THE FIRST PLAYS—RESISTANCE TO CLASSIC INFLUENCE—ADVANTAGES OF THIS—AND THE LIMITATIONS—THE DRAMATIC QUALITY—CLASSIC, SPANISH, AND FRENCH DRAMA—UNITY IN THE ENGLISH PLAYS—‘RALPH ROISTER DOISTER’—‘GAMMER GURTON’S NEEDLE’—‘GORBODUC’—FORMATION OF THE THEATRE—LYLY—GREENE—PEELE—KYD—MARLOWE—CHARACTER OF THESE WRITERS—SHAKESPEARE—GUESSES ABOUT HIS LIFE—ORDER OF HIS WORK—ESTIMATES OF SHAKESPEARE—DIVISIONS OF HIS WORK—THE POEMS—THE DRAMAS—THE REALITY OF SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS.
The first plays.

Three plays stand at the threshold of the Elizabethan drama—Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, and Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. None of the three indicate the course which that dramatic literature was destined to take. Gammer Gurton’s Needle is a spirited farce of low life, holding if from anything, then from the medi?val comedy as it flourished in France. Ralph Roister Doister, as became the work of a schoolmaster, is full of reminiscences of the Latin comedy. Gorboduc is an open imitation of the Senecan tragedy.
Resistance to the classic influence.

When the great and natural authority of the classic[224] models is allowed for—when we remember how many writers for the stage, not only here but wherever the theatre nourished, were university wits—when the taste of the time for moralising is taken into account, it is rather to be wondered at that this pattern proved so unattractive as it did. The predominance of the French drama of the seventeenth century must not lead us into overestimating the rarity of the independence required to reject the classic model in the time of the Renaissance. Corneille and Racine did indeed establish a “correct” form of tragedy, largely constructed on classic lines. But this was part of a general, and far from inexcusable, reaction towards order, measure, and restraint in literature. During the Renaissance the influence of the classic drama was confined to producing a false dawn of the French tragedy. Italy achieved no considerable drama. The classics, both the great Greek and the lesser Latin, were presented to Spain in translations, and by scholarly critics, only to be rejected. The Nise Lastimosa of Gerónimo Bermudez, with here and there a tentative effort in early plays, is all that remains of the teaching of translators and men of learning. Among ourselves Gorboduc had little immediate following, and when Daniel in the very early seventeenth century tried to succeed where Sackville had failed, he wrote for the literary coterie of the Countess of Pembroke and for nobody else. Between the two there is Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s Cornelia or so, and that is all.
Advantages of this.

For this we have undoubtedly reason to be thankful,[225] and so have the Spaniards. Both nations had the spirit to be themselves on their stage, which is something; and then we have had a freer Shakespeare, a more spontaneous Lope, than would have been possible if the three unities and the complete separation of tragedy from comedy had been accepted in the two countries. Yet we may be thankful with more moderation than we commonly show. It is not to be taken for granted that the choice lay between freedom and a convention. It was rather between one convention and another. The Spanish stage is not unconventional. It has a different convention from the French—that is all. Ours made its own rules, less precise than the Spanish or the classical, but none the less real. “Tanto se pierde por carta de mas, como por carta de menos,” says the Spanish proverb. The card too much is a loss as much as the card too little; and a convention which says “You shall” is no less tyrannical than the convention which says “You shall not.” And the limitations. A drama which will allow no mixture of comedy with tragedy is unquestionably limited, and is condemned to give no full picture of life. But a drama which is forced to insert comic scenes is equally under an obligation. The clown who figures as porter in Macbeth is not necessarily more in place than the murder of a king would have been in The Taming of the Shrew. To say that you may fairly keep your comedy unmixed by tragedy, but must never allow your tragedy to be unrelieved by comic scenes, is as arbitrary a rule as any other. Undoubtedly[226] the reaction from the strained emotion of tragedy to lighter feeling is natural—and that is the sufficient artistic justification for the jests of Hamlet. But this just observation does not excuse the insertion into a tragic action of independent comic scenes which have no necessary connection with the main personages and action.

