A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 4

In noticing _Euphues_ an account has already been given of Lyly's life, or rather of the very scanty particulars which are known of it. His plays date considerably later than _Euphues_. But they all bear the character of the courtier about them; and both in this characteristic and in the absence of any details in the gossipping literature of the time to connect him with the Bohemian society of the playhouse, the distinction which separates Lyly from the group of "university wits" is noteworthy. He lost as well as gained by the separation. All his plays were acted "by the children of Paul's before her Majesty," and not by the usual companies before d.i.c.k, Tom, and Harry. The exact date and order of their writing is very uncertain, and in one case at least, that of _The Woman in the Moon_, we know that the order was exactly reversed in publication: this being the last printed in Lyly's lifetime, and expressly described as the first written. His other dramatic works are _Campaspe_, _Sappho and Phaon_, _Endymion_, _Galathea_, _Midas_, _Mother Bombie_, and _Love's Metamorphosis_; another, _The Maid's Metamorphosis_, which has been attributed to him, is in all probability not his.

The peculiar circ.u.mstances of the production of Lyly's plays, and the strong or at any rate decided individuality of the author, keep them in a division almost to themselves. The mythological or pastoral character of their subject in most cases might not of itself have prevented their marking an advance in the dramatic composition of English playwrights. _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and much other work of Shakespere's show how far from necessary it is that theme, or cla.s.s of subject, should affect merit of presentment. But Lyly's work generally has more of the masque than the play. It sometimes includes charming lyrics, such as the famous _Campaspe_ song and others. But most of it is in prose, and it gave beyond doubt--though Gascoigne had, as we have seen, set the example in drama--no small impetus to the use and perfectioning of that medium. For Lyly's dramatic prose, though sometimes showing the same faults, is often better than _Euphues_, as here:--

_End._ "O fair Cynthia, why do others term thee unconstant, whom I have ever found immovable? Injurious time, corrupt manners, unkind men, who finding a constancy not to be matched in my sweet mistress, have christened her with the name of wavering, waxing, and waning. Is she inconstant that keepeth a settled course, which since her first creation altereth not one minute in her moving? There is nothing thought more admirable, or commendable in the sea, than the ebbing and flowing; and shall the moon, from whom the sea taketh this virtue, be accounted fickle for increasing and decreasing? Flowers in their buds are nothing worth till they be blown; nor blossoms accounted till they be ripe fruit; and shall we then say they be changeable, for that they grow from seeds to leaves, from leaves to buds, from buds to their perfection? then, why be not twigs that become trees, children that become men, and mornings that grow to evenings, termed wavering, for that they continue not at one stay? Ay, but Cynthia being in her fulness decayeth, as not delighting in her greatest beauty, or withering when she should be most honoured.

When malice cannot object anything, folly will; making that a vice which is the greatest virtue. What thing (my mistress excepted) being in the pride of her beauty, and latter minute of her age, that waxeth young again? Tell me, Eumenides, what is he that having a mistress of ripe years, and infinite virtues, great honours, and unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might grow tender again? getting youth by years, and never-decaying beauty by time; whose fair face, neither the summer's blaze can scorch, nor winter's blast chap, nor the numbering of years breed altering of colours. Such is my sweet Cynthia, whom time cannot touch, because she is divine, nor will offend because she is delicate. O Cynthia, if thou shouldest always continue at thy fulness, both G.o.ds and men would conspire to ravish thee. But thou, to abate the pride of our affections, dost detract from thy perfections; thinking it sufficient if once in a month we enjoy a glimpse of thy majesty; and then, to increase our griefs, thou dost decrease thy gleams; coming out of thy royal robes, wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes, down into thy swath clouts, beguiling our eyes; and then----"

In these plays there are excellent phrases and even striking scenes. But they are not in the true sense dramatic, and are constantly spoilt by Lyly's strange weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks in ant.i.theses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in _Euphues_ itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only problematically. He was an Oxford man, and most of them were of Cambridge; he was a courtier; if a badly-paid one, and they all lived by their wits; and, if we may judge by the very few doc.u.ments remaining, he was not inclined to be hail-fellow-well-met with anybody, while they were all born Bohemians. Yet none of them had a greater influence on Shakespere than Lyly, though it was anything but a beneficial influence, and for this as well as for the originality of his production he deserves notice, even had the intrinsic merit of his work been less than it is. But, in fact, it is very great, being almost a typical production of talent helped by knowledge, but not mastered by positive genius, or directed in its way by the precedent work of others.

In the work of the University Wits proper--Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and Kyd, the last of whom, it must again be said, is not certainly known to have belonged to either university, though the probabilities are all in favour of that hypothesis--a very different kind of work is found.

