Lyly.
Custom has ruled that the name of Lyly shall be followed by the words “the author of Euphues.” Custom has in this case decided rightly. Lyly was always the author of Euphues. This didactic tale falls to be discussed with the prose of the time, but we may note that it is composed of a very slight framework of story, from which blow out clouds of words arranged in quaint and not inelegant patterns. No drama can be made out of such materials, and, properly speaking, the plays of Lyly are not dramatic.[73] Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was attached to the Court, though, according to his own melancholy summing-up of the results of his labours, he obtained nothing as a reward. He was born in Kent about 1554, and was educated at Oxford. It may be that he went on to Cambridge, according to what was then a common custom. So little is known of the rest of his life that biographers have been driven to make matter by identifying him with a certain Mr Lilly, a bold, witty atheist, who harassed Hall in his first living, and whose sudden death from the plague is recorded by the satirist and future Bishop of Norwich, with pious satisfaction, among the various examples of divine intervention on his own behalf. If he sat in several Parliaments, Lyly cannot have altogether wanted means and friends. He may have lived into the reign of James I., and died in 1606. His plays were part of his service as a courtier. They were not written for the vulgar theatre, but to be performed by the “children of Paul’s” or “of the Queen’s Chapel” before the queen at the New Year feasts. Here he would have an audience which already admired his Euphues, published in 1580, and was well content to hear him “parle Euphuism.” To this we may partly attribute the fact that, while his contemporaries were making blank verse the vehicle of the higher English drama, he showed a marked preference for the use of prose, and also for mythological and classical subjects. The names of his undoubted plays are Alexander and Campaspe; Sapho and Phao; Endimion, or The Man in the Moon; Gallathea; Mydas; Mother Bombie; The Woman in the Moon; and Love’s Metamorphosis. They were written between 1584 and the end of the century. Lyly, as has been said, was no dramatist. His plays do not advance in any coherent story. They rotate or straggle. When, as in Mother Bombie, he did attempt to construct a comedy of intrigue, the result is mere confusion. The faults of his style have been made familiar to all the world by Falstaff’s immortal address to Prince Hal: “For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.... There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile,” and so on. The antitheses work with the regularity of pistons; there is a steady march past of similes, drawn as often as not from a natural history worthy of Sir John Mandeville, and arranged in twos or threes. His humour is of the kind which makes a reader imitate the example of Sancho when he saw his master cutting capers in his shirt on the slope of the Sierra Morena—retire in order to escape the spectacle of a good gentleman making an exhibition of himself. Yet in his grave and poetic moments there is a prim charm about Lyly, and a frosty moonlight glitter which is attractive. His snatches of song are among the best in an age of lyric poetry.
Greene.
Lyric poet tempted or driven by necessity on to the stage is the description which must be given of two of his contemporaries, who in other respects differed from him very widely—Robert Greene and George Peele. If we are bound to take his own confessions, and the abuse poured on his grave by that bad-blooded pedant Gabriel Harvey, quite seriously, we are compelled to believe that Greene ended a thoroughly despicable life by a very sordid death. But a little wholesome scepticism may well be applied both to Greene’s deathbed repentance and to the abuse of his implacable enemy. There was in the Elizabethan time a taste for a rather maundering morality, and for a loud-mouthed scolding style of abuse. The pamphleteers talked a great deal about themselves, and conducted wit combats, which were redolent of the bear-garden and backsword combats. La Rochefoucauld’s observation, that there are men who would rather speak evil of themselves than not speak of themselves at all, may also be kept in mind. A weak, conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of lyric poetry and of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate a summing up as can be given of Greene. He was born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a Bohemian life led in a very exuberant time. There seems to be no doubt that the end was very miserable. Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety on the strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, The Groat’s Worth of Wit, in which he abuses Shakespeare. Everybody has heard of the “only Shake-scene in the country,” the player adorned with the feathers of Greene himself and other real poets. Historically it is of some value as proving that Shakespeare was known and prosperous in 1592. It also helps to give the measure of Greene, that while he was affecting for the press all the agony of a deathbed repentance—partly no doubt sincere enough—and was exhorting his friends to flee destruction, he could break out, with all the venom of wounded vanity, against the man who had succeeded where he himself had failed. If we had the good fortune to know nothing of the life of Greene, he would rank as a respectable writer who had a share in a time of preparation for a far greater than himself or any of his associates. His prose stories—largely adapted from the Italian—include one, Pandosto, which had the honour in its turn to be adapted and made into poetic drama by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale. His undoubted work for the stage which survives was all published after his death with bad or little editing. The first printed, Orlando Furioso, taken from a passage in Ariosto, is hopelessly corrupt. The others are—A Looking-Glass for London and England; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; Scottish Story of James IV.; the Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon; and the doubtful George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield.[74] With Greene we come to something at once very different from Lyly, and quite new,—to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama, which in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry and passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths of rant, or runs to the very madness of fustian. It is not the greater achievement that we must look for in Greene. His heroics are “comical,” in a sense not designed by the printer of Alphonsus. Drawcansir is hardly an exaggeration of that hero, and is incomparably more coherent. His comic scenes have too commonly the air of mere hack work put in to supply parts for the clowns of the theatre, while his plots are mere successions of events frequently unconnected with one another. But in the midst of all is the undeniable vein of tenderness and lyric poetry. All the scenes in his best play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, in which Margaret the Fair Maid of Fressingfield is introduced, are charmingly fresh and natural. With more discipline, and no temptation to serve the taste of the time for King Cambyses’ vein, Greene might have been the author of pleasant little plays of a poetic sentimental order written in a charming simple style.
Peele.
