Neither its exact sources nor the original
date of performance is known.
date of performance is known.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
From start to finish, Lyly's comedy is based on thought,
and cannot properly be appreciated without thought. At every
point, it is planned, constructed, modelled, to suit the critical
standards of its author and of an exacting group of courtier
critics, both eagerly interested in all that Italy and the continent
had to offer them as literary models of the past and present. Lyly
especially rested, for his prospective success, on his skill in phrase.
It is not merely that he is an artist in the complications of the
euphuistic style to which his own Euphues had given vogue, but
that he is a student of skilled phrase for dramatic and charac-
terising purposes. And this is of great significance for two reasons:
first, because high comedy demands, as a further essential, a nice
sense of phrase-witness Congreve and Sheridan among our later
masters of it; and, secondly, because this careful phrasing of Lyly
emphasises, for the first time in our English drama, the third
essential of a perfect play. Story, the first essential, had been,
crudely, understood so early as the trope in liturgical mysteries.
By accretion of episode, constructive story, which is plot, developed.
The need of characterisation soon came to be understood in miracle-
plays, in moralities and in the interlude of the better kind. Yet
phrase, not as a mere means of characterisation, but so treated,
from start to finish, that it shall do more than expound plot and
characterise, that it shall give pleasure for its own sake by its form
2
## p. 128 (#152) ############################################
128
Plays of the University Wit.
or its content, is Lyly's great contribution to the drama. As he
himself said, 'It is wit that allureth, when every word shal have
his weight, when nothing shal proceed, but it shal either savour of
a sharpe conceipt, or a secret conclusion. ' More than anyone else
before 1587, he raises our English drama to the level of literature;
more than anyone else, he creates a popular drama-for the great
public liked it—which was also enthusiastically received by
audiences at the court as the embodiment of prevailing literary
tastes. He bridges from the uncritical to the critical public
more successfully than any one of the dramatists, till Shake-
speare's depicting of character, as exhibited universally, revealed
to all classes of men their community of experience and emotion.
This raising of the intellectual level of the drama Lyly accomplishes,
too, by the addition of the feminine qualities of literature-delicacy,
grace, charm, subtlety. The English drama was masculine already
to the point of swaggering. It was Lyly's pleasant duty to refine
it, to make it more intellectual, and thus to win the plaudits of a
court presided over by a queen who, if virile in her grasp on
affairs of state, was certainly feminine in her attitude towards the
arts.
If, then, Lyly looks back to an English, a continental and,
even, a classical, past, for inspiration and models, he yet rises
above his sources in an accomplishment which is individual and
of not merely ephemeral significance, but of great importance
to those who immediately follow him in the drama. He intel-
lectualises the drama; he brings, not adaptation, but original
work, into closest touch with the most cultivated men and women
of the time; he unites the feminine to the already existent
masculine elements in our drama; he attains, even if somewhat
hazily, that great dramatic form, high comedy, and, attaining it,
breaks the way for a large part of Shakespeare's work.
George Peele (born 1558) graduated B. A. at Christ Church,
Oxford, in 1577, and M. A. in 1579. Either he must have
made rapid advance as a dramatist during his first years in
London, 1580—2, or, during his long career at the university,
some nine years, he must have developed genuine dramatic ability.
This is evident, because, in July 1583, he was summoned from
London to Oxford to assist William Gager, author of Rivales,
in an entertainment which the latter was arranging for the recep-
tion at Christ Church of Albertus Alasco, Polish prince palatine.
Certainly, The Araygnement of Paris, Peele’s ‘first encrease,' as
## p. 129 (#153) ############################################
Varied Work of Peele
129
Thomas Nashe called it, shows a writer who would seem to have
passed the tiro stage. This play, entered for publication in April
1584, is evidently influenced by the dramatic methods of John Lyly,
owing to the fact that, like Lyly's plays, it was acted before the
queen by children. When we consider that Peele's activity covered
sixteen or eighteen years (he was dead by 1598), at a time when
dramatic composition was rapid, his dramatic work remaining to
us seems not large in quantity. Nor was he himself a slow
workman. Syr Clyomon and Clamydes, tentatively assigned to
him by Dyce, is no longer believed to be his. It is clearly of an
earlier date, and, very possibly, was written by Thomas Preston.
Of Wily Beguiled, sometimes attributed to Peele, Schelling rightly
says: "There is nothing in this comedy to raise a question of
Peele's authorship except the simple obviousness with which the
plot is developed. ' Nor does it seem possible at present to go
beyond Miss Jane Lee's conclusions as to Peele's probable share
in The First and Second Parts of Henry VI. The best proof
as yet advanced for Peele's authorship of Locrine is, even cumu-
latively), inconclusive. Besides The Araygnement of Paris, we
have, as extant plays assigned to Peele, The Old Wives Tale,
Edward I, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe and
The Battell of Alcazar. The last of these plays is attributed to
Peele only because a quotation from it in England's Parnassus
(1600) is assigned to him and because of certain similarities of
phrase; but the play is usually accepted as his. The Hunting of
Cupid, a masque extant only in a slight fragment, and The Turkish
Mahomet, which we know only by its title and some references,
complete the list of Peele’s plays.
Even this brief list, however, shows the variety in his work:
the masque, in The Hunting of Cupid, and something very closely
related to it, in The Araygnement of Paris; the chronicle history,
in Edward I, and, very probably, in The Turkish Mahomet, an even
more marked mingling of romance and so-called history; something
like an attempt to revive the miracle-play, in King David and
Fair Bethsabe ; and genuine literary satire on romantic plays of
the day, in The Old Wives Tale. Whether this variety means
that he merely turned his attention hither and thither as chance
called him, or that he was restlessly trying to find his own easiest
and best expression amid the many inchoate forms of the drama
of the moment, it is perfectly clear that his inborn dramatic gift
was slight. Neither dramatic situation nor characterisation
1 Cf. as to Locrine, ante, chap. iv and post, chap. x.
9
>
>
E. L. V,
CH. VI.
## p. 130 (#154) ############################################
130
Plays of the University Wits
interests him strongly. After years of practice, he is not good
in plotting. Even where he is at his best in characterisation, in
such little touches as the following, he cannot sustain himself at
the pitch reached:
(Queen Elinor presents her babe to its uncle, Lancaster. )
Q. ELINOR. Brother Edmund, here's a kinsman of yours:
You must needs be acquainted.
LANCASTER. A goodly boy; God bless him! -
Give me your hand, sir:
Yon are welcome into Wales.
Q. ELINOR. Brother, there's a fist, I warrant you, will hold a mace as
fast as ever did father or grandfather before him.
Uneven in characterisation, loose in construction to the point of
recklessness, so extravagant in diction that, at moments, one
even suspects burlesque, Peele leaves a critical reader wondering
whether he was merely over-hurried and impatient of the work
he was doing, or genuinely held it in contempt. Certainly, the
chief merit of the fantastic Old Wives Tale is its clever satire on
such romantic plays as Common Conditions. Peele, in his play,
makes fun of just those qualities in the current drama which
Sidney criticised in his Defence of Poesie—the myriad happenings
left untraced to any sufficient cause, the confusion caused by this
multiplicity of incident, and the lavish use of surprise. The Old
Wives Tale confuses the reader as much as any one of the plays
which it ridicules ; but, when seen, it becomes amusing and, in
respect of its satire, a fit predecessor of The Knight of the
Burning Pestle. As the first English play of dramatic criticism,
it deserves high praise.
This play shows, too, as Gummere has pointed out, the
peculiar subjective humour of Peele, which rests on ‘something
more than a literal understanding of what is said and done, a
new appeal to a deeper sense of humour. ' He does not get his
fun solely from time-honoured comic business, or clownery, but
from dramatic irony in the contrast of romantic plot and realistic
diction-indeed, by contrasts in material, in method, in characteri-
sation and, even, in phrase. This is Peele's contribution to that
subtler sense of humour which we have noted in Lyly. In Lyly,
it leads to high comedy: in Peele it finds expression in dramatic
criticism.
Though Peele's life may have had its unseemly sides, he had
a real vision of literature as an art: primus verborum artifex,
Thomas Nashe called him ; nor, for the phrasing of the time, were
## p. 131 (#155) ############################################
Peele as Poet
131
the words exaggerated. Reading his songs, such as that of Paris
and Oenone in The Araygnement of Paris, or the lines at the open-
ing of King David and Fair Bethsabe, one must recognise that
he had an exquisite feeling for the musical value of words; that
he had the power to attain a perfect accord between words and
musical accompaniment. One can hear the tinkling lute in
certain lines in which the single word counts for little; but the
total collocation produces something exquisitely delicate. Yet
Peele is far more than a mere manipulator of words for musical
effect. He shows a real love of nature, which, breaking free from
much purely conventional reference to the nature gods of
mythology, is phrased as the real poet phrases. The seven lines
of the little song in The Old Wives Tale beginning, 'Whenas the
rye reach to the chin,' are gracefully pictorial; but the following
lines from The Araygnement of Paris show Peele at his best, as he
breaks through the fetters of conventionalism into finely poetic
expression of his own sensitive observation :
Not Iris, in her pride and bravery,
Adorns her arch with such variety;
Nor doth the milk-white way, in frosty night,
Appear so fair and beautiful in sight,
As done these fields, and groves, and sweetest bowers,
Bestrew'd and deck'd with parti-colourd flowers.
Along the bubbling brooks and silver glide,
That at the bottom do in silence slide;
The water-flowers and lilies on the banks,
Like blazing comets, burgeen all in ranks;
Under the hawthorn and the poplar-tree,
Where sacred Phoebe may delight to be,
The primrose, and the purple hyacinth,
The dainty violet, and the wholesome minth,
The double daisy, and the cowslip, queen
Of summer flowers, do overpeer the green;
And round about the valley as ye pass,
Ye may ne see for peeping flowers the grass:. . .
Is there not in the italicised lines something of that peculiar
ability which reached its full development in the
the mature
Shakespeare—the power of flashing before us in a line or two
something definitive both as a picture and in beauty of phrase ?