The history of the Elizabethan drama is the history of the formation of an English dramatic convention. The questions are what it was, and what were its merits. These questions are not settled by the answer that Shakespeare was the greatest of dramatists. That he would have been in any case. What is greatest in him—his universal sympathy with all nature and his unerring truth to life—was wholly personal. He shared it with nobody. If the Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare, and a ring of men whom we are content to know wholly by “beauties,” which beauties, again, are lyric poetry and not drama, then it is quite superfluous to treat it as dramatic literature at all. The Bible does not belong to a class, and neither does Shakespeare in those qualities which raise him above all others. We must look at him as standing apart; and as for the others, if that for which they are worth studying is their lyric poetry, or their mighty line, or this or that touch of genuine pathos or fine interpretation of character in flashes, it is unnecessary to consider them as writers of plays. If there was an Elizabethan dramatic literature in any other sense than this, that many poets wrote for the stage and put noble poetry into a machinery not essentially dramatic,[227] it must be studied apart from what was purely Shakespeare. And that is not difficult to do. On his predecessors he could have no effect, and it is only necessary to turn from him to any contemporary or successor to see how little they shared with him in all that was not mere language and fashion of the time.
The dramatic quality.

I trust it will not be thought superfluous to attempt a definition of what we ought to look for in judging dramatic literature. Dryden, whose example cannot well be followed too closely in criticism, acknowledges the need for a definition of a play early in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Lisideius, one of the interlocutors in the conversation, gives this, with the proviso that it is rather a description than a definition: “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Now this is neither definition nor description of a play. There is not a word in it which does not apply to Gil Blas. Dryden was himself well aware of its insufficiency, for he makes Crites raise “a logical objection against it”—that it is “only a genere et fine, and so not altogether perfect.” Yet he leaves the matter standing there. That he, who was himself a playwright, should have been content to do this when dealing with the drama is one proof how much English literature had lost “the sense of the theatre.” If Lisideius had not been thinking of literature, but of literature as adapted to the stage, he would have said (but in Dryden’s incomparably better[228] way) something like this: “A play is an action, put before an audience by dialogue and representation, forming a coherent whole, in which all the parts subserve a general purpose, and are dramatically good only in so far as they do.” Lyric beauty, good moral reflection, vigorous deliveries of human nature, are, however good in themselves, as little able to make a good play as the most beautiful ornament is to make a fine building.
Classic, Spanish, and French drama.

It is the unity of the action which constitutes the good play, and it may be obtained by different methods. A dramatist may obtain unity by means of the passion or by the working out of a single situation. Of the great Greek dramatists I cannot speak with expert authority, but as far as they are visible in translations as in a glass darkly, they appear to have achieved unity in this way to the full. The chorus, which in inferior hands offers irresistible temptations for wandering talk, always carries on the action, while what we see is the outward and visible sign of some terrible force working behind. This ever-present sense of the something reserved driving before it what we are allowed to see, with an undeviating directness of aim, gives by itself an awful unity of interest to the tragedy. The Spanish dramatist gains his unity by artful construction of his story, and by subordinating passion and character to the mere action. The French stage in its great days aimed at using the same resources as the Greek, though with certain mechanical changes, such as the dropping of the chorus, and the division of[229] its work among the personages, which in itself was no great gain.
Unity of the English play.

Our own drama adopted neither device. It neither concentrated its attention on the one situation or passion, nor did it subordinate all to the march of an action. There remained to it to do this—to secure unity by giving to the play the unity of life itself—by showing us human nature working in all its manifestations, of love and hate, heroism and cowardice, laughter and tears. Every rule suffers exceptions. There are many pure comedies in our dramatic literature, while Ben Jonson showed at least a strong leaning to accept the unnecessary unities of time and place in order to attain more effectually the indispensable unity of action. Yet the distinguishing feature of our great dramatic literature on its constructive side is that it threw tragedy and comedy together, and that it relied for its unity on an inner binding force of life. This is the greatest skill of all, but it is for that very reason the most difficult of attainment. It presupposes in the dramatist a sympathy with all humanity from Lear to Parolles, and with that a power of creation and construction incomparably greater than is needed to build by the classic rules, or to put together an artful story worked out by stock-figures on the Spanish model. Its dangers are obvious. When the dramatist had no natural tragic power he would be in constant peril of falling into fustian. When he was deficient in a sense of humour, he would be tempted to fall back for his comedy on mere grossness. His action, being free to wander in time and space, would[230] have a constant tendency to straggle, and the play would become a mere succession of scenes following one another “like geese on a common.” The strict following of the classic rules, which work for concentration, helps to preserve the dramatist from these errors, at the cost of limiting his freedom. To Shakespeare they would have been a slavery, but it is not certain that they would not have been a support to Marlowe or Middleton, who stood much less in need of freedom than of discipline and direction. So while feeling duly thankful for that resistance to the authority of the classics which helped to give us Shakespeare, we may remember that it also helped to give us many comic scenes which it is hardly possible to read without feeling ashamed for the men who wrote them, and many so-called plays which are only shapeless combinations of scenes, bound together by no other nexus than thread and paper.
Ralph Roister Doister.