His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older man, and outlived Greene a very few years. He was born about 1558, and was dead by 1598, in a very sordid way. Of his life very little is known except that he was the son of the “clerk” of Christ’s Hospital, that he was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and that he was a thorough Bohemian. His reputation in this respect was so solidly founded that he was made the hero of a book of “jests,” which, in fact, are tales of roguery mostly reprinted from older French originals. Peele worked regularly for a company of actors, and no doubt did much which cannot now be traced. Commentators, who have striven hard to prove the unprovable in the history of the Elizabethan Drama, have assigned him portions of the First and Second Parts of Henry VI.[75] His undoubted plays are—The Arraignment of Paris, The famous Chronicle of King Edward I., The Battle of Alcazar, The Old Wives’ Tale, and David and Fair Bethsabe. To these may be added Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, which is written in the old seven-foot metre, and differs from the others greatly. But custom has assigned it to Peele, who indeed uses the long line elsewhere. Peele was a decidedly stronger man than Greene, but a writer of the same stamp and limitations. What is best in him is the lyric note and the tenderness. The first is well shown in not a few passages of the Arraignment of Paris, a somewhat overgrown masque, written for the Court and to flatter Elizabeth; and the second in the David and Bethsabe. His chronicle play, Edward I., has a certain historical value as illustrating the growth of the class, and it is notorious for the hideous libel it contains on the character of Eleanor of Castile; while The Battle of Alcazar is interesting in another way, as an example of the boyish “blood and thunder” popular at the time, of which Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is the masterpiece. It is the equivalent to Greene’s Alphonsus; but if not more sane it is more substantial, and does really contain lines which are poetry and not rant, though the rant is there in profusion.
Kyd.
Thomas Kyd need hardly be mentioned here except for the purpose of leading on to the master of the school, Marlowe. He is a very shadowy figure, who may have been born in 1557, and may have died in 1595. His voice is still audible in The Spanish Tragedy, and perhaps in Jeronimo. The first-named is a continuation of the second—if the second were not written to supply an introduction to the first. They too are “blood and thunder,” with the occasional flash of real poetry, which is found wellnigh everywhere in that wondrous time.
Greene, Peele, and Kyd, in spite of the independent merit of parts of their work, are mainly interesting because they were forerunners of Shakespeare, and aided in the formation of the English drama. If it had wanted Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, or David and Bethsabe, it would no doubt have been the poorer, but by things not great in themselves, and still less indispensable. |Marlowe.| If it had wanted the author of Doctor Faustus, it would have been the poorer by a very great poet. Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, in the same year as Shakespeare and was the son of a shoemaker. Probably by the help of patrons he was educated at the grammar-school of the town, and went from it to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge. The other events of his life are mainly matter of guesswork till we come to the fact that he was stabbed in a tavern brawl at Deptford on the 1st June 1593. He was accused of exceeding even the large Bohemian licence of life of his contemporaries, and of atheism. The evidence is neither direct nor good, but it is certain that a warrant for his arrest, and that of several of his friends, on the charge of disseminating irreligious opinions, was issued by the Privy Council about a fortnight before he was killed. At a time when all the once accepted foundations of religion were being called in question, sheer denial was naturally not unknown. Given the vehement spirit of all his work, it is as probable that Marlowe went this length as that he stopped short of it. The truth is in this case of little importance, for Marlowe’s place is among the poets, not the controversialists, of the sixteenth century.
As a poet Marlowe stands immediately below Spenser and Shakespeare, but between them and every other contemporary. He fails to rank with them because he wanted their range, and also because there was something in him not only unbridled, but incapable of submitting to order and measure. For a moment, and from time to time, he shoots up to the utmost height of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for a very brief space and then sinks out of view. In these happy passages of inspiration he showed what could be done with English blank verse. It had been written before him, since it was first used by Surrey in his translation of the Æneid, but Marlowe was its real creator as an instrument of English poetry. This was his great achievement. His fragment of Hero and Leander, though a beautiful poem of the mythological and rather lascivious order popular at the time, and full of a most passionate love of beauty, nowhere attains to the height of the constantly quoted “purple patches” from the first part of Tamburlaine, from Dr Faustus, or from The Jew of Malta. In themselves they are unsurpassable, yet his plays cannot by any possible stretch of charity be called good. What we remember of them is always the passage of poetry, expressing in the most magnificent language some extreme passion of ambition, greed, fear, or grasping arrogance, or some sheer revel of delight in the splendour of jewels and the possibilities of wealth. There are few scenes, in the proper sense of the word, and there is much monotonous repetition. The second part of Tamburlaine is the same thing over and over. The first two acts of The Jew of Malta promise well, and then the play falls off into incoherence and absurdity. Marlowe, though an incomparably greater man, seems to have been as blind as Greene or Peele ever were to what is meant by consistency. His Barabas, for instance, who is represented as a wicked able man, is suddenly found putting his neck in the power of a new-bought slave in a fashion hardly conceivable in the case of a mere fool. Dr Faustus holds together no better than Barabas. There is something more astonishing still. A poet may be able to express passion in splendid verse, and yet be able neither to construct a story nor create a character, but we do not expect to find him dropping into what, as mere language, is childishly inept. Now that is what Marlowe did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth at his best and his worst. It is the difference between Dryden and the bellman’s verses—between poetry and rank fustian, or commonplace. His short life, and the conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable that the bulk of Marlowe’s work should be but little. Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II., and The Massacre of Paris sum up the list of the plays which we can be sure were wholly his. The Tragedy of Dido was written in collaboration with Nash. Beyond this there is a supposition, supported by greater or less probability, that he had a share in Lust’s Dominion and in Titus Andronicus and Henry VI. To the plays are to be added the fragment of Hero and Leander, The Passionate Shepherd, and the translations from Ovid written in his earlier days.[76]