In regard to Peele's miscellaneous and occasional poetry there need be noted here only his clever use of blank verse in shorter poems, his charming lyrics, and those noble lines at the end of the Polyhymnia, beginning—
"His golden locks time hath to silver turn'd."
Peele's Place in the Development of English Drama.—Although we had a text of absolute authority and a minutely accurate life of the author, we should gain with all this lore no real stay for a study, a critical understanding of The Old Wives' Tale, regarded as an element in the making of English comedy. Peele and his play, along with any hints of sources and models that are to be heeded, and with whatever help may come from study of his other works, must be fused into a single fact and compared with those "environmental conditions" which influence all literary production. This will determine the equation between art and nature, between the centrifugal forces, which are always expressing themselves in terms of what is called genius or originality, and the centripetal forces of a great literary and popular development. It will determine the relation of Peele's comedy to the line of English comedies.
Such a critical process leaves one with two qualities in mind that seem to have had an initial force. They belong to Peele on contemporary testimony confirmed by a study of his works. Tom Nashe, more in eulogy than in discrimination, yet surely not without a dash of critical discernment, calls Peele "the chief supporter of pleasance now living, the atlas of poetry, and primus verborum artifex...."[989]
Nashe undoubtedly flatters, but another of the "college," Greene, in that death-bed appeal to his brother playwrights, was in no mood for flattery; and it is probably sincere, even if mistaken, praise when he calls Peele "in some things rarer, in nothing inferior," to Marlowe, and to that "young juvenall" who may be Nashe or Lodge. In what things Peele was "rarer," Greene fails to say, but a study of The Arraignment of Paris, of David and Bethsabe, even of portions of Edward I., and of the Battle of Alcazar, supports the reputation of Peele as an artist in words, and in prose as "well-languaged"; while in The Old Wives' Tale there greets the critic, not too openly, it is true, but unmistakably, the quality of humour. Moreover, there are the Jests which, apocryphal as they doubtless are, and sorry stuff by any reckoning, nevertheless show that to people of his day Peele was counted a merry fellow, a humourist in our sense of the word.[990] Perhaps Shakespeare's jests would seem as stale and flat if we had the anecdotes that passed current among his successors at the playhouse. In any case, George had a sense of humour which found utterance in this Old Wives' Tale; it is not the classical humour of Roister Doister, not the hearty but clumsy mirth of Gammer Gurton, but rather a hint of the extravagant and romantic which turns upon itself with audible merriment at its own pretences, a hint, not of farce or of wit merely, but of genuine humour, something not to be found in Greene's lighter work,[991] or in Lyly's Mother Bombie, or in any of those earlier plays that did fealty to the comic muse. Such, then, is the contemporary formula for Peele as a power in the making of English drama: "primus verborum artifex," and "chief supporter of pleasance." He was an artist in words, and he had the gift of humour.
As regards this artistry in words, it is well known that the conditions of English life, the vigour of speech as quickened by intercourse in the street, the market-place, the exchange, where a spoken word even in traffic and commerce still counted better than a written word, dialogue and conversation better than oratory, and the conditions of the stage itself, with its slender resources of scenery and its confident appeal to the imagination, all helped to push this pomp and mastery of phrase into the forefront of an Elizabethan playwright's qualifications. Probably the spectator at a play felt something of the interest which was then so rife in the world of books and learning,—the interest in words as words, in the course of a sentence as indicating more or less triumph over a still untrained tongue. Nietzsche is extravagant but suggestive in certain remarks that bear upon this verbal artistry in the drama. Speaking of Nature and Art,[992] he insists that the Greeks taught men to like pompous dramatic verse and an unnatural eloquence in those tragic situations where mere nature is either stammering or silent. The Italians went further and taught us to endure, in the opera, something still more artificial and unnatural—a passion which not only declaims, but sings. Tragic eloquence, sundered from nature, feeds that pride which "loves art as the expression of a high heroic unnaturalness and conventionality." "The Athenian," Nietzsche goes on to say with cheerful heresy, "went into the theatre not to be roused by pity and terror, but to listen to fine speeches." One is inclined to think that this desire for fine speeches had a large share in the motive which sent an Elizabethan to the play. Certainly the drama responded to this demand more quickly than to any demand for coherence of plot and delicacy of characterization. Who led in this movement? Most critics brush aside all rivals from the path of Marlowe and credit him alone with the "mighty line," the pomp of diction, the sweep of word and figure, which brought the drama from those puerilities of phrase and manner up to its noble estate. This is true in the sense that Marlowe was infinitely greater as a poet and a tragedian than either Greene or Peele. But as verborum artifex it is probable that Marlowe has had considerable credit which belongs to the others, particularly Peele; and the testimony of Nashe and Greene, who knew the craft, must not be rejected so utterly. Campbell, it is true, praised Peele as "the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our language"; but Symonds, and with him are such scholars as Mr. A. W. Ward, asserts that Peele "discovered no new vein." Symonds is inclined to look on Greene as herald[993] and Marlowe as founder; Peele is a pleasant but unimportant maker of plays and verse. Greene, he thinks, began the school of gentleman and scholars who wrote for the stage at a time when rhyming plays were in vogue; but none of those which Greene wrote has come down to our day. Marlowe now comes imperiously upon the scene, forces his blank verse into favour, and is at last reluctantly admitted by Greene and the others into their "college." So runs the theory of Symonds. Quite opposed to this view of the case is Mr. Fleay, who declares that Marlowe followed George Peele in the article of "flowing blank verse."[994] There can be no question, moreover, that certain critics have exalted Greene too high and put Peele too low. Peele had quite as much as Greene to do with the refining and energizing of English dramatic diction, a process aptly described by Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors:[995] "Our English tongue ... is now by this secondary meanes of playing continually refined, every writer striving in himselfe to adde a new florish unto it." Plots remained clumsy, crude; but what change in the diction of plays! In Appius and Virginia there is still puerile diction and jog-trot metre,—
"They framèd also after this, out of his tender side,
A piece of much formosity, with him for to abide."
From this to blank verse and compressed or energetic diction, as (Jeronimo),—
"My knee sings thanks unto your Highness bounty,"—