This cannot be ascribed merely to its presenting a few words which are now obsolete; nor can it be owing, as has been sometimes alleged, to the tedium inseparable from protracted allegory. Allegorical fable may be made entertaining. With every disadvantage of dress and language, the humble John Bunyan has made this species of writing very amusing.

The reader may possibly smile at the names of Spenser and Bunyan being brought forward for a moment in comparison; but it is chiefly because the humbler allegorist is so poor in language that his power of interesting the curiosity is entitled to admiration. We are told by critics that the passions may be allegorized, but that Holiness, Justice, and other such thin abstractions of the mind, are too unsubstantial machinery for a poet;-yet we all know how well the author of the Pilgrim's Progress (and he was a poet, though he wrote in prose) has managed such abstractions as Mercy and Fortitude. In his artless hands, those attributes cease to be abstractions, and become our most intimate friends. Had Spenser, with all the wealth and graces of his fancy, given his story a more implicit and animated form, I cannot believe that there was any thing in the nature of his machinery to set bounds to his power of enchantment. Yet, delicious as his poetry is, his story, considered as a romance, is obscure, intricate, and monotonous. translated entire cantos from Tasso, but adopted the wild and irregular manner of Ariosto. The difference is, that Spenser appears, like a civilized being, slow and sometimes half forlorn, in exploring an uninhabited country, while Ariosto traverses the regions of romance like a hardy native of its pathless wilds. Hurd and others, who forbid us to judge of "The Fairy Queen" by the test of classical unity, and who compare it to a gothic church, or a gothic garden, tell us what is little to the purpose. They cannot persuade us that the story is not too intricate and too diffuse. The thread of the narrative is so entangled, that the poet saw the necessity for explaining the design of his poem in prose, in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh; and the perspicuity of a poetical design which requires such an explanation may, with no great severity, be pronounced a contradiction in terms. It is

He

degrading to poetry, we shall perhaps be told, to attach importance to the mere story which it relates. Certainly the poet is not a great one whose only charm is the management of his fable; but where there is a fable, it should be perspicuous.

There is one peculiarity in "The Fairy Queen," which, though not a deeply pervading defect, I cannot help considering as an incidental blemish; namely, that the allegory is doubled and crossed with complimentary allusions to living or recent personages, and that the agents are partly historical and partly allegorical. In some instances the characters have a threefold allusion. Gloriana is at once an emblem of true glory, an empress of fairy-land, and her majesty Queen Elizabeth. Envy is a personified passion, and also a witch, and, with no very charitable insinuation, a type of the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. The knight in dangerous distress is Henry IV. of France; and the knight of magnificence, Prince Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, an ancient British hero, is the bulwark of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. Such distraction of allegory cannot well be said to make a fair experiment of its power. The poet may cover his moral meaning under a single and transparent veil of fiction; but he has no right to muffle it up in foldings which hide the form and symmetry of truth.

Upon the whole, if I may presume to measure the imperfections of so great and venerable a genius, I think we may say that, if his popularity be less than universal and complete, it is not so much owing to his obsolete language, nor to degeneracy of modern taste, nor to his choice of allegory as a subject, as to the want of that consolidating and crowning strength, which alone can establish works of fiction in the favour of all readers and of all ages. This want of strength, it is but justice to say, is either solely or chiefly apparent when we examine the entire structure of his poem, or so large a portion of it as to feel that it does not impel or sustain our curiosity in proportion to its length. To the beauty of insulated passages who can be blind? The sublime description of "Him who with the Night durst ride," The House of Riches," "The Canto of Jealousy," "The Masque of Cupid,” and other parts, too many to enumerate, are so

splendid, that after reading them, we feel it for the moment invidious to ask if they are symmetrically united into a whole. Succeeding generations have acknowledged the pathos and richness of his strains, and the new contour and enlarged dimensions of grace which he gave to English poetry. He is the poetical father of a Milton and a Thomson. Gray habitually read him when he wished to frame his thoughts for composition; and there are few eminent poets in the language who have not been essentially indebted to him.