One suspects that Peele, in the later years of his life, gave
his time more to pageants than to writing plays, and not un-
willingly. He certainly wrote lord mayors' pageants--in 1585,
for Woolstone Dixie, and, in 1591, his Discursus Astraeae for
William Webbe. Moreover, all his plays except The Old Wives
Tale were in print by 1594, and even that in 1595. One of the
9_2
1
## p. 132 (#156) ############################################
132
Plays of the University Wits
Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, those rather dubious bits
of biography, tells us 'George was of a poetical disposition never
to write so long as his money lasted. ' Whether the Jests be
authentic or not, those words probably state the whole case for
Peele'. He was primarily a poet, with no real inborn gift for the
drama, and he never developed any great skill as a playwright.
This may have been because he could not; the reason may,
probably, be sought in the mood which finds expression in The Old
Wives Tale—a mood partly amused by the popular crude forms of
art, partly contemptuous towards them. Consequently, as he went
on with his work without artistic conscience, without deep interest
in the form, he could not lift it; he could merely try to give an
imperfectly educated public what he deemed it wanted. But even
this compromise with circumstance could not keep the poet from
breaking through occasionally. And in his feeling for pure beauty
—both as seen in nature and as felt in words—he is genuinely of
the renascence.
Robert Greene, born at Norwich in July 1558, took his B. A. at
St John's, Cambridge, in 1578, and his M. A. at Clare hall in 1583.
He was incorporated M. A. at Oxford in 1588. Apparently,
between the times of taking his B. A. and his M. A. degrees, he
travelled, at least in Spain and Italy. Certainly, then or later,
he came to know other parts of the continent, for he says in his
Notable Discovery of Coosnage, 'I have smiled with the Italian. . .
eaten Spanish mirabolanes. . . France, Germany, Poland, Denmark,
I know them all. ' That is, by the time he was twenty-five, he had
had his chance to know at first hand the writings of Castiglione,
Ariosto and Machiavelli—the Italian authors to whom his work is
most indebted. He had had, too, his chance of contrasting the
newer learning of Italy with the traditional English teaching of his
time. A man of letters curiously mingling artistic and Bohemian
sympathies and impulses with puritanic ideals and tendencies, who
had been trained in the formal learning of an English university,
he was greatly stimulated by the varied renascence influences,
and, by them, in many cases, was led, not to greater liberty, but to
greater licence of expression. As novelist, pamphleteer and play-
wright, he is always mercurial, but always, no matter how large his
borrowings, individual and contributive'.
1 As to the Merrie Conceited Jests, cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, p. 360.
2 See, as to Greene's literary activity other than dramatic, vol. III, chap. XVI,
pp. 353 ff. and vol. iv, chap. xvi, pp. 318 ff.
## p. 133 (#157) ############################################
Greene's Novels and Pamphlets
133
Greene seems to have begun his varied literary career while
still at Cambridge, for, in October 1580, the first part of his novel,
Mamillia, was licensed, though it did not appear before 1583. In
the latter year, the second part was licensed, though the first
edition we have bears date 1593. We are not clear as to what
exactly Greene was doing between the time of taking the two
degrees; but, in some way, it meant a preparation which made
it possible for him to pour out, between 1583 and 1590, a rapid
succession of some dozen love stories and ephemeral pamphlets—
Morando, Planetomachia, Menaphon, Perimedes, Pandosto, The
Spanish Masquerado, etc. , etc. That, during this time or later,
Greene was either a clergyman or an actor has not been proved.
About 1590, some unusually strong impulsion, resulting either
from a long sickness or, less probably, from some such contrition
as his Repentance says the eloquence of John More at one time
produced in him, gave him a distaste for his former courses, in
literary work as well as in general conduct. Certainly, as Churton
Collins has pointed out, Greene's Mourning Garment, his Farewell
to Folly, 1590 and 1591, and his Vision-which, though published
after his death (1592) as written when he was moribund, was
evidently, for the most part, composed about 1590—show this
changed mood. Indeed, the mood was sufficiently lasting for him
to write, in 1592, when he published his Philomela,
I promised, Gentlemen, both in my Mourning Garment and Farewell to
Folly, never to busy myself about any wanton pamphlets again . . . but yet
am I come, contrary to vow and promise, once again to the press with a
labour of love, which I hatched long ago, though now brought forth to
light.
In any case, it cannot be denied that his non-dramatic production
in the two years of life remaining before 1592 was, for the main part,
very different from that which had preceded. Whether his series
of coney-catching exposures formed part of a genuine repentance,
it is quite impossible to tell'. The three or four pamphlets of this
sort by Greene were not wholly the result of an observation which
moved him irresistibly, either through indignation or repentance,
to frank speaking.
Even more puzzling, however, than his change of attitude,
about 1590, or than his real feeling in his so-called exposures, is
the question raised with much ingenious argument by Churton
Collins, whether Greene began his dramatic work earlier than
1590. Greene himself says in his Repentance: 'but after I had by
1 As to this, see ante, vol. IV, pp. 319 ff.
1
## p. 134 (#158) ############################################
134
Plays of the University Wits
degrees proceeded Master of Arts (1583) I left the University and
away to London, where. . . after a short time. . . I became an author
of plays and love-pamphlets. ' That, certainly, does not sound as if
Greene did not write any plays for some seven years after he left
Cambridge. Moreover, another passage in Perimedes (1588)
“Two mad men of Rome (that is London] had it in derision for
that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical
buskins'—is open to two interpretations : namely, that he was
derided for not attempting to write blank verse plays, or for
failure in the attempt? Churton Collins skilfully emphasises
what is true, that neither Nashe, in the preface to Menaphon,
nor any of the writers of commendatory verse accompanying
Greene's publications before 1590, mention his drama. But it
is to be noted that two of the four passages cited by Churton
Collins are dated as early as 1588. Now, most recent opinion
does not favour the conclusion that, before this date, Greene had
produced any surviving work besides Alphonsus and, in collabora-
tion with Lodge, A Looking Glasse for London and England.
Even in 1589, Nashe, in his preface to Menaphon, was looking for
evidence to elevate Greene above the writers of blank verse plays,
and, therefore, would hardly have counted the two plays mentioned,
or even Orlando, against such overwhelming successes as The
Spanish Tragedie, Tamburlaine and Faustus. For A Looking
Glasse was written in collaboration; one or both of the others may
have been merely burlesque of the new high-flown style; and there
is more than a suspicion that Alphonsus was a failure. As will
be seen when the probable dates of the plays remaining to us are
considered, the safer statement, probably, is that, although Greene
had been writing plays before 1589, he had not accomplished
anything which could be compared on approximately equal terms
with the original achievements of Marlowe or of Kyd, and that his
best dramatic work was produced in 1590 or after this date.
The dramatic work remaining to us which is certainly his is
small. A lost play of Job is entered in the Stationers' register in
1594 as his. The attribution to him of Selimus on the authority of
the title-page of the first edition, 1594, and of two quotations as-
signed to him by Allot in England's Parnassus, 1600, which are
found in this particular play, is not accepted by either A. W. Ward
or C. M. Gayley; and Churton Collins says that his authorship is
1 Churton Collins, unfortunately for his argument, seems to favour both opinions.
See p. 75, vol. 1, of his Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, where he holds the former
opinion; and p. 40 of his introduction, where, apparently, he holds the second.
## p. 135 (#159) ############################################
Plays attributed to Greene
135
>
'too doubtful to justify any editor including [it] in Greene's works. '
It is now generally admitted that he was not the author of
Mucedorus, or of The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, which have sometimes been assigned to him. It seems
all but impossible to determine Greene's share in the First Part
of the Contention betwixt the Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and
The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke. Critical opinion,
following the lead of Miss Lee, is, on the whole, disposed to favour
the view that Greene had some share in the work, but where, and
to what extent, are mere matters of conjecture! On the other
hand, the attribution to him of George a Greene, the Pinner of
Wakefield is not to be waived. This attribution arises from
two manuscript statements in sixteenth century handwriting on
the title-page of the 1590 edition in the duke of Devonshire's
library, 'Written by . . . a minister, who ac[ted] the piner's pt in
it himselfe. Teste W. Shakespea[re],' and 'Ed. Juby saith that ye
Play was made by Ro. Gree[ne]. ' It is certainly curious that the
play is not known to have been acted until after Greene's death, in
1593, though Henslowe does not mark it as new at that time. The
Sussex men, too, who appeared in it, though they had given two
performances of Frier Bacon, with Greene's former company, seem
never to have owned any of the unquestioned plays of Greene.
On the other hand, there certainly are resemblances between the
play and the dramatist's other work, and though, when taken
together, these are not sufficiently strong to warrant acceptance
of the play as certainly Greene's, no recent student of his work
has been altogether willing to deny that he may have written it.
If it be Greene's, it is a late play, of the period of James IV.
The two most recent students of Greene, C. M. Gayley in his
Representative Comedies and Churton Collins in his Plays and
Poems of Robert Greene, working independently, agree that the
order of Greene's plays remaining to us should be, Alphonsus,
A Looking Glasse for London and England, Orlando Furioso,
Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay and James IV. A Looking
Glasse may best be considered in treating Lodge's dramatic work.
Alphonsus bears on the title of its one edition, 1599, the words,
Made by R. G.
Neither its exact sources nor the original
date of performance is known. It is evidently modelled on
Tamburlaine, aiming to catch some of its success either by direct,
if ineffectual, imitation, or by burlesque. Its unprepared events,
its sudden changes in character and its general extravagance
1 Cf. post, chap. VII.
1
## p. 136 (#160) ############################################
136 Plays of the University Wits
of tone, favour the recent suggestion that it is burlesque rather
than mere imitation. Here is no attempt to visualise and
explain a somewhat complex central figure, in itself a great con-
trast with Tamburlaine. Rather, with the slenderest thread of
fact, Greene embroiders wilfully, extravagantly. The characters
are neither real nor clearly distinguished. Whatever may be the
date of the play in the career of Greene, it is, from its verse and
its lack of technical skill, evidently early dramatic work. Churton
Collins, resting on resemblances he saw between Alphonsus and
Spenser's Complaints, wished to date the beginning of Greene's
dramatic work in 1591. That this theory separates Alphonsus
widely from the success of Tamburlaine in 1587 seems almost
fatal to it; for the significance of Alphonsus, either as imitation or
as burlesque, is lost if there was so wide a gap as this between it
and its model. It seems better, on the metrical and other grounds
stated by C. M. Gayley, to accept circa 1587 as its date. Moreover,
it should be noted that so early a date as this for Greene as play-
wright fits the words already quoted from his Repentance in regard
to his having begun as a dramatist shortly after he left the uni-
versity.
