Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by, By yelping hounds pull'd down, shall seem to die: In Gaveston is portrayed the gay, unthinking, pleasureloving man, a king's favourite, taking nothing seriously, despising nobles and people alike, meeting death with the same levity as he treated life. Young Spencer, who succeeds Gaveston as court favourite, possesses a character to be met in all ages-the man who, while pretending to be acting for the good of society, is only striving to attain his own selfish ends. Kent, a character of Marlowe's own creation, stands forth as a type of the weak, undecided, and impulsive man. In company with all the dramatists prior to Shakespeare, Marlowe lacked the skill to draw female characters; the women of his dramas are shadowy and unreal, and thus, although in Queen Isabella Marlowe had the opportunity of creating a powerful female character, he did not avail himself of it. Nevertheless Marlowe's play is one of the masterpieces of our literature, and the tragic force and passion displayed in it, especially in the death scene at the end, have scarcely been surpassed. Other plays begun, though not finished by Marlowe, are the Massacre of Paris, dealing with the St. Bartholomew, and Dido, Queen of Carthage; the latter was finished by Nash. In addition to the plays Marlowe is the author of a fine poetical fragment, a paraphrase from Musæus, entitled Other works Hero and Leander; of the well-known song by Marlowe. "Come live with me and be my love" (first printed in the Passionate Pilgrim, 1599), to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply; and of a fragment beginning "I walked along a stream for pureness rare ", printed in England's Parnassus (1600). Marlowe's genius was appreciated by his contemporaries and immediate successors. Shakespeare refers to him in As You Like It (iii. 5. 82) as the "Dead Shepherd", and quotes from Hero and Leander the line Who ever loved that loved not at first sight. Sir Hugh Evans, in the Merry Wives of Windsor (iii. 1. 17), quotes lines from the second verse of "Come live with me and be my love". Izaak Walton in his Complete Angler (1653) also quotes the song. Shakespeare's Richard II. bears a strong likeness to Marlowe's Edward II., which, as Charles Lamb thinks, furnished Shakespeare with hints which he scarcely improved on. Ben Jonson in his poem to the memory of Shakespeare writes of "Marlowe's mighty line", and Drayton (1563-1631) declares that Marlowe Had in him those brave translunary things In our own day Marlowe is greatly honoured by all true lovers of poetry. Mr. Swinburne eloquently says of him : : This poet, a poor scholar of humblest parentage, lived to perfect the exquisite metre invented for narrative by Chaucer, giving it (to my ear at least) more of weight and depth, of force and fulness, than its founder had to give;1 he invented the highest and hardest form of English verse, the only instrument since found possible for our tragic or epic poetry; he created the modern tragic drama; and at the age of thirty he went "Where Orpheus and where Homer are". Before entering on a study of Shakespeare, the next great figure in our literature, we should notice two points that were not without influence on his work. Opposition It must be remembered that the city of Lon- to theatrical enterprise in don was exceedingly Puritan in its views, and London. 1 Hero and Leander is written in heroic couplets. greatly opposed to stage plays and the building of theatres: thus it is that the first playhouses were built outside the city boundaries. The mayor and corporation objected to the performance of stage plays on a Sunday, a survival of the Roman Catholic practice, and as many difficulties as possible were placed in the way of the players. In 1579 Stephen Gosson wrote a pamphlet against the stage, entitled the School of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such-like caterpillars of the Commonwealth. Nevertheless, in spite of all opposition, the dramatists and the playhouses flourished, and during the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, dramatic performances were the favourite amusement of the English people. The classical form of drama found no favour in England. The attempts made in our earliest tragedies to follow classical models were soon abandoned. English dramatists refused to shackle themselves with the rules that obtained in the Greek drama; they cared little or nothing for the unities of time or place.2 Such scorn of ancient usages was, in the beginning, often blamed. A dialogue of the day, if we may call it so, contains the following: G. After dinner we will go see a play. H. The plays that they play in England are not right comedies. 7. Yet they do nothing else but play every day! H. Yea, but they are neither right comedies nor right tragedies. G. How would you name them, then? H. Representations of histories without any decorum. It is in large measure to this lack of decorum that we owe 1 Gosson abused poets as well as players, and dedicated the pamphlet to Sir Philip Sidney. It is quite likely that Sidney intended his Apology jor Poetry as an answer to the School of Abuse, for while Gosson defamed poetry, Sidney put it at the head of intellectual gifts. 2 In the Greek drama every play had to preserve the three unities, i.e. there was (1) one main plot (unity of action); (2) the time of the action was not to exceed twenty-four hours (unity of time); (3) the place of action was to be the same throughout the play, or if that was not possible, the distances between the scenes of action were not to be greater than could be traversed in the allotted time (unity of place). the greatness of our dramatic literature. The English drama was to be not classical, but romantic: English playwrights were to take the whole of human life in the past and present for their province, were to give the reins to their fancy, and to indulge in all the variety they knew. In the words of Mr. J. A. Symonds, the muse of this Romantic drama "held the keys of Tragedy and Comedy; bid classic myth and legend suit her turn; stretched her rod over fairyland and history; led lyric poetry, like a tamed leopard-whelp, at chariot wheels of her fantastic progress. . . . For her there was preparing empire over the whole world of man:-over the height and breadth and depth of heaven and earth and hell; over facts of nature and fables of romance; over histories of nations and of households; over heroes of past and present times, and airy beings of all poets' brains!" Older students should read Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature, Vol. I. to end of chap. iii.; Symonds' Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama. |