"Hither, as to their fountain, other stars

Repair, and in their urns draw golden light." The publication of "The Fairy Queen," and the commencement of Shakspeare's dramatic career, may be noticed as contemporary events; for by no supposition can Shakspeare's appearance as a dramatist be traced higher than 1589,* and that of Spenser's great poem was in the year 1590. I turn back from that date to an earlier period, when the first lineaments of our regular drama began to show themselves.

Before Elizabeth's reign we had no dramatic authors more important than Bale and Heywood the Epigrammatist. Bale, before the titles of tragedy and comedy were well distinguished, had written comedies on such subjects as the Resurrection of Lazarus, and the Passion and Sepulture of our Lord. He was, in fact, the last of the race of mysterywriters. Both Bale and Heywood died about the middle of the sixteenth century, but flourished (if such a word can be applied to them) as early as the reign of Henry VIII.

Until the time of Elizabeth, the public was contented with mysteries, moralities, or interludes, too humble to deserve the name of comedy. The first of these, the mysteries, originated almost as early as the Conquest, in shows given by the church to the people. The moralities,† which were chiefly allegorical, probably arose about the middle of the fifteenth century, and the interludes became prevalent during the reign of Henry VIII.‡

Lord Sackville's Gorboduc, first represented in 1561-62, and Still's Gammer Gurton's Needle, about 1566, were the earliest, though faint, drafts of our regular tragedy and comedy. They did not, however, immediately supersede the taste for the allegorical moralities. Sackville even introduced dumb show in his tragedy to explain the piece, and he was not the last of the old dramatists who did so. One might conceive the explanation of allegory by real personages to be a natural complaisance to an audience; but there is something peculiarly ingenious in making allegory explain reality, and the dumb interpret for those who could speak. In reviewing the rise of the drama, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and Sackville's Gorboduc, form convenient resting-places for the memory; but it may be doubted if their superiority over the mysteries and moralities be half so great as their real distance from an affecting tragedy, or an exhilarating comedy. The main incident in Gammer Gurton's Needle is the loss of a needle in a man's small-clothes.|| Gorboduc has no interesting plot or impassioned dia

It is clear that before 1591, or even 1592, Shakspeare had no celebrity as a writer of plays; he must, therefore, have been valuable to the theatre chiefly as an actor; and if this was the case, namely, that he speedily trode the stage with some respectability, Mr. Rowe's tradition that he was at first admitted in a mean capacity must be taken with a bushel of doubt.-CAMPBELL, Life of Shakspeare, Svo, 1838, p. xxii.-C.

The Mysteries Mr. Collier would have called MiraclePlays, and the Moralities, Morals or Moral-Plays.-C.

Warton also mentions Rastell, the brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, who was a printer; but who is believed by the historian of our poetry to have been also an author, and to have made the moralities in some degree the vehicle of science and philosophy. He published [about 1519] a new interlude on The Nature of the Four Elements, in which The Tracts of America lately discovered and the manners of the natives are described.-[See Collier's Annals, vol. ii. p. 319.]

Sackville became a statesman, and forsook the pleasant paths of poetry; nor does he appear to have encouraged it in others; for in an age rife with poetical

commendations, he seems to have drawn but one solitary sonnet, and that attached to a book where praises were made cheap-"The Faerie Queene." He died, and received a funeral sermon from Abbot, but no tears of regret from the Muses;-he who should have been a second Pembroke or Southampton. Still took to the church and became a bishop-but not before the creator of our comedy had written a supplicatory letter that, for acting at Cambridge, a Latin play should be preferred to an English one.-C.

Speaking of Gammer Gurton, Scott writes, "It is a piece of low humour; the whole jest turning upon the loss and the recovery of the needle with which Gammer Gurton was to repair the breeches of her man Hodge; but in point of manners, it is a great curiosity, as the carta supellex of our ancestors is scarcely anywhere so well described." "The unity," he continues, “of time, place, and action, are observed through the play, with an accuracy of which France might be jealous." And adds, alluding to Gorboduc, "It is remarkable, that the earliest English tragedy and comedy are both works of considerable merit; that each partakes of the distinct character

logue; but it dignified the stage with moral reflection and stately measure. It first introduced blank verse instead of ballad rhymes in the drama. Gascoigne gave a farther popularity to blank verse by his paraphrase of Jocasta, from Euripides, which appeared in 1566. The same author's "Supposes," translated from Ariosto, was our earliest prose comedy. Its dialogue is easy and spirited. Edward's Palamon and Arcite was acted in the same year, to the great admiration of Queen Elizabeth, who called the author into her presence, and complimented him on having justly drawn the character of a genuine lover.

