PRE-SHAKESPEARIAN DRAMA: THE UNIVERSITY WITS
In the last chapter we gave a summary of the rise of the English drama; it is now necessary to give an account of the early Elizabethan playwrights.
The name “University Wits” is usually applied to a group of young men, nearly all of whom were associated with Oxford or Cambridge, who did much to found the Elizabethan school of drama. They were all more or less acquainted with each other, and most of them led irregular and stormy lives. Their plays had several features in common. These features were of a nature almost inevitable in strong and immature productions.
(a) There was a fondness for heroic themes, such as the lives of great figures like Mohammed and Tamburlaine.
(b) Heroic themes needed heroic treatment: great fullness and variety; splendid descriptions, long swelling speeches, the handling of violent incidents and emotions. These qualities, excellent when held in restraint, only too often led to loudness and disorder.
(c) The style also was “heroic.” The chief aim was to achieve strong and sounding lines, magnificent epithets, and powerful declamation. This again led to abuse and to mere bombast, mouthing, and in the worst cases to nonsense. In the best examples, such as in Marlowe, the result is quite impressive. In this connection it is to be noted that the best medium for such expression was blank verse, which was sufficiently elastic to bear the strong pressure of these expansive methods.
(d) The themes were usually tragic in nature, for the dramatists were as a rule too much in earnest to give heed to what was considered to be the lower species of comedy. The general lack of real humor in the early drama is one of its most prominent features. Humor, when it is brought in at all, is coarse and immature. Almost the only representative of the writers of real comedies is Lyly, who in such plays as Alexander and Campaspe (1584), Endymion (1592), and The Woman in the Moon gives us the first examples of romantic comedy.
1. George Peele (1558–98) was born in London, educated at Christ’s Hospital and at Oxford, and became a literary hack and free-lance in London. His plays include The Araygnement of Paris (1581), a kind of romantic comedy; The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First (1593), a rambling chronicle-play; The Old Wives’ Tale (1595), a clever satire on the popular drama of the day; and The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (published 1599). Peele’s style can be violent to the point of absurdity; but he has his moments of real poetry; he can handle his blank verse with more ease and variety than was common at the time; he is fluent; he has humor and a fair amount of pathos. In short, he represents a great advance upon the earliest drama, and is perhaps the most attractive among the playwrights of the time.
We give a short example to illustrate the poetical quality of his blank verse:
David. Now comes my lover tripping like the roe,
And brings my longings tangled in her hair.
To ’joy her love I’ll build a kingly bower,
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams,
That, for their homage to her sovereign joys,
Shall, as the serpents fold into their nests,
In oblique turnings wind the nimble waves
About the circles of her curious walks,
And with their murmur summon easeful sleep
To lay his golden sceptre on her brows.
The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe
2. Robert Greene (1560–92) wrote much and recklessly, but his plays are of sufficient merit to find a place in the development of the drama. He was born at Norwich, educated at Cambridge (1575) and at Oxford (1588), and then took to a literary life in London. If all accounts, including his own, are true, his career in London must have taken place in a sink of debauchery. He is said to have died, after an orgy in a London ale-house, “of a surfeit of pickle herringe and Rennish wine.”
Here we can refer only to his thirty-five prose tracts, which are probably the best of his literary work, for they reveal his intense though erratic energy, his quick, malicious wit, and his powerful imagination. His plays number four: Alphonsus, King of Arragon (1587), an imitation of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), easily his best, and containing some fine representations of Elizabethan life; Orlando Furioso (1586), adapted from an English translation of Ariosto; and The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth (acted in 1592), not a “historical” play, but founded on an imaginary incident in the life of the King. Greene is weak in creating characters, and his style is not of outstanding merit; but his humor is somewhat genial in his plays, and his methods less austere than those of the other tragedians.
3. Thomas Nash (1567–1601) was born at Lowestoft, educated at Cambridge, and then (1586) went to London to make his living by literature. He was a born journalist, but in those days the only scope for his talents lay in pamphleteering. He took an active part in the political and personal questions of the day, and his truculent methods actually landed him in jail (1600). He finished Marlowe’s Dido, but his only surviving play is Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), a satirical masque. His Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), a prose tale, is important in the development of the novel (see p. [336]).
