There were countless troops of players, vagabonds in the eyes of the law—those who held no licence from a noble (as "the Earl of Leicester\'s men," "the Admiral\'s men," and many others),[Pg 194] "hardly scaped whipping". In "Ratsei\'s Ghoaste" a company of strollers, Bottoms and Snugs, stage-stricken, are licensed by a highwayman. They acted where they could, mere "barnstormers," mainly in the yards of inns, under the galleries.
The City was puritanic, or, at all events, was adverse to the nuisance caused by crowds of roisterers and hangers-on of the theatre, and by 1577 James Burbage built his theatre beyond the municipal bounds, in Shoreditch. The Curtain and the Fortune were in the same region. Southwark, south of the river, a noisy quarter, gave hospitality to the Rose, and, in 1599, to the Globe, built by Burbage\'s son, the famous Richard, Shakespeare\'s friend.
The Diary of Philip Henslowe, who financed players and authors, among his other enterprises, contains the jottings of this avaricious and uneducated patron. There were many small "private theatres," which had a scrambling existence.
The pit was unseated, and open to the rain and sun, the galleries above were less uncomfortable. The noble and wealthy sat in galleries round the pit, or on the stage, which was covered over or partly covered from the air. The arras, or tapestry hangings, concealed the prompter—and Polonius in "Hamlet". Scenes in bedrooms were at the back, and when such a scene closed, the hangings fell over it. There was no scene-shifting, as with us, pasteboard rocks and trees were easily moved about. A painted frame with a name over it in large letters, stood for town-gate, and for the town.[2]
There were no women actors, boys took women\'s parts till the Restoration.
Such clowns, dancers, singers, and practical jokers as Tarleton and Kemp, and such actors as held shares in their theatres, made good livelihoods. The authors, who sold them dramas for a sum down, and had no more profit from them in any way, were paid sums ranging from ￡6 to ￡20: according to modern rate of purchasing power from ￡50 to ￡160. The play then became the property of the speculator, like Henslowe, or manager, or company of authors, which had paid for it. Robert Greene, the[Pg 195] celebrated literary man of whom we have to speak presently, was accused of selling a copy of a play to one company, and then, when that company went "on tour" through provincial towns, of selling another copy to another company. "He was very capable of having it happen to him." When any speculator or company had once bought a play, they could hand it over to any author with orders to alter it as he pleased. This was annoying to the first author or authors, for sometimes two men, sometimes three, sometimes five or six would combine to make a play. The consequence is that modern critics spend much time and ink in trying to discover which author wrote each part of a comedy or tragedy, and how much of the original work of the first author, or authors, was kept in a play which, perhaps, Shakespeare himself took up and re-wrote.
We have no space for such discussions, which seldom lead to any certain conclusions, but we must remember that the actors much objected to the printing of any plays which they owned, for, once printed, it was not easy to prevent other companies from acting them. But publishers sent shorthand reporters to take down the words during the performance, and wild work they often made of it. These printed plays, small cheap square volumes or "quartoes," may be very correct or very incorrect copies of the author\'s words; some of Shakespeare\'s quartos are good texts, some are execrable.
The playwrights were usually young men who had been at one of the Universities, and had picked up all that they could learn of the newest French and Italian literature, ideas, and manners. They were very scornful of play writers who, like Kyd, Shakespeare, and even Ben Jonson, far more learned than any of them, had not been at Oxford or Cambridge. The pamphlets of the University men tell us much of the little we know about their rivals, often their betters, who had not studied at Oxford or Cambridge.
John Lyly.
From the University wits whose plays preluded to Shakespeare, John Lyly (?1554-1606) of Magdalen, Oxford, stands a little apart.[Pg 196] He wrote dramas to be acted before the maiden Queen by the boy singers of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul\'s. Unlike some of his brethren, he remembered the reverence due to boys and virgins, and his pieces are remarkable for delicacy of tone, while the refined and romantic sentiment, the pure and hopeless passion of his "Endymion," for example, and the style of the prose in his dialogue, are all in the manner of his "Euphues". When he aimed at broad mirth, he was not broad enough or facetious enough to be amusing. His characters usually, as in "Endymion" and "The Woman in the Moon," are the gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines of classical mythology, but their manners are those of the Court of Elizabeth, though more refined.
Allegory on events of the day is suspected of lurking in the plays: Cynthia, for example, has always some complimentary reference to Elizabeth. "Mother Bombie" is not a successful essay in low comedy: "Campaspe," a love story of the Court of Alexander the Great (where Plato finds himself, somehow), is quite a pretty approach, as is "Galatea," towards the romantic comedy; but in Shakespeare\'s early "Love\'s Labour\'s Lost" we see that, at the first attempt, he far surpassed his predecessor. Puns, alliteration, and anecdotes of unnatural history are nearly as prevalent in the plays as in the "Euphues" of Lyly. Several of his songs are pretty; some of his scenes of love-making when the lady, though coy, is willing to be won, are graceful, and the prose of the dialogue, conceits apart, is lucid and in good taste. His blank verse in "The Woman in the Moon," is not specially characteristic.
Peele.