Ralph Roister Doister, the earliest known English comedy, was written apparently about 1530, and printed some fifteen or sixteen years later. The date of the printing of a play is notoriously no test of its date of composition or acting, but only of the time when the actors had no further motive for keeping it in their own hands in manuscript—that is, when it ceased to be popular on the stage. Ralph Roister Doister was the work of Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton and Westminster, and is full of reminiscences of Plautus. Ralph Roister Doister himself is our old friend the miles gloriosus adapted to the conditions of London life in the time of Edward VI.[231] Matthew Merrygreek, described as a “needy humorist,” is our no less familiar friend the parasite. Merrygreek feeds on the vanity and credulity of Ralph Roister Doister, who is made up of conceit, bluster, and cowardice—who thinks that every woman who sees him falls in love with him, and is of course baffled and beaten in the end. It is written in sufficiently brisk lines of no great regularity; and there are much duller plays. Ralph’s courtship of Dame Christian Custance, who will have none of him, is lively. On the whole, the play leaves the impression that Udall was more than a mere imitator of Plautus, but it is only the school exercise of a clever man.[70]
Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

“The right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, entitled Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” is believed, on good evidence, to have been written by John Still (1543?-1608), a churchman, who died Bishop of Bath and Wells. It was played at his college, Christ’s, Cambridge, in 1566, but may have been written three years earlier. However that may be, it was certainly written in his youth. Nothing could well be less academic or clerical. Though divided into five acts, it is, in fact, a farce not unlike much medi?val French comedy. The plot is one of a familiar class which will always hold the stage under new forms, and the working out is of the simplest. Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and then finds it, just where she ought to have looked for it, after upsetting the house by searching in unlikely places, and disturbing the village by unjustly suspecting her[232] neighbours of theft. It is unquestionably too long, but it is very far from dull. There is a directness of purpose in Still which is decidedly dramatic, and with it a power of characterisation by no means contemptible. All the personages, and notably the wandering beggar, Deccon the Bedlam, have a marked truth to humble human nature. They are coarse, but not wilfully and unnecessarily coarse. There are none of those strings of mere nasty words and images which serve as foil to the poetry of the true Elizabethan comedy. Still is honestly naturalistic, neither toning down the truth of the rough talk of rude people, nor lavishing bad language from an apparent wish to startle. If he had not entered the Church, which made it indecent for him to work for the stage, he might have given us a series of spirited naturalistic comedies. As it is, Gammer Gurton’s Needle stands alone. The facts that it contains the capital drinking-song, “Back and side go bare, go bare,” and that it is written in the prevailing seven-foot metre, are all that connect it with the later comedy.[71]
Gorboduc.

We have seen that the Latin comedy had much to do with Ralph Roister Doister. The Latin tragedy is directly responsible for a much more ambitious effort, the play variously named Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, generally attributed to Sir Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, though a claim is made for the part-authorship at least of Thomas Norton. If it had been the intention of the author to establish a prejudice against[233] the regular tragedy in the minds of his audience, he could hardly have done better than write this painfully dull play. The very metre, which is the heroic couplet, moves by jerky steps of the same length, and is inexpressibly wooden. Nor is that by any means all. Gorboduc has all the faults and none of the possible merits of its kind. The “regular” tragedy on the classic model needs the concentration of the interest on one strong situation. But Gorboduc is a long story of how the king of that name divides his kingdom between his sons; how they quarrel, and one kills the other; how the mother slays the slayer; how the people kill her and her husband, and are then killed by the nobles. It is all told in speeches of cruel length, and is necessarily full of repetitions. A very curious feature of the play is the insertion between the acts of dumb shows intended to enforce the excellence of union, the evils of flattery or of anarchy, which have a decided flavour of the morality. The Induction to The Mirror of Magistrates and The Complaint of Buckingham remain to show that Sir T. Sackville was a poet; but Gorboduc is the very ample proof that he was no dramatist. The play, which one thinks must have bored her extremely, was given before the queen by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple in 1561.[72]
Formation of the theatre.

