Among Shakespeare’s predecessors, John Lyly, whose plays were all written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul’s, holds a position apart in English dramatic literature. The euphuism, to which his famous Lyly. romance gave its name, likewise distinguishes his mythological,[172] quasi-historical,[173] allegorical,[174] and satirical[175] comedies. But his real service to the progress of English drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his imagery—though to his fondness for fairylore and for the whole phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a stimulative precedent, and though in his Endimion at all events he excites curiosity by an allegorical treatment of contemporary characters and events. It does not even lie in the songs interspersed in his plays, though none of his predecessors had in the slightest degree anticipated the lyric grace which distinguishes some of these incidental efforts. It consists in his adoption of Gascoigne’s innovation of writing plays in prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and pretentious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious dialogue—an example to Kyd. which even such successors as Shakespeare and Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd, the author of the Spanish Tragedy (preceded or followed by the first part of Jeronimo), and probably of several plays whose author was unnamed, possesses some of the characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. Marlowe. No slighter tribute than this is assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe, whose violent end prematurely closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play, Tamburlaine the Great, in which the use of blank verse was introduced upon the English public stage, while full of the “high astounding terms” of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the passion which was the poet’s most characteristic feature, and which was to find expression so luxuriantly beautiful in his Doctor Faustus, and so surpassingly violent in his Jew of Malta. His masterpiece, Edward II., is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic Peele. power unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele was a far more versatile writer even as a dramatist; but, though his plays contain passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by the side of Marlowe’s Edward II., compared with which, if indeed not absolutely, Peele’s Chronicle of Edward I. still stands on the level of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His finest play is undoubtedly David and Bethsabe, which resembles Edward I. in construction, but far surpasses it in beauty of language and versification, besides treating its subject with greatly superior dignity. If the difference between Peele and Shakespeare is still, in many respects besides that of genius, an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something like a Greene. Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene—unfortunate perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in the proof which he left behind him of his supercilious jealousy of Shakespeare. Greene’s genius, most conspicuous in plays treating English life and scenes, could, notwithstanding his academic self-sufficiency, at times free itself from the pedantry apt to beset the flight of Peele’s and at times even of Marlowe’s muse; and his most delightful work[176] seems to breathe something of the air, sweet and fresh like no other, which blows over an English countryside. Thomas Lodge, whose dramatic, and much less of course his literary activity, is measured by the only play that we know to have been wholly his;[177] Thomas Nashe, the redoubtable pamphleteer and the father of the English picaresque novel;[178] Henry Chettle, who worked the chords of both pity[179] and terror[180] with equal vigour, and Anthony Munday, better remembered for his city pageants than for his plays, are among the other more important writers of the early Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be called predecessors of Shakespeare. It is not possible here to enumerate the more interesting of the anonymous plays which belong to this “pre-Shakespearian” period of the Elizabethan drama; but many of them are by intrinsic merit as well as for special causes deserving of the attention of the student.
The common characteristics of nearly all these dramatists and plays were in accordance with those of the great age to which they belonged. Stirring times called for stirring themes, such as those of “Mahomet, Scipio and Common characteristics of the early Elizabethans. Tamerlane”; and these again for a corresponding vigour of treatment. Neatness and symmetry of construction were neglected for fulness and variety of matter. Novelty and grandeur of subject seemed well matched by a swelling amplitude and often reckless extravagance of diction. As if from an inner necessity, the balance of rhymed couplets gave way to the impetuous march of blank verse; “strong lines” were as inevitably called for as strong situations and strong characters. Although the chief of these poets are marked off from one another by the individual genius which impressed itself upon both the form and the matter of their works, yet the stamp of the age is upon them all. Writing for the stage only, of which some of them possessed a personal experience and from which none of them held aloof, they acquired an instinctive insight into the laws of dramatic cause and effect, and infused a warm vitality into the dramatic literature which they produced, so to speak, for immediate consumption. On the other hand, the same cause made rapidity of workmanship indispensable to a successful playwright. How a play was produced, how many hands had been at work upon it, what loans and what spoliations had been made in the process, were considerations of less moment than the question whether it was produced, and whether it succeeded. His harness—frequently double or triple—was inseparable from the lusty Pegasus of the early English drama, and its genius toiled, to borrow the phrase of the Attic comedian, “like an Arcadian mercenary.”
