mines to seclude herself for life in a nunnery; but it turns out that Lacy's purpose was merely to prove her strength of affection; so, in the end, they are married.

Among other entertainments of the scene, we have a trial of national skill betwixt Bacon and Bungay on one side, and Vandermast, a noted conjurer from Germany, on the other. The trial takes place in the presence of Henry III., the Emperor of Germany, the King of Castile, and his daughter Elinor, the latter three being on a visit to the English King. First, Bungay tries his art, and is thoroughty baffled by the German; then Bacon takes him in hand, and outconjures him all to nothing, calling in one of his Spirits, who transports him straight to his study in Hapsburg. Bacon has a servant named Miles, who, for his ignorant blundering in a very weighty matter, is at last carried off to hell by one of his master's devils. The last scene is concerned with the marriage of Prince Edward and Elinor of Castile, and is closed by Bacon with a grand prophecy touching Elizabeth.

Here, again, we have some well-discriminated and wellsustained characterisation, especially in the Prince, Lacy, Margaret, and Ralph. The maid of Fressingfield is Greene's masterpiece in female character; she exhibits much strength, spirit, and sweetness of composition; in fact, she is not equalled by any dramatic woman of the English stage till we come to Shakespeare, whom no one else has ever approached in that line. — Taken all together, the style of the piece is not quite equal to that of James IV.

"A pleasant-conceited comedy of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield," printed in 1599, is ascribed to Greene, mainly on the testimony of Juby, a contemporary actor; a note to that effect being found in one of the old copies, and pronounced by Mr. Collier to be in the hand-writing of the time. Another manuscript note in the same copy states that it was written by a minister, and refers to Shakespeare as a witness of the fact. Still it is difficult to believe that

Greene was the author of it: certainly the style and versification are much better than in any other of his plays; nor does it show any thing of that incontinence of learning which Greene seems to have been unable to restrain.

The story of the piece is quite entertaining in itself, and is told with a good deal of vivacity and spirit. Among the characters, are King Edward of England, King James of Scotland, the Earl of Kendall, and other lords, and Robin Hood. George a Greene is the hero; who, what with his wit, and what with his strength, gets the better of all the other persons in turn. Withal, he is full of high and solid manhood, and his character is drawn with more vigour and life than any we have hitherto noticed. Our space cannot afford any lengthened analysis: one passage, however, must not be passed over. The piece opens with the Earl of Kendall and his adherents in rebellion against the state. The Earl sends Sir Nicholas Mannering to Wakefield, to demand provision for his camp. Sir Nicholas enters the town, and shows his commission: the magistrates are in a perplexity what to do, till the hero enters amongst them, outfaces the messenger, tears up his commission, makes him eat the seals, and sends him back with an answer of defiance. The Earl afterwards gives his adherents the following account of the

matter:

66

Why, the justices stand on their terms.

Nick, as you know, is haughty in his words:

He laid the law unto the justices

With threatening braves, that one look'd on another,
Ready to stoop; but that a churl came in,

One George a Greene, the Pinner of the town,
And, with his dagger drawn, laid hands on Nick,
And by no beggars swore that we were traitors,
Rent our commission, and upon a brave

Made Nick to eat the seals, or brook the stab:

Poor Mannering, afraid, came posting hither straight."

Here we have a taste of blank-verse- and there is much more of the same — which is far unlike Greene's any where

else. The incident, however, is very curious in that Greene himself once performed a similar feat: so at least Nash tells us in his Strange News, where he has the following addressed to Gabriel Harvey, Greene's bitter enemy: "Had he lived, Gabriel, and thou libelled against him, as thou hast done, he would have driven thee to eat thy own book buttered, as I saw him make an apparitor once in a tavern eat his citation, wax and all, very handsomely served 'twixt two dishes." This, no doubt, would strongly infer Greene's authorship of the play, but that in the old prose history of George a Greene, on which the play is founded, the valiant Pinner puts Mannering through the same operation.

