We must not, however, in the poet forget the playwright, or lose sight of Marlowe's contributions to the purely theatrical side of the drama. "Tamburlaine" set a standard in stage effects as well as in poetry. Kings and sultans appear in droves, crowns are handed about like toys, treaties are torn, cities stormed, battles fought. Frequently eight or ten chieftains crowd the stage with their trains. The tents of the conqueror are pitched and changed from white to red and then to black as the beleaguered city continues to withstand his power. An emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cages. Tamburlaine drives the bridled monarchs harnessed to his chariot. Two bodies are burnt; there are murders by the dozen; and there is a solemn funeral scene where the hearse advances in the light of a burning town. The popular stage had probably never seen such a spectacle before. In "Faustus" new and even more surprising stage effects are supplied to illustrate the wonders of magic. In "The Jew of Malta" there is a display of plots and atrocities which the plays of the next thirty years strove in vain to surpass. Apart from these spectacular elements, it is obvious that the characterization and declamation, in fact the very structure of the plays, were designed to supply full opportunity for the acting of Edward Alleyn. He was nearly seven feet tall, we are told, the greatest actor of his day, and especially skilled in majestic parts. So to him, perhaps, as well as to Marlowe's conception of tragedy, was due the one-part play, the sonorous lines, and the passionate protagonists.
Such considerations recall the double purpose, hardly separable from the drama and particularly manifest in the Elizabethan dramatists, the two desires, to please their audiences and to create literature. The spectacle, bombast, and horrors, the new and startling stories of Marlowe's plays were certainly intended to win his public, and they probably caused no twinges to his artistic conscience. On the other hand, while hardly an element of the dramas is without the influence of theatrical conditions, and while of deliberate artistic theories there is little evidence, yet the study of character, the underlying conceptions, the maturing power of structure, as well as the beauty and wisdom of separate passages, reveal a mind of intellectual and emotional profundity seeking to give noble expression to the things in life that impressed him most vividly. In the traffic of the stage the young poet found a chance to study men and their motives, to seek "the immortal flowers of poetry," and to utter something of his own experience and view of life. Into the rapid translation of stories for the stage he threw his own conception of the rewards and defeats of an overmastering passion, of the glory of struggle, and the pity and terror of failure. In the further development of the drama, his influence continued not only in his series of tragedies forming a fairly definite type, but also as that of an inspiring personality.
"Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clere;
For that fine madnes still he did retaine,
Which rightly should possess a poet's braine."
Drayton: Epistle to Henry Reynolds.
The influence upon the drama of Marlowe's whilom friend, Thomas Kyd, was not due to his personality, concerning which recently discovered documents create no very favorable impression, or to any remarkable poetic genius, but to a single play and the type of tragedy which it fathered. "The Spanish Tragedy,"[11] entered in the Stationers' Register, 1592, and probably acted at about the same time as "Tamburlaine," and earlier than Marlowe's other plays, was the first representative of this type of revenge tragedies, and it gained an immediate and lasting popularity, though after a time encountering the ridicule of Jonson and later dramatists. The story of revenge had already appeared in "Horestes" and in Latin plays at the universities; and theme, ghost, treatment, and structure were derived from Seneca by Kyd and adapted with great originality to the popular drama. At least, no other dramatist has as good a claim to be considered the creator of a species of tragedy that had a long series of representatives even after its culmination in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."
The main theme of the play is revenge of a father for a son, superintended by a ghost; and this theme attaches to itself other motives important both here and in their later developments. The revenge is delayed by hesitation on the part of Hieronimo, who finds his task a difficult one and requires much proof and superabundant deliberation to spur his irresolution into activity. Madness is another accompaniment of the main theme; the second title of the 1602 quarto, "Old Hieronimo mad againe," indicating how important it was in the stage presentation. Hieronimo pretends madness, and his pretended madness often passes into real melancholy and distraction. Isabella, his wife, is driven by insanity to suicide. Intrigue used both against and by the avenger is another important element; the villain is a machinator and Hieronimo finally accomplishes his revenge by means of dissimulation and trickery. According to both Senecan and national precedents, vengeance moves in a pathway of blood; ten of the dramatis personae, innocent and guilty alike, pass to "the loathsome pool of Acheron," and the final slaughter leaves five bodies to be borne from the stage. Intrigue and slaughter characterize most of the tragedies of this period, notably "The Jew of Malta," but the ghost-directed revenge, hesitation, insanity, and the meditative soliloquies distinguished more specifically the Kydian species. In spite of the medley of intrigue and carnage, there is introduced, after Senecan fashion, much philosophizing and introspection. Meditations on fate, revenge, suicide, and similar subjects play a large part in the development of the story and are most frequently given the form of soliloquies. Hieronimo's inner struggle is revealed in lonely communings, now in defense, now in bitter condemnation of his delay.