George Peele would have a far better claim than Kyd to the title of "sporting" if there were even a little truth in the tract about him called "Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman"; while to the title of "gentleman" he would have no moral pretensions. The jests are rough and far from honest practical jokes, but the author had some knowledge of Peele\'s position as a director of pageants and masques. There is no smoke without fire, and the contemporary stories of the "Bohemian"[Pg 197] life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University wits connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely be baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire: he was born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates Hall, now Dr. Johnson\'s college of Pembroke in Oxford, took his Bachelor\'s degree about 1577, his Master\'s in 1579.
His "Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 1589), he probably wrote at Oxford. It is a pocket epic, and summary of the Trojan war—based partly on the "Iliad," partly on the later Ionian legends, as of Palamedes, and the love of Achilles for Polyxena, daughter of Priam. By 1581 Peele was in London. In 1584 his "Arraignment of Paris" was published; it was acted in that year before Elizabeth by the "children" of the Chapel Royal. It is strange sport for ladies, and Mrs. Quickly might have said, "You do ill to teach the child such words". The piece in which Paris is arraigned for giving the apple to Venus, is a pastoral written in a variety of rhymed metres, with some speeches in creditable blank verse: there is a pretty song,
Fair, and fair, and twice as fair,
And fair as any may be.
At the close Diana presents the famous apple, with the assent of Venus, Juno, and Pallas, to Queen Elizabeth. Peele also arranged pageants for the Lord Mayor, and wrote (1593) a "Chronicle History of Edward I," a play based on an absurd ballad about the profligacy and fabulous cruelty of Eleanor, the worthy Queen of "Longshanks". Friar David ap Tuck provides a comic part, in prose. John Baliol, King of Scotland, brags and submits in blank verse: the best of the blank verse is assigned to the wicked Eleanor: the lines are not usually "stopped" in the stiff old style.
In 1593 Peele also wrote his "Honour of the Garter," a poetic vision of "lovely knights" of old days. The Prologue contains a lament for Marlowe,
the Muses\' darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below.
"The Old Wives\' Tale" is thought to have suggested a poem very unlike it, Milton\'s "Comus". The date of Peele\'s "David[Pg 198] and Bathsheba," "a remain of the fashion of Scripture plays," is uncertain (published in 1599). This is the best of Peele\'s extant work, and the blank verse is not unworthy of Marlowe. David says of the dead Absalom—
touch no hair of him,
Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds
Delight to play, and love to make it curl,
Wherein the nightingales would build their nests,
And make sweet bowers in every golden tress,
To sing their lover every night to sleep.
With Peele and Marlowe we are coming close to the perfection of the verse of Shakespeare. Peele died in 1597(?); two years earlier he was poor and in sickness. Probably some of his plays are lost; the "Battle of Alcazar" is but doubtfully assigned to him. Peele cannot have taught Shakespeare much: though he greatly improved blank verse, he only proves that spectators were not intolerant of real poetry in plays.
Greene.
Robert Greene was a Norwich man (born about 1560), the son of parents of substance; at St. John\'s College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1578. Norwich was a puritan town, but the indulgence of Greene\'s mother, as he tells us, enabled him to make the Italian tour, probably between 1578 and 1580,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
said the proverb, and Greene, a man greatly given to fits of repentance, describes his dissipations much as St. Augustine describes his own. At all events he learned Italian and could borrow from novels in that language. He lived among "wags as loose as myself," both in Italy and London. Neither the effects of a rousing sermon nor an early marriage (1585, 1586) to a wife with whom he soon parted company could withdraw Greene from the bottle and his wild comrades. He was the conventional "gentleman of the press," living by a very rapid pen, "yarking up a pamphlet" with unprecedented speed, says Nash, and his wares, we learn, were well paid. He had also many noble patrons, at least he dedicated his[Pg 199] "love pamphlets," romances in the manner of Lyly, to many ladies. They are pure in tone, and his favourite female character is a chaste and long-suffering Patient Grizel, like Enid in the Welsh "Mabinogion," and Enid in the "Idylls of the King". Between 1583 and 1589 he wrote at least eight of those love stories and pamphlets, including "Euphues, his Censure to Philautus," and, as five were dedicated to ladies of rank, they were probably of the sort which women enjoyed. Later he was either remorseful, or affected remorse, for his way of living, and turned his experience of the town to use, in tracts on "Cosenage" and "Cony-catching," exposures of the devices of courtesans, usurers, and other harpies.
His "Repentance," and his "Groatsworth of Wit" (1592), with the notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last efforts. The "Groatsworth of Wit" describes the jealousies between the playwrights and the actors, who, then as always, gained most of the popularity, and then gained most of the money yielded by the stage. It is almost impossible for unbiased readers to avoid detecting in Greene\'s "Johannes Factotum," "the only Shake-scene in the country," an allusion to Shakespeare. Whether he partook too freely of pickled herrings and Rhine wine, as gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness, and died in debt to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592.
Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even according to Nash he was a "ruffler". "Penning of plays," Greene says, was his "continual exercise," but at what date he began it is uncertain. He appears to have been stung by some comment in a play by two other authors on the unfashionable character of his own dramas, "for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins"; that is, apparently, he did not try to write the sonorous blank verse of Marlowe; or tried and failed to produce in Nash\'s words "the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse".
