In the course of the six or seven years ending with Marlowe's death in 1593, tragedy experienced a rapid and multiform development. The various influences already noticed in the last chapter as at work were developed by the ingenuity and innovation of a dozen writers, and translated into the expression of individual genius by Marlowe and Shakespeare. No theory of tragedy ruled the theatres; no school of dramatists adopted any code of principles; the plays which we class as tragedies were mostly known as histories and were written in violence to the accepted literary conception. Nevertheless, tragedy was establishing itself as a popular species of drama, was separating its themes and their treatment clearly from those of comedy, and was defining the course which it was to follow until the Puritan revolution.
The impossibility of determining a precise chronology of the stage history of the period renders the exact appraisal of indebtedness, or the tracing of any certain evolution, very insecure. The changes in the companies in 1594 and the consequent publication of a large number of plays in the same year enable us to fix on a number of tragedies acted before Marlowe's death, and we may safely add a few others as not later than 1595. Among these extant tragedies and in the names of those that have not survived there are representatives of various types,—biblical plays, tragedies dealing with romantic love, domestic tragedies telling stories of contemporary crimes. In any one of these plays, indeed, various types may be combined; the writers were concerned with telling stories, not with l'évolution des genres. But the most salient and pervasive forces working in tragedy may be roughly denominated as (1) the chronicle history play, (2) the revenge type of tragedy, (3) the type of tragedy created by Marlowe. To these should perhaps be added romantic comedy with its idealized love story and its element of averted tragedy. But the first three types, though overlapping and not distinct, were of marked importance in the history of tragedy and need especial consideration in connection with the most important dramatists of this period, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.
The chronicle history play may claim attention first, not because it was demonstrably earlier in appearance than the others, but because it engaged the efforts of nearly every dramatic writer of the period, and because in its disregard of foreign influence or parallel in its methods and structure, and in its devotion to the demands of the London theatres, it is most typical of the drama of the period. The prime essential of a play was that it should tell a story. A playwright took his material from novella, poem, or chronicle, and strove to translate it into an interesting and varied series of scenes. In the chronicles he found material peculiarly suited to such translation. Everything was there,—battles, coronations, counsels, conspiracies, amours, speeches, characterization, and sentiments. No enlargement was necessary as in the case of a novella, no considerations of consistency of characterization, few incidents in addition to those in the highway or the byways of the narrative, and only a minimum of invention. The interest of a distinct plot was superseded by that of historical persons, events, and spectacles, and these compelled only such unity as might be secured by taking the reign of one monarch as the basis of a play, or sometimes of several plays. The presentation of history involved a large number of persons on the stage, many changes of place, a long stretch of time, and an incongruity of matter, all this loosely organized into scenes themselves often long and varied and admitting some change of place and lapse of time within their bounds. Though the scene, rather than the act, was the unit in popular drama, it had almost no structural value. A play was really a continuous performance, the actors coming and going, a battle intervening, and now and then a withdrawal of all the actors and the appearance of a new group presaging a marked change of place or the beginning of an entirely different action. In the arrangement of scenes, however, some attention to parallel, contrast, and climax soon became manifest; and some integration of the confused material from the chronicles, particularly in the separation from scenes abounding in action of those purely narrative or expository and those purely lyrical, chiefly lamentations. In spite of such beginnings of system, the early chronicle plays, "The Famous Victories of Henry V," "Jack Straw," "Leir," "Edward I," and "The Troublesome Reign" are less coherent in structure, more incongruous in material, and less regardful of any clear fable, tragic or comic, than are other contemporary plays.
