nature. "O cruel Love! on thee I lay My curse, which shall strike blind the day The bed thou liest on by despair; Thy sleep, fond dreams: thy dreams, long care; Mock thee, till madness strike thee dead. II. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593). When we pass from Lyly to Marlowe we find ourselves in a wholly different atmosphere. They wrote for a different audience, a different stage, different actors; and the plays are not more unlike than were the lives and characters of the authors. The plays written by Lyly for the Court, and represented by the children of the Chapel Royal, do not come up to M. Taine's description of the ferocity of English manners in that age: their mythological and pastoral worlds are the opposite of a violent and complete expansion of In Marlowe's plays, on the other hand, written for the public theatre, there is ferocity enough, and a good many of the restraints of nature as well as of probability are violently broken through. Passing from Lyly to Marlowe is like passing from sentimental modern comedy to the blood and convulsion, powder and poison drama that still keeps its hold on the south side of the Thames. M. Taine should not have been so anxious to make out that the Elizabethan drama was a faithful reflection of the manners of the Court: one might as soon take Mr Boucicault's Irish dramas as an index to the character of the modern English gentle man. It is the pit and not the boxes that theatrical managers must chiefly keep in view, if they wish their theatres to pay: we are not entitled to infer, from the thrilling agonies, fierce passions, and bloodthirsty heroics of the Elizabethan drama, anything except that they pleased the body of the house. Modern critics have endorsed the judgment of the Elizabethan pit; Lyly and Daniel, with their gentle plays adapted to gentle ears, now require an education to appreciate them, while we are never weary of admiring the gigantic powers that dared to express the tempest and whirlwind of unrestrained passion. But it is not by any means certain that this was the view taken by the gallants of the day, who lounged on the stage or in the boxes ("rooms," as they were then called), and exchanged chaff with the groundlings it is not impossible that the violent passions of the drama, so far from being an attraction for them by natural affinity, were the subjects of their derision, torn to tatters as the passions most usually have been by robustious actors. The passion for heroics and horrors was by no means universal in the Elizabethan age any more than in our own. Thomas Nash ridiculed vainglorious tragedians with their swelling bombast of bragging blank verse. Lodge even ventured to deride the cries for revenge uttered by the Ghost in "Hamlet," a part represented, according to tradition, by the divine dramatist himself. Tragedy was one of the themes of the weak and conceited satires of Joseph Hall. The eulogists of Shakespeare lay stress not upon his power of expressing tragic passions, but upon his sweet witty soul, his mellifluous and honied tongue, his silver tongue, his honey-flowing vein, and the sugared tongues and attractive beauty of his personages. Entries remain in the 'Accounts of the Revels,' of dramas by Shakespeare presented at the Court of James: the list comprises one tragedy, one historical play, and eight comedies. Everything goes to show that in the Elizabethan age persons of fashion and refinement, if they did not actually consider tragedy vulgar, at least had a preference for comedy. The spirit then prevailing on that point at Court was not so very different from what prevailed when Chaucer wrote, and made his representative of "the gentles" put a stop to the tragic recitals of the Monk. The tragic drama emanated from the people. It had its beginnings in the public theatre, and its first and greatest authors were men of the people. Men do not learn passion and the expression of passion, so far as these can be learnt, from national movements, but from the experience of their own individual struggle for existence or fame. Men of easy unvaried lives, who have never had to fight with poverty or slander, the malice of fortune or the malice of men, cannot be dramatists. Marlowe was only two months older than Shakespeare, having been born in February 1564. His father was a shoemaker in Canterbury, with a somewhat numerous family. His first education was probably got at the endowed king's school, and he went to Cambridge (Benet College, Corpus Christi) in 1581. He is not recorded to have held a scholarship, and he may have owed his maintenance at College to a wealthy relative or other patron. He received the degree of M.A. in 1587, but before that he would seem to have renounced the sure prospects of the staid professions for the precarious career of actor and playwright. "Tamburlaine the Great" is inferred by Collier and Dyce to have been his first play, and to have been acted anterior to 1587, though not printed till 1590. None of his other plays were printed till after his death; but Mr Dyce supposes them to have been produced in the following