The suspension—not, indeed, of activity but of growth—in literature which marks the first years of the queen’s reign was as marked in drama as in pure poetry. Udall, Still, and Sir T. Sackville had no[234] following to speak of, and it was not until a new generation had grown up that the first signs of the real Elizabethan drama became visible. The production of pieces for the theatre did not cease, but they belong to the past not to the coming time. The taste for shows was strong, and it was served. But the pieces of this interval are the descendants of the morality, not the ancestors of Shakespeare’s drama. We can leave them aside, for they had no following. There is no Auto Sacramental in English literature. Before that could come it was first necessary to have a theatre, in the sense of a place of public amusement, managed by professional actors, and not only an occasional stage on which corporations and societies performed from time to time. The formation of the theatre in the material sense was the work of these earlier years; but this, which is, moreover, very obscure, does not belong properly to the history of literature. It is enough to note that a body of men working together did here what Lope de Rueda did in Spain. A class of actors was formed. Like him, they often wrote themselves. In both countries the theatre was thoroughly popular, which was not, it may be, altogether an advantage. At least the fact that the same man might be manager of a theatre and keeper of a bear-garden—as Alleyn was—points to the existence of influences which did not visibly work for the production of good literature in the theatre. In England, as in Spain, much was inevitably written to please what may be called the bear-garden element of the audience. In Spain this[235] tended to separate itself into the pasos, mojigangas, entremeses, dances, and so forth, which were given between the three jornadas of the comedia. With us all was thrown into the five acts of the play, and this difference in mechanical arrangement was not without its influence on literary form.

The flowering of the Elizabethan drama dates from the middle years of the queen’s reign. By this time the theatre was formed, and the taste for it was strong. It naturally attracted many writers, if only because it was the most direct and effective way in which they could make themselves heard, to say nothing of the fact that it was by far the most certainly lucrative of all forms of literature, and therefore had an intelligible attraction for all who lived by their pens. Among them it was inevitable that there should be not a few who had no natural faculty for dramatic literature—Lodge, for instance, and Nash. Both lived much about the theatre, and their relations with it, and the writers for it, figure largely in the gossiping pamphlets of the time. But they wrote for it only by necessity or accident, and their dramatic work is altogether subordinate. As much might be not unfairly said of John Lyly; but his plays are so curious, and held so considerable a place in the estimation of his time, that he cannot be put wholly aside.
Lyly.

Custom has ruled that the name of Lyly shall be followed by the words “the author of Euphues.” Custom has in this case decided rightly. Lyly was always the author of Euphues. This didactic tale falls to be discussed with the prose of the[236] time, but we may note that it is composed of a very slight framework of story, from which blow out clouds of words arranged in quaint and not inelegant patterns. No drama can be made out of such materials, and, properly speaking, the plays of Lyly are not dramatic.[73] Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was attached to the Court, though, according to his own melancholy summing-up of the results of his labours, he obtained nothing as a reward. He was born in Kent about 1554, and was educated at Oxford. It may be that he went on to Cambridge, according to what was then a common custom. So little is known of the rest of his life that biographers have been driven to make matter by identifying him with a certain Mr Lilly, a bold, witty atheist, who harassed Hall in his first living, and whose sudden death from the plague is recorded by the satirist and future Bishop of Norwich, with pious satisfaction, among the various examples of divine intervention on his own behalf. If he sat in several Parliaments, Lyly cannot have altogether wanted means and friends. He may have lived into the reign of James I., and died in 1606. His plays were part of his service as a courtier. They were not written for the vulgar theatre, but to be performed by the “children of Paul’s” or “of the Queen’s Chapel” before the queen at the New Year feasts. Here he would have an audience which already admired his Euphues, published in 1580, and was well content to hear him “parle Euphuism.” To this we may partly attribute the fact that, while his contemporaries were making[237] blank verse the vehicle of the higher English drama, he showed a marked preference for the use of prose, and also for mythological and classical subjects. The names of his undoubted plays are Alexander and Campaspe; Sapho and Phao; Endimion, or The Man in the Moon; Gallathea; Mydas; Mother Bombie; The Woman in the Moon; and Love’s Metamorphosis. They were written between 1584 and the end of the century. Lyly, as has been said, was no dramatist. His plays do not advance in any coherent story. They rotate or straggle. When, as in Mother Bombie, he did attempt to construct a comedy of intrigue, the result is mere confusion. The faults of his style have been made familiar to all the world by Falstaff’s immortal address to Prince Hal: “For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.... There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile,” and so on. The antitheses work with the regularity of pistons; there is a steady march past of similes, drawn as often as not from a natural history worthy of Sir John Mandeville, and arranged in twos or threes. His humour is of the kind which makes a reader imitate the example of Sancho when he saw his master cutting capers in his shirt on the slope of the Sierra Morena—retire in order to escape the spectacle of a good gentleman making an exhibition of himself. Yet in his grave and poetic moments there is a prim charm about Lyly, and a frosty moonlight glitter which[238] is attractive. His snatches of song are among the best in an age of lyric poetry.
Greene.

