TO A.D. 1603.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. GEORGE CHAPMAN. 487 request of Queen Elizabeth, who was so much pleased with Falstaff, in the two parts of King Henry IV., that she commanded a play upon Falstaff in love, being, moreover, in such haste for it that it was to be written in fourteen days. This may or may not be true. "The Diary of John Manningham," a member of the Middle Temple, makes known to us that Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was acted in the Middle Temple on the 2nd of February, 1602. In that year Venus and Adonis reached a fifth edition. In May, 1602, Shakespeare continued the investment of his earnings in his native place, by buying of William and John Combe 107 acres of arable land, in the parish of Old Stratford, for £327; and later in the year he made two more purchases, one of a cottage and its ground near New Place, the other, for sixty pounds, of a messuage with two barns, two gardens, and two orchards. He was extending his grounds behind New Place towards the river. It seems to have been in the earlier part of this year, 1602, that Shakespeare's Hamlet was first acted. It was entered by a bookseller on the Stationers' Register on the 26th of July, 1602, to be published as it was latelie acted." Thus, by the date of the death of Elizabeth, March 24, 1603, Shakespeare had risen to the full height of his genius. 98. Of the new dramatists rising around him one, George Chapman, was as old as Elizabeth's reign; and he was not a dramatist only. He was born in 1557 or 1559, at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. He was called afterwards by William Browne, 66 The Shepherd of fair Hitching Hill." About 1574 he was sent to Trinity College, Oxford, where he fastened with especial delight on the Greek and Roman classics. After two years at Oxford, he left without a degree. Nothing is known of him as a writer before 1594, when he published Σkiavvктos, The Shadow of Night: containing two poetical hymnes devised by G. C., Gent. In the next year, 1595, this was followed by Ouid's Banquet oj Sence, a Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie, and his amorous Zodiacke. In 1598 appeared the first section of the main work of George Chapman's life, his translation of Homer in Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, Prince of Poetes, translatea according to the Greeke, in Judgment of his best Commentaries, by George Chapman, Gent. The seven books were the first and second, and the seventh to the eleventh. They are in the fourteen-syllabled measure, to which he adhered throughout the Iliad and Odyssey; but there was a separate issue by him of a version of The Shield of Achilles, in 1598, in ten-syllabled verse. Chapman had now also begun his career as a dramatist, and in 1598 appeared his first printed comedy, the Blind Beggar of Alexandria, which had been acted sundry times by the Earl of Nottingham's servants. The same company acted his second comedy, printed in 1599, An humerous Dayes Myrth. At the end of Elizabeth's reign, Chapman was at work still on his Homer, but had not yet issued another section of it. 99. Thomas Heywood was a native of Lincolnshire and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He joined the players, and was a young man when writing for them in 1596. In 1598 he produced War without Blows and Love without Suit, and immediately afterwards Joan as good as my Lady. Heywood passed into the next reign as one of the most prolific playwrights of the time. Of about the same age as Heywood was Thomas Middleton, a gentleman's son, born in London in 1570. He was admitted of Gray's Inn in 1593, and published in 1597 the Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased; probably he was also the author of Microcynicon, six snarling Satires, published in 1599. In the same year he joined William Rowley in writing his first play, the Old Law. In 1602, Middleton wrote the tragedy of Randall Earl of Chester, without help, and the Two Harpies in partnership with others; in 1602, also, his Blurt, Master Constable, or the Spaniard's Night Walk was printed. His Thomas Dekker, who was also born about 1570, began to write in the days of the later Elizabethan drama. His Phaeton was acted in 1597; other plays rapidly followed. comedies of Old Fortunatus and the Shoemaker's Holiday were printed in 1600, and his Satiromastix, presently to be spoken of, in 1602. John Marston, who was educated at Oxford, began in 1598 as a satirist with the Scourge of Villanie, three Books of Satires, and the Metamorphoses of Pigmalion's Image, and certaine Satyres, one of the books burnt by Whitgift and Bancroft (§ 92) when they forbade the writing of more satire. Marston wrote a tragedy, Antonio and Mellida, which had a sequel, Antonio's Revenge, and these plays were both printed in 1602. 100. But foremost among these writers of the later Elizabethan TO A.D. 1603.] OTHER DRAMATISTS. BEN JONSON. 