In 1592, Greene was accused of having sold Orlando Furioso
to the Admiral's men, when the Queen's men, to whom he had
already sold it, were in the country. This serves to identify the
author, who is not named on the title-page of either the 1594 or
the 1599 edition. Its references to the Spanish Armada, and the
common use by it and Perimedes, 1588, of five names approxi-
mately the same, favour circa 1588 for its date. The earliest
record of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay is under 19 February
1591/2 in Henslowe's diary, when it is not marked as new. It was
published in 1594. Were we sure whether it follows or precedes
Faire Em, with which it has analogies, it would be easier to date.
If it preceded, it belongs to about July or August 1589; if it
followed, then 1591 is the better date. In either case, it is, perhaps,
striking that there occurs in the play the name Vandermast, which
appears, also, in Greene's Vision, written, as Churton Collins shows,
so early as 1590, although not published till later. Though the name
appears in the chapbook which, seemingly, was the source of the
play, no such conjurer is known to history. This tendency to use
common names in pamphlet and in play has already been remarked
in Perimedes and Orlando Furioso. Greene may have borrowed
it from his own play. This would favour the 1589 date for Frier
Bacon and Frier Bongay. Or, the play may have borrowed from
## p. 137 (#161) ############################################
Greene's Sources and Plotting
137
a
the Vision, in which case the evidence points to 1591. The
Scottish History of James IV, slaine at Flodden is not at all,
as its title suggests, a chronicle play, but a dramatisation of the
first novel of the third decade of Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi.
It clearly shows some interpolation; nor is it indubitable that the
interludes of Oberon, king of the fairies, were an original part
of the play or by Greene. Certain resemblances between this
play and Greenes Mourning Garment, 1590, besides references by
Dorothea to the Irish wars and complications with France, point
to 1590—1 as a probable date for this play.
If Nashe's statement be true, that Greene produced more than
four other writers for his company, and a play each quarter, surely
we must have but a small portion of his work. Yet what we have
is marked by no such range of experiment as we noted in Peele's
few plays. His sources, so far as known, are romantic-Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso, a novel of Giraldi Cinthio and a series of
fantastic tales about two conjurers. He handled his sources, too,
in the freest possible way, sometimes using them as little more
than frames on which to hang his own devices. In Alphonsus, for
instance, it is nearly impossible to tell whether he had in mind
either of two historical figures-Alphonso V, king of Aragon, Sicily
and Naples, who died in 1454, and Alphonso I, king of Aragon and
Navarre, who died in 1134. Probably, here, as in Orlando, where
he follows Ariosto closely only in a few details, and in James IV,
where he deliberately foists upon a seemingly historical figure
incidents of pure fiction, he rather uses well known names because
he may thus interest the prospective auditor than because either
these figures or the historical material itself really interest him.
Nashe called Greene a master of his craft' in the art of
plotting. This merit in him has not been enough recognised ; but
any careful comparison of sources and play in the case of Frier
Bacon or James IV will show that he was alive to the essentials
of good play-writing and sensitive to the elements of inherent or
potential interest in his material. In Frier Bacon, he develops
the mere hint of the old romance that a maid Mellisant had two
suitors, and that she preferred the gentleman to the knight, into
the somewhat idyllic incidents of Margaret of Fressingfield, Lacy
and the king. He shifts the order of the stories at will and .
binds together rather skilfully those he selects. He adds several
characters; and he vividly develops others only barely suggested.
In the opening act, he cleverly creates interest and suspense. In
1 Chap. xv (1630). See Churton Collins's Greene, vol. 11, p. 12.
1
1
## p. 138 (#162) ############################################
138
Plays of the University Wits
James IV, he shows right feeling for dramatic condensation by
representing the king as in love with Ida even at the time of his
marriage with Dorothea, thus getting rid of the opening details of
Cinthio's story. By making Ateukin witness the collapse of his plans
rather than hear of it, as in the story, he meets the eternal demand ·
of an audience to see for itself what is important in the motives of
a central figure. The letter incident he changes for the sake of
greater simplicity and verisimilitude. In other words, he is no
haphazard dramatic story teller; for his own time, he certainly
is a master in the craft of plotting.
Moreover, as he matures, he grows to care as much for
character as for incident, as his development of Nano, Margaret
and Dorothea proves. Nashe, thinking of Greene's novels, called
him the 'Homer of women’; and it would not be wholly unfitting
to give him that designation among pre-Shakespearean dramatists.
With him, as with Kyd, the love story becomes, instead of a
by-product, central in the drama-not merely the cause of
ensuing situation, but an interest in itself. To see clearly what he
accomplished for romantic comedy, one should compare his
James IV with Common Conditions. Greene took over the mad
romanticism of the latter production, of which Peele was already
making fun-all this material of disguised women seeking their
lords or lovers, of adventure by flood and field—but, by infusing
into it sympathetic and imaginative characterisation, he transmuted
it into the realistic romance that reaches its full development in
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale.
As Lyly had broken the way for high comedy by his dialogue, the
group of people treated and his feeling for pure beauty, so Greene
broke the way for it on the side of story-an element which was to
play an important part in Shakespeare's romantic work. He sup-
plies just what Lyly lacked, complicated story and verisimilitude,
and, above all, simple human feeling. Thomas Kyd, in his Spanish
Tragedie, had raised such material as that of Tancred and
Gismunda to the level of reality, making the love story central.
Thus, Kyd opened the way to real tragedy. On the level, perhaps
somewhat lower, of romantic comedy, Greene's verisimilitude is
equal. The more we study these men, the more true in many cases
we find contemporary judgment. As Chettle said, Greene, in
1590—2, was the only commedian of a vulgar writer in this
country. '
Thomas Lodge, born 1558, was educated at Trinity college
## p. 139 (#163) ############################################
Sequence of Lodge's Work 139
Oxford; the exact dates of his degrees are not known. He was a
man of manifold activities. As pamphleteer, he wrote against
Stephen Gosson in defence of the stage? He began his play
writing as early as 1582, and his novel writing as early as 1584
with The Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Prisceria. He
took part in the expedition to Tercer and the Canaries in that year,
and whiled away the tiresome hours of the voyage by writing the
source of As You Like It, namely Rosalynde. Euphues' golden
legacie. On his return home, he published a book of verse, Scillaes
Metamorphosis. Just before setting out on a voyage with
Cavendish in 1592, he had published an historical romance,
The History of Robert, second Duke of Normandy, surnamed
Robin the Divell ; during his absence, Greene published for him
his Euphues Shadow, and so facile was Lodge that, immediately
on his return, he printed another historical romance, The Life and
Death of William Longbeard, and his book of sonnets called
Phillis. There followed on these the publication of his two plays,
The Wounds of Civill War and A Looking Glasse for London
and England, 1594, though the latter play was undoubtedly
written much earlier; his book of verse, A Fig for Momus, 1595;
and his romantic story, A Margarite of America, 1596. The
cessation of imaginative work by him after this date, though he
lived on till 1625, is curious. He had become a convert to the
church of Rome : for this, the influence of his second wife, herself
a Roman Catholic, may have been responsible. After all his
roving, he settled down to the life of a physician in London, though,
for a time, before 1619, he was forced to live and practise in the
Netherlands, because of complications in his London life.
Evidently, the activities of the man were varied. Of his plays,
only two survive. Inasmuch as no two critics agree with regard to
the exact parts to be assigned to Greene and Lodge in A Looking
Glasse for London and England, and since the only other play by
Lodge deals with wholly different material, it is nearly impossible
to judge his characteristics on the basis of A Looking Glasse-
one of the last survivals, in modified form, of the disappearing
morality. The Wounds of Civill War is a Titus Andronicus,
with all the thrills and horrors left out. Monotonous in style
and in treatment, it is evidently the work of a man neither by
instinct nor by training a dramatist. It shows, however, the
jumbling of grave and gay usual at the time, without any of the
* See post, vol. vi, chap. xv. As to Lodge's romances see vol. m, chap. XVI,
pp. 350, 358 1.
## p. 140 (#164) ############################################
140
Wits
Plays of the University
saving humour which kept Shakespeare, after his salad days, from
disastrous juxtapositions of this nature.
Lodge added nothing to the development of the English drama.
With ‘his oare in every paper boat,' he, of course, tried his hand
at the popular form. Starting with a university man's suspicion
of it as essentially unliterary, his feeling probably turned to
contempt when he made no real success. At any rate, in 1589,
in his Scillaes Metamorphosis, he gave over the stage, deciding
To write no more of that whence shame doth grow:
Or tie my pen to penny knaves' delight,
But live with fame and so for fame to write.
Lodge, at best but a wayfarer in the hostel of the drama, made
way for a throng of inpouring enthusiasts—and made way
contemptuously.
Thomas Nashe, though younger than Lodge, turned aside, like
Peele, from his real bent into drama, but not, like Peele, to
remain in it and to do a large amount of work. He left St
John's, Cambridge, in the third year after taking his B. A. , because
of some offence given to the authorities, and visited France and
Italy. Returning to London, he not only published his Ana-
tomie of Absurditie and his preface to Greene's Menaphon, both
of 1589, but entered with enthusiasm into the virulent Martin
Marprelate controversy! Nor was his interest decreased when the
quarrel became a personal one between him and Gabriel Harvey.
