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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older man, and outlived Greene a very few years. He was born about 1558, and was dead by 1598, in a very sordid way. Of his life very little is known except that he was the son of the “clerk” of Christ’s Hospital, that he was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and that he was a thorough Bohemian. His reputation in this respect was so solidly founded that he was made the hero of a book of “jests,” which, in fact, are tales of roguery mostly reprinted from older French originals. Peele worked regularly for a company of actors, and no doubt did much which cannot now be traced. Commentators, who have striven hard to prove the unprovable in the history of the Elizabethan Drama, have assigned him portions of the First and Second Parts of Henry VI.[75] His undoubted plays are—The Arraignment of Paris, The famous Chronicle of King Edward I., The Battle of Alcazar, The Old Wives’ Tale, and David and Fair Bethsabe. To these may be added Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, which is written in the old seven-foot metre, and differs from the others greatly. But custom has assigned it to Peele, who indeed uses the long line elsewhere. Peele was a decidedly stronger man than Greene, but a writer of the same stamp and limitations. What is best in him is the lyric note and the tenderness. The first is well shown in not a few passages of the Arraignment of Paris, a somewhat overgrown masque, written for the Court and to flatter Elizabeth; and the second in the David and Bethsabe. His chronicle play, Edward I., has a certain historical value as illustrating the growth of the class, and it is notorious for the hideous libel it contains on the character of Eleanor of Castile; while The Battle of Alcazar is interesting in another way, as an example of the boyish “blood and thunder” popular at the time, of which Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is the masterpiece. It is the equivalent to Greene’s Alphonsus; but if not more sane it is more substantial, and does really contain lines which are poetry and not rant, though the rant is there in profusion.

Thomas Kyd need hardly be mentioned here except for the purpose of leading on to the master of the school, Marlowe. He is a very shadowy figure, who may have been born in 1557, and may have died in 1595. His voice is still audible in The Spanish Tragedy, and perhaps in Jeronimo. The first-named is a continuation of the second—if the second were not written to supply an introduction to the first. They too are “blood and thunder,” with the occasional flash of real poetry, which is found wellnigh everywhere in that wondrous time.

Greene, Peele, and Kyd, in spite of the independent merit of parts of their work, are mainly interesting because they were forerunners of Shakespeare, and aided in the formation of the English drama. If it had wanted Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, or David and Bethsabe, it would no doubt have been the poorer, but by things not great in themselves, and still less indispensable. "Marlowe." If it had wanted the author of Doctor Faustus, it would have been the poorer by a very great poet. Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, in the same year as Shakespeare and was the son of a shoemaker. Probably by the help of patrons he was educated at the grammar-school of the town, and went from it to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge. The other events of his life are mainly matter of guesswork till we come to the fact that he was stabbed in a tavern brawl at Deptford on the 1st June 1593. He was accused of exceeding even the large Bohemian licence of life of his contemporaries, and of atheism. The evidence is neither direct nor good, but it is certain that a warrant for his arrest, and that of several of his friends, on the charge of disseminating irreligious opinions, was issued by the Privy Council about a fortnight before he was killed. At a time when all the once accepted foundations of religion were being called in question, sheer denial was naturally not unknown. Given the vehement spirit of all his work, it is as probable that Marlowe went this length as that he stopped short of it. The truth is in this case of little importance, for Marlowe’s place is among the poets, not the controversialists, of the sixteenth century.