If "Alphonsus, King of Arragon" be his first play, as it gives Tamburlaine on a small scale it may have been suggested by Marlowe\'s drama: however Alphonsus, after Napoleonic victories, marries his own true love, the daughter of the Sultan and Greene\'s[Pg 200] play, like the tragedies preferred by Charles II, "ends happily". The blank verse is inferior to that of the Ninevite play in which Lodge took part, "A Looking Glass for London and England".
"Orlando Furioso" is a strange medley; there is prose, blank verse, and even a speech in Latin: the materials are drawn, of course, from Ariosto; the Paladins deal enormously in classical allusions.
In "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward I, falls in love with a gamekeeper\'s daughter, and describes her charms in blank verse, and in a very pretty pastoral manner. By the old trick of novels and of the stage he sends Lacie, a courtier, to woo for him (as in "Much Ado about Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the usual consequences follow.
The Friars Bacon and Bungay are shown at their pranks, with a devil, and Lacie, "in country apparel," flirts with the keeper\'s daughter in talk of Apollo\'s courtship of Semele (mother of Dionysus by Zeus). The king beholds their courtship by dint of crystal-gazing; while they are also on the stage.
The plot becomes extremely complicated, and poor Margaret, the keeper\'s daughter, has to play the patient Grizel to Lacie. She is cruelly treated, but marries Lacie in the end, while Edward pairs off with Eleanor. The servant of Friar Bacon, Miles, and a devil provide some comic matter. The blank verse is now much more accomplished, and imitates the cadences of Marlowe.
The play of "James IV" is so absurdly unhistorical (it transfers the plot of an Italian novel by Cinthio to the Court of Holyrood), that it can hardly be read with patience, but Greene\'s sweet, patient, long-enduring heroine, Dorothea, appears again, in the part historically filled by a very different person, Margaret Tudor, whose passion for being alternately married (finally to "Lord Muffin") and divorced, was rebuked by her brother, Henry VIII, himself no model of constancy. Greene introduced and Shakespeare continued the practice of taking plots for romantic comedies, (such as "As You Like It") from Italian novels; and, like Shakespeare, he is the poet of good women, "the Homer of women," as his friend Nash said with hyperbole of compliment.
[Pg 201]
Lodge.
The Memoirs of Thomas Lodge, had he left them to us, would be of more interest than are his writings. He "had an oar in every paper-boat," says the Cambridge satirist in the play, "The Return from Parnassus," but he had oars in other boats that were not of paper. Born about 1558, he was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, an eminent grocer. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, being by one academic generation junior to Lyly. Going to the Inns of Court, London, he answered Gosson\'s attack on poetry, "The School of Abuse," in an abusive style very unlike that of Sir Philip Sidney\'s "Defence of Poesy". He and Barnaby Rich (the supposed author of a most vivacious translation of two books of Herodotus), were friends, and wrote commendatory verses, each for the other\'s work (1581).
If in his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), Lodge is speaking from his personal experience, he already knew "the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment," thanks to the expensive acquaintance of "Mrs. Minx," and long bills due to his tailor. He warns the young against the temptations of the town, at tedious length and with overabundance of classical allusions. In an unreadable romance (1584) (Lyly\'s "Euphues" being the model), "Forbonius and Prisceria," he inserts many not unreadable verses.
"Glaucus and Scilla" is a work of the same genre as Shakespeare\'s "Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas of six lines.
"Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences"
says Lodge, and his tale is too prolix, verbose, and full of "delayes". There are harmonious cadences, and pretty descriptions, but Lodge\'s poetic vein is best in his brief lyrics. He found time, on sea or land, to write "Rosalynde: Euphues\' Golden Legacy". This contains the tale which Shakespeare made immortal by transfiguring it in "As You Like It". The vagrant and affected prolixity of this kind of story had a popularity that endured for a century, and surprises us as much as our popular novels will[Pg 202] doubtless astonish future generations. Such as the style was, Lodge had mastered it, and redeemed it by the intercalated verses. "Rosalynde" had vogue, and Lodge, who had set forth on a freebooting expedition with young Thomas Cavendish, wrote probably the only novel, "A Margarite of America" (1596), ever composed in the frosty Straits of Magellan. His next novel was "Euphues\'s Shadow," the euphuism of the shadow is equal to that of the substance. His play, "A Looking Glass for London and England," written in collaboration with Greene, was acted in 1592. We are introduced to Rasni, King of Nineveh, with three Kings of Cilicia, Crete, and Paphlagonia, returning from the overthrow of Jeroboam, King of Jerusalem..
Greene and Lodge are magnificently disdainful of local colour. The Cilician King, in very sonorous blank verse, proclaims the Assyrian monarch to be more beautiful than Hyacinthus and Endymion, personages of Greek mythology. Oseas the prophet, brought in by an angel, listens to an angelic harangue of some thirty lines, and tersely replies: "The will of the Lord be done!" To him enter "Clown and a crew of Ruffians," and we have several pages of humours in prose; mainly the talk is of ale and horses. After a prolonged and chaotic performance, Nineveh repents under the preaching of Jonah, and these amiable moralists, Greene and Lodge, bid London go and do likewise. That the blank verse is not bad, and that the satire of Rasni\'s flatterers may be a hit at the adulators of Elizabeth, is the best that can be said for this Scriptural drama. After all it is not so tedious as Lodge\'s play from Roman history, "The Wounds of Civil War".