The long series of politico-religious and maliciously personal
pamphlets poured out by him for some seven years made him
so noteworthy that it is not surprising he should have taken
advantage of his reputation by writing for the stage. Whether
he worked with Marlowe on Dido Queene of Carthage, published
1594, or finished a manuscript left incomplete by the former, is not
clear. Nor is it safe to base judgment of his dramatic ability on
this play because of the contradiction by critics in the apportion-
ing of authorship. Of the lost Isle of Dogs, he says himself that
he wrote only the induction and the first act. When the play bred
trouble, and Nashe, as author, was lodged in the Fleet for a time,
he maintained that he was not really responsible for the contents
of the play. But any reader of his pamphlets will need no proof
that even an induction and a first act, if by Nashe, might contain
much venom. Summer's Last Will and Testament, acted at or
1 See vol. 11, chap. XVII, pp. 392 ff. As to Nashe's other pamphlets and prose
fiction, see ibid. chap. XVI, pp. 362 ff.
a
## p. 141 (#165) ############################################
Characteristics of the Group
141
near Croydon in 1592, gives little opportunity to judge Nashe's
real dramatic quality. It suggests both a morality and a play
written for a special occasion. Nashe here shows himself ingenious,
at times amusing, satirical as always. But to know Nashe at
his best in what is really individual to him, one must read his
pamphlets, or, better still, his Unfortunate Traveller, of 1594,
the first of English picaresque novels. The dramatic work of
Nashe suggests that he has stepped aside into a popular form
rather than turned to it irresistibly. He cannot, like Lyly,
adapt renascence ideas to the taste and the ideals of the most
educated public of the time; nor is he even so successful as Peele,
who, like him, stepped aside, but who succeeded well enough to be
kept steadily away from what he could do best. Nashe is far
enough from Greene, who, whatever his ideas gained from the
university and from foreign travel, could so mould and adjust
them as to be one of the most successful of popular dramatists.
As a group, then, these contemporaries illustrate well the
possible attitudes of an educated man of their time toward
the drama. Midway between Lyly and his successful practice
of the drama, which, for the most cultivated men and women of
his day, maintained and developed standards supplied to him,
at least in part, by his university, and Thomas Lodge, who put
the drama aside as beneath a cultivated man of manifold activities,
stand Nashe, Peele and Greene. Nashe, feeling the attraction of
a popular and financially alluring form, shows no special fitness
for it, is never really at home in it and gives it relatively little
attention. Peele, properly endowed for his best expression in
another field, spends his strength in the drama because, at the
time, it is the easiest source of revenue, and turns from the drama
of the cultivated to the drama of the less cultivated or the un-
cultivated. Greene, from the first, is the facile, adaptive purveyor
of wares to which he is helped by his university experience, but
to which he gives a highly popular presentation. Through Nashe
and Lodge, the drama gains nothing. Passing through the hands
of Lyly, Greene and even Peele, it comes to Shakespeare some-
thing quite different from what it was before they wrote.
University-bred one and all, these five men were proud of their
breeding. However severe from time to time might be their censures
of their intellectual mother, they were always ready to take arms
against the unwarranted assumption, as it seemed to them, of cer-
tain dramatists who lacked this university training, and to confuse
them by the sallies of their wit. One and all, they demonstrated
their right to the title bestowed upon them—'university wits. '
a
## p. 142 (#166) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
MARLOWE AND KYD
CHRONICLE HISTORIES
WHETHER, in strict chronology, we should say Kyd and Marlowe
rather than Marlowe and Kyd is but a minor problem of precedence.
Even if it be found, as some suspect to be the case, that The
Spanish Tragedie is earlier than Tamburlaine, we need not
disturb the traditional order; for Marlowe, more truly than his
contemporary, is the protagonist of the tragic drama in England,
and, in a more intimate sense, the forerunner of Shakespeare
and his fellows. After all, the main consideration is that the two
poets may be grouped together, because, in ways complementary
to each other, they show the first purpose of the higher and more
serious type of English tragedy, the first hints of the romantic
quality which is the literary token and honour of their successors,
and, if Lyly be joined with them, the training and technical circum-
stance of Shakespeare himself.
Of the life of Christopher Marlowe', son of a Canterbury shoe-
maker and a clergyman's daughter, there is little on record. To
some of his contemporaries, and, unfortunately, to later biographers,
interest in his personality has been confined to an exaggerated tale
of blasphemy and evil living; above all, to his death at the early
age of twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl at Deptford, by the hand of
a 'bawdy serving-man,' named Archer, or Fraser, or Ingram. The
recent elucidation of the facts of the poet's career at Cambridge
has happily diverted attention from the sordid ending and adjusted
the balance of the scanty biography. In this short career there
must, of necessity be little available to the antiquary; and yet we
know as much of the man Marlowe as of the man Shakespeare, or,
indeed, of any of the greater Elizabethans, Jonson excepted.
Marlowe proceeded from the King's school at Canterbury to
Bene’t (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, about Christmas
1 This is the baptismal form, but the poet's father is referred to as · Marley'or
Marlyn,' and, in the Cambridge records, the name is spelt Marlin,''Marlyn,'«Marlen,'
Malyn. ' In 1588, he is described as Christopher Marley of London," and Peele
speaks of Marley, the Muses' darling. '
6
6
## p. 143 (#167) ############################################
>
>
Marlowe's Early Life and Literary Work 143
1580. He was in residence, with occasional breaks, till 1587, when
he took his master's degree, following on his bachelor's in 1583—4.
There is evidence that, soon after 1587, he had fallen into dis-
favour at the university, and was already settled in London.
He had probably been there for some time before the production
of Tamburlaine in that year or the next. The interval between
graduation and the appearance of this play is ingeniously filled in for
us by Collier. We must, however, treat the ballad of The Atheist's
Tragedie, which describes Marlowe's actor's life and riot in
London, as one of Collier's mystifications, and, together with it,
the interpolation in Henslowe's diary (fol. 19 v. ) about 'addicions'
to Dr Faustus and a 'prolog to Marloes tambelan. ' Cunningham's
suggestion that the young poet sought adventure as a soldier in the
Low Countries, as Jonson did later, may be correct; but it must
be proved on other grounds than his ‘familiarity with military
terms. ' It is useless to speculate on the causes of the Cambridge
quarrel and his alleged restlessness. Malone's view that Marlowe
had become heretical under the influence of Francis Kett, fellow
of Benet, was based on a misconception of Kett's doctrine. If
Kett resigned his fellowship in 1580", it would be hard to prove
any association between him and Marlowe. The only extant piece
which, with some show of reason, may be ascribed to this early
period is the translation of Ovid's Amores (Certaine of Ovid's
Elegies), which was printed posthumously, c. 1597. As an inter-
pretation of the text, it does not reach even the indifferent level of
Elizabethan scholarship, but it conveys the sensuous quality of
the original. Marlowe's early choice of this subject and of another
in the same vein (said by Warton to have been The Rape of Helen
by Coluthus, non-extant) has many parallels in contemporary litera-
ture; but it has greater value as a commentary on the later work
of the poet who, unlike Shakespeare, was not allowed time to
outlive his youthful passion. We might find in the eighteenth
elegy (Ad Macrum) of the second book of his Ovid a motto for
his coming endeavour, when, sitting in Venus' slothful shade,' he
>
says:
Yet tragedies and sceptres filld my lines,
But, though I apt were for such high designs,
Love laughëd at my cloak.
If, later, he forsook the shade for the stately tent of war,' it was
because his passion had been transformed, not because he had
grown old.
See Dictionary of National Biography, art. Marlowe. '
-
--
1
## p. 144 (#168) ############################################
144
Marlowe and Kyd
>
Marlowe's first original work was the two parts of Tamburlaine
the Great, played in 1587 or 1588, and printed in 1590. The
grandeur of the style, the gorgeous strutting of Alleyn in the
title rôle, the contrast of the piece with the plays which had held
the popular stage, gave Tamburlaine a long lease of popularity; so
that the Water Poet could truly say that the hero was not so
famous in his own Tartary as in England. How strongly it im-
.
pressed the public mind may be gauged by the number of attacks,
some reasonably satirical, others merely spiteful, which came from
literary rivals. From this onslaught, directed against what
appeared, to classicists (like Jonson) and to 'rhyming mother
wits,' to be an intolerable breach of all the laws of decorum,'has
sprung the tradition of 'bombast' and 'brag' which has clung to
Marlowe's literary name—a tradition which is at fault, not because
it has no measure of truth, but because it neglects much that is
not less true.
This sudden success confirmed Marlowe in his dramatic
ambition. Hard words like Nashe's about idiote art-masters. . .
who. . . think to outbrave better pens' could not deter this young
Tamburlaine of the stage. On the heels of his first triumph came
The tragicall History of Dr Faustus, probably produced in 1588,
though its entry in the Stationers' register is as late as January,
1601, and the earliest known edition is the posthumous quarto of
1604. Interest in this play-a boldiy drawn study of the pride
of intellect, as consuming as the Tartar's ambition has been
seriously warped by speculation on the crude insets of clownage.
Many readers have felt that the comic scenes are disturbing
factors in the progress of the drama, and that Marlowe's text
has suffered from playhouse editing. The presumption is sup-
ported by the evidence of the printer Jones, who tells us
apologetically, in his edition of Tamburlaine, that he 'purposely
omitted. . . some fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, and, in my
poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter. ' He saw the 'disgrace'
of mixing these things in print 'with such matter of worth. ' The
bias for decorum' may, however, be too strong, and there may
be reasons derived from consideration of the historical sentiment
of the popular drama and of Marlowe's artistic mood to make
us pause in saying that the original has been greatly, and sadly,
altered. As bibliography cannot help us, the position of these
alleged 'addicions' of tomfoolery and squibs in the Marlowe canon
becomes a purely critical matter.
The same problem, but in a more difficult form, is presented in
## p. 145 (#169) ############################################
Edward II.
The Massacre at Paris. Dido 145
the next play, The Jew of Malta. The first record of this piece is in
Henslowe's diary, February 1592, and two years later it is named
in the Stationers' register; but, as there is no evidence that it was
printed before 1633, when it received the editorial care of Thomas
Heywood, we have a ready excuse for disclaiming the poorer
passages as the result of the playhouse practice of writing-up’
for managerial ends. Yet, here again, caution is necessary, before
we say that only in the earlier acts, in which Barabas is presented
with little less than the felicity and dramatic mastery of Shake-
speare's Jew, do we have the genuine Marlowe.
Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta constitute
the first dramatic group.
and cannot properly be appreciated without thought. At every
point, it is planned, constructed, modelled, to suit the critical
standards of its author and of an exacting group of courtier
critics, both eagerly interested in all that Italy and the continent
had to offer them as literary models of the past and present. Lyly
especially rested, for his prospective success, on his skill in phrase.
It is not merely that he is an artist in the complications of the
euphuistic style to which his own Euphues had given vogue, but
that he is a student of skilled phrase for dramatic and charac-
terising purposes. And this is of great significance for two reasons:
first, because high comedy demands, as a further essential, a nice
sense of phrase-witness Congreve and Sheridan among our later
masters of it; and, secondly, because this careful phrasing of Lyly
emphasises, for the first time in our English drama, the third
essential of a perfect play. Story, the first essential, had been,
crudely, understood so early as the trope in liturgical mysteries.
By accretion of episode, constructive story, which is plot, developed.
The need of characterisation soon came to be understood in miracle-
plays, in moralities and in the interlude of the better kind. Yet
phrase, not as a mere means of characterisation, but so treated,
from start to finish, that it shall do more than expound plot and
characterise, that it shall give pleasure for its own sake by its form
2
## p. 128 (#152) ############################################
128
Plays of the University Wit.
or its content, is Lyly's great contribution to the drama. As he
himself said, 'It is wit that allureth, when every word shal have
his weight, when nothing shal proceed, but it shal either savour of
a sharpe conceipt, or a secret conclusion. ' More than anyone else
before 1587, he raises our English drama to the level of literature;
more than anyone else, he creates a popular drama-for the great
public liked it—which was also enthusiastically received by
audiences at the court as the embodiment of prevailing literary
tastes. He bridges from the uncritical to the critical public
more successfully than any one of the dramatists, till Shake-
speare's depicting of character, as exhibited universally, revealed
to all classes of men their community of experience and emotion.
This raising of the intellectual level of the drama Lyly accomplishes,
too, by the addition of the feminine qualities of literature-delicacy,
grace, charm, subtlety. The English drama was masculine already
to the point of swaggering. It was Lyly's pleasant duty to refine
it, to make it more intellectual, and thus to win the plaudits of a
court presided over by a queen who, if virile in her grasp on
affairs of state, was certainly feminine in her attitude towards the
arts.
If, then, Lyly looks back to an English, a continental and,
even, a classical, past, for inspiration and models, he yet rises
above his sources in an accomplishment which is individual and
of not merely ephemeral significance, but of great importance
to those who immediately follow him in the drama. He intel-
lectualises the drama; he brings, not adaptation, but original
work, into closest touch with the most cultivated men and women
of the time; he unites the feminine to the already existent
masculine elements in our drama; he attains, even if somewhat
hazily, that great dramatic form, high comedy, and, attaining it,
breaks the way for a large part of Shakespeare's work.
George Peele (born 1558) graduated B. A. at Christ Church,
Oxford, in 1577, and M. A. in 1579. Either he must have
made rapid advance as a dramatist during his first years in
London, 1580—2, or, during his long career at the university,
some nine years, he must have developed genuine dramatic ability.
This is evident, because, in July 1583, he was summoned from
London to Oxford to assist William Gager, author of Rivales,
in an entertainment which the latter was arranging for the recep-
tion at Christ Church of Albertus Alasco, Polish prince palatine.
Certainly, The Araygnement of Paris, Peele’s ‘first encrease,' as
## p. 129 (#153) ############################################
Varied Work of Peele
129
Thomas Nashe called it, shows a writer who would seem to have
passed the tiro stage. This play, entered for publication in April
1584, is evidently influenced by the dramatic methods of John Lyly,
owing to the fact that, like Lyly's plays, it was acted before the
queen by children. When we consider that Peele's activity covered
sixteen or eighteen years (he was dead by 1598), at a time when
dramatic composition was rapid, his dramatic work remaining to
us seems not large in quantity. Nor was he himself a slow
workman. Syr Clyomon and Clamydes, tentatively assigned to
him by Dyce, is no longer believed to be his. It is clearly of an
earlier date, and, very possibly, was written by Thomas Preston.
Of Wily Beguiled, sometimes attributed to Peele, Schelling rightly
says: "There is nothing in this comedy to raise a question of
Peele's authorship except the simple obviousness with which the
plot is developed. ' Nor does it seem possible at present to go
beyond Miss Jane Lee's conclusions as to Peele's probable share
in The First and Second Parts of Henry VI. The best proof
as yet advanced for Peele's authorship of Locrine is, even cumu-
latively), inconclusive. Besides The Araygnement of Paris, we
have, as extant plays assigned to Peele, The Old Wives Tale,
Edward I, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe and
The Battell of Alcazar. The last of these plays is attributed to
Peele only because a quotation from it in England's Parnassus
(1600) is assigned to him and because of certain similarities of
phrase; but the play is usually accepted as his. The Hunting of
Cupid, a masque extant only in a slight fragment, and The Turkish
Mahomet, which we know only by its title and some references,
complete the list of Peele’s plays.
Even this brief list, however, shows the variety in his work:
the masque, in The Hunting of Cupid, and something very closely
related to it, in The Araygnement of Paris; the chronicle history,
in Edward I, and, very probably, in The Turkish Mahomet, an even
more marked mingling of romance and so-called history; something
like an attempt to revive the miracle-play, in King David and
Fair Bethsabe ; and genuine literary satire on romantic plays of
the day, in The Old Wives Tale. Whether this variety means
that he merely turned his attention hither and thither as chance
called him, or that he was restlessly trying to find his own easiest
and best expression amid the many inchoate forms of the drama
of the moment, it is perfectly clear that his inborn dramatic gift
was slight. Neither dramatic situation nor characterisation
1 Cf. as to Locrine, ante, chap. iv and post, chap. x.
9
>
>
E. L. V,
CH. VI.
## p. 130 (#154) ############################################
130
Plays of the University Wits
interests him strongly. After years of practice, he is not good
in plotting. Even where he is at his best in characterisation, in
such little touches as the following, he cannot sustain himself at
the pitch reached:
(Queen Elinor presents her babe to its uncle, Lancaster. )
Q. ELINOR. Brother Edmund, here's a kinsman of yours:
You must needs be acquainted.
LANCASTER. A goodly boy; God bless him! -
Give me your hand, sir:
Yon are welcome into Wales.
Q. ELINOR. Brother, there's a fist, I warrant you, will hold a mace as
fast as ever did father or grandfather before him.
Uneven in characterisation, loose in construction to the point of
recklessness, so extravagant in diction that, at moments, one
even suspects burlesque, Peele leaves a critical reader wondering
whether he was merely over-hurried and impatient of the work
he was doing, or genuinely held it in contempt. Certainly, the
chief merit of the fantastic Old Wives Tale is its clever satire on
such romantic plays as Common Conditions. Peele, in his play,
makes fun of just those qualities in the current drama which
Sidney criticised in his Defence of Poesie—the myriad happenings
left untraced to any sufficient cause, the confusion caused by this
multiplicity of incident, and the lavish use of surprise. The Old
Wives Tale confuses the reader as much as any one of the plays
which it ridicules ; but, when seen, it becomes amusing and, in
respect of its satire, a fit predecessor of The Knight of the
Burning Pestle. As the first English play of dramatic criticism,
it deserves high praise.
This play shows, too, as Gummere has pointed out, the
peculiar subjective humour of Peele, which rests on ‘something
more than a literal understanding of what is said and done, a
new appeal to a deeper sense of humour. ' He does not get his
fun solely from time-honoured comic business, or clownery, but
from dramatic irony in the contrast of romantic plot and realistic
diction-indeed, by contrasts in material, in method, in characteri-
sation and, even, in phrase. This is Peele's contribution to that
subtler sense of humour which we have noted in Lyly. In Lyly,
it leads to high comedy: in Peele it finds expression in dramatic
criticism.
Though Peele's life may have had its unseemly sides, he had
a real vision of literature as an art: primus verborum artifex,
Thomas Nashe called him ; nor, for the phrasing of the time, were
## p. 131 (#155) ############################################
Peele as Poet
131
the words exaggerated. Reading his songs, such as that of Paris
and Oenone in The Araygnement of Paris, or the lines at the open-
ing of King David and Fair Bethsabe, one must recognise that
he had an exquisite feeling for the musical value of words; that
he had the power to attain a perfect accord between words and
musical accompaniment. One can hear the tinkling lute in
certain lines in which the single word counts for little; but the
total collocation produces something exquisitely delicate. Yet
Peele is far more than a mere manipulator of words for musical
effect. He shows a real love of nature, which, breaking free from
much purely conventional reference to the nature gods of
mythology, is phrased as the real poet phrases. The seven lines
of the little song in The Old Wives Tale beginning, 'Whenas the
rye reach to the chin,' are gracefully pictorial; but the following
lines from The Araygnement of Paris show Peele at his best, as he
breaks through the fetters of conventionalism into finely poetic
expression of his own sensitive observation :
Not Iris, in her pride and bravery,
Adorns her arch with such variety;
Nor doth the milk-white way, in frosty night,
Appear so fair and beautiful in sight,
As done these fields, and groves, and sweetest bowers,
Bestrew'd and deck'd with parti-colourd flowers.
Along the bubbling brooks and silver glide,
That at the bottom do in silence slide;
The water-flowers and lilies on the banks,
Like blazing comets, burgeen all in ranks;
Under the hawthorn and the poplar-tree,
Where sacred Phoebe may delight to be,
The primrose, and the purple hyacinth,
The dainty violet, and the wholesome minth,
The double daisy, and the cowslip, queen
Of summer flowers, do overpeer the green;
And round about the valley as ye pass,
Ye may ne see for peeping flowers the grass:. . .
Is there not in the italicised lines something of that peculiar
ability which reached its full development in the
the mature
Shakespeare—the power of flashing before us in a line or two
something definitive both as a picture and in beauty of phrase ?