As a poet Marlowe stands immediately below Spenser and Shakespeare, but between them and every other contemporary. He fails to rank with them because he wanted their range, and also because there was something in him not only unbridled, but incapable of submitting to order and measure. For a moment, and from time to time, he shoots up to the utmost height of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for a very brief space and then sinks out of view. In these happy passages of inspiration he showed what could be done with English blank verse. It had been written before him, since it was first used by Surrey in his translation of the Æneid, but Marlowe was its real creator as an instrument of English poetry. This was his great achievement. His fragment of Hero and Leander, though a beautiful poem of the mythological and rather lascivious order popular at the time, and full of a most passionate love of beauty, nowhere attains to the height of the constantly quoted “purple patches” from the first part of Tamburlaine, from Dr Faustus, or from The Jew of Malta. In themselves they are unsurpassable, yet his plays cannot by any possible stretch of charity be called good. What we remember of them is always the passage of poetry, expressing in the most magnificent language some extreme passion of ambition, greed, fear, or grasping arrogance, or some sheer revel of delight in the splendour of jewels and the possibilities of wealth. There are few scenes, in the proper sense of the word, and there is much monotonous repetition. The second part of Tamburlaine is the same thing over and over. The first two acts of The Jew of Malta promise well, and then the play falls off into incoherence and absurdity. Marlowe, though an incomparably greater man, seems to have been as blind as Greene or Peele ever were to what is meant by consistency. His Barabas, for instance, who is represented as a wicked able man, is suddenly found putting his neck in the power of a new-bought slave in a fashion hardly conceivable in the case of a mere fool. Dr Faustus holds together no better than Barabas. There is something more astonishing still. A poet may be able to express passion in splendid verse, and yet be able neither to construct a story nor create a character, but we do not expect to find him dropping into what, as mere language, is childishly inept. Now that is what Marlowe did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth at his best and his worst. It is the difference between Dryden and the bellman’s verses—between poetry and rank fustian, or commonplace. His short life, and the conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable that the bulk of Marlowe’s work should be but little. Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II., and The Massacre of Paris sum up the list of the plays which we can be sure were wholly his. The Tragedy of Dido was written in collaboration with Nash. Beyond this there is a supposition, supported by greater or less probability, that he had a share in Lust’s Dominion and in Titus Andronicus and Henry VI. To the plays are to be added the fragment of Hero and Leander, The Passionate Shepherd, and the translations from Ovid written in his earlier days.[76]

If the question is asked what this body of poets had done to advance the development of the English drama, the answer must be that they had done something to improve its language. More can hardly be claimed for them. They certainly give no example of how to construct a dramatic story, nor did they create a consistent interesting character, unless Greene’s Fair Margaret be allowed as an exception. That you did very well as long as you took care that something happened, whether it was what the personage would have done, or what would follow from what went before, or not, was apparently an accepted rule with all of them. It was somewhat strange that it should have been so, for all were educated men, and were deeply conscious of their learning. Even if they did not take the classic model, which, as they were all far better qualified to write a chorus than to construct a plot, it would have been to their advantage to do, they might have learnt, without going beyond Horace, to avoid their grosser faults. It must not be forgotten that none of their surviving plays were published in favourable circumstances. All may have been, and some certainly were, subject to manipulation while in the hands of the actors. But even when allowance is made for this, it is undeniable that the writers of the school of Marlowe, to use a not very accurate but convenient expression, were totally wanting in any sense of proportion. To judge by much that they were content to write, they cannot have known the difference between good and bad. The incoherent movement of their plays was perhaps partly due to the want of scenery. When the audience would take a curtain for Syracuse, they would also take it for Ephesus or for twenty different places, indoors and out, in one act. There was, therefore, no check on the playwright, who could move with all the licence of the story-teller. But then they did not give their plays even the coherence of a story. As they were all dependent on companies of actors, they may often have put in what their employers told them was needed to please a part of the audience. It is to this necessity that we may attribute the comic scenes of Dr Faustus if we wish to find an excuse for Marlowe—and if, indeed, they were his, and not written in by others at the orders of Henslowe the manager. But this does not account for all. When it is allowed for, enough remains to show that all these predecessors of Shakespeare were unable to see the difference between horseplay and humour, and were almost equally blind to the immense distinction between the “grand manner” and mere fustian. This last, indeed, had an irresistible attraction for them, and not less for Marlowe than for the others. If it had not he would never have put the rant of Tamburlaine into the mouth which spoke the superb lines beginning “If all the pens that ever poets held,” nor would he have allowed Barabas to sink from the gloomy magnificence of his beginning into a mere grotesque puppet Jew with a big nose.

“All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is,—that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon—married and had children there—went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays—returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.” This summary, which Steevens put in a note to the ninety-third sonnet, is as true as when it was written in the last century. It is not quite exhaustive, for we know that Shakespeare had the respect and affection of his contemporaries from Chettle to Ben Jonson, and also that he was a very prosperous man. Yet Steevens included nearly all that the most extreme industry has been able to discover of Shakespeare’s life. The date of his birth was on or just before the 23rd April 1564, and he died on that day in 1616. From the age of about twenty till he was nearly forty he lived in London as actor or manager. In his youth he wrote two poems in the prevailing fashion, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The sonnets published in 1609 belong to a later period, but it is impossible to fix their date. His chief work was always done for the company to which he belonged. For that he recast old plays or wrote new ones. The poems alone were published by himself. His sonnets appeared in a pirated edition during his life, and his plays after his death, when his fellow-actors had no longer an overpowering motive to keep them for themselves. On this very slight framework there has been built a vast superstructure of guesswork of which very little need be said here.

