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a coxcomb? Why, he hath made a prologue longer than his play! Nay, 'tis no play neither, but a show.' After this box-on-the-ears to Lyly, Summer, the Season, enters, holds his Court, reviews the revolutions of the year, and makes his will, reserving all the honours of the prime to Queen Elizabeth :

Unto Eliza, that most sacred dame,

Whom none but saints and angels ought to name.

To

While the Seasons in their masquing dresses pass across the stage and furnish forth appropriate entertainment, Summer, the Court fool, sits by and comments. modern readers the fun of the show, if fun it ever had, is withered and gone by-more withered than the roses, and more wasted than the snows of yester-year. 'Ingenious, fluent, facetious Thomas Nash,' wrote genial Dekker; 'from what abundant pen flowed honey to thy friends, and mortal aconite to thy enemies!' Alas, poor Tom Nash! Little enough is left of thee, thy humour and thy satire! The men of our days cannot taste thy honey, and thy aconite has lost its venom. Dust too are the pedants and the puritans on whom it was so freely spilt. Yet something still survives from this dry caput mortuum of an ephemeral medley. The first lyric printed in the Golden Treasury,' that gift-book to all children of our time and vade-mecum of all lovers of old literature, is a spring song from Will Summer's Testament.' Nor is there wanting in its scenes a second ditty, of less general application, but sweeter still and sadder, in which the dying Summer proves that our 'young gallant Juvenal'

was a real poet.

LODGE AS DRAMATIST.

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Let one of its stanzas serve to vin

dicate this claim, and satisfy his disappointed ghost:

Beauty is but a flower,

Which wrinkles will devour:
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair :
Dust hath closed Helen's eye :

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

IX.

One more dramatist of Greene's brood must be mentioned. Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor's son, master of arts, law student, perhaps actor, buccaneer, physician, poet of Scylla and of Rosalynde, satirist of manners, defender of the stage, exposer of moneylenders and their myrmidons-this man of multifarious ability and chequered experience, was also a playwright. In proportion to his other works, the plays of Lodge are insignificant. He aided his friend Greene in The Looking Glass for London,' and quarried a tragedy from Plutarch on the rivalries of Marius and Sylla. The Wounds of Civil War' is disappointing in execution-especially in the versification, which shows no effort to profit by Marlowe's invention, and in the comic parts, which fall below the usual level of such stuff. Lodge may indeed be credited with an honest effort to trace firm outlines of his principal male characters. Yet his reputation as an English poet will not rest upon this lifeless

PP 2

play, but on the charming lyrics which are scattered through his novels.

X.

It is time to leave the little coterie of friends who clustered around Greene in London, and to concentrate attention upon Marlowe, himself a member of their society, but far superior in all qualities which make a dramatist and poet. In the prose romances of this group, the influence of Lyly's style is still discernible. But Greene marks a new departure in dramatic literature. The romantic play, the English Farsa, may be called in a great measure his discovery. Nash marks a no less noticeable departure in the prose of controversy and satire. Peele is a sweet versifier and an artist gifted with a sense of proportion unusual in his age. Lodge distinguishes himself as a rarely musical and natural lyrist. Marlowe, intervening at the height of Greene's popularity, imposed his style in a measure on these contemporaries. But none of them were able effectively to profit by the contact of this fiery spirit. He took the town by storm; they adopted some of his inventions, without understanding their importance and without assimilating the more potent influences of his art.

1 Lodge has found so genial and able an expositor in Mr. Gosse, that I have purposely curtailed the above notice of his interesting career and distinguished literary work. See the first essay in that charming collection, Seventeenth Century Studies, by G. W. Gosse.

CHAPTER XV.

MARLOWE.

I. The Life of Marlowe-Catalogue of his Works.-II. The Father of English Dramatic Poetry-He Fixes the Romantic Type-Adopts the Popular Dramatic Form, the Blank Verse Metre of the Scholars -He Transfigures both Form and Metre-His Consciousness of his Vocation.-III. The History of Blank Verse in England-Italian Precedent-Marlowe's Predecessors-Modern and Classical Metrical Systems-Quantity and Accent-The Licentiate Iambic-Gascoigne's Critique Marlowe's Innovations in Blank Verse-Pause-Emphasis -Rhetoric a Key to good Blank Verse-The Variety of Marlowe's Metre.-IV. His Transfiguration of Tragedy-The Immediate Effect of his Improvements-He marks an Epoch in the Drama.-V. Colossal Scale of Marlowe's Works-Dramatisation of Ideals-Defect of Humour-No Female Characters. -VI. Marlowe's Leading Motive-The Impossible Amour-The Love of the Impossible portrayed in the Guise-In Tamburlaine-In Faustus-In MortimerImpossible Beauty-What would Marlowe have made of Tannhauser'? - Barabas-The Apotheosis of Avarice.-VII. The Poet and Dramatist inseparable in Marlowe-Character of Tamburlaine. -VIII. The German Faustiad-Its Northern Character-Psychological Analysis in 'Doctor Faustus'-The Teutonic Sceptic-Forbidden Knowledge and Power-Grim Justice-Faustus and Mephistophilis-The Last Hour of Faustus-Autobiographical Elements in 'Doctor Faustus.'-IX. 'The Jew of Malta'- Shylock - Spanish Source of the Story-An Episode of Spanish Humour-Acting Qualities of Marlowe's Plays.-X. ‘Edward II.'—Shakspere and Marlowe in the Chronicle-Play-Variety of Characters-Dialogue-The Opening of this Play - Gaveston - Edward's Last Hours.-XI. 'The Massacre at Paris'-Its Unfinished or Mangled Text-Tragedy of 'Dido'- Hyperbolical Ornament-Romantic and Classic Art.-XII. Marlowe greater as a Poet than a Dramatist-His Reputation with Contemporaries.

I.

Of the life of Christopher Marlowe very little is known. He was a shoemaker's son, born at Canterbury in 1564.

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-two months earlier than Shakspere at Stratfordand was educated at the King's School in that town. He entered Benet College, Cambridge, as a Pensioner, in 1581, and after taking his B.A. degree came up to seek his fortune in London, a boy in years, a man in genius, a god in ambition,' as Swinburne no less truly than finely writes of the young Titan of the stage. It is more than probable that Marlowe, under the influence perhaps of Francis Kett, who was a Fellow of Benet College in 1573, and was burned at Norwich in 1589 for anti-Christian heresy, had already contracted opinions which closed a clerical career against him, and which rendered any of the recognised professions distasteful. Be this as it may, he was indubitably born a poet, and nothing but the exercise of his already fullgrown genius could have satisfied his nature. The most remarkable point to notice about Marlowe is that he served no apprenticeship to art, and went to school with none of the acknowledged masters of his age. His first extant tragedy shows him in possession of a new style, peculiar to himself, representative of his own temperament, and destined by its force, attractiveness, and truth to revolutionise the practice of all elder playwrights and contemporaries. The demand for plays in public theatres was sufficient at this epoch to make dramatic authorship fairly profitable. The society of the green-room and the stage, in revolt against conventions and tolerant of eccentricities in conduct and opinion, suited the wild and ardent spirit of a man who thirsted lawlessly for pleasure and forbidden things. Marlowe does not seem to have hesitated in his choice of life, but threw his lot in frankly with the libertines

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