489 drama, was Ben Jonson. He was of a north country family, son of a gentleman who was ruined by religious persecution in the reign of Mary, who became a preacher in Elizabeth's reign, and who died a month before the poet's birth, in 1573. Ben Jonson's mother took a bricklayer for second husband, and at some time during Ben's childhood she was living in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross. The boy was first taught in the parish school of St. Martin's, and then owed to the kindness of William Camden (§ 82) an admission to Westminster School. He is said to have tried his stepfather's business for a little while, before he went to fight against Spain as a volunteer in the Low Countries. When he came home he joined the players and married. In 1597, when he was twenty-four years old, he was a sharer in the company of the Rose at Bankside. In these early days Ben Jonson acted the old Marshal Jeronimo in Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and enriched the play with an effective scene between mad old Jeronimo and a painter, in the manner of the earlier Elizabethan drama. In 1596 Ben Jonson's comedy, Every Man in his Humour was produced, with Italian characters and a scene laid at Florence. He then revised it, made the characters all English, and laid the scene in and between Coleman Street and Hoxton. In this, its present shape, it was performed in 1598 by the company to which Shakespeare belonged, the name of Shakespeare himself standing at the head of the list of actors. Every Man in His Humour is a true comedy carefully constructed. Its action, contained within a single day, opens at six in the morning and ends with a supper. The course of time is unobtrusively but exactly marked as the story proceeds, and the plot is not only contrived to show varieties of character, each marked by a special humour or predominance of one peculiar quality, but the incidents are run ingeniously into a dramatic knot which the fifth act unties. But Ben Jonson's next three plays were of another character; they were not so much true comedies as bright dramatic satires, based on a noble sense of life and of the poet's place in it. Every Man out of his Humour, produced in 1599, Cynthia's Revels, in 1600, and the Poetaster, in 1601, were annual satires, the first touching especially the citizens, the second the courtiers, and the third the poets, in as far as any of these lived for aims below the dignity of manhood. Ben Jonson was at that time of his life tall, meagre, large-boned, with a pock-marked face and eager eyes; a poet and keen satirist, with a true reverence for all that was noble, a lofty sense of the aims of literature, and a young zeal to set the world to rights, with a bold temper and an over-readiness for self-assertion. In Cynthia's Revels he jested scornfully at the euphuisms and shallow graces of the Court, at lives spent in the mere study of airs and grimaces. "Would any reasonable creature,” he asked through one of his characters, "make these his serious studies and perfections, much less only live to these ends, to be the false pleasure of a few, the true love of none, and the just laughter of all?" He urged for the Court idlers, in words characteristic of the mind that made him, next to Shakespeare, foremost among English dramatists,— 'That these vain joys in which their wills consume To raise their beings to eternity, May be converted on works fitting men; To God's high figures, which they have in power. When Dekker and Marston considered themselves to have been pointed at in the Poetaster, they resolved to give a taste of his own whip to the too ardent satirist, whose vivid impersonations of the follies of society were looked upon as personal attacks by all the men in whom such follies were conspicuous. Dekker wrote his Satiromastix (whip for the satirist), and it was acted as a retort on Jonson's Poetaster. But although Ben Jonson's own admirable bully, Captain Tucca, was reproduced and let loose upon him to abuse him roughly, yet through the characters of Demetrius and Crispinus, by whom Dekker and Marston held themselves to have been attacked, and who were also reproduced, the retort was made in a tone that showed the quarrel to be, as a Latin motto to the printed book expressed, among friends only. The motto said, "I speak only to friends, and that upon compulsion." One passage will serve as sufficient evidence of this. Ben Jonson, as Horace Junior, is made to plead for his satires of citizens and others : "Horace. What could I do, out of a just revenge, But bring them to the stage? They envy me, Because I hold more worthy company. "Demetrius. Good Horace, no. My cheeks do blush for thine As often as thou speaks't so. Where one true TO A.D. 1603.] BEN JONSON. DEKKER. MARSTON. And nobly virtuous spirit for thy best part On which thy learning grows, and can give liíe Dance antics on your paper- 491 In that spirit Dekker resolved to let his eager, positive friend Ben feel in his own person how he liked being held up to the town as the butt of satire. Jonson replied with an Epilogue to his Poetaster, and urged, as he had always urged, that his books were taught "to spare the persons and to speak the vices." But, in fact, he generously yielded, and said, "Since the comic Muse Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try If tragedy have a more kind aspect. Her favours in my next I will pursue, When, if I prove the pleasure of but one, So he judicious be, he shall be alone A theatre unto me." Thus it happened that Ben Jonson's last work in Elizabeth's reign was upon his first tragedy Sejanus. CHAPTER VIII. FROM ELIZABETH TO THE COMMONWEALTH. A. REIGN OF JAMES I. 1. WHEN Elizabeth died, on the 24th of March, 1603, and James VI. of Scotland became James I. of England, Shakespeare was thirty-nine years old and Bacon forty-two. Spenser had been dead about four years, Richard Hooker three. Robert Greene had been dead about eleven years and Christopher Marlowe ten. George Peele was dead, and Thomas Nash had been dead a year or two. Thomas Sackville, the author of our first tragedy (ch. vii. § 8), now Lord Buckhurst, aged seventy |