It is always faulty, as a whole, for even _Dr. Faustus_ and _Edward II._, despite their magnificent poetry and the vast capabilities of their form, could only be called good plays or good compositions as any kind of whole by a critic who had entirely lost the sense of proportion. But in the whole group, and especially in the dramatic work of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Kyd (for that of Lodge and Nash is small in amount and comparatively unimportant in manner), the presence, the throes of a new dramatic style are evident. Faults and beauties are more or less common to the whole quartet. In all we find the many-sided activity of the Shakesperian drama as it was to be, sprawling and struggling in a kind of swaddling clothes of which it cannot get rid, and which hamper and cripple its movements. In all there is present a most extraordinary and unique rant and bombast of expression which reminds one of the shrieks and yells of a band of healthy boys just let out to play. The pa.s.sages which (thanks chiefly to Pistol's incomparable quotations and parodies of them) are known to every one, the "Pampered jades of Asia," the "Have we not Hiren here," the "Feed and grow fat, my fair Callipolis," the other quips and cranks of mine ancient are scattered broadcast in their originals, and are evidently meant quite seriously throughout the work of these poets. Side by side with this mania for bombast is another mania, much more clearly traceable to education and a.s.sociations, but specially odd in connection with what has just been noticed. This is the foible of cla.s.sical allusion. The heathen G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, the localities of Greek and Roman poetry, even the more out-of-the-way commonplaces of cla.s.sical literature, are put in the mouths of all the characters without the remotest attempt to consider propriety or relevance. Even in still lesser peculiarities the blemishes are uniform and constant--such as the curious and childish habit of making speakers speak of themselves in the third person, and by their names, instead of using "I"

and "me." And on the other hand, the merits, though less evenly distributed in degree, are equally constant in kind. In Kyd, in Greene still more, in Peele more still, in Marlowe most of all, phrases and pa.s.sages of blinding and dazzling poetry flash out of the midst of the bombast and the tedium.

Many of these are known, by the hundred books of extract which have followed Lamb's _Specimens_, to all readers. Such, for instance, is the

"See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament"

of Marlowe, and his even more magnificent pa.s.sage beginning

"If all the pens that ever poets held;"

such Peele's exquisite bower,

"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams,"

which is, with all respect to Charles Lamb, to be paralleled by a score of other jewels from the reckless work of "George Pyeboard": such Greene's

"Why thinks King Henry's son that Margaret's love Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time?"

such even Kyd's

"There is a path upon your left hand side That leadeth from a guilty conscience Unto a forest of distrust and fear."

But the whole point of the thing is that these flashes, which are not to be found at all before the date of this university school, are to be found constantly in its productions, and that, amorphous, inartistic, incomplete as those productions are, they still show _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ in embryo. Whereas the greatest expert in literary embryology may read _Gorboduc_ and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ through without discerning the slightest signs of what was coming.

Nash and Lodge are so little dramatists (the chief, if not only play of the former being the shapeless and rather dull comedy, _Will Summer's Testament_, relieved only by some lyrics of merit which are probably not Nash's, while Lodge's _Marius and Sylla_, while it wants the extravagance, wants also the beauty of its author's companions' work), that what has to be said about them will be better said later in dealing with their other books. Greene's prose pieces and his occasional poems are, no doubt, better than his drama, but the latter is considerable, and was probably his earliest work. Kyd has left nothing, and Peele little, but drama; while beautiful as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ is, I do not quite understand how any one can prefer it to the faultier but far more original dramas of its author. We shall therefore deal with these four individually here.

The eldest of the four was George Peele, variously described as a Londoner and a Devons.h.i.+re man, who was probably born about 1558. He was educated at Christ's Hospital (of which his father was "clerk") and at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and had some credit in the university as an arranger of pageants, etc. He is supposed to have left Oxford for London about 1581, and had the credit of living a Bohemian, not to say disreputable, life for about seventeen years; his death in 1597(?) being not more creditable than his life. But even the scandals about Peele are much more shadowy than those about Marlowe and Greene. His dramatic work consists of some half-dozen plays, the earliest of which is _The Arraignment of Paris_, 1581(?), one of the most elaborate and barefaced of the many contemporary flatteries of Elizabeth, but containing some exquisite verse. In the same way Peele has been accused of having in _Edward I._ adopted or perhaps even invented the basest and most groundless scandals against the n.o.ble and stainless memory of Eleanor of Castile; while in his _Battle of Alcazar_ he certainly gratifies to the utmost the popular anti-Spanish and anti-Popish feeling. So angry have critics been with Peele's outrage on Eleanor, that some of them have declared that none but he could have been guilty of the not dissimilar slur cast on Joan of Arc's character in _Henry VI._, the three parts of which it has been the good pleasure of Shakesperian commentators to cut and carve between the University Wits _ad libitum_. I cannot myself help thinking that all this has arisen very much from the idea of Peele's vagabondism given by the untrustworthy "Jests." The slander on Queen Eleanor was pretty certainly supplied to him by an older ballad. There is little or nothing else in Peele's undoubted writings which is at all discreditable. His miscellaneous poems show a man by no means given to low company or low thoughts, and one gifted with the truest poetic vein; while his dramas, besides exhibiting a greater command over blank verse than any of his predecessors and than any except Marlowe of his contemporaries can claim, are full of charming pa.s.sages. _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which has been denied to him--an interesting play on the rare basis of the old romance--is written not in blank verse but in the fourteener. The _Old Wives' Tale_ pretty certainly furnished Milton with the subject of Comus, and this is its chief merit.

