The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

Character of these writers.

If the question is asked what this body of poets had done to advance the development of the English drama, the answer must be that they had done something to improve its language. More can hardly be claimed for them. They certainly give no example of how to construct a dramatic story, nor did they create a consistent interesting character, unless Greene’s Fair Margaret be allowed as an exception. That you did very well as long as you took care that something happened, whether it was what the personage would have done, or what would follow from what went before, or not, was apparently an accepted rule with all of them. It was somewhat strange that it should have been so, for all were educated men, and were deeply conscious of their learning. Even if they did not take the classic model, which, as they were all far better qualified to write a chorus than to construct a plot, it would have been to their advantage to do, they might have learnt, without going beyond Horace, to avoid their grosser faults. It must not be forgotten that none of their surviving plays were published in favourable circumstances. All may have been, and some certainly were, subject to manipulation while in the hands of the actors. But even when allowance is made for this, it is undeniable that the writers of the school of Marlowe, to use a not very accurate but convenient expression, were totally wanting in any sense of proportion. To judge by much that they were content to write, they cannot have known the difference between good and bad. The incoherent movement of their plays was perhaps partly due to the want of scenery. When the audience would take a curtain for Syracuse, they would also take it for Ephesus or for twenty different places, indoors and out, in one act. There was, therefore, no check on the playwright, who could move with all the licence of the story-teller. But then they did not give their plays even the coherence of a story. As they were all dependent on companies of actors, they may often have put in what their employers told them was needed to please a part of the audience. It is to this necessity that we may attribute the comic scenes of Dr Faustus if we wish to find an excuse for Marlowe—and if, indeed, they were his, and not written in by others at the orders of Henslowe the manager. But this does not account for all. When it is allowed for, enough remains to show that all these predecessors of Shakespeare were unable to see the difference between horseplay and humour, and were almost equally blind to the immense distinction between the “grand manner” and mere fustian. This last, indeed, had an irresistible attraction for them, and not less for Marlowe than for the others. If it had not he would never have put the rant of Tamburlaine into the mouth which spoke the superb lines beginning “If all the pens that ever poets held,” nor would he have allowed Barabas to sink from the gloomy magnificence of his beginning into a mere grotesque puppet Jew with a big nose.

Shakespeare.

“All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is,—that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon—married and had children there—went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays—returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.” This summary, which Steevens put in a note to the ninety-third sonnet, is as true as when it was written in the last century. It is not quite exhaustive, for we know that Shakespeare had the respect and affection of his contemporaries from Chettle to Ben Jonson, and also that he was a very prosperous man. Yet Steevens included nearly all that the most extreme industry has been able to discover of Shakespeare’s life. The date of his birth was on or just before the 23rd April 1564, and he died on that day in 1616. From the age of about twenty till he was nearly forty he lived in London as actor or manager. In his youth he wrote two poems in the prevailing fashion, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The sonnets published in 1609 belong to a later period, but it is impossible to fix their date. His chief work was always done for the company to which he belonged. For that he recast old plays or wrote new ones. The poems alone were published by himself. His sonnets appeared in a pirated edition during his life, and his plays after his death, when his fellow-actors had no longer an overpowering motive to keep them for themselves. On this very slight framework there has been built a vast superstructure of guesswork of which very little need be said here.

Guesses about his life.

It is not only the large element of sheer folly in these guesses, the imbecile attempt to prove that the man of whom Ben Jonson spoke and wrote the well-known words was not the author of his own plays, which may be put aside. Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort to find political journalism, or other things didactic, social, and scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez, speaking of the very similar race of Cervantistas, has said that this is the resource of people, often respectable for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy literature as literature, but being also conscious that they ought to enjoy it, have been driven to look for something else in their author. These good people have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled on Molière in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some great names may be quoted to give a certain authority to the supposition that Shakespeare unlocked his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their sake we must not dismiss this guess as unceremoniously as we may well turn out the egregious Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not essentially wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is proved except this, that Shakespeare experienced some of the common fortunes of men of letters and other men, and then this, that he carried the indelicacy of his time to its possible extreme. We know that his “sugared sonnets” were handed about among his friends so freely that they got into print. So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart, and if the sonnet beginning “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” did refer to a particular person who must have been perfectly well known to many of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist must have been singularly destitute of the beginnings of a sense of shame, even according to the standard of the sixteenth century. It is impossible to prove that those who take this view are wrong—and if the word evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to prove that they are right. But be their belief right or wrong, the value of the sonnets is not affected. They are valuable, not because they reveal the passing fortunes of one man, however great, but because they express what is permanent in mankind in language of everlasting excellence.

Order of his work.

The work by which Shakespeare was first known in his time were the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the dates of composition and order of succession of his plays are obscure, it is certain that he was working for the stage before the first of these years. But as yet he was rather redoing the work of others than producing for himself. The sonnets were widely known by 1598, and were in all probability inspired, as so many other collections of the same class, though of very different degrees of merit, were, by the example of Astrophel and Stella. The chronology of the plays is, it may be repeated, difficult to settle, but on the whole they may be asserted to have followed the order in which it would appear natural to assign them on internal evidence. First come those in which his hand, though never to be mistaken, is seen in least power—Pericles and Henry VI. Then come others in which we get most of the mere fashion of the time, its euphuism and other affectations—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour Lost, &c. Next follow the long series of romantic plays and chronicle plays, darkened by tragedy and irradiated by humour—The Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV., As You Like It. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps more accurate to call the greater drama, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, belong to the later years.

Estimates of Shakespeare.

The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes to speak, after so many others, of Cervantes, stands in an even more formidable shape on the path of him who wishes to speak of Shakespeare. Most generations have produced those who have spoken badly. When they were honest, and were not also incapable of literature, which has sometimes been the case, they were enslaved to some fashion, some pedantry of their own time. With these have been the merely inept, and there has not been wanting the buffoon, straining after singularity. The gutter and the green-room have been audible. But by the side of these there has been an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the greatest masters of English literature. It began with Ben Jonson, and has lasted till it has become wellnigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement of the competent judges, this universal acceptance, are by themselves enough to dispense us from proving that in him there was something more than was merely national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, all the Elizabethans, belong to us and to others only as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso, Lope, Calderon, all the others of Spain’s great time, belong to the Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes, though the first is very English and the second very Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their countrymen may understand them best, but there is that in them which is common to all humanity. The one star differs from the other in glory; for if Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece under the “species of eternity,” he brought much less than Shakespeare, who included everything except religion, and leaves us persuaded of his power to deal with that. Don Quixote is equivalent to one of the great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme quality of universality. So much can be said of only one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman Montaigne, in whom also there was something which speaks to all men at all times.