One suspects that Peele, in the later years of his life, gave
his time more to pageants than to writing plays, and not un-
willingly. He certainly wrote lord mayors' pageants--in 1585,
for Woolstone Dixie, and, in 1591, his Discursus Astraeae for
William Webbe. Moreover, all his plays except The Old Wives
Tale were in print by 1594, and even that in 1595. One of the
9_2
1
## p. 132 (#156) ############################################
132
Plays of the University Wits
Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, those rather dubious bits
of biography, tells us 'George was of a poetical disposition never
to write so long as his money lasted. ' Whether the Jests be
authentic or not, those words probably state the whole case for
Peele'. He was primarily a poet, with no real inborn gift for the
drama, and he never developed any great skill as a playwright.
This may have been because he could not; the reason may,
probably, be sought in the mood which finds expression in The Old
Wives Tale—a mood partly amused by the popular crude forms of
art, partly contemptuous towards them. Consequently, as he went
on with his work without artistic conscience, without deep interest
in the form, he could not lift it; he could merely try to give an
imperfectly educated public what he deemed it wanted. But even
this compromise with circumstance could not keep the poet from
breaking through occasionally. And in his feeling for pure beauty
—both as seen in nature and as felt in words—he is genuinely of
the renascence.
Robert Greene, born at Norwich in July 1558, took his B. A. at
St John's, Cambridge, in 1578, and his M. A. at Clare hall in 1583.
He was incorporated M. A. at Oxford in 1588. Apparently,
between the times of taking his B. A. and his M. A. degrees, he
travelled, at least in Spain and Italy. Certainly, then or later,
he came to know other parts of the continent, for he says in his
Notable Discovery of Coosnage, 'I have smiled with the Italian. . .
eaten Spanish mirabolanes. . . France, Germany, Poland, Denmark,
I know them all. ' That is, by the time he was twenty-five, he had
had his chance to know at first hand the writings of Castiglione,
Ariosto and Machiavelli—the Italian authors to whom his work is
most indebted. He had had, too, his chance of contrasting the
newer learning of Italy with the traditional English teaching of his
time. A man of letters curiously mingling artistic and Bohemian
sympathies and impulses with puritanic ideals and tendencies, who
had been trained in the formal learning of an English university,
he was greatly stimulated by the varied renascence influences,
and, by them, in many cases, was led, not to greater liberty, but to
greater licence of expression. As novelist, pamphleteer and play-
wright, he is always mercurial, but always, no matter how large his
borrowings, individual and contributive'.
1 As to the Merrie Conceited Jests, cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, p. 360.
2 See, as to Greene's literary activity other than dramatic, vol. III, chap. XVI,
pp. 353 ff. and vol. iv, chap. xvi, pp. 318 ff.
## p. 133 (#157) ############################################
Greene's Novels and Pamphlets
133
Greene seems to have begun his varied literary career while
still at Cambridge, for, in October 1580, the first part of his novel,
Mamillia, was licensed, though it did not appear before 1583. In
the latter year, the second part was licensed, though the first
edition we have bears date 1593. We are not clear as to what
exactly Greene was doing between the time of taking the two
degrees; but, in some way, it meant a preparation which made
it possible for him to pour out, between 1583 and 1590, a rapid
succession of some dozen love stories and ephemeral pamphlets—
Morando, Planetomachia, Menaphon, Perimedes, Pandosto, The
Spanish Masquerado, etc. , etc. That, during this time or later,
Greene was either a clergyman or an actor has not been proved.
About 1590, some unusually strong impulsion, resulting either
from a long sickness or, less probably, from some such contrition
as his Repentance says the eloquence of John More at one time
produced in him, gave him a distaste for his former courses, in
literary work as well as in general conduct. Certainly, as Churton
Collins has pointed out, Greene's Mourning Garment, his Farewell
to Folly, 1590 and 1591, and his Vision-which, though published
after his death (1592) as written when he was moribund, was
evidently, for the most part, composed about 1590—show this
changed mood. Indeed, the mood was sufficiently lasting for him
to write, in 1592, when he published his Philomela,
I promised, Gentlemen, both in my Mourning Garment and Farewell to
Folly, never to busy myself about any wanton pamphlets again . . . but yet
am I come, contrary to vow and promise, once again to the press with a
labour of love, which I hatched long ago, though now brought forth to
light.
In any case, it cannot be denied that his non-dramatic production
in the two years of life remaining before 1592 was, for the main part,
very different from that which had preceded. Whether his series
of coney-catching exposures formed part of a genuine repentance,
it is quite impossible to tell'. The three or four pamphlets of this
sort by Greene were not wholly the result of an observation which
moved him irresistibly, either through indignation or repentance,
to frank speaking.
Even more puzzling, however, than his change of attitude,
about 1590, or than his real feeling in his so-called exposures, is
the question raised with much ingenious argument by Churton
Collins, whether Greene began his dramatic work earlier than
1590. Greene himself says in his Repentance: 'but after I had by
1 As to this, see ante, vol. IV, pp. 319 ff.
1
## p. 134 (#158) ############################################
134
Plays of the University Wits
degrees proceeded Master of Arts (1583) I left the University and
away to London, where. . . after a short time. . . I became an author
of plays and love-pamphlets. ' That, certainly, does not sound as if
Greene did not write any plays for some seven years after he left
Cambridge. Moreover, another passage in Perimedes (1588)
“Two mad men of Rome (that is London] had it in derision for
that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical
buskins'—is open to two interpretations : namely, that he was
derided for not attempting to write blank verse plays, or for
failure in the attempt? Churton Collins skilfully emphasises
what is true, that neither Nashe, in the preface to Menaphon,
nor any of the writers of commendatory verse accompanying
Greene's publications before 1590, mention his drama. But it
is to be noted that two of the four passages cited by Churton
Collins are dated as early as 1588. Now, most recent opinion
does not favour the conclusion that, before this date, Greene had
produced any surviving work besides Alphonsus and, in collabora-
tion with Lodge, A Looking Glasse for London and England.
Even in 1589, Nashe, in his preface to Menaphon, was looking for
evidence to elevate Greene above the writers of blank verse plays,
and, therefore, would hardly have counted the two plays mentioned,
or even Orlando, against such overwhelming successes as The
Spanish Tragedie, Tamburlaine and Faustus. For A Looking
Glasse was written in collaboration; one or both of the others may
have been merely burlesque of the new high-flown style; and there
is more than a suspicion that Alphonsus was a failure. As will
be seen when the probable dates of the plays remaining to us are
considered, the safer statement, probably, is that, although Greene
had been writing plays before 1589, he had not accomplished
anything which could be compared on approximately equal terms
with the original achievements of Marlowe or of Kyd, and that his
best dramatic work was produced in 1590 or after this date.
The dramatic work remaining to us which is certainly his is
small. A lost play of Job is entered in the Stationers' register in
1594 as his. The attribution to him of Selimus on the authority of
the title-page of the first edition, 1594, and of two quotations as-
signed to him by Allot in England's Parnassus, 1600, which are
found in this particular play, is not accepted by either A. W. Ward
or C. M. Gayley; and Churton Collins says that his authorship is
1 Churton Collins, unfortunately for his argument, seems to favour both opinions.
See p. 75, vol. 1, of his Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, where he holds the former
opinion; and p. 40 of his introduction, where, apparently, he holds the second.
## p. 135 (#159) ############################################
Plays attributed to Greene
135
>
'too doubtful to justify any editor including [it] in Greene's works. '
It is now generally admitted that he was not the author of
Mucedorus, or of The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, which have sometimes been assigned to him. It seems
all but impossible to determine Greene's share in the First Part
of the Contention betwixt the Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and
The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke. Critical opinion,
following the lead of Miss Lee, is, on the whole, disposed to favour
the view that Greene had some share in the work, but where, and
to what extent, are mere matters of conjecture! On the other
hand, the attribution to him of George a Greene, the Pinner of
Wakefield is not to be waived. This attribution arises from
two manuscript statements in sixteenth century handwriting on
the title-page of the 1590 edition in the duke of Devonshire's
library, 'Written by . . . a minister, who ac[ted] the piner's pt in
it himselfe. Teste W. Shakespea[re],' and 'Ed. Juby saith that ye
Play was made by Ro. Gree[ne]. ' It is certainly curious that the
play is not known to have been acted until after Greene's death, in
1593, though Henslowe does not mark it as new at that time. The
Sussex men, too, who appeared in it, though they had given two
performances of Frier Bacon, with Greene's former company, seem
never to have owned any of the unquestioned plays of Greene.
On the other hand, there certainly are resemblances between the
play and the dramatist's other work, and though, when taken
together, these are not sufficiently strong to warrant acceptance
of the play as certainly Greene's, no recent student of his work
has been altogether willing to deny that he may have written it.
If it be Greene's, it is a late play, of the period of James IV.
The two most recent students of Greene, C. M. Gayley in his
Representative Comedies and Churton Collins in his Plays and
Poems of Robert Greene, working independently, agree that the
order of Greene's plays remaining to us should be, Alphonsus,
A Looking Glasse for London and England, Orlando Furioso,
Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay and James IV. A Looking
Glasse may best be considered in treating Lodge's dramatic work.
Alphonsus bears on the title of its one edition, 1599, the words,
Made by R. G.
Neither its exact sources nor the original
date of performance is known. It is evidently modelled on
Tamburlaine, aiming to catch some of its success either by direct,
if ineffectual, imitation, or by burlesque. Its unprepared events,
its sudden changes in character and its general extravagance
1 Cf. post, chap. VII.
1
## p. 136 (#160) ############################################
136 Plays of the University Wits
of tone, favour the recent suggestion that it is burlesque rather
than mere imitation. Here is no attempt to visualise and
explain a somewhat complex central figure, in itself a great con-
trast with Tamburlaine. Rather, with the slenderest thread of
fact, Greene embroiders wilfully, extravagantly. The characters
are neither real nor clearly distinguished. Whatever may be the
date of the play in the career of Greene, it is, from its verse and
its lack of technical skill, evidently early dramatic work. Churton
Collins, resting on resemblances he saw between Alphonsus and
Spenser's Complaints, wished to date the beginning of Greene's
dramatic work in 1591. That this theory separates Alphonsus
widely from the success of Tamburlaine in 1587 seems almost
fatal to it; for the significance of Alphonsus, either as imitation or
as burlesque, is lost if there was so wide a gap as this between it
and its model. It seems better, on the metrical and other grounds
stated by C. M. Gayley, to accept circa 1587 as its date. Moreover,
it should be noted that so early a date as this for Greene as play-
wright fits the words already quoted from his Repentance in regard
to his having begun as a dramatist shortly after he left the uni-
versity.
