definitely at unity and artistic finish. Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (c. 1585) first gives us the drama, or rather the melodrama, of passion, copied by Marlowe and Shakespeare. This was the most popular of the early Elizabethan plays; it was revised again and again, and Ben Jonson is said to have written one version and to have acted the chief part of Hieronimo.1 And Robert Greene (1558?-1592) plays the chief part in the early development of romantic comedy, and gives us some excellent scenes of English country life in plays like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Even a brief glance at the life and work of these first playwrights shows three noteworthy things which have a Methods of the Early Dramatists bearing on Shakespeare's career: (1) These men were usually actors as well as dramatists. They knew the stage and the audience, and in writing their plays they remembered not only the actor's part but also the audience's love for stories and brave spectacles. "Will it act well, and will it please our audience," were the questions of chief concern to our early dramatists. (2) Their training began as actors; then they revised old plays, and finally became independent writers. In this their work shows an exact parallel with that of Shakespeare. (3) They often worked together, probably as Shakespeare worked with Marlowe and Fletcher, either in revising old plays or in creating new ones. They had a common store of material from which they derived their stories and characters, hence their frequent repetition of names; and they often produced two or more plays on the same subject. Much of Shakespeare's work depends, as we shall see, on previous plays; and even his Hamlet uses the material of an earlier play of the same name, probably by Kyd, which was well known to the London stage in 1589, some twelve years before Shakespeare's great work was written. .* All these things are significant, if we are to understand the Elizabethan drama and the man who brought it to 1 See Schelling, I, 211. perfection. Shakespeare was not simply a great genius; he was also a great worker, and he developed in exactly the same way as did all his fellow craftsmen. And, contrary to the prevalent opinion, the Elizabethan drama is not a Minervalike creation, springing full grown from the head of one man; it is rather an orderly though rapid development, in which many men bore a part. All our early dramatists are worthy of study for the part they played in the development of the . drama; but we can here consider only one, the most typical of all, whose best work is often ranked with that of Shakespeare. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593) Marlowe is one of the most suggestive figures of the English Renaissance, and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors. The glory of the Elizabethan drama dates from his Tamburlaine (1587), wherein the whole restless temper of the age finds expression : Nature, that framed us of four elements Tamburlaine, Pt. I, II, vii. Life. Marlowe was born in Canterbury, only a few months before Shakespeare. He was the son of a poor shoemaker, but through the kindness of a patron was educated at the town grammar school and then at Cambridge. When he came to London (c. 1584), his soul was surging with the ideals of the Renaissance, which later found expression in Faustus, the scholar longing for unlimited knowledge and for power to grasp the universe. Unfortunately, Marlowe had also the unbridled passions which mark the early, or Pagan Renaissance, as. Taine calls it, and the conceit of a young man just entering the realms of knowledge. He became an actor and lived in a low-tavern atmosphere of excess and wretchedness. In 1587, when but twenty-three years old, he produced Tamburlaine, which brought him instant recognition. Thereafter, notwithstanding his wretched life, he holds steadily to a high literary purpose. Though all his plays abound in violence, no doubt reflecting many of the violent scenes in which he lived, he develops his "mighty line" and depicts great scenes in magnificent bursts of poetry, such as the stage had never heard before. In five years, while Shakespeare was serving his apprenticeship, Marlowe produced all his great work. Then he was stabbed in a drunken brawl and died wretchedly, as he had lived. The Epilogue of Faustus might be written across his tombstone : Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burnéd is Apollo's laurel bough That sometime grew within this learned man. Marlowe's Works. In addition to the poem "Hero and Leander," to which we have referred,1 Marlowe is famous for four dramas, now known as the Marlowesque or one-man type of tragedy, each revolving about one central personality who is consumed by the lust of power. The first of these is Tamburlaine, the story of Timur the Tartar. Timur begins as a shepherd chief, who first rebels and then triumphs over the Persian king. Intoxicated by his success, Timur rushes like a tempest over the whole East. Seated on his chariot drawn by captive kings, with a caged emperor before him, he boasts of his power which overrides all things. Then, afflicted with disease, he raves against the gods and would overthrow them as he has overthrown earthly rulers. Tamburlaine is an epic rather than a drama; but one can understand its instant success with a people only half civilized, fond of military glory, and the instant adoption of its "mighty line" as the instrument of all dramatic expression. Faustus, the second play, is one of the best of Marlowe's works. The story is that of a scholar who longs for infinite 1 See p. 114. 