Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/449

ENGLISH.] DRAMA 429 kind. The Marprelatc controversy in 1589 led to a stoppage of stage plays which proved only temporary; but the general result of the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of political abuse and invective was beyond a doubt to coarsen and degrade both plays and players. The true remedy was at last applied, when from about the year 1594 the chief London actors became divided into two great rival companies the Lord Chamberlain s and the Lord Admiral s which alone received licences. Instead of half-a-dozen or more companies whose jealousies com municated themselves to the playwrights belonging to them, there were now, besides the Children of the Chapel, two established bodies of actors, directed by steady and, in the full sense of the word, respectable men. To the Lord Chamberlain s Company, which, after being settled at " the Theater," moved to the Globe on the Bankside in 1599, Shakespeare and Richard Burbadge, the greatest of the Elizabethan actors, belonged ; the Lord Admiral s was managed by Philip Henslowe, the author of the Diary, and Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, and was ultimately, in 1600, settled at the Fortune. In these and other houses were performed the plays of our Elizabethan dramatists, with few adventitious aids, the performance being crowded into a brief afternoon, when it is obvious that only the idler sections of the population could attend. No woman might appear at a playhouse unless masked; on the stage, down to the Restoration, women s parts continued to be acted by boys. It is futile to take no account of such outward circum stances as these and many which cannot here be noted in surveying the progress of the literature of the Elizabethan drama. No dramatic literature which has any claim to rank beside it not that of Athens nor those of modern Italy and Spain, nor those of France and Germany in their classic periods had to contend against such odds; a mighty inherent strength alone ensured to it the vitality which it so triumphantly asserted, and which enabled it to run so unequalled a course. y. Among Shakespeare s predecessors John Lyly (1554- 1G60), whose plays were all written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul s, holds a position apart in our dramatic literature. The euphuism, to which his famous romance gave its name, likewise distin guishes his mythological, 1 quasi-historical, 2 allegorical, 3 and satirical 4 comedies. But his real service to the progress of our drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his imagery though to his fondness for fairy- lore and for the whole phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a stimulative precedent. It lies in his adoption of Gascoigne s innovation of writing plays in prose ; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and vicious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious dialogue an example to which even such successors as Shakespeare and Jonson ,j were indebted. Thomas Kyd (d. c. 1594), the author of the Spanish Tragedy, possesses some of the characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is rlowe. assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whose violent end prematurely closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play, Tamburlaine the Great, in which the use of blank verse was introduced upon the English public stage, while full of the "high astounding terms" of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the passion which was this poet s most characteristic feature, and which was to find ex- 1 The Woman in the Moone; Sapho and Phao. 2 Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes. 3 Endimion: My das. Gallathea. pression so luxuriant in his Doctor Faustus and so surpass ingly violent in his Jew of Malta. His master-piece, Edward II., is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele (1552-1596-7) was a far more versatile Peele, writer even as a dramatist ; but though his plays contain passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by the side of Marlowe s Edward II., compared with which, if indeed not absolutely, Peele s Chronicle of Edward I. still stands on the level of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His finest play is undoubtedly David and Bethsabc, which resembles Edward I. in construction, but far surpasses it in beauty of language and versification, besides treating its subject with gic/atly superior dignity. If the difference between Peek) and Shakespeare is still in many respects besides that of genius an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something like a Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene (1561-1592), Greene, unfortunate perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in his notorious enmity to Shakespeare himself. His genius, which shone most brightly in plays treating English life and scenes, was in the main free from the pedantry which occasionally besets the flight of Peele s and even of Marlowe s muse; and his most delightful work at all events seems to breathe something of that indescribable freshness which we recognize, if not as a peculiarly Shakespearian characteristic, at least as one belonging to none but a truly national art. Thomas Lodge (c. 1558-1625), Thomas Nash the redoubtable pamphleteer (c. 1565-c. 1602), Henry Chettle (1564-c. 1667), who worked the chords of both pity and terror 7 with equal vigour, and Anthony Munday (1553-1633), better remembered for his city pageants than for his plays, are among the other more generally known writers of the early Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be called predecessors of Shakespeare. The common characteristics of nearly all these dramatists Commc were in accordance with those of the great age to which clmract they belonged. Stirring times called for stirring themes, ^ tlcs j such as those of " Mahomet, Scipio, and Tamerlane;" and gj iza . these again for a corresponding vigour of treatment, bethnn- Neatness and symmetry of construction were neglected for fulness and variety of matter. Novelty and grandeur of subject seemed well matched by a swelling amplitude and often reckless extravagance of diction. As if from an inner necessity, the balance of rhymed couplets gave way to the impetuous march of blank-verse ; " strong lines " were as in evitably called for as strong situations and strong characters. Distinct as the chief of these poets are from one another by the marks impressed upon both form and matter by individual genius, yet the stamp of the age is upon them all. Writing for the stage only, of which some of them possessed a personal experience, they acquired an instinctive insight into the laws of dramatic cause and effect, and in fused a warm vitality into the dramatic literature which they produced, so to speak, for immediate consumption. On Ihe other hand, the same cause made rapidity of work manship indispensable to a successful playwright. How a play was produced, how many hands bad been at work upon it, what loans and what spoliations had been made in the process, were considerations of less moment than the question whether it was produced, and whether it succeeded. His harness frequently double or triple was inseparable from the lusty Pegasus of the early English drama, and its genius toiled, to borrow the phrase of the Attic comedian, " like an Arcadian mercenary." 6 Friar Bacon and Friar JJungay. 6 Patient Grissil (with Dekker and Haughton),

7 Hojfman, or A Jtevcnge for a Fattier.