_Edward I._ and _The Battle of Alcazar_, but especially the latter, contain abundance of the hectoring rant which has been marked as one of the characteristics of the school, and which is half-excused by the sparks of valour that often break from its smoke and clatter. But Peele would undoubtedly stand higher, though he might not be so interesting a literary figure, if we had nothing of his save _The Arraignment of Paris_ and _David and Bethsabe_. _The Arraignment_ (written in various metres, but mainly in a musical and varied heroic couplet), is partly a pastoral, partly a masque, and wholly a Court play. It thus comes nearest to Lyly, but is altogether a more dramatic, livelier, and less conceited performance than anything by the author of _Euphues_. As for _David and Bethsabe_, it is crammed with beauties, and Lamb's curiously faint praise of it has always been a puzzle to me. As Marlowe's are the mightiest, so are Peele's the softest, lines in the drama before Shakespere; while the spirit and humour, which the author also had in plenty, save his work from the merely cloying sweetness of some contemporary writers. Two of his interposed or occasional lyrics will be given later: a blank verse pa.s.sage may find room here:--

_Bethsabe._ "Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love, And stroke my bosom with thy silken fan: This shade, sun-proof,[21] is yet no proof for thee; Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring, And purer than the substance of the same, Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce: Thou, and thy sister, soft and sacred Air, G.o.ddess of life, and governess of health, Keep every fountain fresh and arbour sweet; No brazen gate her pa.s.sage can repulse, Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath: Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes, And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes, To play the wanton with us through the leaves."

[21] Cf. Milton's "elms star-proof" in the _Arcades_. Milton evidently knew Peele well.

Robert Greene, probably, if not certainly, the next in age of the group to Peele, was born in 1560, the son of apparently well-to-do parents at Norwich, and was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he took his Master's degree in 1553. He was subsequently incorporated at Oxford, and being by no means ill-inclined to make the most of himself, sometimes took the style of a member "Utriusque Academiae." After leaving the university he seems to have made a long tour on the Continent, not (according to his own account) at all to the advantage of his morals or means. He is said to have actually taken orders, and held a living for some short time, while he perhaps also studied if he did not practise medicine. He married a lady of virtue and some fortune, but soon despoiled and deserted her, and for the last six years of his life never saw her. At last in 1592, aged only two and thirty,--but after about ten years it would seem of reckless living and hasty literary production,--he died (of a disease caused or aggravated by a debauch on pickled herrings and Rhenish) so miserably poor that he had to trust to his injured wife's forgiveness for payment of the money to the extent of which a charitable landlord and landlady had trusted him. The facts of this lamentable end may have been spitefully distorted by Gabriel Harvey in his quarrel with Nash; but there is little reason to doubt that the received story is in the main correct. Of the remarkable prose pamphlets which form the bulk of Greene's work we speak elsewhere, as also of the pretty songs (considerably exceeding in poetical merit anything to be found in the body of his plays) with which both pamphlets and plays are diversified. His actual dramatic production is not inconsiderable: a working-up of the _Orlando Furioso_; _A Looking Gla.s.s for London and England_ (Nineveh) with Lodge; _James IV._ (of Scotland), a wildly unhistorical romance; _Alphonsus, King of Arragon_; and perhaps _The Pinner of Wakefield_, which deals with his own part namesake George-a-Greene; not impossibly also the pseudo-Shakesperian _Fair Em_. His best play without doubt is _The History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, in which, after a favourite fas.h.i.+on of the time, he mingles a certain amount of history, or, at least, a certain number of historical personages, with a plentiful dose of the supernatural and of horseplay, and with a very graceful and prettily-handled love story. With a few touches from the master's hand, Margaret, the fair maid of Fressingfield, might serve as handmaid to Shakespere's women, and is certainly by far the most human heroine produced by any of Greene's own group. There is less rant in Greene (though there is still plenty of it) than in any of his friends, and his fancy for soft female characters, loving, and yet virtuous, appears frequently. But his power is ill-sustained, as the following extract will show:--

_Margaret._ "Ah, father, when the harmony of heaven Soundeth the measures of a lively faith, The vain illusions of this flattering world Seem odious to the thoughts of Margaret.