It is needless to speak of such mere hackwork as his books on William Longbeard and Robert the Devil, but his "Fig for Momus," satires in rhyming heroic couplets, accredit him, contrary to the boast of Joseph Hall, as the first English satirist.
Not popular in literature, Lodge (1600) turned physician, taking his M.D. degree at Avignon. Now he really flourished, and was in good practice, till his death in 1625. His reputation rests on his lyrics; for the advance of the drama he did nothing.
[Pg 203]
Nash.
With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, or Nashe, made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the history of Elizabethan literature. The son of "William Nash, minister" (not improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk in November, 1567. The Christian names of his brothers and sisters, Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are of the Biblical sort favoured by "the Brethren".
Nash made no claim to the title "gentleman" then used in the heraldic sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar" (at Oxford "servitor") or Lady Margaret\'s Scholar of St. John\'s College, Cambridge, and was in residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 he was in London, a literary hack, employed, for example, to write an "Introduction" to Greene\'s "Menaphon". He addresses the students of both Universities in his irrepressibly rattling way, and it is hardly possible to doubt that in a long passage he rails at the unfortunate Kyd in his capacities as playwright and translator from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed contemporary literature and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings of Gabriel Harvey.
With him Nash later had a war of pamphlets, the best known is "Have with You to Saffron Walden," containing a full answer to the eldest son of the Halter-maker (1596). The pamphlets are only of interest for their personal hints: the feud arose from a slighting allusion by Greene to Harvey\'s parentage ("Quip for an Upstart Courtier"). Nash took up the cudgels (as his weapons of wit may be called) for Greene; Harvey pursued Greene\'s memory beyond the tomb, and Government at last put an end to the publication of the pamphlets.
Nash and Marlowe worked together at the play of "Dido," mainly based on the "?neid" of Virgil, with an opening scene in un-Virgilian bad taste, and highly unedifying to the players, "the Children of her Majesty\'s Chapel The play is in blank verse, usually better than Nash\'s own in his "Summer\'s Last Will and Testament". Much of this is in Nash\'s hasty prose; a blank verse tirade in praise of dogs is amusing:—
[Pg 204]
To come to speech, they have it questionless,
Although we understand them not so well,
They bark as good old Saxon as may be.
In 1597, Nash was imprisoned for a play "The Isle of Dogs".
It is impossible to enumerate his tracts, of which his turbulent prose satire, "Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil," is the most spirited. His "Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton" (1594) is a crude anticipation of "Gil Blas," and the novel of unscrupulous wandering adventurers, and contains the feigned story of the loves of Surrey and his Geraldine, which was taken to be historical. Nash lived a scrambling life, a bookseller\'s hack, destitute of patrons, and died about 1601. For the advance of the drama, despite his play-writing, Nash did nothing.
Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe is happily on the right side of the line which separates poets who may be read from poets who must be written about. He was born on 6 February, 1564, being the son of an eminent shoemaker at Canterbury. He was educated at the King\'s School of that city, where he held a little scholarship of a pound, quarterly, and went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with one of the scholarships founded there for Canterbury boys by Archbishop Parker (1581). In 1584 he took his Bachelor\'s degree, being a contemporary of Nash and Greene, and three years later put on his Master\'s gown. His translations of Ovid\'s "Amores" may have been executed at Cambridge; he did not publish them. His first public work was the first part of the play of "Tamburlaine," acted in 1587 or 1588. The drama, in both parts, is destitute of construction; the hero, Tamburlaine, "the scourge of God," merely overruns a vast extent of country, subduing kings, massacring maidens, and glutting his unbounded rage for universal conquest. His only human weakness is his passion for "divine Zenocratê," his wife, and he might be called a martyr to "megalomania," trampling on divine names no less than on the backs of Emperors. The scene in which he enters[Pg 205] in his chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizond and Soria, bit in mouth, and cries:—
Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!
was matter of constant jest and parody, a proof of the popularity of the drama.
In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays, Marlowe was "a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with the thought of what man may achieve. "Nature," he makes Tamburlaine say,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet\'s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all...
but after this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine sinks to finding felicity in "an earthly crown".
The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, places in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines on the aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful:—
If all the pens that poets ever held
Had fed the feeling of their masters\' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem\'s period,
And all combined in beauty\'s worthiness
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
This is the vision of beauty which haunts and evades Marlowe, as the shadow of the mother of Odysseus in Hades fades away from his embrace. Sometimes it appears to him
[Pg 206]
like women or unmarried maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.
Again, in "Dr. Faustus," a new Tamburlaine who seeks the impossible in magic, not by arms, and sells his soul to the Adversary, the vision arises in the form of Helen of Troy, that ancient symbol of the World\'s Desire.
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium...
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
In this absolute perfection of the magic of verse, we see the true conquest of Marlowe: as in the agonies of the last hour of Faustus,
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo\'s Laurel Bough.
The last act is full of pity and of terror.
The dagger-thrust that slew Marlowe in a Deptford tavern, at the end of May, 1593, robbed English poetry of a genius whose future performance cannot be measured, nor can the form which it might have taken be guessed. The comic prose scenes in "Faustus" are very stupid and may perhaps be by another hand, but nothing in Marlowe indicates the gift of humour.