It is not only the large element of sheer folly in these guesses, the imbecile attempt to prove that the man of whom Ben Jonson spoke and wrote the well-known words was not the author of his own plays, which may be put aside. Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort to find political journalism, or other things didactic, social, and scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez, speaking of the very similar race of Cervantistas, has said that this is the resource of people, often respectable for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy literature as literature, but being also conscious that they ought to enjoy it, have been driven to look for something else in their author. These good people have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled on MoliÈre in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some great names may be quoted to give a certain authority to the supposition that Shakespeare unlocked his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their sake we must not dismiss this guess as unceremoniously as we may well turn out the egregious Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not essentially wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is proved except this, that Shakespeare experienced some of the common fortunes of men of letters and other men, and then this, that he carried the indelicacy of his time to its possible extreme. We know that his “sugared sonnets” were handed about among his friends so freely that they got into print. So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart, and if the sonnet beginning “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” did refer to a particular person who must have been perfectly well known to many of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist must have been singularly destitute of the beginnings of a sense of shame, even according to the standard of the sixteenth century. It is impossible to prove that those who take this view are wrong—and if the word evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to prove that they are right. But be their belief right or wrong, the value of the sonnets is not affected. They are valuable, not because they reveal the passing fortunes of one man, however great, but because they express what is permanent in mankind in language of everlasting excellence.

The work by which Shakespeare was first known in his time were the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the dates of composition and order of succession of his plays are obscure, it is certain that he was working for the stage before the first of these years. But as yet he was rather redoing the work of others than producing for himself. The sonnets were widely known by 1598, and were in all probability inspired, as so many other collections of the same class, though of very different degrees of merit, were, by the example of Astrophel and Stella. The chronology of the plays is, it may be repeated, difficult to settle, but on the whole they may be asserted to have followed the order in which it would appear natural to assign them on internal evidence. First come those in which his hand, though never to be mistaken, is seen in least power—Pericles and Henry VI. Then come others in which we get most of the mere fashion of the time, its euphuism and other affectations—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour Lost, &c. Next follow the long series of romantic plays and chronicle plays, darkened by tragedy and irradiated by humour—The Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV., As You Like It. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps more accurate to call the greater drama, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, belong to the later years.

The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes to speak, after so many others, of Cervantes, stands in an even more formidable shape on the path of him who wishes to speak of Shakespeare. Most generations have produced those who have spoken badly. When they were honest, and were not also incapable of literature, which has sometimes been the case, they were enslaved to some fashion, some pedantry of their own time. With these have been the merely inept, and there has not been wanting the buffoon, straining after singularity. The gutter and the green-room have been audible. But by the side of these there has been an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the greatest masters of English literature. It began with Ben Jonson, and has lasted till it has become wellnigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement of the competent judges, this universal acceptance, are by themselves enough to dispense us from proving that in him there was something more than was merely national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, all the Elizabethans, belong to us and to others only as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso, Lope, Calderon, all the others of Spain’s great time, belong to the Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes, though the first is very English and the second very Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their countrymen may understand them best, but there is that in them which is common to all humanity. The one star differs from the other in glory; for if Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece under the “species of eternity,” he brought much less than Shakespeare, who included everything except religion, and leaves us persuaded of his power to deal with that. Don Quixote is equivalent to one of the great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme quality of universality. So much can be said of only one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman Montaigne, in whom also there was something which speaks to all men at all times.