I loved once,--Lord Lacy was my love; And now I hate myself for that I loved, And doted more on him than on my G.o.d,-- For this I scourge myself with sharp repents.

But now the touch of such aspiring sins Tells me all love is l.u.s.t but love of heaven; That beauty used for love is vanity: The world contains naught but alluring baits, Pride, flattery [ ], and inconstant thoughts.

To shun the p.r.i.c.ks of death I leave the world, And vow to meditate on heavenly bliss, To live in Framlingham a holy nun, Holy and pure in conscience and in deed; And for to wish all maids to learn of me To seek heaven's joy before earth's vanity."

We do not know anything of Thomas Kyd's, except _The Spanish Tragedy_, which is a second part of an extremely popular play (sometimes attributed to Kyd himself, but probably earlier) called _Jeronimo_, and the translation of _Cornelia_, though others are doubtfully attributed. The well-known epithet of Jonson, "sporting" Kyd, seems to have been either a mere play on the poet's name, or else _a lucus a non lucendo_; for both _Jeronimo_ and its sequel are in the ghastliest and bloodiest vein of tragedy, and _Cornelia_ is a model of stately dullness. The two "Jeronimo"

or "Hieronimo" plays were, as has been said, extremely popular, and it is positively known that Jonson himself, and probably others, were employed from time to time to freshen them up; with the consequence that the exact authors.h.i.+p of particular pa.s.sages is somewhat problematical. Both plays, however, display, nearly in perfection, the rant, not always quite ridiculous, but always extravagant, from which Shakespere rescued the stage; though, as the following extract will show, this rant is by no means always, or indeed often, smoke without fire:--

"O! forbear, For other talk for us far fitter were.

But if you be importunate to know The way to him, and where to find him out, Then list to me, and I'll resolve your doubt.

There is a path upon your left hand side, That leadeth from a guilty conscience Unto a forest of distrust and fear-- A darksome place and dangerous to pa.s.s.

There shall you meet with melancholy thoughts Whose baleful humours if you but uphold, It will conduct you to despair and death.

Whose rocky cliffs when you have once beheld Within a hugy dale of lasting night-- That, kindled with the world's iniquities, Doth cast up filthy and detested fumes-- Not far from thence, where murderers have built An habitation for their cursed souls, There is a brazen cauldron fixed by Jove In his fell wrath upon a sulphur flame.

Yourselves shall find Lorenzo bathing him In boiling lead and blood of innocents."

But nothing, except citation of whole scenes and acts, could show the extraordinary jumble of ghosts, blood, thunder, treachery, and horrors of all sorts which these plays contain.

Now for a very different citation:--

"If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts, Their minds, and muses, on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they 'still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein as in a mirror we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least Which into words no virtue can digest."

It is no wonder that the whole school has been dwarfed in the general estimation, since its work was critically considered and isolated from other work, by the towering excellence of this author. Little as is known of all the band, that little becomes almost least in regard to their chief and leader. Born (1564) at Canterbury, the son of a shoemaker, he was educated at the Grammar School of that city, and at Benet (afterwards Corpus) College, Cambridge; he plunged into literary work and dissipation in London; and he outlived Greene only to fall a victim to debauchery in a still more tragical way. His death (1593) was the subject of much gossip, but the most probable account is that he was poniarded in self-defence by a certain Francis Archer, a serving-man (not by any means necessarily, as Charles Kingsley has it, a footman), while drinking at Deptford, and that the cause of the quarrel was a woman of light character. He has also been accused of gross vices not to be particularised, and of atheism. The accusation is certain; and Mr. Boas's researches as to Kyd, who was also concerned in the matter, have thrown some light on it; but much is still obscure. The most offensive charges were due to one Bame or Baines, who was afterwards hanged at Tyburn. That Marlowe was a Bohemian in the fullest sense is certain; that he was anything worse there is no evidence whatever.

He certainly was acquainted with Raleigh and other distinguished persons, and was highly spoken of by Chapman and others.

