overseen, and corrected by W. S.,"
sometimes assigned to Peele, and in an earlier form perhaps acted about
1590.
[13] Preserved in MS. and first printed in the _Shakespeare Jahrbuch_ in
1899.
[14] Harold DeW. Fuller, _Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn._ 1901.
[15] The collaborators on Part I (1623) are unknown, and Shakespeare's
contribution to the present form seems likely to have been written later
than the bulk of the play, a not very impressive example of chronicle
history. Parts II and III (1623) exist also in the abridged and altered
forms of the two quartos of 1594, _The First Part of The Contention_ and
_The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York_. The problems of the relations
of these two quarto plays to the folio texts are among the most puzzling
encountered by Shakespearean scholars.
[16] Somewhat similar situations between Lycus and Megaera in _Hercules
Furens_, Locrine and Estrile in _Locrine_, and Tamburlaine and Zenocrate in
_Tamburlaine_ must have been known to Shakespeare.
[17] See H. DeW. Fuller, "Romeo and Julietta," _Modern Philology_, 1906. It
seems clear, however, that Shakespeare drew directly from Brooke.