“And why did you leave him so far from the entrance to the play-houses?” asked Tabbard.
“A man who has creditors must appear to be a beggar on foot. I limped to the theater and have now let the crowd precede me as you see,” explained the other, and then noticing a group emerging from the fog, he exclaimed: “Ah! here the boy is now, and there is your horse where you tied him.”
The pair had been following the path for some distance, and now mounting their horses, rode down the lane between brick walls, over which great orchard trees extended their branches, and again on between low houses with green blinds where the miserable outcasts of the city had located themselves. Before them ran the Shore-ditch highway, and entering this they rode on toward the invisible city wall.
In this vacancy of event, there is space for an epitome of the period, in so far as it affected the condition of the principal character of this romance. The somberness of the natural scenery, and the obscurity of the sky were in keeping with his social surroundings and the uncertainty of his existence. The fog might rise disclosing a sky conducive of joyous spirits, or it might gather so dense that naught but the austere form of Melancholy, with her trailing robes of black, could walk with firm and unfaltering strides within it. It was the latter condition that was to follow. At that moment, in the mind of Marlowe, the rosiest dreams of life pursued one another as though conceived by an Ovid, and impelled by the spirit of a Homer; but they were to be buried in the blackness of what seemed eternal night.
Fired with the ambition of a god, he had issued from the studious walks of Cambridge in 1587. Finding dramatic art confined to a close circle, wherein only rhyming productions were considered fit for presentation on the stage, and the public clamorous for aught that possessed the fire of action and the thunder of bombastic declamation, he cast from his shoulders the splendid cloak of rhyme, in which for a moment he had adorned himself, and with the plain but majestic front of a warrior, with feet in the buskins of an actor, he presented himself before the public. It fell in adoration at his feet. The thunder of his tread shook all the gods of rhyme from their immemorial thrones, and from amid the ruins Greene, Nashe and others lifted their protesting voices. Recognizing him as the son of the clerk of the parish church of St. Mary, Greene insisted that he could not “write true English without the help of clerks of parish churches,”[10] and Nashe, like Gervinus in his analysis of the “Shakespere” plays, saw in the productions of this late graduate of Cambridge and dramatic innovator, the lines of Seneca read under the light of the English candle.[11] But all in vain was the outcry.
In the production of Tamburlaine he had with one bound reached an eminence from which it was impossible to dislodge him,[12] and, in quick succession, followed the dramas of Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and the Massacre at Paris. These plays had been produced during a term of six years, wherein he had alternated his afternoon occupation as an actor at the Curtaine,[13] with nights as a dramatic writer. These productions, teeming with majestic lines, and filled with a spirit from “translunary” sources, required not the critical minds of a later school of commentators to establish their worth.[14] Some passages are still recognized as having “no parallel in all the range of tragedy.”[15] Thus it was that at this period he was throned in a school where all his fellows were his servile imitators. Among them were Nashe, Peele, and Lilly; but poor Greene, with one more outburst against the “upstart crow,” with “his tygres heart,”[16] who could have been none else than the writer whom he had attacked in 1587, had finished his unfortunate career. And his career was the one being pursued by all these fiery and impatient souls. It was Marlowe, especially, who had plunged into all the mad excesses of an unbridled life,[17] the temporary drift of a youth with convictions unsettled by draughts from Greek philosophers, senses inflamed by the voluptuousness of Ovid, and an existence checkered by frequent shadows of poverty and flitting gleams of plenty. It was the unsettled state of vigorous youth, augmented by the peculiar social conditions then existing.
Upon the continent the civil wars of Henry IV. had approached their close. In England the Starchamber held its secret sessions; the block of the executioner was kept warm with the blood of the insecure nobility; while the torch for the fires of heretics was never allowed to smolder. Elizabeth had been on the throne 35 years; Francis Bacon, with mind bent on pre-eminence as a philosophic writer, was her counsel learned extraordinary, and William Shakespere, six years previously arrived from the obscure village of Stratford-on-Avon, was a member of Lord Pembroke’s Company of actors. There were no theaters at that time within the walls of the city; histrionic exhibitions being presented on the boards of the “gorgeous playing houses erected in the fields.” The edict against strolling players was rigorously enforced; freedom of expression in matters of religious belief was the subject of penal laws, and any animadversions concerning the policy of the government were declared treasonable.
As an evidence of the barbarity of the times, the Southwark end of the London bridge was decorated with the heads of thirty traitors, all of which had fallen beneath the axe of the executioner after the hanging and disemboweling of the bodies. The tower held many martyrs of religion; and Fleet Street prison, with its foul quarters, was the abiding place of hopeless prisoners for debt. If the pinch of poverty of itself was spur enough to have produced the poems of Goldsmith, the wonder at the immortal dramas and poems of the Elizabethan era must vanish upon consideration of what poverty and debt then meant, and the insecurity of the beggar who gave expression to his coin-producing thoughts.
It was during a time, thus out of joint, that Hamlet and Richard the III. walked, as embodied entities, from the brain of their author. Besides the barbarity of the period, the intolerant spirit, and the harsh laws, did any other factor add its motive power toward these productions? Had some crisis been reached in the life of the author greater than that evolved through poverty and the prospect of imprisonment alone?