Lyric poet tempted or driven by necessity on to the stage is the description which must be given of two of his contemporaries, who in other respects differed from him very widely—Robert Greene and George Peele. If we are bound to take his own confessions, and the abuse poured on his grave by that bad-blooded pedant Gabriel Harvey, quite seriously, we are compelled to believe that Greene ended a thoroughly despicable life by a very sordid death. But a little wholesome scepticism may well be applied both to Greene’s deathbed repentance and to the abuse of his implacable enemy. There was in the Elizabethan time a taste for a rather maundering morality, and for a loud-mouthed scolding style of abuse. The pamphleteers talked a great deal about themselves, and conducted wit combats, which were redolent of the bear-garden and backsword combats. La Rochefoucauld’s observation, that there are men who would rather speak evil of themselves than not speak of themselves at all, may also be kept in mind. A weak, conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of lyric poetry and of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate a summing up as can be given of Greene. He was born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a Bohemian life led in a very exuberant time. There seems to be no doubt that the end was very miserable. Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety on the strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, The Groat’s Worth of Wit, in which he abuses Shakespeare.[239] Everybody has heard of the “only Shake-scene in the country,” the player adorned with the feathers of Greene himself and other real poets. Historically it is of some value as proving that Shakespeare was known and prosperous in 1592. It also helps to give the measure of Greene, that while he was affecting for the press all the agony of a deathbed repentance—partly no doubt sincere enough—and was exhorting his friends to flee destruction, he could break out, with all the venom of wounded vanity, against the man who had succeeded where he himself had failed. If we had the good fortune to know nothing of the life of Greene, he would rank as a respectable writer who had a share in a time of preparation for a far greater than himself or any of his associates. His prose stories—largely adapted from the Italian—include one, Pandosto, which had the honour in its turn to be adapted and made into poetic drama by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale. His undoubted work for the stage which survives was all published after his death with bad or little editing. The first printed, Orlando Furioso, taken from a passage in Ariosto, is hopelessly corrupt. The others are—A Looking-Glass for London and England; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; Scottish Story of James IV.; the Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon; and the doubtful George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield.[74] With Greene we come to something at once very different from Lyly, and quite new,—to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama, which in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry[240] and passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths of rant, or runs to the very madness of fustian. It is not the greater achievement that we must look for in Greene. His heroics are “comical,” in a sense not designed by the printer of Alphonsus. Drawcansir is hardly an exaggeration of that hero, and is incomparably more coherent. His comic scenes have too commonly the air of mere hack work put in to supply parts for the clowns of the theatre, while his plots are mere successions of events frequently unconnected with one another. But in the midst of all is the undeniable vein of tenderness and lyric poetry. All the scenes in his best play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, in which Margaret the Fair Maid of Fressingfield is introduced, are charmingly fresh and natural. With more discipline, and no temptation to serve the taste of the time for King Cambyses’ vein, Greene might have been the author of pleasant little plays of a poetic sentimental order written in a charming simple style.
Peele.

His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older man, and outlived Greene a very few years. He was born about 1558, and was dead by 1598, in a............