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least, of their authors. It also explains the singularly careless execution of such copies as were printed, these having been given to the public in many cases surreptitiously, and in direct contravention to the wishes and interests of the author. It must be confessed that in the sixteenth century in England theatrical writing was considered the very lowest branch of literature, if indeed it was regarded as literature at all. The profession of actor, though often profitable, and exercised by many individuals with dignity and respectability, was certainly not looked upon by society in a very favorable light. The vices and profligacy of many of its members seemed almost to justify the infamy stamped on the occupation by the old law, which classed players with rogues and vagabonds." Placed in such a social atmosphere, and exposed to such powerful and opposing influences, the dramatic author of those times was likely to exhibit precisely the tendencies which we actually find characterizing his works, and recorded in his life.

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§ 9. I will now give a rapid sketch of the principal English playwrights anterior to Shakspeare. JOHN LYLY (b. about 1554) composed several court plays and pageants, and is supposed to have enjoyed in some degree the favor of Elizabeth, for we know that he was at one time a petitioner for the reversion of the office of Master of the Revels. His few plays were written upon classical, or rather mythological subjects, as the story of Endymion, Sappho and Phaon, and Alexander and Campaspe. He has a rich and fantastic imagination, and his writings exhibit genius and elegance, though strongly tinctured with a peculiar kind of affectation with which he infected the language of the Court, the aristocracy, and even to a considerable degree literature itself, till it fell under the ridicule of Shakspeare, like the parallel absurdity in France, the Phébus of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, under the lash of the Précieuses Ridicules and the Critique de l'École des Femmes. Lyly was the English Gongora; and his absurd though ingenious jargon, like the estilo culto in Spain, became the fashionable affectation of the day. It consisted in a kind of exaggerated vivacity of imagery and expression; the remotest and most unexpected analogies were sought for, and crowded into every sentence. The reader may form some notion of this mode of writing (which was called Euphuism, from Lyly's once fashionable book entitled Euphues and his England) by consulting the caricature of it which Scott has introduced in the character of the courtier Sir Piercy Shafton in The Monastery. In fact the Euphuism of Lyly was the somewhat exaggerated wit of the style of Sydney, still further outré. Lyly was a man of considerable classical acquirements, and had been educated at Oxford. His lyrics are extremely graceful and harmonious, and even as a playwright his merits are rather lyrical than dramatic.

GEORGE PEELE, like Lyly, had received a liberal education at Oxford. He was one of Shakspeare's fellow-actors and fellow-shareholders in the Blackfriars Theatre. He had also been employed by the City of London in composing and preparing those spectacles and shows which formed so great a portion of ancient civic festivity. His earliest work,

The Arraignment of Paris, was printed anonymously in 1584. His most celebrated dramatic works were the David and Bethsabe, and Absolom, in which there are great richness and beauty of language, and occasional indications of a high order of pathetic and elevated emotion; but his versification, though sweet, has little variety; and the luxurious and sensuous descriptions in which Peele most delighted are so numerous that they become rather tiresome in the end. It should be remarked that this poet was the first to give an example of that peculiar kind of historical play in which Shakspeare was afterwards so consummate a master. His Edward I. is, though monotonous, declamatory, and stiff, in some sense the forerunner of such works as Richard II., Richard III., or Henry V.

THOMAS KYD, who lived about the same time, is principally noticeable as having probably been the original author of that famous play upon which so many dramatists tried their hands in the innumerable recastings which it received, and which have caused it to be ascribed in succession to almost the whole body of the elder Elizabethan dramatists. Of this piece, in spite of its occasional extravagance, even the greatest of these authors might have been proud. It is called Hieronymo, the Spanish Tragedy. Its popularity was very great, and furnishes incessant allusions to the playwrights of the day. The subject is exceedingly gloomy, bloody, and dolorous; but the pictures of grief, despair, revenge, and madness, with which it abounds, not only testify high dramatic power of conception, but must have been, as we know they were, exceedingly favorable for displaying the powers of a great tragic actor. THOMAS NASH and ROBERT GREENE, both Cambridge men, both sharp, and, I fear, mercenary satirists, and both alike in the profligacy of their lives and the misery of their deaths, though they may have eked out their income by occasionally writing for the stage, were in reality rather pasquinaders and pamphleteers than dramatists — dottieri of the press, shamelessly advertising the services of their ready and biting pen to any person or any cause that would pay them. They were both unquestionably men of rare powers; Nash probably the better man and the abler writer of the two. Nash is famous for the bitter controversy he maintained with the learned Gabriel Harvey, whom he has caricatured and attacked in numerous pamphlets, in a manner equally humorous and severe. He was concerned with other dramatists in the production of a piece entitled Summer's Last Will and Testament, and in a satirical comedy, The Isle of Dogs, which drew down upon him the anger of the Government, for we know that he was imprisoned for some time in consequence.