Ten tragedies of Seneca were translated into English verse at different times, and by different authors, before the year 1581. One of these translators was Alexander Neyvile, afterwards secretary to Archbishop Parker, whose Edipus came out as early as 1563; and though he was but a youth of nineteen, his style has considerable beauty. The following lines, which open the first act, may serve as a specimen:

"The night is gone, and dreadful day begins at length t' appear,

And Phoebus, all bedimm'd with clouds, himself aloft doth rear;

And, gliding forth, with deadly hue and doleful blaze in skies,

Doth bear great terror and dismay to the beholder's eyes. Now shall the houses void be seen, with plague devoured quite,

And slaughter which the night hath made shall day bring forth to light.

Doth any man in princely thrones rejoice? O brittle joy! How many ills, how fair a face, and yet how much annoy In thee doth lurk, and hidden lies what heaps of endless strife!

They judge amiss, that deem the Prince to have the happy life."

In 1568 was produced the tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda," by Robert Wilmot, and four other students of the Inner Temple. It is reprinted in Reed's plays; but that reprint is taken not from the first edition, but from one greatly polished and amended in 1592.* Considered as a piece

of its class; that the tragedy is without intermixture of comedy; the comedy without any intermixture of tragedy."-Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 333.-C.

Newly revived, and polished according to the decorum of these days. That is, as Mr. Collier supposes, by the removal of the rhymes to a blank verse fashion. -C.

In the title-page it is denominated "A lamentable Tragedy, mixed full of pleasant Mirth."

The Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furi

coming within the verge of Shakspeare's age, it ceases to be wonderful. Immediately subsequent to these writers we meet with several obscure and uninteresting dramatic names, among which is that of Whetstone, the author of "Promos and Cassandra,” [1578], in which piece there is a partial anticipation of the plot of Shakspeare's Measure for Measure. Another is that of Preston, whose tragedy of Cambyses† is alluded to by Shakspeare, when Falstaff calls for a cup of sack, that he may weep "in King Cambyses' vein." There is, indeed, matter for weeping in this tragedy; for, in the course of it, an elderly gentleman is flayed alive. To make the skinning more pathetic, his own son is witness to it, and exclaims,

"What child is he of Nature's mould could bide the same to see,

His father fleaed in this wise? O how it grieveth me!" It may comfort the reader to know that this theatric decortication was meant to be allegorical; and we may believe that it was performed with no degree of stage illusion that could deeply affect the spectator.?

In the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, we come to a period when the increasing demand for theatrical entertainments produced play-writers by profession. The earliest of these appears to have been George Peele, who was the city poet and conductor of the civil pageants. His "Arraignment of Paris" came out in 1584. Nash calls him an Atlas in poetry. Unless we make allowance for his antiquity, the expres sion will appear hyperbolical; but, with that allowance, we may justly cherish the memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our language. His "David and Bethsabe" is the earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender, and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity and ideal beauty.

ous vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. --BEN JONSON. (Gifford, vol. ix. p. 180.)

I suspect that Shakspeare confounded King Cambyses with King Darius. Falstaff's solemn fustian bears not the slightest resemblance, either in metre or in matter, to the vein of King Cambyses. Kyng Daryus, whose doleful strain is here burlesqued, was a pithie and plesaunt Enterlude, printed about the middle of the sixteenth century.-GIFFORD. Note on Jonson's Poetaster, Works, vol. ii. p. 455.-C.

The stage direction excites a smile. Flea him with a false skin.-C.

There is no such sweetness of versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare.* David's character -the traits both of his guilt and sensibility -his passion for Bethsabe-his art in inflaming the military ambition of Urias, and his grief for Absalom, are delineated with no vulgar skill. The luxuriant image of Bethsabe is introduced by these lines:

Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes
That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love,
And stroke my bosom with thy gentle fan:
This shade, sun-proof, is yet no proof for thee.
Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring,
And purer than the substance of the same,
Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce.
Thou and thy sister, soft and sacred Air,
Goddess of life, and governess of health,
Keeps every fountain fresh, and arbour sweet.
No brazen gate her passage can refuse,
Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath:
Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes,
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes,
To play the wanton with us through the leaves.
David. What tunes, what words, what looks, what
wonders pierce

My soul, incensed with a sudden fire?

