he makes a faint protest against the new-fangled blank verse as a vehicle of dramatic expression. It is to Greene's credit that, to the end of his life, he endeavoured, even when imitating Marlowe's manner, to carry out his own principle of mingling instruction with amusement (utile dulci): all his plays have a faint shadow of a moral in them. But in point of style he soon found that he must surrender to his formidable rival: public taste after the appearance of Tamburlaine insisted on a certain amount of rant, rodomontade, bloodshed, and villainy, in sounding blank verse; and as the following extracts from his dramas show, Greene did his best to follow in the footsteps of the reigning favourite. In his Orlando Furioso, Sacripant, having been mortally wounded by Orlando, makes his departure with the following not unsuccessful imitation of Marlowe in his worst moments :

Phoebus, put on thy sable-suited wreath,

Clad all thy spheres in dark and mourning weeds,
Parched be the earth to drink up every spring:

Let corn and trees be blasted from above;

Heaven turned to brass, and earth to wedge of steel;
The world to cinders. Mars, come thundering down,
And never sheath thy swift revenging sword,

Till, like the deluge in Deucalion's days,

The highest mountains swim in streams of blood.
Heaven, earth, men, beasts, and every living thing,
Consume and end with County Sacripant.1

In A Looking Glass for London, the joint work of Greene and Lodge, Rasni, King of Nineveh, enters with an address to his subordinate allies, which it will be at once perceived is a copy of Tamburlaine :

So pace on, ye triumphant warriors,

Make Venus' leman, armed in all his pomp,
Bash at the brightness of your hardy looks,
For you, the viceroys, are the cavaliers

That wait on Rasni's royal mightiness.

Boast, petty kings, and glory in your fates,

That stars have made your fortunes climb so high
To give attend on Rasni's excellence.2

1 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 108.

2 Ibid. p. 117.

The Machiavellian morality, first introduced on the stage by Marlowe, is embodied in James IV., where Ateukin, the flattering villain of the play, urges the king to murder his wife :

Why, prince, it is no murder in a king,
To end another's life to save his own.
For you are not as common people be,
Who die and perish with a few men's tears;
But if you fail the state doth whole default,
The realm is rent in twain in such a loss.
And Aristotle holdeth this for true,

Of evil needs [that] we must choose the least:
Then better were it that a woman died,

Than all the help of Scotland should be blent.
'Tis policy, my liege, in every state,

To cut off members that disturb the head:
And by corruption generation grows,

And contraries maintain the world and state.1

The History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon (which from internal evidence I should take to be Greene's first play in Marlowe's manner), imitates closely the plan of action in Tamburlaine, and sometimes reproduces almost exactly that poet's exaggerated conception of virtù. Thus in Tamburlaine, the conqueror being about to die, commands his son Amyras to mount his chariot (drawn by vanquished kings) and to receive the crown. The prince resists vehemently, and when he at last obeys his father, he expresses himself as follows:

Heavens witness me with what a broken heart,
And damned spirit I ascend this seat,

And send my soul, before my father die,
His anguish and his burning agony.2

When Alphonsus, in Greene's play, has conquered his enemies he magnanimously distributes all the crowns to his lieutenants, reserving to himself only the prospect of wider conquests. Albinius, one of his subordinates, professes his reluctance to avail himself of his leader's generosity in exactly the same manner as Marlowe's Amyras :

1 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 211.
2 Marlowe's Works (Dyce), p. 73.

Thou king of heaven, which by thy power divine,

Dost see the secret of each living heart,

Bear record now with what unwilling mind

I do receive the crown of Arragon.1

The play of Greene which bears the least resemblance to Marlowe is The History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; but I doubt not that the feeble episodes of magic, which form one portion of this ill-constructed drama, were the result of the vast popularity of Faustus.