In "The Jew of Malta" Barabas, on a scale less disproportionate than Tamburlaine, represents immeasurable desire of wealth, not of royalty. In the earlier scenes the speeches of Barabas, with the recurrence of romantic and sonorous names, in a way remind us of Milton. The Jew, ill-treated as he is, is not allowed to be sympathetic, and the monstrosity of his crimes reminds the modern reader of Aytoun\'s "Firmilian": with a touch of the story of the Hunchback in the "Arabian Nights". Though Barabas has a beloved daughter, rapidly converted to Christianity, though his ducats and his daughter are all that he loves, he lags very far behind Shylock. The play was well calculated for popularity, but, save Barabas, it contains no character of marked merit.
[Pg 207]
"Edward II" has been much praised in modern times, and even preferred to the "Richard II" of Shakespeare. Neither King was a good subject for tragedy, though both endured the extremes of misfortune. But in Richard there were noble elements, debased by a long struggle with some of his uncles, and undermined by a period of absolute power. In Edward II we know nothing estimable, save a moment of princely valour when he was all but taken at Bannockburn. His doting devotion to Piers Gaveston, who is well sketched by Marlowe, his intolerable insults to his Queen, place him quite beyond sympathy, till his awful last hours and appalling end. The instantaneous change of the Queen from a loving, forgiving, and intolerably wronged woman to a monster of cruel hypocrisy cannot be called artistic; and though the play, compared with Marlowe\'s other dramas, is "regular," and opens the path to what we may call the legitimate drama, without the monstrosities of "The Jew of Malta," it does not contain such surprising excellencies as occur in "Tamburlaine" and "Faustus". The noblest passage, the speech of the fallen King to Leicester, could scarcely come from the Edward of the earlier acts. The "Massacre of Paris" (the Bartholomew massacre of 1572) is of no importance among Marlowe\'s works.
If we could agree with his too fond biographer that Marlowe wrote the passages of "Henry VI," in which Jeanne d\'Arc is worthy of herself, and that Shakespeare contributed the scandalous scenes of her debasement, we might regard Marlowe as a wonder of clear-sighted appreciation. But nothing in their works confirms this conjecture. What share, if any, Marlowe had in "Henry VI" and "Titus Andronicus," and precisely what Shakespeare did for both of these dramas is unknown. Marlowe\'s beautiful lyric, "Come live with me and be my Love," is for ever fragrant, and his "Hero and Leander" (stiffly finished by Chapman, it is said at Marlowe\'s own dying request) is at least the equal of, and may even be preferred by many readers to, the first fruits of Shakespeare\'s invention, "Venus and Adonis".
Shakespeare\'s "dead shepherd" did not die unlamented by his brother poets: he had patrons in Raleigh and Sir Thomas[Pg 208] Walsingham, and it is not necessary to criticize here certain horrible libels on his life and conversation.[3]
Kyd.
The irony of chance, by a freak of Ben Jonson\'s, has attached to the most ill-fated of authors the name of "Sporting Kyd". Born about 1558 the son of a scrivener in the City, Kyd was educated at Merchant Taylors\' School. He was not a member of either University. It is by a piece of luck, for his biographers, that he was satirized by Nash as one who stole from a French translation of Seneca\'s tragedies; and so produced a play, "Pompey the Great, his fair Cornelia\'s Tragedie," one who "will afford you whole Hamlets," and who took up the business of translating from the Italian. By pursuing these and other sarcastic hints of Nash\'s, Kyd has been identified as the author of the most truly popular of early Elizabethan plays "The Spanish Tragedy"; of what the Germans call the "Ur-Hamlet," the oldest English Hamlet play; and the translator of "The Householder\'s Philosophic," in prose; while he is thought guiltless of the first part of "Jeronimo," a prelude, meant to be humorous, to his "Spanish Tragedy". To that work, again, additions were made, and Ben Jonson was paid for making them, though they are thought not to resemble his manner, and he frequently girds in his own later dramas at the popular "Spanish Tragedy". It is a long tissue of horrors and revenges in blank verse, old Hieronymo slowly pursuing the slayers of his son, Horatio, and contains, like "Hamlet," a play within a play, in which the actors in a fencing scene slay each other in earnest, to glut Hieronymo\'s revenge. As in "Hamlet" there is a ghost, but ghosts were common in the dramas of[Pg 209] Seneca and his English imitators. Hieronymo, when apprehended, bites his tongue out, and stabs himself and a Duke who happens to be convenient in his neighbourhood.
If Kyd were really the author of the first play of "Hamlet," based on a Danish story which English actors who played in Germany in 1587 may have brought home, the fact would be interesting. If we only possessed a copy of this first "Hamlet," we should know how much, if anything at all, Shakespeare retained from the original play. Kyd is credited with being the first to show the change and development of characters under the sway of the events of the drama, though this can scarcely be proved save by a long comparison of all the characters in the plays of other writers. Grotesque as are his horrors, when we compare those of "Titus Andronicus" and of successors of Shakespeare who ought to have known better, we wonder at his moderation.