4. Thomas Lodge (1558–1625) was the son of a Lord Mayor of London, was educated in London and at Oxford, and studied law. He deserted his legal studies, took to a literary career, and is said to have been an actor at one time.
His dramatic work is small in quantity. He probably collaborated with Shakespeare in Henry VI, and with other dramatists, including Greene. The only surviving play entirely his own is The Woundes of Civile War, a kind of chronicle-play. His pamphleteering was voluminous and energetic; and he imitated the euphuistic tales of Lyly.
5. Thomas Kyd (1558–94) is one of the most important of the University Wits. Very little is known of his life. He was born in London, educated (probably) at Merchant Taylors’ School, adopted a literary career, and became secretary to a nobleman. He became acquainted with Marlowe, and that brilliant but sinister spirit enticed him into composing “lewd libels” and “blasphemies.” Marlowe’s sudden death saved him from punishment for such offenses; but Kyd was imprisoned and tortured. Though he was afterward released, Kyd soon died under the weight of “bitter times and privy broken passions.”
Much of this dramatist’s work has been lost. Of the surviving plays The Spanish Tragedy (about 1585) is the most important. Its horrific plot, involving murder, frenzy, and sudden death, gave the play a great and lasting popularity. There is a largeness of tragical conception about the play that resembles the work of Marlowe, and there are touches of style that dimly foreshadow the great tragical lines of Shakespeare. Other plays of Kyd’s are Soliman and Perseda (1588), Jeronimo (1592), a kind of prologue to The Spanish Tragedy, and Cornelia (1594), a tedious translation from the French.
6. Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) is symbolical both of the best and the worst of his boisterous times. The eldest son of a shoemaker, he was born at Canterbury, and educated there and at Cambridge. Like so many more of that day, he adopted literature as a profession, and became attached to the Lord Admiral’s players. Marlowe’s great mental powers had in them a twist of perversity, and they led him into many questionable actions and beliefs. He became almost the pattern of the evil ways of his tribe. Charges of atheism and immorality were laid against him, and only his sudden death saved him from the experiences of his friend Kyd. Marlowe is said to have met his death in a tavern brawl, “stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his lewde love.” In fairness to the memory of Marlowe it must be remembered that these charges were made against him by the Puritanical opponents of the stage.
With Marlowe’s tragedies we at length come within measureable distance of Shakespeare. The gulf between the work of the two men is still very great. In Marlowe there is none of that benign humanity that clings to even the grimmest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Marlowe’s characters are bleak in nature and massive in outline; enormous and majestical, but forbidding and almost inhuman. His style has the same qualities: glowing with a volcanic energy, capable of a mighty soaring line and phrase (“Marlowe’s mighty line,” as Ben Jonson called it), but diffuse, truculent, exaggerated, and bombastic. It is a lopsided style lacking the more amiable qualities of humor, flexibility, sweetness, and brevity.
His four great plays, all written within a few years, are Tamburlaine the Great (1587), Doctor Faustus (1588), The Jew of Malta (1589), and Edward II (1593). All four, in their march of horrors and splendors, are not unlike one another. The last has a conclusion which for pity and terror ranks among the great achievements of Elizabethan tragedy. The plays, moreover, show a progressing dexterity in the handling of blank verse. Marlowe’s life was pitiably short. If he had lived there might have been another triumph to chronicle.
He also collaborated with Nash in the tragedy of Dido (1593), and left uncompleted a poor fragment of a play called The Massacre at Paris.
We give a brief extract to show the “mighty line.” In the passage Tamburlaine, “the Scourge of God,” mentally reviews his past conquests.
And I have marched along the river Nile
To Machda where the mighty Christian priest,
Called John the Great, sits in a milk-white robe,
Whose triple mitre I did take by force,
And made him swear obedience to my crown,
From thence unto Cazates did I march,
Where Amazonians met me in the field,
With whom, being women, I vouchsafed a league,
And with my power did march to Zanzibar,
The eastern part of Afric, where I viewed
The Ethiopian sea, rivers and lakes,
But neither man nor child in all the land;
Therefore I took my course to Manico,
Where unresisted, I removed my camp,
And by the coast of Byather, at last
I came to Cubar, where the negroes dwell,
And conquering that, made haste to Nubia.
There having sacked Borno, the kingly seat,
I took the king, and led him bound in chains
Unto Damasco, where I stayed before.