While Greene was thus compelled to follow the triumphal march of Marlowe, his genius struggled to assert itself; and his efforts to blend the violent and rhetorical vein and the loftier spirit of his rival with his own tastes and dramatic traditions, though unhappy enough in their artistic issues, give a certain character and interest to his plays. He was meant by nature for a novelist rather than for a playwright. His fancy, graceful, pastoral, and tender, is most at home when it is dwelling amid sheepfolds, and on the downs of Arcadia, and it is almost pathetic to see how gladly he escapes from the atmosphere of blood and thunder to which the public craving condemns him, to indulge for a moment in idyllic byplay in some retired woodland nook. His softer nature appears in the construction of his plots, which abound in tragic incidents, but invariably end happily. If his kings of Nineveh exalt themselves to heaven like Tamburlaine, it is only that they may afterwards repent in sackcloth and ashes, like the author of the Groat's-worth of Wit. He kills his dramatis persona plentifully, but casually. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, for example, two Oxford scholars go to consult Friar Bacon, who shows them in his magic glass their fathers engaged in a duel. Though previously friends, the young men at once fall to fighting, and stab each other on the stage. This incident is quite unnecessary to the action of the play. To relieve his scenes of horror or solemn rhetoric, the dramatist takes obvious pleasure in bringing in clowns who chatter together in a semi-Euphuistic dialect, and are soundly belaboured by a madman, or carried away on the back of a devil, 1 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 234.

after the manner of the old-fashioned Vice, for the gratification of the spectators. Marlowe disdained these antiquated tricks, which were doubtless surviving relics of Greene's original style.

What is best and most characteristic in the plays of Greene is the poetry of his pastoral landscape, and his representation of the characters of women; in both of these respects he exercised an unmistakable influence on the genius of Shakespeare. His pastoral vein is displayed rather in his novels than in his dramas: it runs very happily through Menaphon, and even more so through Pandosto, a story which furnished Shakespeare with the outline of his Winter's Tale. But there are touches of the same quality in his Orlando Furioso, and the rustic scenes in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay have much charm. Perhaps the best lines Greene ever wrote are those describing Oxford in the latter play :

EMPEROR.

Trust me, Plantagenet, these Oxford schools
Are richly seated near the river side:

The mountains full of fat and fallow deer,

The battling pastures lade with kine and flocks,
The town gorgeous with high-built colleges,
And scholars seemly in their grave attire,
Learned in searching principles of art.

What is thy judgment, Jaques Vandemast?
VANDEMAST. That lordly are the buildings of the town,

Spacious the rooms, and full of pleasant walks;
But for the doctors, how that they be learned,
It may be meanly, for aught I can hear.1

Greene was also the first to exhibit on the stage romantic ideals of female character. It is true that he could only represent one type of woman under various aspects, loving, virtuous, constant, unfortunate, or all at once. So possessed was his imagination of the beauty of this ideal, that he bestowed it on a heroine who would seem least of all to deserve it-the fickle, treacherous, and roving Angelica of Ariosto; and he even altered the story of the Orlando Furioso for the sake of his imaginary charThe type is reproduced in the somewhat insipid

acter.

1 Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works (Dyce), p. 166.

person of Margaret, the fair Maid of Fressingfield, who, wooed by Lord Lacy on behalf of Prince Edward, first falls in love with the deputy-wooer, and braves the displeasure of the Prince; then, being deceived by a heartless stratagem of her lover to test her constancy, prepares to retire into a convent; but afterwards, on hearing the explanation of Lacy, returns to his arms without any show of resentment. This unvarying conception is worked out with some care in Greene's romantic history of James IV., which, if we set aside its utter want of historic truth, is perhaps the best constructed of his plays. Virtue is here seen triumphant in Ida resisting the solicitations of the king; tender fidelity shines in the persecuted Queen Dorothea; both are developments of the simple character of Isabella in the Groat's-worth of Wit; in other words of Greene's own forsaken and deeply injured wife. There is something truly pathetic in the steadiness with which the poet kept this idea of moral beauty before his imagination throughout his dissolute career: the name which he assigned to the heroic Queen of James IV. was apparently that of his wife; nor did he hesitate in his last moments to trust his wife's generosity for the repayment of the debt incurred to the poor people who had cared for him on his friendless deathbed.1 Pale and shadowy as Greene's creations appear in comparison with the infinite variety of Shakespeare's heroines, it is honourable to him that he should have introduced on the English stage the prototype of Viola and Imogen.

Passing on to Peele, we find ourselves in company with a man less interesting in his life and character than Greene, but with a finer range of imagination, which gave an impulse of its own to the development of the drama. Like Greene, Peele, in his later plays, Edward I., The Battle of Alcazar, and David and Bethsabe, felt the influence of Marlowe, but without, like Greene, succumbing to

1 "Doll I charge thee by the love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died on the streets."-Greene's last letter to his wife. Dyce, Account of R. Greene and his Writings (Works), p. 57.