What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise,
Enjoys the beauty of so fair a dame?

Fair Eva, placed in perfect happiness,

Lending her praise-notes to the liberal heavens,
Strook with the accents of archangels' tunes,
Wrought not more pleasure to her husband's thoughts,
Than this fair woman's words and notes to mine.
May that sweet plain, that bears her pleasant weight,
Be still enameli'd with discolour'd flowers!
That precious fount bear sand of purest gold;
And, for the pebble, let the silver streams
Play upon rubies, sapphires, chrysolites;
The brims let be embraced with golden curls
Of moss, that sleeps with sound the waters make;
For joy to feed the fount with their recourse
Let all the grass that beautifies her bower
Bear manna every morn instead of dew.

* Mr. Dyce, in his edition of Peele, has quoted this passage from Mr. Campbell, "a critic," he styles him, who is by no means subject to the pardonable weakDess of discovering beauties in every writer of the olden time."-p. xxxviii.

It is quoted too by Mr. Hallam, (Lit. Hist. vol. ii. p. 278), who concurs with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive.-C.

† An interesting subject of inquiry in Shakspeare's literary history, is the state of our dramatic poetry when he began to alter and originate English plays. Before his time mere mysteries and miracle plays, in which Adam and Eve appeared naked, in which the devil dis

At the conclusion of the tragedy, when David gives way to his grief for Absalom, he is roused with great dignity and energy by the speech of Joab. When informed by Joab of the death of his son, David exclaims:

David. Thou man of blood! thou sepulchre of death! Whose marble breast entombs my bowels quick, Did I not charge thee, nay, entreat thy hand, Even for my sake, to spare my Absalom? And hast thou now, in spite of David's health, And scorn to do my heart some happiness,

Given him the sword, and spilt his purple soul?

Joab. What! irks it David, that he victor breathes, That Juda. and the fields of Israel

Should cleanse their faces from their children's blood?
What! art thou weary of thy royal rule?

Is Israel's throne a serpent in thine eyes,
And he that set thee there, so far from thanks,
That thou must curse his servant for his sake?
Hast thou not said, that, as the morning light,
The cloudless morning, so should be thine house,
And not as flowers, by the brightest rain,
Which grow up quickly, and as quickly fade?
Hast thou not said, the wicked are as thorns,

That cannot be preserved with the hand;

And that the man shall touch them must be arm'd
With coats of iron, and garments made of steel,
Or with the shaft of a defenced spear?
And art thou angry he is now cut off,

That led the guiltless swarming to their deaths,
And was more wicked than an host of men?
Advance thee from thy melancholy den,
And deck thy body with thy blissful robes,
Or, by the Lord that sways the Heaven, I swear,
I'll lead thine armies to another king,
Shall cheer them for their princely chivalry;
And not sit daunted, frowning in the dark,

When his fair looks, with oil and wine refresh'd,
Should dart into their bosoms gladsome beams,

And fill their stomachs with triumphant feasts;
That, when elsewhere stern War shall sound his trump,
And call another battle to the field,

Fame still may bring thy valiant soldiers home,

And for their service happily confess

She wanted worthy trumps to sound their prowess;
Take thou this course, and live;-Refuse, and die.

Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe, were the other writers for our early stage, a part of whose career preceded that of Shakspeare.† Lyly, whose dramatic language is prose, has traits of genius which we should not expect from his generally depraved taste, and he has several graceful

played his horns and tail, and in which Noah's wife boxed the patriarch's ears before entering the ark, had fallen comparatively into disuse, after a popularity of four centuries: and, in the course of the sixteenth century, the clergy were forbidden by orders from Rome to perform in them. Meanwhile "Moralities," which had made their appearance about the middle of the fifteenth century, were also hastening their retreat, as well as those pageants and masques in honour of royalty, which nevertheless aided the introduction of the drama. But we owe our first regular dramas to the universities, the inns of court, and public seminaries. The scholars of these establishments engaged in free translations of clas