To determine criteria to define these plays and their successors as a class is by no means easy. They were usually based on the chronicles, but the method of composition just described was applied to legend or poem with similar results, and there were also plays based on chronicles of contemporary events. They had for their main purpose the presentation of history, but this was shared by plays on French and Roman as well as English history, and there were historical plays that had no marks of the chronicle method of structure. The English chronicle plays usually show a pronounced patriotic temper, but this is often subsidiary and neglected in the desire for farce or sensation. The spectacular features are a characteristic element, a battle-scene being perhaps the most indispensable element or ingredient of a chronicle play, but this again fails to supply even more than a superficial criterion. In the popularity of the presentations of historical facts, all kinds of stories were worked over into a likeness to "true chronicle history," and the genuine historical, legendary, and biographical plays are hardly distinguishable from the pretenders. An illuminating illustration of the characteristics of the national drama about 1590 can be found in a comparison of two dramatic versions of a romance in Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," one by Cinthio himself, the other by Robert Greene. The Italian play is a tragicomedy in strict Senecan form, in which Arrenopia (Greene's Dorothea) appears as a declamatory queen confiding her troubles to the attendant nurse. Greene took the romantic comedy, added some pseudo-historical events, patriotic sentiments, and a pitched field for the finale, and called the whole "The Scottish Historie of James IV, slaine at Flodden." For our purpose the chronicle plays are to be regarded less as a distinct type than as representing a set of practices in vogue at this period and widely influential on the drama's development. They possessed the following characteristics and imposed some or all of them on very different forms of drama: subjects drawn from English history, the presentation of historical and political events, an incongruous mixture of material, a narrative structure almost as unorganized as the chronicles themselves, patriotic sentiments, and the stage pageantry of court and camp.
From their earliest appearance, however, the chronicle plays offered opportunities for developments later consummated by Shakespeare. Comic scenes were freely interspersed to enliven the tedium of royal declamations, and in these lay the possibility of the combination of history and comedy in the Falstaff plays. On the other hand, the history of a doleful fall of a prince or the retribution visited on some tyrant gave the plays a tragic tone and opened the way for "Macbeth" and "Lear." "The Troublesome Reign of King John,"[9] the basis of Shakespeare's play, is the best example of an early chronicle play presenting undeveloped possibilities for tragedy. It is written partly in blank verse, partly in rhyme, and partly in prose. It does not follow the chronicles with any fidelity, but twists history, adds fiction, and proclaims throughout a vigorous protestant patriotism. Battles, embassies, farce, orations, death, and much else mingle together, each scene being treated like another and no discernible method being followed in their arrangement or proportion, except that of a loose adherence to the scheme of "a life and death." The first part closes with John crowned and assured of the miscarriage of his intended murder of Arthur; in the second part, as the address to the reader declares,
"First scenes shows Arthur's death in infancie,
And last concludes John's fatall tragedie."
"The Troublesome Reign" indicates what little advance had been made toward tragedy when Marlowe's first play appeared. The prologue to that play was a declaration of reform and innovation.
"From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."
The doggerel rhyme favored in the popular drama was to give place to blank verse, and the jigging clowns to heroic themes and "high astounding terms." Marlowe came to the theatre,[10] fresh from the university, his fancy aflame with the beauty of Latin verse and story, his mind storming with the problems and ambitions of adolescent genius. He threw aside Senecan traditions and devoted himself to meeting the demands of the professional stage. When a few years later he died, English tragedy had been created anew largely through his achievement.
His independence and initiative are shown in his choice of subjects. Although in "Dido" he took a standard theme of humanistic tragedy, and in the Henry VI plays and "Edward II" followed the prevailing taste for English history, and in "The Massacre of Paris" another fashion for the dramatization of current atrocities; yet in "Tamburlaine" he chose the story of a world conqueror, in "Faustus" a legend that had just entered print in the German "Volksbuch" of 1587, and in "The Jew of Malta" he worked over unknown sources into a tragedy of revenge with evident freedom of invention. All three stories present notable contributions to tragic themes, and the last two disregard both the fashion for historical subjects and the requirement that tragedy deal only with princes. These new and varied themes gave a chance for a considerable revolution in the content of tragedy. Revenge, murders, battles, intrigue, physical horrors are still prominent; but the Senecan round of incest and adultery disappears, and the "Mirror for Magistrates" no longer represents the epitome of tragic action. Marlowe's choice and treatment of plots seem, indeed, dictated by a new conception of tragedy, as dealing not merely with a life and death, or a bloody crime, or a reversal of fortune, but with the heroic struggle of a great personality, doomed to inevitable defeat. "Tamburlaine" is scarcely a tragedy at all, but rather a chronicle of the hero's greatness; but in "Faustus" and "The Jew" heroes with ambitions boundless and passionate like Tamburlaine's are overwhelmed in the end by the inexorable destiny of human weakness. In "Edward II," where the hero is less dominant over the action, the study of historical facts results in a more restrained, more human presentation of the same theme, a ruling passion drawing the protagonist to pitiful defeat.