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Greene was, like Nash, the author of a multitude of tracts and pamphlets on the most miscellaneous subjects. Sometimes they were tales, often translated or expanded from the Italian novelists; sometimes amusing exposures of the various arts of cony-catching, i. e. cheating and swindling, practised at that time in London, and in which, it is to be feared, Greene was personally not unversed; sometimes moral confessions, like Nash's Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the

or Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, purporting to be a warning to is against the consequences of unbridled passions. Some of these onfessions are exceedingly pathetic, and would be more so could the reader divest himself of a lurking suspicion that the whole is often a mere trick to catch a penny. The popularity of these tracts, we know, was very great. The only dramatic work we need specify of Greene's was George-a-Green, the legend of an old English popular hero, recounted with much occasional vivacity and humor.

THOMAS LODGE (1556-1625?) is described by Mr. Collier as "second to Kyd in vigor and boldness of conception; but as a drawer of character, so essential a part of dramatic poetry, he unquestionably has the advantage." His principal work is a tragedy entitled The Hounds of Civil War, lively set forth in the Two Tragedies of Marius and Sylla (1594). He also composed, in conjunction with Greene, A LookingGlass for London and England, the object of which is a defence of the stage against the Puritanical party. (See also p. 86.)

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§ 10. But by far the most powerful genius among the dramatic poets who immediately preceded Shakspeare was CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1563?-1593). This man, if destiny had granted to him a longer life, which might have enabled him to correct the luxuriance of an ardent temperament and an unregulated imagination, might have left works that would have placed him very high among the foremost poets of his age. As it is, his remains strike us with as much regret as admiration regret that such rare powers should have been so irregularly cultivated. Marlowe was born at Canterbury in 1563, and was educated at Cambridge. On leaving the University he joined a troop of actors, and is recorded to have broken his leg upon the stage. His mode of life was remarkable for vice and debauchery, even in a profession so little scrupulous; and he was strongly suspected by his contemporaries of having been little better than an Atheist. His career was as short as it was disgraceful: he was stabbed in the head with his own dagger, which he had drawn in a disreputable scuffle with a disreputable antagonist, in a disreputable place: and he died of this wound at the age of thirty. His works are not numerous, but they are strongly distinguished from those of preceding and contemporary dramatists by an air of astonishing power, energy, and elevation - an elevation, it is true, which is sometimes exaggerated into bombast, and an energy which occasionally degenerates into extravagance. His first work was the tragedy of Tamburlaine, and the rants of the declamation in this piece furnished rich materials for satire and caricature; but in spite of this bombast the piece contains many passages of great power and beauty. Marlowe's best work is incontestably the drama of Faustus, founded upon the very same popular legend which Goethe adopted as the groundwork of his tragedy; but the point of view taken by Marlowe is far simpler than that of Goethe; and the English poem contains no trace of the profound self-questioning of the German hero, of the extraordinary creation of Mephistopheles, nor anything like the pathetic episode of Margaret. The witch element, which reigns so