interspersions of "sweet lyric song." But his manner, on the whole, is stilted. "Brave Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,"* of whose "mighty muse" Ben Jonson himself speaks reverentially, had powers of no ordinary class, and even ventured a few steps into the pathless sublime. But his pathos is dreary, and the terrors of his Muse remind us more of Minerva's gorgon than her countenance. The first sober and cold school of tragedy, which began with Lord Sackville's Gorboduc, was succeeded by one of headlong extravagance. Kyd's bombast was proverbial in his own day. With him the genius of tragedy might be said to have run mad; and, if we may judge of one work, the joint production of Greene and Lodge, to have hardly recovered her wits in the company of those authors. The piece to which I allude is entitled "A Lookingglass for London" [1594]. There, the Tamburlane of Kyd is fairly rivalled in rant and blasphemy by the hero Rasni, King of Nineveh, who boasts

"Great Jewry's God, that foil'd stout Benhadad,
Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought;
For be he God in Heaven, yet viceroys know
Rasni is God on earth, and none but he."

sical dramatists, though with so little taste, that Seneca was one of their favourites. They caught the coldness of that model, however, without the feeblest trace of his slender graces; they looked at the ancients without understanding them; and they brought to their plots neither unity, design, nor affecting interest. There is a general similarity among all the plays that preceded Shakspeare in their ill-conceived plots, in the bombast and dulness of tragedy, and in the vulgar buffoonery of comedy.

Of our great poet's immediate predecessors, the most distinguished were Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe. Lyly was not entirely devoid of poetry, for we have some pleasing lyrical verses by him; but in the drama he is cold, mythological, and conceited, and he even polluted for a time the juvenile age of our literature with his abominable Euphuism. Peele has left some melodious and fanciful passages in his "David and Bethsabe." Greene is not unjustly praised for his comedy "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay." Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy" was at first admired, but, subsequently, quoted only for its samples of the mock sublime. Nash wrote no poetry except for the stage; but he is a poor dramatic poet-though his prose satires are remarkably powerful. Lodge was not much happier on the stage than Nash; his prose works are not very valuable; but he wrote one satire in verse of considerable merit, and various graceful little lyrics. Marlowe was the only great man among Shakspeare's precursors; his conceptions were strong and original; his intellect grasped his subject as a whole: no doubt he dislocated the thews of his language by overstrained efforts at the show of strength, but he delineated character with a degree of truth unknown to his predecessors: his "Edward the Second" is pathetic; and his "Faustus" has real gran

In the course of the play, the imperial swaggerer marries his own sister, who is quite as consequential a character as himself; but finding her struck dead by lightning, he deigns to espouse her lady-inwaiting, and is finally converted after his wedding, by Jonah, who soon afterwards arrives at Nineveh. It would be perhaps unfair, however, to assume this tragedy as a fair test of the dramatic talents of either Greene or Lodge. Ritson recommended the dramas of Greene as well worthy of being collected. The taste of that antiquary was not exquisite, but his knowledge may entitle his opinion to consideration.†

Among these precursors of Shakspeare we may trace, in Peele and Marlowe, a pleasing dawn of the drama, though it was by no means a dawn corresponding to so bright a sunrise as the appearance of his mighty genius. He created our romantic drama, or if the assertion is to be qualified, it requires but a small qualification. There were, undoubtedly, prior occupants of the dramatic ground in our language; but they appear only like unprosperous settlers on the patches and skirts of a wilderness,

deur. If Marlowe had lived, Shakspeare might have had something like a competitor.-CAMPBELL, Life of Shak speare, p. xxiii.-C.

* Drayton.-C.

His Dramas and Poems were printed together in 1831, by Mr. Dyce. "In richness of fancy, Greene," says Mr. Dyce, "is inferior to Peele; and with the exception of his amusing comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, there is, perhaps, but little to admire in his dramatic productions."-C.

Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age,

I found not, but created first the stage,—
And if I drain'd no Greek or Latin store,
"Twas that my own abundance gave me more.
DRYDEN of Shakspeare.

The English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakspeare. Had he received an education more extensive, and possessed a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius, as comprehensive and versatile as intense and powerful, Shakspeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order; and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical rule.