2 In 1587 the first history of Johann Faust, a half-legendary German necromancer, appeared in Frankfort. Where Marlowe found the story is unknown; but he used it, as Goethe did two centuries later, for the basis of his great tragedy. Faustus knowledge, and who turns from Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law, the four sciences of the time, to the study of magic, much as a child might turn from jewels to tinsel and colored paper. In order to learn magic he sells himself to the devil, on condition that he shall have twenty-four years of absolute power and knowledge. The play is the story of those twenty-four years. Like Tamburlaine, it is lacking in dramatic construction,1 but has an unusual number of passages of rare poetic beauty. Milton's Satan suggests strongly that the author of Paradise Lost had access to Faustus and used it, as he may also have used Tamburlaine, for the magnificent panorama displayed by Satan in Paradise Regained. For instance, more than fifty years before Milton's hero says, "Which way I turn is hell, myself am hell,” Mårlowe had written: Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell? Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed Marlowe's third play is The Jew of Malta, a study of the lust for wealth, which centers about Barabas, a terrible old money lender, strongly suggestive of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The first part of the play is well constructed, showing a decided advance, but the last part is an accumulation of melodramatic horrors. Barabas is checked in his murderous career by falling into a boiling caldron which he had prepared for another, and dies blaspheming, his only regret being that he has not done more evil in his life. Marlowe's last play is Edward II, a tragic study of a king's weakness and misery. In point of style and dramatic construction, it is by far the best of Marlowe's plays, and is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare's historical drama. 1 We must remember, however, that our present version of Faustus is very much mutilated, and does not preserve the play as Marlowe wrote it. Marlowe is the only dramatist of the time who is ever compared with Shakespeare.1 When we remember that he Marlowe and died at twenty-nine, probably before Shakespeare Shakespeare had produced a single great play, we must wonder what he might have done had he cutlived his wretched youth and become a man. Here and there his work is remarkable for its splendid imagination, for the stateliness of its verse, and for its rare bits of poetic beauty; but in dramatic instinct, in wide knowledge of human life, in humor, in delineation of woman's character, in the delicate fancy which presents an Ariel as perfectly as a Macbeth, — in a word, in all that makes a dramatic genius, Shakespeare stands alone. Marlowe simply prepared the way for the master who was to follow. - Variety of the Early Drama. The thirty years between our first regular English plays and Shakespeare's first comedy 2 witnessed a development of the drama which astonishes us both by its rapidity and variety. We shall better appreciate Shakespeare's work if we glance for a moment at the plays that preceded him, and note how he covers the whole field and writes almost every form and variety of the drama known to his age. First in importance, or at least in popular interest, are the new Chronicle plays, founded upon historical events and charTypes of acters. They show the strong national spirit of the Drama Elizabethan Age, and their popularity was due largely to the fact that audiences came to the theaters partly to gratify their awakened national spirit and to get their first knowledge of national history. Some of the Moralities, like Bayle's King Johan (1538), are crude Chronicle plays, and the early Robin Hood plays and the first tragedy, Gorboduc, show the same awakened popular interest in 1 The two dramatists may have worked together in such doubtful plays as Richard III, the hero of which is like Timur in an English dress, and Titus Andronicus, with its violence and horror. In many strong scenes in Shakespeare's works Marlowe's influence is manifest. 2 Gammer Gurton's Needle appeared c. 1562; Love's Labour's Lost, c. 1591. |