But the interest of Marlowe's name has nothing to do with these obscure scandals of three hundred years ago, though it may be difficult to pa.s.s them over entirely. He is the undoubted author of some of the masterpieces of English verse; the hardly to be doubted author of others not much inferior. Except the very greatest names--Shakespere, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Sh.e.l.ley--no author can be named who has produced, when the proper historical estimate is applied to him, such work as is to be found in _Tamburlaine_, _Doctor Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward the Second_, in one department; _Hero and Leander_ and the _Pa.s.sionate Shepherd_ in another. I have but very little doubt that the powerful, if formless, play of _l.u.s.t's Dominion_ is Marlowe's, though it may have been rewritten, and the translations of Lucan and Ovid and the minor work which is more or less probably attributed to him, swell his tale. Prose he did not write, perhaps could not have written. For the one characteristic lacking to his genius was measure, and prose without measure, as numerous examples have shown, is usually rubbish. Even his dramas show a singular defect in the architectural quality of literary genius. The vast and formless creations of the writer's boundless fancy completely master him; his aspirations after the immense too frequently leave him content with the simply unmeasured. In his best play as a play, _Edward the Second_, the limitations of a historical story impose something like a restraining form on his glowing imagination. But fine as this play is, it is noteworthy that no one of his greatest things occurs in it. _The Ma.s.sacre at Paris_, where he also has the confinement of reality after a fas.h.i.+on, is a chaotic thing as a whole, without any great beauty in parts. _The Tragedy of Dido_ (to be divided between him and Nash) is the worst thing he ever did. But in the purely romantic subjects of _Tamburlaine_, _Faustus_, and _The Jew of Malta_, his genius, untrammelled by any limits of story, showed itself equally unable to contrive such limits for itself, and able to develop the most marvellous beauties of detail. Shakespere himself has not surpa.s.sed, which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famous and wonderful pa.s.sages in _Tamburlaine_ and _Faustus_, which are familiar to every student of English literature as examples of the _ne plus ultra_ of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. The tragic imagination in its wildest flights has never summoned up images of pity and terror more imposing, more moving, than those excited by _The Jew of Malta_. The riot of pa.s.sion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form which characterises his version of _Hero and Leander_ has never been approached by any writer. But Marlowe, with the fullest command of the _apeiron_, had not, and, as far as I can judge, never would have had, any power of introducing into it the law of the _peras_. It is usual to say that had he lived, and had his lot been happily cast, we should have had two Shakesperes. This is not wise. In the first place, Marlowe was totally dest.i.tute of humour--the characteristic which, united with his tragic and imaginative powers, makes Shakespere as, in a less degree, it makes Homer, and even, though the humour is grim and intermittent, Dante. In other words, he was absolutely dest.i.tute of the first requisite of self-criticism. In the natural course of things, as the sap of his youthful imagination ceased to mount, and as his craving for immensity hardened itself, he would probably have degenerated from bombast shot through with genius to bombast pure and simple, from _Faustus_ to _l.u.s.t's Dominion_, and from _l.u.s.t's Dominion_ to _Jeronimo_ or _The Distracted Emperor_. Apart from the magnificent pa.s.sages which he can show, and which are simply intoxicating to any lover of poetry, his great t.i.tle to fame is the discovery of the secret of that "mighty line" which a seldom-erring critic of his own day, not too generously given, vouchsafed to him. Up to his time the blank verse line always, and the semi-couplet in heroics, or member of the more complicated stanza usually, were either stiff or nerveless.

Compared with his own work and with the work of his contemporaries and followers who learnt from him, they are like a dried preparation, like something waiting for the infusion of blood, for the inflation of living breath. Marlowe came, and the old wooden versification, the old lay-figure structure of poetic rhythm, was cast once for all into the lumber-room, where only poetasters of the lowest rank went to seek it. It is impossible to call Marlowe a great dramatist, and the attempts that have been made to make him out to be such remind one of the attempts that have been made to call Moliere a great poet. Marlowe was one of the greatest poets of the world whose work was cast by accident and caprice into an imperfect mould of drama; Moliere was one of the greatest dramatists of the world who was obliged by fas.h.i.+on to use a previously perfected form of verse. The state of Moliere was undoubtedly the more gracious; but the splendour of Marlowe's uncut diamonds of poetry is the more wonderful.

The characteristics of this strange and interesting school may be summed up briefly, but are of the highest importance in literary history. Unlike their nearest a.n.a.logues, the French romantics of the 1830 type, they were all of academic education, and had even a decided contempt (despite their Bohemian way of life) for unscholarly innovators. They manifested (except in Marlowe's fortuitous and purely genial discovery of the secret of blank verse) a certain contempt for form, and never, at least in drama, succeeded in mastering it. But being all, more or less, men of genius, and having the keenest sense of poetry, they supplied the dry bones of the precedent dramatic model with blood and breath, with vigour and variety, which not merely informed but transformed it. _David and Bethsabe_, _Doctor Faustus_, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, are chaotic enough, but they are of the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no doubt often been used before), were of the brood of Otus and Ephialtes, who grew so rapidly and in so disorderly a fas.h.i.+on that it was necessary for the G.o.ds to make an end of them. The universe probably lost little, and it certainly gained something.