Greene was concerned, along. with Thomas Lodge, in writing another extant play, entitled A Looking-Glass for London and England. The piece is little better than a piece of stage trash, being a mixture of comedy, tragedy, and Miracle-play. It sets forth the crimes and vices of Nineveh, from the king downwards, the landing of Jonah from the whale's belly, his preaching against the city, and the repentance of the people in sackcloth and ashes; an Angel, a Devil, and the Prophet Hosea taking part in the action: all which was of course meant as a warning to England in general, and London in particular. The verse parts are in Greene's puffiest style, and the prose parts in his filthiest.

Greene probably wrote divers other plays, but none others have survived, that are known to have been his. Nevertheless, we make very little doubt that he was the author of the old play on which Shakespeare founded The Taming of the Shrew: but, as the question is discussed enough in our Introduction to that play, it need not be dwelt upon here.

We now come to by far the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors. Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, was born at Canterbury, and baptized in the church of St. George the Martyr, on the 26th of February, 1564, just two months before the baptism of Shakespeare. His earlier

education was in the King's School at Canterbury, founded by Henry VIII.: he was entered a Pensioner of Benet College, Cambridge, in March, 1581, took his first degree in 1583, and became Master of Arts in 1587. He was educated, no doubt, with a view to one of the learned professions : Mr. Dyce thinks he was "most probably intended for the Church." It is not unlikely that he may have adopted the atheist's faith before leaving the University, and it is pretty certain that he led the rest of his life according to that beginning; as in his later years he was specially notorious for his blasphemous opinions and profligate behaviour. Perhaps it was an early leaning to atheism that broke up his purpose of taking holy orders; at all events, he was soon embarked among the worst literary adventurers of London, living by his wits, and rioting on the quick profits of his pen. We have already seen that his Tamburlaine was written, certainly before 1588, probably before 1587; for a young man of twenty-four, a most astonishing production! There is little doubt that he strutted awhile on the stage; for in a ballad written upon him not long after his death, and entitled The Atheist's Tragedy, we are told, —

"He had also a player been upon the Curtain-stage,

But brake his leg in one lewd scene, when in his early age."

Marlowe's career was of brief duration, but very fruitful in more senses than one. He was slain by one Francis Archer in a brawl, on the 1st of June, 1593. Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, 1598, makes the following note of the event: "Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love." In Beard's Theatre of God's Judgments, 1597, the process of his death is stated thus: 66 So it fell out, that, as he purposed to stab one whom he owed a grudge unto, with his dagger, the other party, perceiving, so avoided the stroke, that, withal catching hold of his wrist, he stabbed his own dagger into his own head, in such sort that, notwithstanding all the

means of surgery that could be wrought, he shortly after died thereof." Some further particulars respecting him may be found in Chapter iii. of the Poet's Life.

as

Marlowe's first dramatic labours came from the press in 1590, the title-page reading thus: "Tamburlaine the Great: Who, from a Scythian shepherd, by his rare and wonderful conquests became a most puissant and mighty Monarch.; and, for his tyranny, and terror in war, was termed The Scourge of God. Divided into two tragical Discourses, as they were sundry times showed upon stages in the City of London, by the Right Honourable the Lord Admiral his servants." In these two pieces, what Ben Jonson describes "Marlowe's mighty line" is out in all its mightiness. The lines, to be sure, have a vast amount of strut and syell in them, as if they would fain knock the planets out of their stations; but then they have, also, a great deal of real energy and vigour. Not the least of his merits consists, as we have already seen, in the delivering of the public stage from the shackles of rhyme, and endowing the national dramatic poetry with at least the beginnings of genuine freedom, and nexhaustible variety of structure and movement. This is audaciously announced in his Prologue to the play in hand, as follows:

"From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."

Perhaps nothing less than his dare-devil audacity was need ed, to set at defiance the general prescription of the time in this particular; a work less likely to be achieved alone by the far greater mind of Shakespeare, since, from his very greatness, especially in the moral elements, he would needs be more eager and apt to learn, and therefore more reverent of the past, and more docile to the collective experience of nis age and nation.