The literary and even the personal career of most of the great dramatists of this period is in many respects so much the same, and also tends in so great a degree to throw light upon the true character of their works, that we will make a few general remarks on this subject before entering into any critical or biographical details: by so doing also we hope to give a clearer notion of our national stage at this vigorous and brilliant period of its existence. The immortal men who have illustrated this portion of our literature were, in a great majority of cases, persons of academical education-in some instances, as in those of Ben Jonson and Chapman, they were distinguished for their learning, even in a learned age. In a multitude of instances, too, they were young men of violent passions and desperate fortune, who rushed up to the capital from their academic retirement of Oxford or Cambridge, and thought to find in the theatre the source of a rapid and turbid glory, and perhaps the means for indulging, with little exertion to themselves, in the riotous pleasures of the town, elevated the while by the spirit of freedom and intellect which prevailed in the theatrical circle. They almost all of them began their career as actors, and it is to this circumstance that we must attribute some of the peculiar excellences of their way of writing. It made them consummate masters of what is called "stage-effect," the art of placing their characters in the most striking and picturesque situations, though at the same time it tended to increase that taste for violent exaggeration and inconsistent passion which forms one of their evident defects. They were not calm, contemplative scholars, building up, in the silence of their study, structures of elaborate and artificial character; but menactive, suffering, enjoying men; who had mingled in the serious business of life, and painted its smiles and its tears, its grandeur and its littleness, from incessant and personal observation. They wrote, too, for an audience eager for novelty, thirsting and hungering for strong, true passion- an audience composed, not of the court, but of the body of the people. On reading the dramas of this period we cannot understand how human sensibilities could bear the shock of such terrible pathos as we find in these wonderful worksagony piled upon agony till it becomes almost too powerful when read; what then must it have been when represented with all the graces of delivery! The truth is, that "there were giants in those days," and the spectators cared not how painfully their sympathies were awakened, provided they were moved strongly, naturally, and directly. The language, too, in which these terrible or playful scenes were written, was a medium admirably suited to the purpose and to the time it was in the highest degree rich, varied, tender, and majestic; adorned with all the graces of classical imagery, but without a trace of pedantry or formality. The great object of these writers was Passion; as Dignity had been the principal aim of the Greek dramatists. They therefore directed all their efforts to a faithful delineation of Nature, and made their scene a true mirror of Life itself, mingling the grave and the merry, the serious and the comic, in the same play, the same scene, and even in the same speech. And thus they have produced a constellation of immortal works, which, like the creations of the greatest among them all, "were not for an age, but for all time;" and which, notwithstanding the great and grievous faults with which their excellences are contrasted, will be read with still increasing ardour and admiration through age after age, because in them Art has been but the interpreter and handmaid of Nature! CHAPTER VI. MARLOW AND SHAKSPEARE. Marlow: his Career and Works - His Faustus- His Death- Contemporary Judgments on his Genius. Shakspeare: His Birth, Education, and Early Life-Traditions respecting Him-His Marriage-Early Studies-Goes to London--His Career-Death and Monument-Order of his Works-Roman Plays His Diction - Characters. The remark which we made in the preceding chapter respecting the general character and career of the great dramatists of the Elizabethan era will be found to apply so universally as to render it unnecessary for us to give biographical details of individuals whose life was, for the most part, a constant alternation of squalid poverty and of temporary success. The profession of playwright at the period we are considering was held in but low esteem; in fact, was not raised in any perceptible degree above the occupation of the actor. It will be found, indeed, that most of the great authors we are speaking of were themselves actors, as well as writers for the stage; and this circumstance undoubtedly tended to give their productions some of those peculiarities which so strongly distinguish this school of dramatists from any other which ever existed in the world. The peculiarities so communicated were, as might naturally be expected, both good and evil. Writing for an audience of the most miscellaneous character, and addressing themselves at the same time to the learned and the ignorant, to the refined and to the illiterate, they were obliged to seek for matter adapted to every taste; now gratifying the most elegant tastes of the courtly and scholarlike noble, and then, in the same play-often in the same It scene-tickling the coarser fancy of the rude and jovial artisan. is in some measure, therefore, to the popularity of the drama as a favourite amusement, at this period, of all ranks, that we owe much of what is most grand, most airy, and most romantic, in the Elizabethan theatre, and also, it cannot be denied, a good deal of the irregularity that characterises these wonderful compositions - their strange mixture of elevated passion and mean buffoonery; much of their sublimity, and much also of their meanness. It should be carefully borne in mind that the above remarks apply universally (though of course not in the same degree or proportion) to all the dramatists of the Shakspearian or Elizabethan school, some being distinguished for pathos, some for sublimity, others for sweetness of fancy and a "Sicilian fruitfulness" of beautiful diction and harmony. Passing, therefore, over John Lyly, the affected euphuist and fantastical innovator on the language of the court, but whose dramas are distinguished by an exquisite grace and Grecian purity of construction, and whose songs in particular are models of airiness and music, we come to Peele, Nash, Greene, and Lodge, the immediate predecessors of Marlow, who was himself, so to speak, the forerunner and herald of Shakspeare. The luxuriant fancy of his 'David and Bethsabé,' and the kingly amplification of his 'Edward I.,' would have given Peele's name no mean place on the national Parnassus; the "gall and salt" of Nash's vigorous satire would have preserved his memory in the admiration of his country; Greene's "happy talent, clear spirit, and lively imagination" would have saved him from that oblivion