This fraternity, children of ill-fortune and of passion, were scarce distinguishable from each other; and if the fortunes, and the fate of some, are more known, it is but by the recklessness of their days—their criminal impetuosity. Several perished in their immaturity, torches blazing, while they were consuming themselves. The chance-record of the violent end of one; a cry of desperation still more horrible of another; the death-bed repentance of a third; the dishonourable life of dupery probably practised by a fourth;[9] are adapted to enter into moral, if not into literary history.
The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of genius—for such were many among them—feels how precious are the slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence. However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity.
An ungenial critic has morosely censured Robert Greene, who, harboured in an obscure lodging, which a poor man’s charity had yielded, when lying on his death-bed, prayed for the last favour that poor man’s charity could bestow on a miserable, but a conscious poet—that his coffin might be covered with bays. In the shadow of death, the poet and the romancer dwelt on the fame which he cherished as life.
Even their small theatres appeared to the poet “thronged,” and the heart of the dramatist would swell at “the shouts and claps.” Drayton, who, at a later day, joined in several dramas, has perpetuated this rejoicing of the poet, which he himself had experienced in that small world “the proud round” of the Globe Theatre. It is a sonnet in the collection which he has entitled “Idea,” and which no successful dramatist will read without some happy emotion.
| In pride of wit, when high desire of fame Gave life and courage to my labouring pen, And first the sound and vertue of my name Were grace and credit in the ears of men; With those the thronged theaters that presse, I in the circuit for the Lawrell strove, Where the full praise, I freely must confesse, In heate of blood and modest minde might move; With SHOWTS and CLAPS at every little PAWSE When the prowd ROUND on everie side hath rung. |
The ample roll might not be tedious, though it were long, had we aught to record of this brotherhood of genius—but nothing we know of the much-applauded, and much-ridiculed, and most ingenious John Lyly; nothing of the searching and cynical Marston; nothing of the inventive and flowing Dekker; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertile Heywood; nor of the pathetic Webster; nor of Middleton, from whose “Witch” Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor of Rowley, whom Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and grave Massinger; nor of the lonely and melancholy Ford.
Among these poets stood He, in whose fire the Greek of Homer burned clear in his Homeric English. Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer, and went on writing Homerically; at once the translator and the original. One may read in that “most reverend aspect” of his, the lofty spirit that told how, above all living, was to him the poet’s life—when he exclaimed—
| The work that I was born to do is done! The conclusion Makes the beginning of my life; for never Let me be said to live, till I live ever![10] |
The plays were bought by a manager for his company, and each company was jealously alive that no other should perform their purchased copies. These monopolists were therefore anxious to suppress the publication of plays, and to smother the fame of their dramatist on their own boards. The players, who were usually copartners, at the sovereign pleasure of their proprietorship, unmercifully mutilated the tender limbs of their poet,[11] or what was not less usual, made him for ever ridiculous by foisting in whole scenes of the basest humour, as clap-traps for “the groundlings,” and which sometimes were perpetuated in the prompter’s copy. Such scenes of ribaldry have tainted even immortal pages, and have provoked much idle criticism either to censure or to palliate.
As the stock-copies increased and lost their novelty, they required some new-fashioning. The tarnished piece was drawn out of the theatrical wardrobe; once in vogue, and now neglected, the body, not yet moth-eaten, might be flounced with new scenes. To this humiliated state of jobbers of old plays, were reduced the most glorious names in our drama’s roll. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger sate down to this obscure drudgery. Our earlier commentators on Shakespeare had no suspicion that even his plays were often rifacimentos of neglected stock-copies. When the account-books of Henslow, the manager, were discovered at Dulwich College, they supplied some strange literary anecdotes. This entry appears, “lent to Bengemen Jonson, forty shillings for his adycions to Jeronymo,” which was an old favourite play of Kyd’s. Again, more lent for “new adycions.” When Hawkins republished “Jeronymo” in his collection, he triumphantly rejected these “adycions,” as being “foisted in by the players.” This he had detected by collation with the first edition; further his critical decision could not advance. The Diary of Henslow was fatal to the matter-of-fact critic—the passages he had ejected relate to the madness of Hieronymo for the murder of his son; the learned poet never wrote with such a Shakespearian force.