Side by side with this learned, extravagant, gifted, ill-regulated school, there was slowly growing up a very different one, which was to inherit all the gifts of the University Wits, and to add to them the gifts of measure and proportion. The early work of the actor school of English dramatists is a difficult subject to treat in any fas.h.i.+on, and a particularly difficult subject to treat shortly. Chronology, an important aid, helps us not very much, though such help as she does give has been as a rule neglected by historians, so that plays before 1590 (which may be taken roughly as the dividing date), and plays after it have been muddled up ruthlessly. We do not know the exact dates of many of those which are (many of the plays of the earlier time are not) extant; and of those which are extant, and of which the dates are more or less known, the authors are in not a few most important cases absolutely undiscoverable. Yet in the plays which belong to this period, and which there is no reason to attribute wholly to any of the Marlowe group, or much reason to attribute to them under the guidance, or perhaps with the collaboration of practical actors (some at least of whom were like Shakespere himself, men of no known regular education), there are characteristics which promise at least as well for the future as the wonderful poetic outbursts of the Marlowe school itself. Of these outbursts we find few in this other division. But we find a growing knowledge of what a play is, as distinguished from a series of tableaux acted by not too lifelike characters. We find a glimmering (which is hardly anywhere to be seen in the more literary work of the other school) of the truth that the characters must be made to work out the play, and not the play be written in a series of disjointed scenes to display, in anything but a successful fas.h.i.+on, the characters. With fewer flights we have fewer absurdities; with less genius we have more talent. It must be remembered, of course, that the plays of the university school itself were always written for players, and that some of the authors had more or less to do with acting as well as with writing. But the flame of discord which burns so fiercely on the one side in the famous real or supposed dying utterances of Greene, and which years afterwards breaks out on the other in the equally famous satire of _The Return from Parna.s.sus_,[22] illuminates a real difference--a difference which study of the remains of the literature of the period can only make plainer. The same difference has manifested itself again, and more than once in other departments of literature, but hardly in so interesting a manner, and certainly not with such striking results.

[22] The outburst of Greene about "the only Shakescene," the "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," and so forth, is too well known to need extracting here. _The Return from Parna.s.sus_, a very curious tripart.i.te play, performed 1597-1601 but retrospective in tone, is devoted to the troubles of poor scholars in getting a livelihood, and incidentally gives much matter on the authors of the time from Shakespere downward, and on the jealousy of professional actors felt by scholars, and _vice versa_.

CHAPTER IV

"THE FAeRIE QUEENE" AND ITS GROUP

"Velut inter ignes luna minores"

There is no instance in English history of a poet receiving such immediate recognition, and deserving it so thoroughly, as did Edmund Spenser at the date of _The Shepherd's Calendar_. In the first chapter of this volume the earlier course of Elizabethan poetry has been described, and it will have been seen that, with great intention, no very great accomplishment had been achieved. It was sufficiently evident that a poetic language and a general poetic spirit were being formed, such as had not existed in England since Chaucer's death; but no one had yet arisen who could justify the expectation based on such respectable tentatives. It seems from many minute indications which need not be detailed here, that at the advent of _The Shepherd's Calendar_ all the best judges recognised the expected poet. Yet they could hardly have known how just their recognition was, or what extraordinary advances the poet would make in the twenty years which pa.s.sed between its publication and his death.

The life of Spenser is very little known, and here and elsewhere the conditions of this book preclude the reproduction or even the discussion of the various pious attempts which have been made to supply the deficiency of doc.u.ments. The chief of these in his case is to be found in Dr. Grosart's magnificent edition, the princ.i.p.al among many good works of its editor.

That he belonged to a branch--a Lancas.h.i.+re branch in all probability--of the family which produced the Le Despensers of elder, and the Spencers of modern English history, may be said to be unquestionable. But he appears to have been born about 1552 in London, and to have been educated at Merchant Taylors', whence in May 1569 he matriculated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. At or before this time he must have contributed (though there are puzzles in the matter) certain translations of sonnets from Petrarch and Du Bellay to a book called _The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings_, published by a Brabanter, John van der Noodt. These, slightly changed from blank verse to rhyme, appeared long afterwards with his minor poems of 1590. But the original pieces had been claimed by the Dutchman; and though there are easy ways of explaining this, the thing is curious. However it may be with these verses, certainly nothing else of Spenser's appeared in print for ten years. His Cambridge life, except for some vague allusions (which, as usual in such cases, have been strained to breaking by commentators and biographers), is equally obscure; save that he certainly fulfilled seven years of residence, taking his Bachelor's Degree in 1573, and his Master's three years later. But he did not gain a fellows.h.i.+p, and the chief discoverable results of his Cambridge sojourn were the thorough scholars.h.i.+p which marks his work, and his friends.h.i.+p with the notorious Gabriel Harvey--his senior by some years, a Fellow of Pembroke, and a person whose singularly bad literary taste, as shown in his correspondence with Spenser, may be perhaps forgiven, first, because it did no harm, and secondly, because without him we should know even less of Spenser than we do. It is reasonably supposed from the notes of his friend, "E. K."

