[7] One play should be mentioned here as standing in some ways between the classical and popular plays. Promus and Cassandra, by George Whetstone, published 1578, cannot be placed in any of our four classes, for there is no evidence that it was ever acted. Like Tancred and Gismunda, it was based on an Italian novella, also the source of Measure for Measure, and it follows Latin comedy rather than tragedy. In its division into five acts, its frequent soliloquies, its attempted observance of decorum (especially vaunted in the preface), and in its serious purpose and moral sentiments, the play shows a pedantic clinging to classicism. In the main, however, it belongs with Damon and Pithias and Appius and Virginia, and seems to have been intended for performance by children. It is a mixture of tragedy, comedy, farce, and songs; and this abundance of incongruous material seems to have led to its division into two plays, as Whetstone says, for the purpose of decorum. Here, as elsewhere in the period, the experiment of putting new material into old dramatic structures burst the bottles. Clowns, parasites, tyrants, prostitutes, hangmen, Egyptians, and girls in boys' clothing make up a pageant which is a sort of tragicomedy but which the learned author called by the more popular title, "a history."
[8] Ariodante and Genevra (Orlando Furioso), Ajax and Ulysses, Agamemnon and Ulysses, Cæsar and Pompey, Cloridon and Radimanta Duke of Milan, Effigenia (Iphigenia), Four Sons of Fabius, Mutius Scævola, Quintus Fabius, Perseus and Andromeda, Sarpedon, Scipio Africanus, Timoclea at the Siege of Thebes, Telemo, Twelve Labors of Hercules. Some titles suggesting medieval romance are: Knight of the Burning Bush, Red Knight, Paris and Vienna, Solitary Knight.
CHAPTER IV
MARLOWE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
The growing national consciousness that reached its triumphant culmination in the defeat of Spain made itself felt in the drama, specifically in efforts to present the glories of English history, and still more potently in an awakened responsiveness to the new fields and new incentives for artistic ambition. The beginning of the greatness of the national drama is significantly coincident with the victory over the Armada. By that time the spirit of noble endeavor had found lodgment in every worthy breast. It animated Marlowe no less than Drake, and the author of the least successful chronicle play as well as admiral or counselor. The extraordinary achievements that had been contributing to the might of England as a political power were, indeed, but one expression of the freedom and eagerness of individual initiative that characterized this English Renaissance and found other expression in the activities and accomplishments of literature. In comparison with the men of preceding generations, the Elizabethan Englishman faced a world of new horizons, new ideas, boundless opportunities, and alluring rewards. Every career was open and promised an untrod pathway and unworn laurels. He might win fame as a pirate, philosopher, or poet; or in the new excitement of living he might crowd not one but many careers into the span of life. The versatility of a Raleigh only typifies the excitement and energy of deed, the lively movement of thought which quickened mind and body, and resulted, now in a voyage to Virginia, now in a conspiracy, now in a sonnet, and now in a history of the universe. And this feverishness to make trial of thronging opportunities was symptomatic not only of vigor of intellect, celerity of emotion, and independence of will, but also of an imaginative idealism that enlightened the daily living of many a sorry citizen, and was destined to live resplendent in the verses of Spenser and Shakespeare. In the stir of free ideas, the surprise of discovery, and the glow of accomplishment, life grew heroic, attainment seemed easy, and no ideals too lofty for the scaling ladders of human aspiration. Men achieved much and they dreamt of more. The apprentice went to the theatre to don Fortunatus's cap or to triumph with Tamburlaine; every one had his El Dorado distant only a short voyage; and, with the new world before them, poets and playwrights set sail in blithe confidence of splendid discovery. Never before, or perhaps since, have so many new things seemed within grasp, whether in literature or in life; never has all living so throbbed with a sense of the nearness of the unattainable, the kinship of the real and the ideal.
In non-dramatic literature the incentives of the classics and of the Italians from Petrarch to Tasso had led on from translations and imitations to experiments and inventions. In the dozen years before the Armada, lyric poetry, criticism, and prose fiction had felt the stir of successful English innovation, and the time was almost ripe for the vast projects of Spenser, Hooker, and Bacon. In comedy the development had been earlier and more rapid than in tragedy, and had already in Peele and Lyly reached the stage of dexterous expression and varied innovation. Whether presenting a story of classical mythology or of medieval romance, whether farcical, Plautian, pastoral, sentimental, satirical, or spectacular, comedy was by the time of Marlowe ready with its examples to offer instruction to any writer attempting tragic themes. Tragedy could hardly remain longer in the stage of translation, imitation, and feeble experiment which we have been considering.