The work of Shakespeare falls into two classes—the pure poetry and the drama. The second is, indeed, intensely poetic, both in form and spirit, so that the division becomes unintelligent if we push it too far. But when his poetry is dramatic—when it is employed to set forth an action by talk—it is used for another purpose, and is found in combination with other qualities than are to be found in the pure poems. These are the Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, the sonnets, and the lyrics, which are mostly to be found in the plays, but can be detached from them. "The poems." It is a sufficient proof of the vast sweep of Shakespeare’s genius that if we had nothing of him but these, the loss to the literature of the world would be irreparable, but he would still be a great poet. The Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are greater poems than Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, more intense in passion, more uniformly magnificent in expression. Marlowe may reach their level when he is speaking to the full extent of his power, but he is not always there. Shakespeare always leaves the impression that he is within the limit of what he could do. The lyrics are the most perfect achievements of an age of lyric poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones for the much that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and Greene. But if their best is put beside Shakespeare it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if hung by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the comparison. The age was rich in sonnets. It produced the passion and melody of Sidney, the beauty of Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the vigour of Drayton. Yet Shakespeare’s sonnets are no less distinctly the greatest than his lyrics. It is even here that his pre-eminence is the most marked, for he has triumphed over more. The lyric is free and is brief. The sonnet is bound by rigid laws, and a cycle of sonnets is peculiarly liable to become monotonous, to be redundant, to be mechanical and frigid. But Shakespeare’s sonnets, whether or no they be in the order in which he would have put them, or were written to fall into any particular order, gave a varied yet consistent play of thought and passion, overshadowed by the ever-present consciousness of “the barren rage of death’s eternal cold.” In them, too, we always feel the superiority of the faculty to the work done. There is no toil, no struggle to express. What would have made another poet immortal, if said with manifest effort, is all poured out in “a first fine careless rapture.”

And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico lies the far-spreading palace of the plays. The dramatic work of Shakespeare is greater than the purely poetic, mainly because of its vastly greater scope. It contains all that is in the poems, and so much more that they are, as it were, lost in the abundance. In this stately pleasure-house there are no doubt parts which diligent examination will show to bear the traces of inexperience in the builder, fragments of the work of others, and ornaments in the passing taste of the time. Shakespeare laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock plays, and now and then he passed what he found in them, not because it was good but because it would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like others, he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere playing with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and the quibbles which made Dr Johnson shake his head. In common with every other dramatist from Sophocles downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his audience. The mere man of letters writing “closet” plays can forget the stage, and be punished by the discovery that his masterpiece won’t act. Shakespeare aimed at being acted. His stage had no change of scenery, and his audience loved action. Therefore he could put in more words than can be admitted when time must be found for the operations of the stage-carpenter and the scene-shifter. Therefore also he could allow himself a licence in the change of scene, which is impossible when it carries with it a change of scenery. But all this is either easily separable or can be amended by rearrangement. And therein lies the absolute difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Jew of Malta could not be made an acting play by any process of manipulation. Take from the best of the others—even from Ben Jonson—what was purely Elizabethan, and how much remains? They are excellent to read, and were good to act before an audience which accepted their convention, but before that only. For purely stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The Dama Melindrosa would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not Every Man in his Humour, or Epicene. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains—not in all cases, indeed, but in most—a play—that is, a consistent action—carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature.

It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare’s plays their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of Bardolph, “Would I were with him wheresome’er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell,” are the outward and visible signs of this inward and spiritual truth to nature. Henry IV. and Henry V. may seem to be but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree is less trim and balanced than the clipped yew. But it has a higher life and the finer unity. The Henry V. who meets Falstaff with—

is the same man as he who said—

Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father, he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs him nothing—a perfect portrait of the “unconscious hypocrite.” The circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously, and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity. Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-loving animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic, grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made on the model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused, unnatural, or inconsequent.

The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of some of Shakespeare’s characters is a tribute to their reality. We are never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille or Racine, or the galanes, damas, and jealous husbands of Lope and Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even MoliÈre, who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and transparent, because he also is, in comparison, narrow and arbitrary. We may differ as to his purpose in writing Don Juan or Tartuffe. Was he only drawing infidelity and hypocrisy to make them hateful? Was he speaking for the libertins of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of the philosophy of the eighteenth, who were in revolt against the claim of religion to be a guide of life and to control conduct? But the personages explain themselves. Again, when we meet one of those sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently explained alterations of the whole nature of a man or woman, so common with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know it to be false to life, and put it down at once as a clumsy playwright’s device. But the characters of Shakespeare are like the great figures of history, real, and yet not always to be understood at once, because they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery of nature.

The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the last years of the sixteenth century, and who outlived him, do not belong to our subject. It is enough to point out how unlikely it was that they would continue him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shakespearian drama without Shakespeare, when he deliberately sacrificed character to the convenient simplicity of the “humour,” and looked for the structural coherence of his plays to the unities. Other men who were less wise preferred to keep the freedom which they had not the strength to bear.