In 1592, Greene was accused of having sold Orlando Furioso
to the Admiral's men, when the Queen's men, to whom he had
already sold it, were in the country. This serves to identify the
author, who is not named on the title-page of either the 1594 or
the 1599 edition. Its references to the Spanish Armada, and the
common use by it and Perimedes, 1588, of five names approxi-
mately the same, favour circa 1588 for its date. The earliest
record of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay is under 19 February
1591/2 in Henslowe's diary, when it is not marked as new. It was
published in 1594. Were we sure whether it follows or precedes
Faire Em, with which it has analogies, it would be easier to date.
If it preceded, it belongs to about July or August 1589; if it
followed, then 1591 is the better date. In either case, it is, perhaps,
striking that there occurs in the play the name Vandermast, which
appears, also, in Greene's Vision, written, as Churton Collins shows,
so early as 1590, although not published till later. Though the name
appears in the chapbook which, seemingly, was the source of the
play, no such conjurer is known to history. This tendency to use
common names in pamphlet and in play has already been remarked
in Perimedes and Orlando Furioso. Greene may have borrowed
it from his own play. This would favour the 1589 date for Frier
Bacon and Frier Bongay. Or, the play may have borrowed from
## p. 137 (#161) ############################################
Greene's Sources and Plotting
137
a
the Vision, in which case the evidence points to 1591. The
Scottish History of James IV, slaine at Flodden is not at all,
as its title suggests, a chronicle play, but a dramatisation of the
first novel of the third decade of Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi.
It clearly shows some interpolation; nor is it indubitable that the
interludes of Oberon, king of the fairies, were an original part
of the play or by Greene. Certain resemblances between this
play and Greenes Mourning Garment, 1590, besides references by
Dorothea to the Irish wars and complications with France, point
to 1590—1 as a probable date for this play.
If Nashe's statement be true, that Greene produced more than
four other writers for his company, and a play each quarter, surely
we must have but a small portion of his work. Yet what we have
is marked by no such range of experiment as we noted in Peele's
few plays. His sources, so far as known, are romantic-Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso, a novel of Giraldi Cinthio and a series of
fantastic tales about two conjurers. He handled his sources, too,
in the freest possible way, sometimes using them as little more
than frames on which to hang his own devices. In Alphonsus, for
instance, it is nearly impossible to tell whether he had in mind
either of two historical figures-Alphonso V, king of Aragon, Sicily
and Naples, who died in 1454, and Alphonso I, king of Aragon and
Navarre, who died in 1134. Probably, here, as in Orlando, where
he follows Ariosto closely only in a few details, and in James IV,
where he deliberately foists upon a seemingly historical figure
incidents of pure fiction, he rather uses well known names because
he may thus interest the prospective auditor than because either
these figures or the historical material itself really interest him.
Nashe called Greene a master of his craft' in the art of
plotting. This merit in him has not been enough recognised ; but
any careful comparison of sources and play in the case of Frier
Bacon or James IV will show that he was alive to the essentials
of good play-writing and sensitive to the elements of inherent or
potential interest in his material. In Frier Bacon, he develops
the mere hint of the old romance that a maid Mellisant had two
suitors, and that she preferred the gentleman to the knight, into
the somewhat idyllic incidents of Margaret of Fressingfield, Lacy
and the king. He shifts the order of the stories at will and .
binds together rather skilfully those he selects. He adds several
characters; and he vividly develops others only barely suggested.
In the opening act, he cleverly creates interest and suspense. In
1 Chap. xv (1630). See Churton Collins's Greene, vol. 11, p. 12.
1
1
## p. 138 (#162) ############################################
138
Plays of the University Wits
James IV, he shows right feeling for dramatic condensation by
representing the king as in love with Ida even at the time of his
marriage with Dorothea, thus getting rid of the opening details of
Cinthio's story. By making Ateukin witness the collapse of his plans
rather than hear of it, as in the story, he meets the eternal demand ·
of an audience to see for itself what is important in the motives of
a central figure. The letter incident he changes for the sake of
greater simplicity and verisimilitude. In other words, he is no
haphazard dramatic story teller; for his own time, he certainly
is a master in the craft of plotting.
Moreover, as he matures, he grows to care as much for
character as for incident, as his development of Nano, Margaret
and Dorothea proves. Nashe, thinking of Greene's novels, called
him the 'Homer of women’; and it would not be wholly unfitting
to give him that designation among pre-Shakespearean dramatists.
With him, as with Kyd, the love story becomes, instead of a
by-product, central in the drama-not merely the cause of
ensuing situation, but an interest in itself. To see clearly what he
accomplished for romantic comedy, one should compare his
James IV with Common Conditions. Greene took over the mad
romanticism of the latter production, of which Peele was already
making fun-all this material of disguised women seeking their
lords or lovers, of adventure by flood and field—but, by infusing
into it sympathetic and imaginative characterisation, he transmuted
it into the realistic romance that reaches its full development in
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale.
As Lyly had broken the way for high comedy by his dialogue, the
group of people treated and his feeling for pure beauty, so Greene
broke the way for it on the side of story-an element which was to
play an important part in Shakespeare's romantic work. He sup-
plies just what Lyly lacked, complicated story and verisimilitude,
and, above all, simple human feeling. Thomas Kyd, in his Spanish
Tragedie, had raised such material as that of Tancred and
Gismunda to the level of reality, making the love story central.
Thus, Kyd opened the way to real tragedy. On the level, perhaps
somewhat lower, of romantic comedy, Greene's verisimilitude is
equal. The more we study these men, the more true in many cases
we find contemporary judgment. As Chettle said, Greene, in
1590—2, was the only commedian of a vulgar writer in this
country. '
Thomas Lodge, born 1558, was educated at Trinity college
## p. 139 (#163) ############################################
Sequence of Lodge's Work 139
Oxford; the exact dates of his degrees are not known. He was a
man of manifold activities. As pamphleteer, he wrote against
Stephen Gosson in defence of the stage? He began his play
writing as early as 1582, and his novel writing as early as 1584
with The Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Prisceria. He
took part in the expedition to Tercer and the Canaries in that year,
and whiled away the tiresome hours of the voyage by writing the
source of As You Like It, namely Rosalynde. Euphues' golden
legacie. On his return home, he published a book of verse, Scillaes
Metamorphosis. Just before setting out on a voyage with
Cavendish in 1592, he had published an historical romance,
The History of Robert, second Duke of Normandy, surnamed
Robin the Divell ; during his absence, Greene published for him
his Euphues Shadow, and so facile was Lodge that, immediately
on his return, he printed another historical romance, The Life and
Death of William Longbeard, and his book of sonnets called
Phillis. There followed on these the publication of his two plays,
The Wounds of Civill War and A Looking Glasse for London
and England, 1594, though the latter play was undoubtedly
written much earlier; his book of verse, A Fig for Momus, 1595;
and his romantic story, A Margarite of America, 1596. The
cessation of imaginative work by him after this date, though he
lived on till 1625, is curious. He had become a convert to the
church of Rome : for this, the influence of his second wife, herself
a Roman Catholic, may have been responsible. After all his
roving, he settled down to the life of a physician in London, though,
for a time, before 1619, he was forced to live and practise in the
Netherlands, because of complications in his London life.
Evidently, the activities of the man were varied. Of his plays,
only two survive. Inasmuch as no two critics agree with regard to
the exact parts to be assigned to Greene and Lodge in A Looking
Glasse for London and England, and since the only other play by
Lodge deals with wholly different material, it is nearly impossible
to judge his characteristics on the basis of A Looking Glasse-
one of the last survivals, in modified form, of the disappearing
morality. The Wounds of Civill War is a Titus Andronicus,
with all the thrills and horrors left out. Monotonous in style
and in treatment, it is evidently the work of a man neither by
instinct nor by training a dramatist. It shows, however, the
jumbling of grave and gay usual at the time, without any of the
* See post, vol. vi, chap. xv. As to Lodge's romances see vol. m, chap. XVI,
pp. 350, 358 1.
## p. 140 (#164) ############################################
140
Wits
Plays of the University
saving humour which kept Shakespeare, after his salad days, from
disastrous juxtapositions of this nature.
Lodge added nothing to the development of the English drama.
With ‘his oare in every paper boat,' he, of course, tried his hand
at the popular form. Starting with a university man's suspicion
of it as essentially unliterary, his feeling probably turned to
contempt when he made no real success. At any rate, in 1589,
in his Scillaes Metamorphosis, he gave over the stage, deciding
To write no more of that whence shame doth grow:
Or tie my pen to penny knaves' delight,
But live with fame and so for fame to write.
Lodge, at best but a wayfarer in the hostel of the drama, made
way for a throng of inpouring enthusiasts—and made way
contemptuously.
Thomas Nashe, though younger than Lodge, turned aside, like
Peele, from his real bent into drama, but not, like Peele, to
remain in it and to do a large amount of work. He left St
John's, Cambridge, in the third year after taking his B. A. , because
of some offence given to the authorities, and visited France and
Italy. Returning to London, he not only published his Ana-
tomie of Absurditie and his preface to Greene's Menaphon, both
of 1589, but entered with enthusiasm into the virulent Martin
Marprelate controversy! Nor was his interest decreased when the
quarrel became a personal one between him and Gabriel Harvey.
