day,' contains some depth of thought and passion. Summer's last Will and Testament is the one conspicuous dramatic effort of Thomas Nash (1557-1601), perhaps more famous as a caustic pamphleteer and an unscrupulous satirist-witness his baiting of poor Gabriel Harvey (see p. 53, s. 35), and his battle with the controversialist Hydra of the Puritans, 'Martin Mar-prelate.' But Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), already mentioned as the translator of Musæus (see p. 57, s. 36), was undoubtedly the greatest of the pre-Shakesperian writers, and 'the true founder of the dramatic school;'—* For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.' (Drayton.) 'In delineating character, he reaches a degree of truth to which they [the predecessors of Shakespeare] make comparatively slight approaches; and in Faustus and Edward the Second he attains to real grandeur and pathos. Even in his earlier tragedy, Tamburlaine, amid all its extravagance of incident and inflation of style, we recognise a power which none of its contemporaries possessed.'† Besides the above-named plays, Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta, and he is also the author of the beautiful lyric,-Come live with me, and be my love, to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the almost equally celebrated answer,—If all the world and love were young. Marlowe died at thirty, by a thrust from his own dagger, which had been turned against him in a tavern brawl. Indeed, misfortunes or excesses appear to have been the fate and portion of most of the earlier Elizabethan playwrights. Of those already mentioned:-Lyly, in one of his latest petitions to the Queen, speaks of 'patience to his creditors, melancholy without measure to his friends, and beggarie without shame to his family,' as the only legacies he has to leave; Kyd died miserably; Nash wrote for bare existence, to use his own words, 'contending with the cold and conversing with scarcity;' Peele, again, was poor and dissolute, and Greene, after a life of follies and contritious, ended at last ignobly of an illness brought on by a surfeit. 40. Shakespeare.—The brief paragraphs which can be given in these pages to William Shakespeare (1564-1616) must, of necessity, be inadequate to the subject. It is easy enough, in the spirit of the words of Chaucer's Man of Law, to make a 'short tale' of the 'chaf' and 'stro',' but it is impossible to do justice to the Taine, Eng. Literature (Van Laun's trans.), Bk. II. ch. ii. Div. 4. † Dyce, Shakespeare's Works, 1866, i. 47, 'corn.' In so far, however, as the life proper of our greatest writer is concerned, a limited space will suffice for the slender collection of facts which have been established respecting it; for, even at this date, a century's curiosity has added little to the well-worn and well-known summary, setting forth that,― All that is known with any certainty concerning Shakespeare is-that he was born at Stratfordupon-Avon-married and had children there-went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.'* The parents of Shakespeare were John Shakespeare, of Stratford, and Mary Arden. He was born in 1564, and christened on the 26th April, in that year; acquired, it is supposed, his 'small Latin and less Greek' at the Stratford grammar-school; perhaps - might we so interpret a passage in a contemporary writer,†—passed some time in an attorney's office; and was married, in 1582, to Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a yeoman in an adjoining hamlet. Shortly afterwards, for unknown reasons, he quitted his native town, left his wife and children at Stratford, came up to London, and joined R. Burbage's company of players. From this date (1586?) to 1592, nothing is known of his movements. In the latter year, as would appear from the Groatsworth of Witte of Robert Greene (see p. 61, s. 39), he had become sufficiently expert as an author and adapter to have excited the envy of rival dramatists:-'There is an upstart crow,' says the above-mentioned writer, 'beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde [a parody of a line in Henry VI., Third Part, Act 1. sc. 4], supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and beeing an absolute Johannes Fac-totum, is, in his own conceyte, the only SHAKESCENE in a countrey. In 1593, he published his Venus and Adonis, styled in its preface the first heir of his invention,' and, in 1594, Lucrece, both dedicated to Henry Wriothesly, third Earl of Southampton. In 1597, from his purchase of a large house in his native town, it may be assumed that his career had been sufficiently prosperous; and, in 1598, another and less equivocal allusion is made to his literary reputation. In his Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, Francis Meres writes as follows:-'As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the Nash's words rather apply to Kyd. * George Steevens, 1780 English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage;' and he goes on to enumerate some of his tragedies and comedies. Omitting a few intervening facts relating to his family, the next thing of importance concerning the poet is his removal to Stratford about 1610. Here, occupying himself in agricultural pursuits, he lived in retirement until his death, which took place on the 23rd of April, 1616, at the age of 52. The record of his life, it will be seen, affords little or no information with regard to his personal character. But there is no reason to suppose that it was not in consonance with his literary eminence. Behind that 'livelong monument' which he has built for himself, to use Milton's words, 'in our wonder and astonishment,' the placid figure of the poet may be discerned dimly,-a kindly, noble, and equal-minded man. 