(apparently Kirke, a Pembroke man), to _The Shepherd's Calendar_, that he went to his friends in the north after leaving Cambridge and spent a year or two there, falling in love with the heroine, poetically named Rosalind, of _The Calendar_, and no doubt writing that remarkable book. Then (probably very late in 1578) he went to London, was introduced by Harvey to Sidney and Leicester, and thus mixed at once in the best literary and political society. He was not long in putting forth his t.i.tles to its attention, for _The Shepherd's Calendar_ was published in the winter of 1579, copiously edited by "E. K.," whom some absurdly suppose to be Spenser himself. The poet seems to have had also numerous works (the t.i.tles of which are known) ready or nearly ready for the press. But all were subsequently either changed in t.i.tle, incorporated with other work, or lost. He had already begun _The Faerie Queene_, much to the pedant Harvey's disgust; and he dabbled in the fas.h.i.+onable absurdity of cla.s.sical metres, like his inferiors. But he published nothing more immediately; and powerful as were his patrons, the only preferment which he obtained was in that Eldorado-Purgatory of Elizabethan ambition--Ireland. Lord Grey took him as private secretary when he was in 1580 appointed deputy, and shortly afterwards he received some civil posts in his new country, and a lease of abbey lands at Enniscorthy, which lease he soon gave up. But he stayed in Ireland, notwithstanding the fact that his immediate patron Grey soon left it. Except a few bare dates and doubtful allusions, little or nothing is heard of him between 1580 and 1590. On the eve of the latter year (the 1st of December 1589) the first three books of _The Faerie Queene_ were entered at Stationers' Hall, and were published in the spring of the next year. He had been already established at Kilcolman in the county Cork on a grant of more than three thousand acres of land out of the forfeited Desmond estates. And henceforward his literary activity, at least in publication, became more considerable, and he seems to have been much backwards and forwards between England and Ireland. In 1590 appeared a volume of minor poems (_The Ruins of Time_, _The Tears of the Muses_, _Virgil's Gnat_, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_, _The Ruins of Rome_, _Muiopotmos_, and the _Visions_), with an address to the reader in which another list of forthcoming works is promised. These, like the former list of Kirke, seem oddly enough to have also perished. The whole collection was called _Complaints_, and a somewhat similar poem, _Daphnaida_, is thought to have appeared in the same year. On the 11th of June 1594 the poet married (strangely enough it was not known whom, until Dr. Grosart ingeniously identified her with a certain Elizabeth Boyle _alias_ Seckerstone), and in 1595 were published the beautiful _Amoretti_ or love sonnets, and the still more beautiful _Epithalamion_ describing his courts.h.i.+p and marriage, with the interesting poem of _Colin Clout's Come Home Again_; while in the same year (old style; in January 1596, new style) the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of _The Faerie Queene_ were entered for publication and soon appeared. The supposed allusions to Mary Stuart greatly offended her son James. The _Hymns_ and the _Prothalamion_ followed in the same year.

Spenser met with difficulties at Court (though he had obtained a small pension of fifty pounds a year), and had like other Englishmen troubles with his neighbours in Ireland; yet he seemed to be becoming more prosperous, and in 1598 he was named Sheriff of Cork. A few weeks later the Irish Rebellion broke out; his house was sacked and burnt with one of his children; he fled to England and died on the 16th of January 1599 at King Street, Westminster, perhaps not "for lack of bread," as Jonson says, but certainly in no fortunate circ.u.mstances. In the year of his misfortune had been registered, though it was never printed till more than thirty years later, his one prose work of substance, the remarkable _View of the Present State of Ireland_; an admirable piece of prose, and a political tract, the wisdom and grasp of which only those who have had to give close attention to Irish politics can fully estimate. It is probably the most valuable doc.u.ment on any given period of Irish history that exists, and is certainly superior in matter, no less than in style, to any political tract in English, published before the days of Halifax eighty years after.

