F. B. Gummere.
FOOTNOTES:
[989] "To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities," prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, a well-known passage. Little, if anything, can be made of Meres when (Haslewood, II., 153) he couples Peele now with Ariosto, now, as tragical poet, with Apollodorus Tarsensis. He does not name Peele among the writers of comedy. Later, in Have with You to Saffron Walden (Grosart, III. 196), Nashe, with no mention of Peele, concedes to Greene mastery, above all the craft, in "plotting of plaies." This dramatic art of words, by the way, must not be confused with Euphuistic feats. Greene, Nashe, even Harvey, turned with Sidney against mere "playing with words and idle similies," and Peele is anything but a follower of Guevara.
[990] Merrie conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman, sometimes a Student in Oxford Wherein is shewed the course of his life, how he lived: a man very well knowne in the Citie of London and elsewhere.... There was an edition in 1607, hardly ten years after Peele's death.
[991] The Looking Glasse for London and England has some boisterous comedy, but no humour. In George-a-Greene, good play that it is, the ballad material is taken quite seriously. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay there is exquisite idyllic work, a dash of passable, though quite traditional, comedy, but no trace of the peculiar element, presently to be described as the dominant note of treatment in The Old Wives' Tale.
[992] Fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 109 f. So in his Geburt der Tragödie, p. 89, speaking of the prologue as used by Euripides, which told in advance the action of the play, Nietzsche asserts that the Athenians were less interested in the plot than in the pathos of situations and the rhetoric of the players.
[993] "The romantic play, the English Farsa, may be called in a great measure his discovery." Shakespeare's Predecessors, p. 580.
[994] "A matter in which he certainly anticipated Marlowe," Biog. Chron. II. 151.
[995] Ed. Shakespeare Society, 1841, p. 52.
[996] Peele is not of the extreme group whose feats in diction remind one of what Dr. Johnson said about the metaphysical poets, that "their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before."