'I lov'd him,' says his rival, Ben Jonson, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd... But hee redeemed his vices [i.e. his literary vices], with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.' * As a detailed list of the dramatic works of Shakespeare, with the approximate dates of their production, is given in the note to this chapter, it is not necessary to particularise them here. It may be stated, however, that QUARTO editions of the following plays were issued during the author's lifetime:-(1) Richard II., 1597; (2) Richard III., 1597; (3) Romeo and Juliet, 1597; (4) Love's Labour's Lost, 1598; (5) Henry IV., Part 1, 1598; (6) Henry IV., Part 2, 1600; (7) Much Ado About Nothing, 1600; (8) Henry V., 1600; (9) The Merchant of Venice, 1600; (10) Titus Andronicus, 1600; (11) Midsummer Night's Dream, 1600; (12) The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602; (13) Hamlet, 1603; (14) King Lear, 1608; (15) Troilus and Cressida, 1609; and (16) Pericles, 1609. In 1622, Othello was published; and in 1623 appeared the first complete FOLIO edition of the author's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published according to the True Originall Copies, which included all the foregoing plays (with the exception of Pericles) and twenty others. The collectors were John Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeare's fellow-actors and co-partners in the Globe Theatre; the printers were Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, and the volume contained a portrait by Droeshout, with lines by Timber: De Shakespeare nostrat. 1641. Ben Jonson. The 'putters forth' claimed to have used the 'true originall copies,' but it is more than probable that their real sources were the above-mentioned quartos, or imperfect transcripts of the author's MSS. A second folio edition, memorable as containing Milton's first published English poem (see p. 82, s. 57), followed in 1632; and a third in 1664, to which the seven following plays were added:-(1) Pericles, Prince of Tyre; (2) The London Prodigall; (3) The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell; (4) Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham; (5) The Puritan Widow; (6) A York-shire Tragedy; and (7) The Tragedy of Locrine. Of these the first alone has been retained. The earliest annotated Edition of Shakespeare's plays was that of Nicholas Rowe, 1709-10. Since that date commentators have been innumerable. Of Shakespeare's minor works, two have already been mentioned (see p. 63, s. 40). To Venus and Adonis and Lucrece must be added a part of the collection entitled The Passionate Pilgrime, 1599, and the 'sugred Sonnets' referred to by Meres, 1609. Beyond recording the opinion of Mr. Staunton that although these [lastmentioned] poems are written in the poet's own name, and are, apparently, grounded on actual incidents in his career, they are, for the most part, if not wholly, poetical fictions,' we cannot touch upon the vexed question of their intention or the person to whom they were addressed. Ample information will be found in the edition by Prof. Dowden, 1881, and some new theories in that of Mr. Thos. Tyler, 1890. To select a suitable testimony to Shakespeare's genius is far more difficult than to find one. His prime and all-inclusive characteristic was the perfection of his imaginative faculty:-' He was of imagination all compact,' as he says of his own poet. 'He had a complete imagination—in this his genius lay,' says M. Taine; and the definition might content us. But a few words at hand may be quoted, because they carry this idea a little further. that he had no peculiar or prominent merit. constituted, so justly and admirably balanced, that it had nothing in excess. It was the harmonious combination, the well-adjusted powers, aiding and answering to each other, as occasion required, that produced his completeness, and constituted the secret of his great intellectual strength.'* His great merit is, His mind was so well As regards his work (we here borrow the words of a master of literary style), 'In the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakespeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life; that life, in * Memoir of Jonson, by Barry Cornwall, in Moxon's Edn. 1842, p. xxxv. fact, is a new thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakespeare has extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are) by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. . . . In Shakespeare all is presented in the concrete; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, or by some effort of an anatomical artist, but embodied and imbedded, so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex system of a human life; a life in which all the elements move and play simultaneously, and with something more than mere simultaneity or co-existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other,―nay, even acting by each other and through each other. In Shakespeare's characters is felt for ever a real organic life, where each is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole is for each and in each. They only are real incarnations . . . . From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtlest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case; yet, at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune.'* 41. The Contemporaries of Shakespeare.-The dramatist with whom we propose to head this class is generally admitted to hold the second place in the Elizabethan School. If Shakespeare had little learning, his contemporary, Ben Jonson (1573– 1635), was perhaps unwieldily equipped with erudition, although— to use Mr. Campbell's figure-it does not impair his activity. Expanding this, M. Taine compares him to 'the war elephants which used to bear towers, men, weapons, machines, on their backs, and ran as swiftly under the freight as a nimble steed.' Jonson, like the scholar he was, sought his models among the ancients, and endeavoured to construct his pieces in accordance with classical precepts. Unfortunately, it is the defect of Sejanus, 1603, and Catiline, 1611, · that these labored and understanding works' can claim no loftier praise than that of being excellent mosaic. Upon his Comedies of Manners and Character (or rather characteristics-for he does not so much depict character as personify abstract qualities), † – upon Every Man in his Humour, Volpone, The Silent Woman, and the Alchemist, his reputation principally rests. Nevertheless, in Cynthia's Revels and other Masques (of which class of composition De Quincey, Works, 1862-3, xv, 71, 72, 82, † Hallam, Taine, |