It has been said that _The Shepherd's Calendar_ placed Spenser at once at the head of the English poets of his day; and it did so. But had he written nothing more, he would not (as is the case with not a few distinguished poets) have occupied as high or nearly as high a position in quality, if not in quant.i.ty, as he now does. He was a young man when he published it; he was not indeed an old man when he died; and it would not appear that he had had much experience of life beyond college walls. His choice of models--the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelled itself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritus themselves--was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already his extraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and other stanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapaests more or less irregular, and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever may have been his own idea in practising it, looked back to early Middle English rhythms and forward to the metre of _Christabel_, as Coleridge was to start it afresh. He also transgressed into religious politics, taking (as indeed he always took, strange as it may seem in so fanatical a wors.h.i.+pper of beauty) the Puritan side. Nor is his work improved as poetry, though it acquires something in point of quaint attractiveness, by good Mr.

"E. K.'s" elaborate annotations, introductions, explanations, and general gentleman-usherings--the first in English, but most wofully not the last by hundreds, of such overlayings of gold with copper. Yet with all these drawbacks _The Shepherd's Calendar_ is delightful. Already we can see in it that double command, at once of the pictorial and the musical elements of poetry, in which no English poet is Spenser's superior, if any is his equal. Already the unmatched power of vigorous allegory, which he was to display later, shows in such pieces as _The Oak and the Briar_. In the less deliberately archaic divisions, such as "April" and "November," the command of metrical form, in which also the poet is almost peerless, discovers itself. Much the same may be said of the volume of _Complaints_, which, though published later than _The Faerie Queene_, represents beyond all question very much earlier work. Spenser is unquestionably, when he is not at once spurred and soothed by the play of his own imagination, as in _The Queene_, a melancholy poet, and the note of melancholy is as strong in these poems as in their joint t.i.tle. It combines with his delight in emblematic allegory happily enough, in most of these pieces except _Mother Hubbard's Tale_. This is almost an open satire, and shows that if Spenser's genius had not found a less mongrel style to disport itself in, not merely would Donne, and Lodge, and Hall, and Marston have had to abandon their dispute for the post of first English satirist, but the attainment of really great satire in English might have been hastened by a hundred years, and _Absalom and Achitophel_ have been but a second. Even here, however, the piece still keeps the Chaucerian form and manner, and is only a kind of exercise. The sonnets from and after Du Bellay and others are more interesting. As in the subsequent and far finer _Amoretti_, Spenser prefers the final couplet form to the so-called Petrarchian arrangement; and, indeed, though the most recent fas.h.i.+on in England has inclined to the latter, an impartial judgment must p.r.o.nounce both forms equally good and equally ent.i.tled to place. The _Amoretti_ written in this metre, and undoubtedly representing some, at least, of Spenser's latest written work, rank with the best of Sidney's, and hardly below the best of Shakespere's; while both in them and in the earlier sonnets the note of regret mingled with delight--the special Renaissance note--sounds as it rarely does in any other English verse. Of the poems of the later period, however (leaving _The Faerie Queene_ for a moment aside), the _Epithalamion_ and the _Four Hymns_ rank undoubtedly highest. For splendour of imagery, for harmony of verse, for delicate taste and real pa.s.sion, the _Epithalamion_ excels all other poems of its cla.s.s, and the _Four Hymns_ express a rapture of Platonic enthusiasm, which may indeed be answerable for the unreadable _Psyches_ and _Psychozoias_ of the next age, but which is itself married to immortal verse in the happiest manner.

Still, to the ordinary reader, Spenser is the poet of _The Faerie Queene_, and for once the ordinary reader is right. Every quality found in his other poems is found in this greatest of them in perfection; and much is found there which is not, and indeed could not be, found anywhere else. Its general scheme is so well known (few as may be the readers who really know its details) that very slight notice of it may suffice. Twelve knights, representing twelve virtues, were to have been sent on adventures from the Court of Gloriana, Queen of Fairyland. The six finished books give the legends (each subdivided into twelve cantos, averaging fifty or sixty stanzas each) of Holiness, Temperance, Chast.i.ty, Friends.h.i.+p, Justice, and Courtesy; while a fragment of two splendid "Cantos on Mutability" is supposed to have belonged to a seventh book (not necessarily seventh in order) on Constancy. Legend has it that the poem was actually completed; but this seems improbable, as the first three books were certainly ten years in hand, and the second three six more. The existing poem comprehending some four thousand stanzas, or between thirty and forty thousand lines, exhibits so many and such varied excellences that it is difficult to believe that the poet could have done anything new in kind. No part of it is as a whole inferior to any other part, and the fragmentary cantos contain not merely one of the most finished pictorial pieces--the Procession of the Months--to be found in the whole poem, but much of the poet's finest thought and verse. Had fortune been kinder, the volume of delight would have been greater, but its general character would probably not have changed much. As it is, _The Faerie Queene_ is the only long poem that a lover of poetry can sincerely wish longer.