Kyd\'s end was lamentable. He was arrested, and tortured, in May, 1593, on suspicion of having written a placard threatening a massacre of undesirable aliens in London, who interfered with home industries. In his papers was found part of a perfectly serious though heterodox discourse on a theological topic, apparently intended to be submitted to a Bishop. He cleared himself of the placard, and, in a letter to Puckering, the Lord Keeper, said that he had the theological piece from Marlowe, that it was among his papers by accident, and that Marlowe, then just dead, was an evil man, and no friend of his.
Kyd now lost the patronage of a peer, unnamed, and by December in the following year he was dead; his family renounced the administration of what possessions he may have left behind him. He has of late been the subject of minute English and German research, like every one who had, or may have had, the faintest connexion with Shakespeare. The indecision of Hieronymo (Act III. scene 12) in revenging himself on Balthasar for slaying Horatio, Hieronymo\'s son, and hanging him up in Hieronymo\'s summer-house, has other motives than the indecision of Hamlet. But this indecision, and the play within the play, and Kyd\'s supposed authorship of the "Ur-Hamlet," which lies behind the First Quarto of "Hamlet," make Kyd interesting to critical specialists.
[Pg 210]
These predecessors of Shakespeare need to be mentioned, though perhaps only Marlowe\'s dramas are now commonly read by lovers of poetry. Though these men wandered in the wilderness, so to speak, they pointed out the way to Shakespeare, and made the world familiar with rude forecasts of the forms of the romantic comedy, the historical play, and the tragedy. Several wrote blank verse well, occasionally; Marlowe brought blank verse, not precisely dramatic, but rather reflective, to the highest beauty. Almost all the early dramatists also graced their plays with charming songs.
All of these early dramatists had that sweet and birdlike English note of song, "woodnotes wild," which (to an English ear) is rare in all but the early poetry of France. We have observed this note in the lyrics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Time did not stifle the music, it is prolonged in the fashionable love-romances and in the early dramas. Thus even Nash, the least poetical of his associates, has his
Adieu, farewell earth\'s bliss
This world uncertain is,
which, with its refrain,
Lord, have mercy on us,
recalls Dunbar\'s lament
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
Dust hath closed Helen\'s eye,
Worms feed on Hector brave.
Where are the lovely knights and the ladies of old time?
Autumn hath all the summer\'s fruitful treasure,
written in a time of pestilence, is another lament of Nash\'s, and
Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year.
Peele has
His golden locks hath time to silver turned,
and the beautiful song of Bethsabe at the bath,
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air.
[Pg 211]
Greene has his
Ah, what is love, it is a pretty thing,
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king,
which is in the spirit of Burns\'s best songs of rural love; and his courtly love song with the French refrain,
N\'oserez vous, mon bel ami!
and his Lullaby
Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there\'s grief enough for thee.
This has the charm of the folk-songs,
Old and plain,
And dallying with the innocence of love.
It may also be said that, at the opposite pole, Greene\'s snatches of English hexameters are the best of their kind then written.
If nothing else Of Lyly\'s existed his
Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses—Cupid payed,
would keep his memory green.
Lodge has been blamed as a common plagiary because he translated so many of his lyrics, not always or often with due acknowledgment, from Des Portes and Ronsard. But in some cases he improved the land which he conquered, and his "Love in my bosom like a bee," "Down a down!" "Thus Phyllis sung," and "Pluck the fruit and taste the pleasures," are genuine additions to English song, and prelude to Shakespeare\'s, and the music of the coming generation.
All of the treasures of his predecessors are not equivalent or nearly equivalent to the small change of Shakespeare\'s genius. But the best things in his predecessors\' work indicate that, in a favourite phrase of Aristotle, "Nature was wishing to make" a Shakespeare. Yet was the birth of his genius none the less a miracle. He did much more than combine all that was good in all the others. He added that which is universal and eternal.
[Pg 212]
Shakespeare.
Concerning the life of William Shakspere (as he signed it), or Shakespeare (as his name was usually spelled), only a few essential facts are known from records of his own time, mainly documents concerning the legal affairs of himself, his family, and the theatrical company with which he was connected. Unlike many of the contemporary playwrights he was not a member of either University, and so college records about him are necessarily absent: and there is no contemporary roll of names of pupils at the school of his native place, Stratford-on-Avon.
Again, he was not a pamphleteer or journalist, like Nash, Greene, and others, and so he left no account of his friendships and enmities; no prose books about his opinions on art and literature, like Ben Jonson; he wrote no satirical plays, as Ben did, full of angry, contemptuous, and envious attacks on his rivals, and on the actors. As he was no learned scholar, the Universities never dreamed of making him, like Ben Jonson, a Master of Arts. People who wrote criticisms of poetry in prose or verse always spoke highly of him: one, John Davies, remarks that, in the opinion of some, had he not been an actor, he would have been fit company for Kings. But anecdotes of him were not sought for till all who had known him had long been dead. His own dramas contain a few topical allusions, and his sonnets appear to be more or less autobiographical, though to what degree, as in the case of Sidney\'s sonnets, is matter of dispute. He took almost no part in any public services, and in these circumstances little is known of his life, despite the painful researches of many learned students, and the wildest modern conjectures.