This period of the English drama, though it is far from being one of crude effort, could not therefore yet be one of full consummation. In tragedy the advance which had been made in the choice of great themes, in knitting closer Progress of tragedy and comedy before Shakespeare. the connection between the theatre and the national history, in vindicating to passion its right to adequate expression, was already enormous. In comedy the advance had been less decisive and less independent; much had been gained in reaching greater freedom of form and something in enlarging the range of subjects; but artificiality had proved a snare in the one direction, while the licence of the comic stage, upheld by favourite “clowns,” such as Kemp or Tarlton, had not succumbed before less elastic demands. The way of escaping from the dilemma had, however, been already recognized to lie in the construction of suitable plots, for which a full storehouse was open in the popular traditions preserved in national ballads, and in the growing literature of translated foreign fiction, or of native imitations of it. Meanwhile, the aberration of the comic stage to political and religious controversy, which it could never hope to treat with Attic freedom in a country provided with a strong monarchy and a dogmatic religion, seemed likely to extinguish the promise of the beginnings of English romantic comedy.
These were the circumstances under which the greatest of dramatists began to devote his genius to the theatre. Shakespeare’s career as a writer of plays can have differed little in its beginnings from those of his contemporaries Shakespeare. and rivals. Before or while he was proceeding from the re-touching and re-writing of the plays of others to original dramatic composition, the most gifted of those whom we have termed his predecessors had passed away. He had been decried as an actor before he was known as an author; and after living through days of darkness for the theatre, if not for himself, attained, before the close of the century, to the beginnings of his prosperity and the beginnings of his fame. But if we call him fortunate, it is not because of such rewards as these. As a poet, Shakespeare was no doubt happy in his times, which intensified the strength of the national character, expanded the activities of the national mind, and were able to add their stimulus even to such a creative power as his. He was happy in the antecedents of the form of literature which commended itself to his choice, and in the opportunities which it offered in so many directions for an advance to heights yet undiscovered and unknown. What he actually accomplished was due to his genius, whose achievements are immeasurable like itself. His influence upon the progress of English drama divides itself in very unequal proportions into a direct and an indirect influence. To the former alone reference can here be made.
Already the first editors of Shakespeare’s works in a collected form recognized so marked a distinction between his plays taken from English history and those treating other historical subjects (whether ancient or modern) that, Shakespeare and the national historical drama. while they included the latter among the tragedies at large, they grouped the former as histories by themselves. These histories are in their literary genesis a development of the chronicle histories of Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries, the taste for which had greatly increased towards the beginning of his own career as a dramatist, in accordance with the general progress of national life and sentiment in this epoch. Though it cannot be assumed that Shakespeare composed his several dramas from English history in the sequence of the chronology of their themes, his genius gave to the entire series an inner harmony, and a continuity corresponding to that which is distinctive of the national life, such as not unnaturally inspired certain commentators with the wish to prove it a symmetrically constructed whole. He thus brought this peculiarly national species to a perfection which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his later contemporaries and successors to make more than an occasional addition to his series. None of them was, however, found able or ready to take up the thread where Shakespeare had left it, after perfunctorily attaching the present to the past by a work (probably not all his own) which must be regarded as the end rather than the crown of the series of his histories.[181] But to furnish such supplements accorded little with the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans; and with the exception of an isolated work,[182] the national historical drama in Shakespeare reached at once its perfection and its close. The ruder form of the old chronicle history for a time survived the advance made upon it; but the efforts in this field of T. Heywood,[183] S. Rowley,[184] and others are, from a literary point of view, anachronisms.
Of Shakespeare’s other plays the several groups exercised a more direct influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same fidelity as that of the English histories, even more effectively taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes, and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his predecessors, as well as with his successors, “is that nature which they paint and draw.” He threw open to modern tragedy a range of hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never again restrict itself without a consciousness of having renounced its enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive. The comedies of Shakespeare accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference to any method of classification deserving to be called precise; and several of them are comedies only according to a purely technical use of the term. In those in which the instinct of reader or spectator recognizes the comic interest to be supreme, it is still of its nature incidental to the progress of the action; for the criticism seems just, as well as in agreement with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare’s process of construction, that among all his comedies not more than a single one[185] is in both design and effect a comedy of character proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled wealth of his invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, he left much to be done by his successors; while the truest secrets of his comic art, which interweaves fancy with observation, draws wisdom from the lips of fools, and imbues with character what all other hands would have left shadowy, monstrous or trivial, are among the things inimitable belonging to the individuality of his poetic genius.