order" Faustus," "Jew of Malta," " Edward II.," "Massacre at Paris." He lost his life in 1593 in a miserable brawl. Among the papers left behind him were part of the tragedy of "Dido," afterwards completed by Nash; a metrical paraphrase of part of Museus's "Hero and Leander," afterwards continued by Chapman; a translation of some of Ovid's Elegies; and a translation into blank. verse of the First Book of Lucan.1 1 For the discussion of other works attributed to him see the 'Account Marlowe's life was brief and probably dissolute. We have no right to identify a dramatist with his characters, but it is impossible to disregard the combined evidences of his dramatic conceptions and the accusations brought against him by more respectable contemporaries. His chief characters, Tamburlaine, Faustus, and the Jew of Malta, are not the creations of a calm mind: their volcanic passions and daring scepticism are the offspring of a turbulent, vehement, irregular nature, bold and defiant of public opinion. Marlowe's alleged writings against the Trinity have never been seen; in all probability, like some alleged infidel works of the Middle Ages, they never existed but there seems no reason to doubt that he was, as his accusers stated, a man that neither feared God nor regarded man. Beauty, which he worshipped with passionate devotion, was the only sunshine of his life, and it shone with a burning fierceness proportioned to the violence of his tempestuous moods. The vision of Hero and Leander is a rapt surrender of the whole soul to impassioned meditation on luxurious beauty. In his life as in his plays, such intervals of delight were probably rare. Tamburlaine is a most impassioned adorer of divine Zenocrate; Faustus hangs in ecstatic worship on the lips of Helen; but these are only brief transports in lives where energy and ambition are devouringly predominant. Marlowe's genius was little adapted to sonneteering and pastoral poetry he stigmatised the fashionable love-lyrics as "egregious foppery," and derided them with rough ridicule. He wrote no sonnets; only one pastoral song has been ascribed to him, and it is direct and fresh, a movement of impatient of Marlowe and his writings in Mr Dyce's edition p. lviii-lxvii. (1850); and Bell's Greene and Marlowe, p. 150, (1856). I adhere to Bell's remarks on the authorship of "Lust's Dominion" and "The First Part of the Contention." If isolated coincidences of expression are taken as proof of authorship, almost any given play in the Elizabethan age might be assigned to any given author: the dramatists made so communistically free with the productions of their fellows. In spite of its dealing with events subsequent to Marlowe's death, "Lust's Dominion" is on the whole much more like his work than "The First Part of the Contention." 1 The song of the "Passionate Shepherd to his Love" is ascribed to Mar captivating sweetness, an impulsive tone of invitation that will take no denial. Marlowe was a clear and powerful genius, and we often seem to catch in his poetry an undertone of almost angry contempt for commonplace. The most generally impressive of Marlowe's works is his fragment on the tale of Hero and Leander, and if we founded solely upon this, we should form most erroneous notions of his 'genius. We should suppose his worship of beauty, which was but a rare and transient passion, to have been the presiding force of his imagination. It is in his plays that we find the world of storm and strife wherein he delighted to expatiate, and a most Titanic world it is, immeasurably transcending nature in breadth and height of thought, feeling, and destructive energy; a region where everything is on a gigantic scale, peopled with creatures that are monstrous in the largeness of their composition and the fierceness of their passions. "Tamburlaine the Great" was his first play, and serves as well as any other to give a notion of his grand manner. Tamburlaine (better known as Timour the Tartar) is represented as a Scythian shepherd, whose ambition, fed by heavenly portents and oracles, soars to the height of subduing the three continents: he aspires to spread his name "As far as Boreas claps his brazen wings, Theridamas, a Persian general, is sent to take the mad shepherd prisoner, but when he sets eyes on him he is se lowe in 'England's Helicon,' but this is not conclusive, as pieces were not always given to their true authors in these miscellanies. The curious thing is, that in the "Passionate Pilgrim " where it is given as Shakespeare's, all the staves would pass for his: but in E. H. two more staves are given that seem to be in Marlowe's distinctive vein. 1 This passage seems to be referred to in Nash's celebrated Epistle prefixed to Greene's "Menaphon," where he speaks of vainglorious tragedians who think themselves all right "if they once but get Boreas by the beard and the heavenly Bull by the dewlap." If so, this would confirm Mr Collier's opinion that Marlowe is the "idiot art-master" assailed in that connection, and cast some doubt on the propriety of M. Taine's taking Marlowe's plays as the standard of English taste in that age. |