Concerning even the paternal grandfather of the poet, presumed to have been Richard Shakespeare, a farmer at Snitterfield, within four miles of Stratford-on-Avon, we have little more than probable presumptions. Richard\'s son John, father of the poet, in 1551 set up in business at Stratford-on-Avon, then a town of some 1500 inhabitants. He was a dealer in agricultural commodities; Aubrey, the antiquary, a century later, heard that he[Pg 213] was a butcher. But the trade of a butcher in a tiny town is not lucrative, yet by 1556 he could buy two tenements, one in Henley Street, next door to the so-called "Birthplace". He held a succession of municipal offices, and was one of two chamberlains of town accounts. In 1557 (?) he married Mary Arden, a daughter of a far away branch of a good family; she inherited fifty acres of land and a house at Wilmcote, and other property. After the birth of children who died young, came William, baptized on 26 April, 1564. His father, still prospering, was chief magistrate in 1568: that year came licensed play-actors to Stratford—"The Queen\'s," and "The Earl of Worcester\'s". But after 1572 the affairs of the father turned gradually to the worse; he mortgaged the property near Wilmcote in 1578; he fell into debt, and in 1586 ceased to be an alderman. His family had increased while his fortunes declined.
As there was a free Grammar School at Stratford, it is natural to suppose that William was educated there from his seventh or eighth to his thirteenth year. If so, he would learn Latin grammar, and read more or less in the popular classics, including, "old Mantuan"—not Virgil, but a writer of the Italian Renaissance. Supposing Shakespeare to have left school at thirteen, he was at the age of Bacon when he went up to Cambridge. Books have been written about the learning or want of learning of Shakespeare. In all probability he could make out most of the meaning of a Roman writer of comedies, like Plautus, or of a philosopher like Seneca. But his use of English translations, whenever he could get them, does not look as if he read Latin with ease: he could ask a friend or pay a poor scholar to help him when he had no translations; and to Ben Jonson his Latin seemed "small," because Ben had so much scholarship, and was so proud of it. All general information Shakespeare acquired as easily as he drew breath. Of schoolmasters, judging from allusions in the plays, he entertained the same opinion as Sir Walter Scott. The classics are most in view in his early plays, in some of which he worked over an earlier manuscript by a more scholarly hand. Moreover classical allusions, mythological and historical, lay loose on the surface of all contemporary literature;[Pg 214] and abounded in the conversation of the wits.[4] No man ever cared less for historical accuracy and correct "local colour" than Shakespeare: he piled up anachronisms, making Aristotle live before the Trojan war.
When not yet 19 years of age, at the close of 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who had the same dowry, in money (￡6. 13s. 4d.) as his mother. She was seven or eight years older than he: their first child was born at the end of May, 1583, and the circumstances did not promise domestic happiness. Twins, Hamnet (who died young) and Judith, were born in 1585, and whether Shakespeare did, or did not get into trouble for poaching on the lands of Lucy of Charlecote (against whom his heraldic ridicule, in "Merry Wives," Act I, Scene I, indicates a grudge), it was time for him to seek his fortune. Perhaps he made ventures near home (Aubrey, who knew an old actor that had traditions, says he was a schoolmaster), but by 1587 he was probably "hanging loose on the town" in London. Here he had a fellow townsman, Field, who later printed his "Venus," and his "Lucrece". The story that Shakespeare held the horses of playgoers outside the doors of a theatre comes late into literary anecdote.
By 1594 (perhaps by 1592) Shakespeare was a member of the Company of Actors known successively as "Leicester\'s," "Derby\'s" (died 1592) "Hunsdon\'s" (Carey) and, at the accession of James VI and I (1603) "The King\'s". With him were the great Richard Burbage, John Heminge, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips. By this Company all his plays were first acted. By 1592 they used the Rose Theatre, and others, and in 1599 the Globe. There is no proof that Shakespeare ever played in Scotland (he could not pronounce Dunsinane, and accentuated the final syllable) or abroad.
From the moment of his departure from Stratford nothing is certainly known of Shakespeare, till the dying Greene apparently[Pg 215] alludes to him in "A groat\'s worth of wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592). Adjuring his comrades (Nash, Peele, and Marlowe?), to forswear sack and the stage, Greene seems to remind them of a hardship in their professional position: the rewriting of plays, once sold, by other hands. A new hand might alter it for the owners, the hand might be that of an actor, one of the "puppets," says Greene, "that speak from our mouths.... There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his \'Tyger\'s heart wrapt in a Player\'s hide\' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute \'Johannes factotum\'" (jack-of-all-work) "is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.... It is a pity men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes."
If, as has been suggested (there is no certainty), a piece called "Henry VI" (part I), played by Shakespeare\'s company in March, 1592, was an older drama "bombasted" by Shakespeare, and if his conduct was one cause of Greene\'s wrath, we can only regret that Shakespeare set his hand to a work that rejoiced English patriots. The author or authors represent Jeanne d\'Arc in two totally different characters, now as a patriot, equally brave, self-sacrificing, and eloquent; now as a loose woman who denies her father, and asserts her pregnancy by one or other of several lovers. History is strangely treated, and the materials must have been taken from Anglo-Burgundian scandals, and from a curious French prose chronicle romance, obviously done into prose out of verse, the "Chronique de Lorraine". This appears to have been the source of the scenes in which Jeanne fights at Rouen, many years after her martyrdom in 1431.