The influences of Shakespeare’s diction and versification upon those of the English drama in general can hardly be overrated, though it would be next to impossible to state them definitely. In these points, Shakespeare’s manner as a writer was progressive; and this progress has been deemed sufficiently well traceable in his plays to be used as an aid in seeking to determine His style and its influence. their chronological sequence. The general laws of this progress accord with those of the natural advance of creative genius; artificiality gives way to freedom, and freedom in its turn submits to a greater degree of regularity and care. In versification as in diction the earliest and the latest period of Shakespeare’s dramatic writing are more easily recognizable than what lies between and may be called the normal period, the plays belonging to which in form most resemble one another, and are least affected by distinguishable peculiarities—such as the rhymes and intentionally euphuistic colouring of style which characterize the earliest, or the feminine endings of the lines and the more condensed manner of expression common to the latest of his plays. But, such distinctions apart, there can be no doubt but that in verse and in prose alike, Shakespeare’s style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to be regarded as the norm of that of the Elizabethan drama; that in it the prose form of English comedy possesses its first accepted model; and that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama established itself as irremovable unless at the risk of an artificial experiment.
The assertion may seem paradoxical, that it is by their construction that Shakespeare’s plays exerted the most palpable influence upon the English drama, as well as upon the modern drama of the Germanic nations in general, Influence of his method of construction. and upon such forms of the Romance drama as have been in more recent times based upon it. For it was not in construction that his greatest strength lay, or that the individuality of his genius could raise him above the conditions under which he worked in common with his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Yet the fact that he accepted these conditions, while producing works of matchless strength and of unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them as inseparable from the Shakespearian drama—to use a term which is perhaps unavoidable but has been often misapplied. The great and irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare’s public was for incident—a demand which of itself necessitated a method of construction different from that of the Greek drama, or of those modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other reason is to be ascribed the circumstance that Shakespeare so constantly combined two actions in the course of a single play, not merely supplementing the one by means of the other as a bye- or under-plot. In no respect is the progress of his technical skill as a dramatist more apparent,—a proposition which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life must be left to prove.
Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in characterization—in the drawing His characters. of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art—that he remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like a flower of spring, and where Othello’s noble nature had suffered and sinned.
By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakespeare or in the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the national drama, every form commending itself to the tastes and sympathies of the national genius was essayed. None were neglected except those from which the spirit of English literature had been estranged by the Reformation, and those which had from the first been artificial importations of the Forms of the later Elizabethan drama. Renaissance. The mystery could not in England, as in Spain, produce such an aftergrowth as the auto, and the confines of the religious drama were only now and then tentatively touched.[186] The direct imitations of classical examples were, except perhaps in the continued efforts of the academical drama, few and feeble. Chapman, while resorting to use of narrative in tragedy and perhaps otherwise indebted to ancient models, was no follower of them in essentials. S. Daniel (1562-1619) may be regarded as a belated disciple of Seneca,[187] while experiments like W. Alexander’s (afterwards earl of Stirling) Monarchicke Tragedies[188] (1603-1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, and more exclusively so than Milton’s imposing Samson Agonistes, which belongs to a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the light gaiety of the Italian and French farce could not establish itself on the English popular stage without more substantial adjuncts; the Englishman’s festive digestion long continued robust, and The pastoral drama. he liked his amusements solid. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many English dramatists found special opportunities for the exercise of their lyrical gifts and of their inventive powers. The former could never become other than an exotic, so long as it retained the artificial character of its origin. Shakespeare had accordingly only blended elements derived from it into the action of his romantic comedies. In more or less isolated works Jonson, Fletcher, Daniel, Randolph, and others sought to rival Tasso and Guarini—Jonson[189] coming nearest to nationalizing an essentially foreign growth by the fresh simplicity of his treatment, Fletcher[190] bearing away the palm for beauty of poetic execution; Daniel being distinguished by simpler beauties of style in both verse and prose.[191]