The structure is an interesting adaptation of Senecan and popular characteristics. The play does not confine itself to the last phase of an action, and it introduces various actions introductory or subsidiary to that of the revenge, and a mixture of comedy. Moreover, everything is represented on the stage with the freedom established in the popular drama. On the other hand, there is much exposition by means of narrative, and Revenge and the ghost of Andrea appear, after Senecan fashion, as a prologue, and after each act as a sort of vestigial chorus. While there is a surplus of violent and external action, the epic, lyric, and reflective scenes picture an inner conflict and supply both aphorisms and a searching psychology. When late in the play Hieronimo's revenge for his son is finally started, it has to contend with both his own hesitation and the intrigues of the villain. Its development, in comparison with "Hamlet," is absurdly faulty because of Kyd's failure to make clear from the start the character of the avenger; but, if it is studied as a first attempt to give structure to a complex theme, the vicissitudes of Hieronimo's irresolution and frenzy will seem carefully designed and strikingly prophetic of the course of Hamlet's struggle.
Kyd's skill in devising stage situations is shown by the dramatic value and lasting effect on the public of the scene in which Hieronimo is called from his naked bed to discover the body of his son hanging in the arbor, or of the scene in which, offering a handkerchief to the weeping Senex, he draws forth the bloody napkin which he has kept as a reminder of his son's death. The play within the play, used here as a means of revenge; the scenes in which Isabella "runs lunatick"; the laments and final exultation of the ghost; the exhibition of the body of Horatio after the mock play, found later imitators and became usual accessories of revenge tragedies. Indeed, minor bits of stage business, as the wearing of black, the swearing by the cross of the sword, the capture of the accomplice by the watch, the reading of a book before a soliloquy, the falling on the ground as an expression of grief, though not the inventions of Kyd, were given their later vogue partly through the popularity of this play.
Some of the types of character represented also appear again and again in later plays. Lorenzo is the villain par excellence; his accomplice is grotesque as well as evil; and Bel Imperia, both prettily sentimental and desperately revengeful, is of a type not uncommon in later tragedy. The character of Hieronimo, rudely as it is drawn, is not without subtlety of conception. This type of tragic hero, very different from Marlowe's, naturally good and noble, meditative by temperament, driven to melancholy and madness by the responsibility forced on him by crime, and at length accomplishing direful revenge through trickery and irony, is manifestly a precursor of Hamlet. Kyd's style justifies Nash's description, "whole handfulls of tragical speeches" and "a blank verse bodged up with ifs and ands." It displays the rhetorician rather than the poet and, like his conception and structure, gives evidence of an ingenious innovator adapting Seneca. It abounds in artificial balance, parallelism, antitheses, word-play, strained figures, and it harrows hell for its tragic vocabulary; but its love scenes have a verbal prettiness and its tirades and soliloquies helped to confer on subsequent tragic style sententiousness and elevation as well as rant. Far inferior to "Tamburlaine" as an artistic achievement, "The Spanish Tragedy" can no more than that play be pushed aside as a mere blood and thunder tirade. Beneath its absurdities there lies the conception of an inner struggle against overwhelming responsibility, and of the conflict of the individual against evil and fate.
From the success of such a play Kyd may very naturally have turned to the similar story of revenge embodied in Belleforest's "Historie of Hamblet." From contemporary references we infer that the old "Hamlet" was a tragedy of blood, written under Senecan influence, and containing a ghost that cried "revenge." If, as seems undoubted, it was used by Shakespeare, traces of it must be found in the German version of Hamlet, in the corrupt first quarto, and even in Shakespeare's final version; but there is as yet no agreement among scholars as to what can be attributed to Shakespeare's borrowing rather than to his invention and transformation. It seems entirely probable, however, that the early play was a companion-piece to "The Spanish Tragedy," containing the motives of revenge, hesitation, insanity, intrigue, and slaughter, with the addition of the murderer's passion for the wife of the murdered. On the now established theory that the play was by Kyd, we may infer a protagonist like Hieronimo, much meditating and soliloquizing, a dramatic structure like that of "The Spanish Tragedy," a play within a play, a mad Ophelia, and an intrigue culminating in slaughter. There are evidences in Marston and later contributors to the revenge type that the original "Hamlet," fully as much as "The Spanish Tragedy," served as their model; while doubtless like "The Spanish Tragedy," Kyd's "Hamlet" must have borne a much closer resemblance than even that play to Shakespeare's masterpiece.