Shakespeare may have "written in" the scenes where Jeanne acts and speaks like herself; the others (let us hope so!) may be by a baser hand. The second and third parts of "Henry VI," were later much altered, probably by Shakespeare; the scenes with Jack Cade are entirely in his manner.
As we have not the original manuscripts, we are often unable to distinguish, in Shakespeare\'s earlier works, between what is his own and what belongs to a play by an earlier hand, or by a[Pg 216] collaborator. The tendency of criticism is to attribute the best passages to Shakespeare and to guess at the authors of what is not so good.
The dates especially of the early plays are far from certain. But we can hardly be mistaken in thinking "Love\'s Labour\'s Lost" a very early example of the poet\'s play-writing. He has not mastered blank verse: the sense usually ends with the end of each line; much of the play is written in rhymed verse of various metres: prose is comparatively little used. Some of the personages, as Biron and Longueville, are of the contemporary Court of Henry of Navarre, a most unlikely person to contemplate seclusion from female society! The play, of which the plot seems to be Shakespeare\'s own,[5] is full of promise of good things to come. Biron will blossom into Benedick, Costard and Jaquenetta into Touchstone and Audrey; the ladies are predecessors of the poet\'s many ladies, as Beatrice and Rosalind, who are merry when in love. We have the stock figure of the pedant schoolmaster in Holofernes, of the fantastic talker in Armado, and the songs, "On a day, Alack the day," and "When daisies pied and violets blue," prelude to all the enchantments of Shakespeare\'s lyrics. The play was revised and worked over in 1598 (?).
"Titus Andronicus" (certainly extant in 1594) is the play which Burns and his brothers, in boyhood, declined to listen to; it is as full of horrors as an Assyrian bas-relief of the torturing of prisoners of war. Tortures were familiar, in practice, to the subjects of Elizabeth, and the horrors are not worse than those of ancient Athenian and other Greek legendary histories. But neither these things nor the over-abundance of pedantic classical allusions are in Shakespeare\'s mature taste. Much of the play has been guessed at as the work of "Sporting Kyd," and a fairly old tradition (published in 1678) says that Shakespeare only touched it up. Long ago Hallam remarked that criticism might come to be as dubious[Pg 217] as to Shakespeare\'s precise share in the plays, as, after Wolf (1795) she has been uncertain about Homer\'s part in his epics. It is clear and certain that plays, when Shakespeare came to the town, were often altered and added to by others than the original authors. Though "Titus Andronicus" was, in 1598, assigned to Shakespeare by Francis Meres, and was included in the first collected edition, the Folio, in 1623, he may, perhaps, have been the last and, as the most popular, the titular bearbeiter, or worker-over of the drama.
"Richard III" could scarcely be made to feed more full of horrors on the stage than that prince actually did, as reported by Holinshed, and the play, if inflated, is less so than Marlowe\'s "Tamburlaine". Marlowe\'s "Edward II," again, had its influence on "Richard II," a perilous play to be concerned with, from the scene of deposing the king, under the irritable Elizabeth. Acted by order of the Essex conspirators, in 1601, it brought Shakespeare\'s company under the momentary displeasure of the Queen.
The third Richard has all the elements of popularity. He is as hideous as the second Richard was effeminately beautiful, as resolute as his predecessor was weak. It is well that a dramatist should make himself plainly understood, but Shakespeare seems to play with his own art when the splendid rhetoric of Richard III reveals (he soliloquizes more than Hamlet) the cause why he is "determined to prove a villain"—his spite against the world for his own deformity,—and why he is determined to be a hypocrite,
With odd old ends stolen forth of Holy Writ.
The scene of the wooing of the Lady Anne, and the dream of Clarence, are among the most familiar passages in English poetry, and the second is rich in the magic of Shakespeare\'s blank verse. The wavering character of Richard II, ever in extremes of confident arrogance and of sudden dread, like that of Agamemnon, would not have seemed to Aristotle fit for a hero of tragedy. But in memorable passages of poetry, single lines that, once read, can never be forgotten, the play is rich, and such lines are the mark and sign manual of Shakespeare\'s genius. "The real Shakespeare[Pg 218] cannot help showing himself here and there; and then we are in the presence of something new—of a kind of English poetry that no one has hit upon before...."[6]
It is in "Romeo and Juliet," and the "Midsummer Night\'s Dream," both relatively early pieces, even more than in the chronicle plays, that this ever-present magic of genius, the unequalled command of beautiful fresh phrases, the hurrying rush of exquisite ideas, first shines out most conspicuously: the youth of passion in the Romeo, and the soul of romance, are accompanied by the gay wit of glorious Mercutio and the lax humours of the Nurse and the servants. Shakespeare was compelled to kill Mercutio by Tybalt\'s sword, otherwise a character so congenial to him would have run away with the play, and turned the tragedy into comedy. Shakespeare, says Ben Jonson, "had an excellent phantasy" (fancy), "brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with such facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." Mercutio could only be stopped by a sword thrust! The "Midsummer Night\'s Dream" is the enchanted consummation of the world-wide fairy belief, relieved against the rustic comedy of Bottom and Snug.
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CHAPTER XX. OTHER DRAMATISTS.
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