The long series of politico-religious and maliciously personal
pamphlets poured out by him for some seven years made him
so noteworthy that it is not surprising he should have taken
advantage of his reputation by writing for the stage. Whether
he worked with Marlowe on Dido Queene of Carthage, published
1594, or finished a manuscript left incomplete by the former, is not
clear. Nor is it safe to base judgment of his dramatic ability on
this play because of the contradiction by critics in the apportion-
ing of authorship. Of the lost Isle of Dogs, he says himself that
he wrote only the induction and the first act. When the play bred
trouble, and Nashe, as author, was lodged in the Fleet for a time,
he maintained that he was not really responsible for the contents
of the play. But any reader of his pamphlets will need no proof
that even an induction and a first act, if by Nashe, might contain
much venom. Summer's Last Will and Testament, acted at or
1 See vol. 11, chap. XVII, pp. 392 ff. As to Nashe's other pamphlets and prose
fiction, see ibid. chap. XVI, pp. 362 ff.
a
## p. 141 (#165) ############################################
Characteristics of the Group
141
near Croydon in 1592, gives little opportunity to judge Nashe's
real dramatic quality. It suggests both a morality and a play
written for a special occasion. Nashe here shows himself ingenious,
at times amusing, satirical as always. But to know Nashe at
his best in what is really individual to him, one must read his
pamphlets, or, better still, his Unfortunate Traveller, of 1594,
the first of English picaresque novels. The dramatic work of
Nashe suggests that he has stepped aside into a popular form
rather than turned to it irresistibly. He cannot, like Lyly,
adapt renascence ideas to the taste and the ideals of the most
educated public of the time; nor is he even so successful as Peele,
who, like him, stepped aside, but who succeeded well enough to be
kept steadily away from what he could do best. Nashe is far
enough from Greene, who, whatever his ideas gained from the
university and from foreign travel, could so mould and adjust
them as to be one of the most successful of popular dramatists.
As a group, then, these contemporaries illustrate well the
possible attitudes of an educated man of their time toward
the drama. Midway between Lyly and his successful practice
of the drama, which, for the most cultivated men and women of
his day, maintained and developed standards supplied to him,
at least in part, by his university, and Thomas Lodge, who put
the drama aside as beneath a cultivated man of manifold activities,
stand Nashe, Peele and Greene. Nashe, feeling the attraction of
a popular and financially alluring form, shows no special fitness
for it, is never really at home in it and gives it relatively little
attention. Peele, properly endowed for his best expression in
another field, spends his strength in the drama because, at the
time, it is the easiest source of revenue, and turns from the drama
of the cultivated to the drama of the less cultivated or the un-
cultivated. Greene, from the first, is the facile, adaptive purveyor
of wares to which he is helped by his university experience, but
to which he gives a highly popular presentation. Through Nashe
and Lodge, the drama gains nothing. Passing through the hands
of Lyly, Greene and even Peele, it comes to Shakespeare some-
thing quite different from what it was before they wrote.
University-bred one and all, these five men were proud of their
breeding. However severe from time to time might be their censures
of their intellectual mother, they were always ready to take arms
against the unwarranted assumption, as it seemed to them, of cer-
tain dramatists who lacked this university training, and to confuse
them by the sallies of their wit. One and all, they demonstrated
their right to the title bestowed upon them—'university wits. '
a
## p. 142 (#166) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
MARLOWE AND KYD
CHRONICLE HISTORIES
WHETHER, in strict chronology, we should say Kyd and Marlowe
rather than Marlowe and Kyd is but a minor problem of precedence.
Even if it be found, as some suspect to be the case, that The
Spanish Tragedie is earlier than Tamburlaine, we need not
disturb the traditional order; for Marlowe, more truly than his
contemporary, is the protagonist of the tragic drama in England,
and, in a more intimate sense, the forerunner of Shakespeare
and his fellows. After all, the main consideration is that the two
poets may be grouped together, because, in ways complementary
to each other, they show the first purpose of the higher and more
serious type of English tragedy, the first hints of the romantic
quality which is the literary token and honour of their successors,
and, if Lyly be joined with them, the training and technical circum-
stance of Shakespeare himself.
Of the life of Christopher Marlowe', son of a Canterbury shoe-
maker and a clergyman's daughter, there is little on record. To
some of his contemporaries, and, unfortunately, to later biographers,
interest in his personality has been confined to an exaggerated tale
of blasphemy and evil living; above all, to his death at the early
age of twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl at Deptford, by the hand of
a 'bawdy serving-man,' named Archer, or Fraser, or Ingram. The
recent elucidation of the facts of the poet's career at Cambridge
has happily diverted attention from the sordid ending and adjusted
the balance of the scanty biography. In this short career there
must, of necessity be little available to the antiquary; and yet we
know as much of the man Marlowe as of the man Shakespeare, or,
indeed, of any of the greater Elizabethans, Jonson excepted.
Marlowe proceeded from the King's school at Canterbury to
Bene’t (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, about Christmas
1 This is the baptismal form, but the poet's father is referred to as · Marley'or
Marlyn,' and, in the Cambridge records, the name is spelt Marlin,''Marlyn,'«Marlen,'
Malyn. ' In 1588, he is described as Christopher Marley of London," and Peele
speaks of Marley, the Muses' darling. '
6
6
## p. 143 (#167) ############################################
>
>
Marlowe's Early Life and Literary Work 143
1580. He was in residence, with occasional breaks, till 1587, when
he took his master's degree, following on his bachelor's in 1583—4.
There is evidence that, soon after 1587, he had fallen into dis-
favour at the university, and was already settled in London.
He had probably been there for some time before the production
of Tamburlaine in that year or the next. The interval between
graduation and the appearance of this play is ingeniously filled in for
us by Collier. We must, however, treat the ballad of The Atheist's
Tragedie, which describes Marlowe's actor's life and riot in
London, as one of Collier's mystifications, and, together with it,
the interpolation in Henslowe's diary (fol. 19 v. ) about 'addicions'
to Dr Faustus and a 'prolog to Marloes tambelan. ' Cunningham's
suggestion that the young poet sought adventure as a soldier in the
Low Countries, as Jonson did later, may be correct; but it must
be proved on other grounds than his ‘familiarity with military
terms. ' It is useless to speculate on the causes of the Cambridge
quarrel and his alleged restlessness. Malone's view that Marlowe
had become heretical under the influence of Francis Kett, fellow
of Benet, was based on a misconception of Kett's doctrine. If
Kett resigned his fellowship in 1580", it would be hard to prove
any association between him and Marlowe. The only extant piece
which, with some show of reason, may be ascribed to this early
period is the translation of Ovid's Amores (Certaine of Ovid's
Elegies), which was printed posthumously, c. 1597. As an inter-
pretation of the text, it does not reach even the indifferent level of
Elizabethan scholarship, but it conveys the sensuous quality of
the original. Marlowe's early choice of this subject and of another
in the same vein (said by Warton to have been The Rape of Helen
by Coluthus, non-extant) has many parallels in contemporary litera-
ture; but it has greater value as a commentary on the later work
of the poet who, unlike Shakespeare, was not allowed time to
outlive his youthful passion. We might find in the eighteenth
elegy (Ad Macrum) of the second book of his Ovid a motto for
his coming endeavour, when, sitting in Venus' slothful shade,' he
>
says:
Yet tragedies and sceptres filld my lines,
But, though I apt were for such high designs,
Love laughëd at my cloak.
If, later, he forsook the shade for the stately tent of war,' it was
because his passion had been transformed, not because he had
grown old.
See Dictionary of National Biography, art. Marlowe. '
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--
1
## p. 144 (#168) ############################################
144
Marlowe and Kyd
>
Marlowe's first original work was the two parts of Tamburlaine
the Great, played in 1587 or 1588, and printed in 1590. The
grandeur of the style, the gorgeous strutting of Alleyn in the
title rôle, the contrast of the piece with the plays which had held
the popular stage, gave Tamburlaine a long lease of popularity; so
that the Water Poet could truly say that the hero was not so
famous in his own Tartary as in England. How strongly it im-
.
pressed the public mind may be gauged by the number of attacks,
some reasonably satirical, others merely spiteful, which came from
literary rivals. From this onslaught, directed against what
appeared, to classicists (like Jonson) and to 'rhyming mother
wits,' to be an intolerable breach of all the laws of decorum,'has
sprung the tradition of 'bombast' and 'brag' which has clung to
Marlowe's literary name—a tradition which is at fault, not because
it has no measure of truth, but because it neglects much that is
not less true.
This sudden success confirmed Marlowe in his dramatic
ambition. Hard words like Nashe's about idiote art-masters. . .
who. . . think to outbrave better pens' could not deter this young
Tamburlaine of the stage. On the heels of his first triumph came
The tragicall History of Dr Faustus, probably produced in 1588,
though its entry in the Stationers' register is as late as January,
1601, and the earliest known edition is the posthumous quarto of
1604. Interest in this play-a boldiy drawn study of the pride
of intellect, as consuming as the Tartar's ambition has been
seriously warped by speculation on the crude insets of clownage.
Many readers have felt that the comic scenes are disturbing
factors in the progress of the drama, and that Marlowe's text
has suffered from playhouse editing. The presumption is sup-
ported by the evidence of the printer Jones, who tells us
apologetically, in his edition of Tamburlaine, that he 'purposely
omitted. . . some fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, and, in my
poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter. ' He saw the 'disgrace'
of mixing these things in print 'with such matter of worth. ' The
bias for decorum' may, however, be too strong, and there may
be reasons derived from consideration of the historical sentiment
of the popular drama and of Marlowe's artistic mood to make
us pause in saying that the original has been greatly, and sadly,
altered. As bibliography cannot help us, the position of these
alleged 'addicions' of tomfoolery and squibs in the Marlowe canon
becomes a purely critical matter.
The same problem, but in a more difficult form, is presented in
## p. 145 (#169) ############################################
Edward II.
The Massacre at Paris. Dido 145
the next play, The Jew of Malta. The first record of this piece is in
Henslowe's diary, February 1592, and two years later it is named
in the Stationers' register; but, as there is no evidence that it was
printed before 1633, when it received the editorial care of Thomas
Heywood, we have a ready excuse for disclaiming the poorer
passages as the result of the playhouse practice of writing-up’
for managerial ends. Yet, here again, caution is necessary, before
we say that only in the earlier acts, in which Barabas is presented
with little less than the felicity and dramatic mastery of Shake-
speare's Jew, do we have the genuine Marlowe.
Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta constitute
the first dramatic group.