wildly and picturesquely in the German poem, is here entirely absent. But, on the other hand, there is certainly no passage in the tragedy of Goethe in which terror, despair, and remorse are painted with such a powerful hand, as the great closing scene of Marlowe's piece, when Faustus, after the twenty-four years of sensual pleasure which were stipulated in his pact with the Evil One, is waiting for the inevitable arrival of the Fiend to claim his bargain. This is truly dramatic, and is assuredly one of the most impressive scenes that ever were placed upon the stage. The tragedy of the Few of Malta, though inferior to Faustus, is characterized by similar merits and defects. The hero, Barabbas, is the type of the Jew as he appeared to the rude and bigoted imaginations of the fifteenth century. a monster half terrific, half ridiculous, impossibly rich, inconceivably bloodthirsty, cunning, and revengeful, the bugbear of an age of ignorance and persecution. Though the exploits of cruelty and retaliation upon his Christian oppressors make Barabbas a fantastic personage, the intense expression of his rage, his triumph, and his despair, give occasion for many noble bursts of Marlowe's powerful declamation. The tragedy of Edward II., which was the last of this great poet's works, shows that in some departments of his art, and particularly in that of moving terror and pity, he might, had he lived, have become no insignificant rival of Shakspeare himself. The scene of the assassination of the unhappy king is worked up to a very lofty pitch of tragic pathos. Charles Lamb observes that "the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakspeare scarce improved in his Richard II.; and the death-scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." Marlowe was the morning star that heralded the rising of the great dramatic Sun.

§ 11. I pass over the names of a number of comparatively insignificant authors who appeared about this time, whose dramatic works have not yet been collected and printed. They in some instances, according to the custom of that age, either composed plays in partnership, or revised and altered plays written before, so that it is exceedingly difficult to assign to each playwright his just share of merit. There are, however, two or three pieces which have come down to us, either anonymous, or at least attributed to so many different authors, that it is now impossible to father them with precision. Some of these pieces are of great merit, and others are curious as being examples of the practice which afterwards became general in our theatre, of dramatizing either episodes from the chronicle history of our own or other countries (of which class we may cite the old Hamlet, The Famous Victories, and King John), or remarkable crimes -causes célèbres· - which had attracted the public attention by their unusual atrocity or the romantic nature of their details. Good examples of these are Arden of Feversham, and The Yorkshire Tragedy, both founded on fact, both works of no mean merit, and both attributed, though without any probability, to the pen of Shakspeare.

CHAPTER VII.

SHAKSPEARE. A. D. 1564-1616.

§ 1. Parentage and education of Shakspeare. § 2. His early life and marriage. §3. He comes to London, joins the Globe Theatre, and turns author. §4. Company of the Globe Theatre. § 5. Shakspeare's career at the Globe. His acting. § 6. Continuation of his life. His success and prudence. Returns to Stratford. His death. § 7. Classification of his Dramas into History and Fiction. Sources of the Dramas. § 8. His treatment of the Historical Dramas. 9. His treatment of the Dramas founded upon Fiction. § 10. His Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrêce, and Sonnets.

§ 1. WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE was born on the 23d of April, 1564, in the small county town of Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, and was baptized on the 26th of the same month. His father, John Shakspeare, respecting whose trade and position in life much controversy has been raised, was, in all probability, a fellmonger and wool-dealer, to which commerce he appears to have added that of glover or manufacturer of the many articles of dress that were then made of leather. He unquestionably belonged to the burgher or shopkeeper class; but had married an heiress of ancient and even knightly descent, Isabella Arden or Arderne, the scion of a family which had figured in the courtly and warlike annals of preceding reigns; and thus in the veins of the great poet of humanity ran blood derived from both the aristocratic and popular portions of the community. Isabella Arderne had brought her husband in dowry a small freehold property; but this acquisition, though apparently advantageous, seems to have been ultimately the cause of misfortune to the family; for John Shakspeare, who had originally been a thriving and prosperous tradesman, gradually descended, during the boyhood and youth of his illustrious son, to a condition of comparative indigence. This is to be attributed, as far as may be guessed, to his acquisition of land having tempted him to engage, without experience, in agricultural pursuits, which ended disastrously in his being obliged at different times to mortgage and sell not only his farm, but even one of the houses in Stratford of which he had been owner. He at last retained nothing but that small, but now venerable dwelling, consecrated to all future ages by being the spot where the greatest of poets first saw the light, and which will ever be carefully preserved as the shrine of England's greatest glory. That John Shakspeare had been originally in flourishing circumstances is amply proved by his having long been one of the Aldermen of Stratford, and having served the office of Bailiff or Mayor in 1568. His distresses appear to have become severe in 1579, when he was excused by his brethren of the municipality from contributing a small sum at a time of public calam

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