whence his works are seldom recalled but by the painful commentator on Shakspeare; and the romantic spirit and woodland freshness of Lodge's graceful muse might have earned him a lasting niche in "Fame's proud temple." But all these bright intellects were quenched and swallowed up in the immeasurable splendour of their great successor. At noon we know, as well as at midnight, the stars are in the sky, but we can only see them in the absence of the sun. The dates of the birth and death of the above dramatists are as follows:- Lyly, born 1554, died some time after 1600; George Peele, a fellow-actor and shareholder with Shakspeare in the Blackfriars Theatre, died before 1599; Nash, born in Suffolk, 1564, and died, "after a life spent," as he pathetically says himself, "in fantastical satirism, in whose veins heretofore I misspent my spirit, and prodigally conspired against good hours," also about 1600; Greene died in 1592; and Lodge, who at the end of his life is supposed to have renounced the stage, and become a physician of eminence, is reported to have died in London of the plague in 1625. While these authors had been gradually but imperceptibly improving and developing the infant drama of England, we now come to the great writer who performed for our stage nearly the same offices as were rendered to that of Greece, according to the wellknown dictum of Horace, by Eschylus: "Et docuit magnumque loqui, nitique cothurno." This was Christopher Marlow. Born at Canterbury, about the year 1562, he received a learned education at Bene't College, Cambridge, and is supposed to have been attracted by the reputation he had obtained by his first dramatic essay, the tragedy of 'Tamburlaine,' to embrace the profession of actor. The play to which we have just alluded was calculated, from the wild oriental nature of its subject, to give a too free current to Marlow's natural tendency to bombastic fury of declamation, and gigantic monstrosity and exaggeration of sentiment. Jonson has left on record his admiration for "Marlow's mighty line," as he so nobly expresses the peculiar character of this dramatist's wild and swelling spirit; and the Eschylus of the English stage, like his great Athenian prototype, seems to have impressed his contemporaries with a most exalted respect for his sublime and irregular genius. Indeed it may easily be conceived that, as grandeur and force are the qualities most likely to strike the imagination of the public at a period when art is in its infancy, so the too often accompanying faults of tumidity and exaggeration are generally perceptible at such a period. The biting raillery of Aristophanes has shown no mercy to the extravagance, obscurity, and bombast of Eschylus; and we cannot, therefore, be surprised to find the deeper and more delicate raillery of Shakspeare fixing upon the absurdities of Marlow's gigantic dramas. The two greatest works of this powerful writer are undoubtedly the Faustus' and the Jew of Malta,' the latter of which was produced before 1593. We trust we shall be excused for attempting to give some account of the first of these extraordinary works, when we mention the obligations incurred by Goethe to the Faustus' of Marlow, obligations which the patriarch of Weimar never failed to acknowledge. As in the 'Faust' of Goethe, Marlow's hero is a learned man of Wittenberg, who, finding the vanity of those studies which have made him the glory and envy of all Germany, makes a compact with the Evil One that he may enjoy, in exchange for his eternal salvation, a certain period of youth, beauty, and sensual indulgence. It must be confessed that, in the grandeur and vastness of the satire on human follies, in the tenderness of the pathetic scenes, in the admirable conception of the character of Margaret-that daisy, dew-besprent with tears, and blooming so sweetly at the mouth of an infernal abyss of sin and misery which yawns to engulf it—and, above all, in the complete creation of that wondrous Mephistophiles, the German bard has shown a power not approached by the old English bard. In the pictures, however, of terror, despair, and unavailing remorse, and particularly in the terrific scene when Faustus is expecting the approach of the demon to claim performance of the dread contract,in these, and in a rich glow of classic imagery, and in the appropriate colouring of gloom and horror thrown over the whole action, we must be pardoned if we think our countryman superior. The Jew of Malta' is the portraiture of revenge and hatred embodied in the common type of the Jewish character as it appeared to the popular imagination of the sixteenth century; that is, under a form at once terrific, odious, and contemptible. Not among the least astonishing proofs of Shakspeare's divine and prescient mind is the fact that, living at a period when the Jews were still persecuted, and when popular prejudice-that indestructible monster-still believed the calumnies of the Middle Ages, and fancied that the Jews sacrificed a Christian child at the Passover, and practised the forbidden arts of magic and necromancy, that Shakspeare should have been victorious over the prejudices which still enchained the mind even of the learned Marlow, and should have given us, in Shylock, the portrait, the living image, of "an Israelite indeed,”—not the absurd bugbear of the Elizabethan stage, with his red nose, his impossible riches, and equally impossible crimes, but a real breathing man, desperately cruel and revengeful it is true, but cruel and revengeful on what seem to him good grounds, and only so far a Jew as not the less to remain a human being like ourselves. Nothing can surpass the absurdity of Marlow's plot in this play-an absurdity hardly compensated by occasional passages of majestic though somewhat tumid declamation. Few things, for instance, can be finer than the dying speech of Barabas, the Jew— "Die life, fly soul, tongue curse thy fill, and die !”— or his comparison of himself to the ominous and obscene bird "The sad-presaging raven, that tolls The sick man's passport from her hollow beak, Doth shake contagion from her sable wings." Marlow's life was as wild and irregular as his genius, and his death at once tragic and deplorable. It is related that in an unworthy brawl, in a place and with a person (according to some accounts a serving-man) as disreputable as the occasion, he endeavoured to use his dagger on the person of his antagonist, who, seizing Marlow's wrist, gave a different direction to the poniard; the weapon entered Marlow's own head, "in such sort," to use the words of Anthony Wood, "that, notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be brought, he shortly after died of his wound.” He was buried at Deptford on the 1st of June, 1593; and many dramas have come down to us bearing the impress of his genius, and several, indeed, ascribed to his name: but such was the prevalence of his style when he wrote, and so universal at this period was the custom for several dramatists to work together or successively at the |