It is in part this poetic style which distinguishes the play from the later tragedies, but the difference is everywhere manifest to our impressions. The evil and gloom and pessimism that help to make up the tragic fact in "Lear" and "Macbeth" are here scarcely felt. To joy comes sorrow, because of evil and through accident,—this is the tragic theme. In the course of its presentation one may find it suggestive of the passing of youth to age or of passionate love to oblivion, but surely no one comes from the poem with a dominant impression of the wickedness of family feuds, or of the inevitable brevity of romantic passion, or of the dangers of youthful precipitousness,—rather the mind glows with the beauty and joy revealed in life.
In this impression the play has a kinship with the tragedies, even the poor and the maimed, that had preceded it. Tragedies so far have been strangely free from Christian teaching or sentiment. Compared with the medieval drama, early Elizabethan tragedy seems not only secular but pagan. This is partly because it followed its sources and treated of Romans, Moors, Scythians, and heroes of myths and legends; partly because it derived stoic and fatalistic sentiments from Seneca and other classical writers; but it also represents an entire departure from the medieval point of view, a departure necessarily emphasized in tragedy. In the medieval drama, death had been a translation to final reward or punishment,—the portals of heaven and hell were open on the stage. In the Renaissance conception of tragedy death was the point and pith of tragic fact. Faith, forgiveness, reliance on Providence, assurance of immortality are rarely alluded to. Chance, mysterious fate, the emissaries of the devil, the powers of evil in the mind of man are the forces to which tragedy must attend; and they lead to a death terrible and pitiful, to be met bravely and defiantly, it may be, but not peacefully and hopefully. And this emphasis of the gloom of death required an equal emphasis on the glory and beauty of life. Tragedy was the passing into darkness from under this majestic roof fretted with golden fire, the loss of noble reason and infinite faculty; and it must needs proclaim the beauty of the world as well as the quintessence of dust.
And so, although writers of tragedy dwelt on the horrors of death and its accompaniments of blood and atrocity, and though they symbolized in their villains their sense of the reign of evil, yet, in Marlowe's treatment of an Asiatic conqueror or the ignoble fascination of Edward II, or in Peele's fancy that made musical the amours of David; everywhere indeed, in the Pantheas and Persedas, the Marii and Selimi, they were presenting human life as removed from the commonplace, the sordid, the usual, and as the abode of heroisms, splendors, and aspirations. Even evil deeds and villains, even death itself sometimes partook of this glorification; and tragic theory, moral purpose, and theological dogma were alike forgotten in the fascination of human character, passion, and achievement. This idealization of life was, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, characteristic of the national temper and of the artistic impulses in every field of literature during its brief breathing spell between the Protestant and Puritan revolutions. Its power is curiously illustrated in the effect of the story of Romeo and Juliet upon Brooke in the course of his by no means despicable attempt to turn it into a tragic poem. In his Address to the Reader, he dilates with medieval propriety on the moral of the poem "to raise in the reader an hatefull lothyng of so filthy beastlynes." "And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authorite and advice of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of unchastitie)"—and so on through all their evil doings until "finallye, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe hastyng to most unhappye death." So wrote the conscious Puritan; but the story charmed the artist. It enticed his meagre art to a share in the joys of the lovers, it led him to a delight in unhonest life, it dissolved his sermon into romance and poetry, and left him enamored even of his "superstitious frier."
And so the tragedy of the lovers became for Shakespeare as for Brooke and as other stories had become for Marlowe, Peele, and Greene, the spur and the means to an idealization of life. It is not in the reconciliation of the families, still less in the sense of a deserved punishment, that we find an antidote for death and evil; but in the assurance that human passion may be so lovely, human nature so full of strength and beauty. "The sun for sorrow will not show his head," says Prince Escalus at the end, but we believe with Romeo that
"Jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops."
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward, Fleay, and Schelling are the best general guides for this period. The books already mentioned by Collier, Symonds, Jusserand, Cunliffe, Fischer, and Churchill bear directly on the matter of this chapter. The sources for documents and records are the same as for chapter iii, with the important addition of Henslowe's Diary, vol. i, 1904, ed. by W. W. Greg. The sources for lists of plays and bibliography are the same as in chapter ii,—Greg, Fleay, Hazlitt, Schelling, and Bates. There is no satisfactory and comprehensive treatment of Marlowe's work; J. H. Ingram's Christopher Marlowe and his Associates (1904) supplies a full bibliography. Marlowe has been well edited by Dyce and by A. H. Bullen. Dyce's editions of Greene and Peele have long been standard. Bullen has also a good edition of Peele. The recent Clarendon Press editions of Greene, Lyly, Kyd supply careful texts and full introductions. My article, The Relations of "Hamlet" to Contemporary Revenge Plays (Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1902), has been drawn upon for the discussion of Kyd; it furnishes references to the various critical discussions of Kyd's work. Texts of the plays by minor writers are to be found in Dodsley; W. C. Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library (6 vols., 1875), containing old plays and other sources for Shakespeare's plays; Delius, Pseudo-Shakspere'sche Dramen (1874); the Tauchnitz edition of Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare; and in the editions of several of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays by K. Warncke and L. Proescholdt, Halle. This last edition of Arden of Feversham contains a valuable introduction. For direction to the bibliography of Shakespeare, see chapter v. On the Henry VI plays, Miss Jane Lee's paper, New Shaks. Soc. Transactions, 1875-76, still offers the most exhaustive treatment of the question of authorship. On Titus Andronicus, Mr. Harold DeW. Fuller's article, Mod. Lang. Publ. (1901), and Mr. J. M. Robertson's Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus? (1905) are among the latest discussions. My review of Mr. Robertson's book, Journal of Eng. and Germ. Philology (1907), treats in detail some of the discussion of this chapter. The latest studies of the Elizabethan theatre are C. Brodmeier's Die Shakespeare-Bühne (Weimar, 1904), which reduces the "alternation" theory to an absurdity, and G. F. Reynold's Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging (Chicago, 1905), which disposes of Brodmeier's theories, but goes a little too far in the other direction. See, also, Baker's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist for a careful and detailed account of the London theatres. Miss V. C. Gildersleeve's Governmental Regulation of the Shakespearean Drama (Columbia Univ. Studies in English, in press) is an exhaustive treatment of its subject and incidentally throws light on theatrical matters. Volume iv of Courthope's History of English Poetry is on the "Development and Decline of the Poetic Drama," from Marlowe to 1642. Schelling's The English Chronicle Play (1902) is the best discussion of this species. W. Bang's series, Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas, includes reprints and studies of interest in connection with this and the three following chapters.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] It consists of two parts published 1591, and acted, as the prologue indicates, shortly after Tamburlaine, perhaps in 1588. Its scenes cover about the same ground as Shakespeare's play, with the addition of a ribald account of the sack of a monastery, an explanation of the poisoning of John in his treatment of the clergy, and a scene of some power in which Philip obtains from his mother, Lady Fauconbridge, a confession that his father was Richard.
[10] Tamburlaine in two parts, certainly acted as early as 1588, gained an immediate and long-continued popularity, and was followed by a number of plays, all tragedies or histories. Without reckoning the numerous plays that have been assigned to Marlowe on no sufficient grounds, he collaborated on the Tragedy of Dido (1594), perhaps an early work, and on the three parts of Henry VI; and was the author of The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, printed 1604, acted 1588 (?); The Jew of Malta, acted about 1589, and long the most popular of Henslow's repertoire: The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, printed 1594, acted about 1591; and The Massacre of Paris, of an unknown date of acting.