Still further, a stimulus for tragedy was exercised by the daily events of that active era. These stirred men's imagination and ambition, and must almost inevitably have directed artistic impulse toward the heroic, the passionate, and the terrible. The abundance of bloodshed in Elizabethan tragedy may find some interpretation in the fact that Ben Jonson killed his man in a duel and that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. The time was one of bloodshed, violence, quick and brutal passion; a time in which the torture of a Gloster or the revenge of a Shylock was far closer to life, to the life at least of poets and dramatists, than such stories are to-day. Drake in his cabin drinking and praying with the unmoved lieutenant whom he was to hang the next day is a bit of fact that rivals in horror the devilries of a Barabas. Even if Seneca's example had not already approved themes of adultery, murder, blood-vengeance, the atrocities of tyranny, and the deadly strife of father and son, such themes must have stirred men's minds in the days of the Massacre of St. Bartholemew and the career of Mary Stuart. If tradition had not already selected the falls of princes as the especial field for tragedy, the history of monarchical Europe in the sixteenth century must have given such stories a power of appeal hardly to be appreciated now. In that strenuous generation the dramatist must have found artistic impulses from bloody and gruesome deeds, and no less from daring ambition, heroic struggle, and indomitable greatness of mind.
The summons, however, which the tragic muse heeded came directly from the public theatres and the professional actors. The university men who at this time were writing for the theatre under the lash and loans of a slave-driving theatrical manager may have been tempted to forget that their sordid and Bohemian existence offered a means for triumphant artistic expression. The London theatres were now well established, patronized by the courtiers, and secured in prosperity by the motley audiences that crowded their performances. They had become important centres in the social life of the time, comparable to the newspaper offices of a twentieth-century city in their close touch with the daily life about them; and in their task of affording amusement and information fulfilling in part the functions of periodicals and novels as well as of the drama at present. The stage, without scenery, was still in a transition state between the medieval and modern, and, to our view, almost unrealizably crude. Places were sometimes indicated by signs; properties, beds, tables, or trees were brought on or off as occasion required; or, a heavier property, like a cave, might remain whether the scene was in cave-land or a counting-room. There was no drop curtain; actors went off, others came on, and the place changed from a seacoast to the palace; or, the actors merely moved across the platform, and it transpired that they had passed from "a fair and pleasant green" to a room in the house of Faustus. At the close of a tragedy all the survivors might be needed to bear off the bodies of the dead. A balcony in the rear of the stage stood in stead of a castle wall or the deck of a ship, while a curtained space below might represent an inner room or a dungeon vault. A curtain extending across the stage seems at times to have been used in managing a change of scene. Spectacular elements were not lacking: fireworks, ascents and descents of gods, armies, coronations, and battles delighted the eye. On costume, anachronistic but elaborate, the manager lavished his money and ingenuity. Cleopatra tightly laced, Tamburlaine in scarlet copper breeches are recorded facts, but Venuses, Apollos, mermaids, devils, satyrs, and nymphs leave something for fancy to conceive, as does the "gown to go invisible in" which perhaps shielded Ariel or Puck. Of the acting we have little information. Female parts were played by boys; clowns with their jigs were great favorites, but a considerable skill in acting must be supposed,—less subtle, less occupied with stage business than to-day, more declamatory possibly, and more attentive to the spoken word. Any superiority in the appreciation possessed by the audiences over those of to-day must be attributed not to their superior intelligence, but to their long training in listening to plays. They probably differed from uneducated audiences in the cheaper theatres of to-day chiefly, if at all, in spontaneity of emotions, a desire for emotional incongruity, and a cultivated delight in verbal fireworks or felicities. It is certain that in the time of Marlowe they were gaping for sensation and joyed in a comedy of beatings, a tragedy of murders, and a mixture of jigging and villany. For such audiences, for such a stage, under stress of immediate demand requiring hasty and collaborative work, Marlowe and his contemporaries wrote. They were hack writers, and so viewed by the literati of their day. Every one of them, Shakespeare included, had in the first place to satisfy the demands of the public theatres. This needs to be remembered no less than the fact that the plays of nearly all, of the meanest hack as well as Shakespeare, seem to have felt the stir and thrill of the effort to express thought in enduring words.