ful writer in many kinds. Marston has a deservedly high place in our dramatic literature. Hall, though that part of his life lies outside the scope of this book, was a divine and controversialist of mark in his later years. Donne, who however belongs in the main to a later time, is one of the most enigmatical and debated, alternately one of the most attractive and most repellent, figures in English literature. If Hall's boast in the Prologue to his Satires "I first adventure, follow me who list, is to be taken seriously, he must be supposed to have claimed the honour of leading. If so, he must also be presumed not to have known The Steel Glass of Gascoigne, an undeniable though rambling and ineffective satire, belonging to the first half of the queen's reign. He certainly ignored the earlier claim of Lodge, whose Fig for Momus appeared in 1595, two years before the first six books of Hall's Virgidemiarum. But it may be that he wrote long before he printed, and in any case the originality is not great enough to be worth fighting over, since both were followers of Latin originals; while it appears more than probable that Marston and Donne were turning their thoughts in the same direction about the same time. In fact, the Poetic Satire was so certain to arise that many men may well have begun it together in complete independence one of another. The satire of Lodge is confessedly a mere echo of Horace. Lodge. This cannot be said of the Satires of Joseph Hall. Hall, who in his very interesting brief autobiography that he was born on the 1st January, says Hall. 1574 (which, if he went by the old official calendar, means 1575), and was educated at the Puritan College of Emmanuel, Cambridge, lived to attain the bishopric of Exeter, to play a conspicuous part in the early days of the Long Parliament, to be translated to Norwich in the eclipse of King Charles's fortunes, and to be rabbled out of his palace by the Puritans. He died at Heigham in 1656. His Satires, therefore, appeared when he was at the utmost only twenty-three. Although marked by a certain youthful loftiness of moral pose and some impudence, they show an undoubted maturity of form much more meritorious then than it would be now, when there is so much more in English to copy. In "A Postscript to the Reader," printed with the first issue of the Virgidemiarum (a pedantic title taken from Virgidemia, a gathering of rods), he states what undoubtedly was the literary faith of the satirists of the time: "It is not for every one to relish a true natural satire, being of itself, besides the nature and inbred bitterness and tartness of particulars, both hard of conceit and harsh of style, and therefore cannot but be unpleasing both to the unskilful and over - musical ear." In other words, a rough form and a deliberate violation of melody were proper to satire. Marston and Donne acted on that rule. But Hall in his own verses is not markedly hard of conceit or harsh of style. His couplets flow easily enough, carrying with them shrewd but not very important remarks on the contradictions of sinners. We can well believe that when Pope was shown them late in life he wished he had seen them sooner, and that he thought the first satire of the sixth book "optima satira." Hall's attitude of superiority to a sinful world is rather comic in a young gentleman who knew no more of it than lay inside the walls of "pure Emmanuel.” His worst fault was a habit of sniffing at contemporary poets, whose poetic shoe-latchet he was not worthy to undo. He falls upon the sonneteers and their "Blowesses" (i.e., Blowsibellas) after a fashion afterwards bettered by Swift with his incomparable brutality.1 Marston's first set of Satires were printed under the assumed name of W. Kinsayder in 1598, together with a poem called Pygmalion's Image. A Marston. second instalment of the Satires followed next year, and both bear the same title-The Scourge of Villainy. There was not much villainy to which Marston had better call to apply the scourge than the greasy lubricity of Pygmalion's Image. He preferred to scold at his contemporaries in verse which is as pleasant to read as charcoal would be to eat, and to lecture an imaginary world made up of vices which he took at second hand from Latin books, in a style which raises the image of ancient Pistol unpacking his heart with curses. 1 Satires by Joseph Hall. Chiswick Press, 1824. 223 CHAPTER VIII. THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. THE FIRST PLAYS-RESISTANCE TO CLASSIC INFLUENCE-ADVANTAGES OF -- -KYD-MARLOWE-CHARACTER OF THESE WRITERS-SHAKESPEARE THREE plays stand at the threshold of the Elizabethan drama-Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. None The first plays. of the three indicate the course which that dramatic literature was destined to take. Gammer Gurton's Needle is a spirited farce of low life, holding if from anything, then from the mediaval comedy as it flourished in France. Ralph Roister Doister, as became the work of a schoolmaster, is full of reminiscences of the Latin comedy. Gorboduc is an open imitation of the Senecan tragedy. When the great and natural authority of the classic Resistance to the classic models is allowed for-when we remember how many writers for the stage, not only here but wherever the theatre flourished, were uniinfluence. versity wits-when the taste of the time for moralising is taken into account, it is rather to be wondered at that this pattern proved so unattractive as it did. The predominance of the French drama of the seventeenth century must not lead us into overestimating the rarity of the independence required to reject the classic model in the time of the Renaissance. Corneille and Racine did indeed establish a "correct" form of tragedy, largely constructed on classic lines. But this was part of a general, and far from inexcusable, reaction towards order, measure, and restraint in literature. During the Renaissance the influence of the classic drama was confined to producing a false dawn of the French tragedy. Italy achieved no considerable drama. The classics, both the great Greek and the lesser Latin, were presented to Spain in translations, and by scholarly critics, only to be rejected. The Nise Lastimosa of Gerónimo Bermudez, with here and there a tentative effort in early plays, is all that remains of the teaching of translators and men of learning. Among ourselves Gorboduc had little immediate following, and when Daniel in the very early seventeenth century tried to succeed where Sackville had failed, he wrote for the literary coterie of the Countess of Pembroke and for nobody else. Between the two there is Kyd's translation of Garnier's Cornelia or so, and that is all. For this we have undoubtedly reason to be thankful, |