English Literature
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough
That sometime grew within this learnéd man.
MARLOWE'S WORKS. In addition to the poem "Hero and Leander," to which we
have referred,[140] Marlowe is famous for four dramas, now known as the
Marlowesque or one-man type of tragedy, each revolving about one central
personality who is consumed by the lust of power. The first of these is
_Tamburlaine_, the story of Timur the Tartar. Timur begins as a shepherd
chief, who first rebels and then triumphs over the Persian king.
Intoxicated by his success, Timur rushes like a tempest over the whole
East. Seated on his chariot drawn by captive kings, with a caged emperor
before him, he boasts of his power which overrides all things. Then,
afflicted with disease, he raves against the gods and would overthrow them
as he has overthrown earthly rulers. _Tamburlaine_ is an epic rather than a
drama; but one can understand its instant success with a people only half
civilized, fond of military glory, and the instant adoption of its "mighty
line" as the instrument of all dramatic expression.
_Faustus_, the second play, is one of the best of Marlowe's works.[141] The
story is that of a scholar who longs for infinite knowledge, and who turns
from Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law, the four sciences of the
time, to the study of magic, much as a child might turn from jewels to
tinsel and colored paper. In order to learn magic he sells himself to the
devil, on condition that he shall have twenty-four years of absolute power
and knowledge. The play is the story of those twenty-four years. Like
_Tamburlaine_, it is lacking in dramatic construction,[142] but has an
unusual number of passages of rare poetic beauty. Milton's Satan suggests
strongly that the author of _Paradise Lost_ had access to _Faustus_ and
used it, as he may also have used _Tamburlaine_, for the magnificent
panorama displayed by Satan in _Paradise Regained_. For instance, more than
fifty years before Milton's hero says, "Which way I turn is hell, myself am
hell," Marlowe had written:
_Faust_. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
_Mephisto_. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
* * * * *
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.
Marlowe's third play is _The Jew of Malta_, a study of the lust for wealth,
which centers about Barabas, a terrible old money lender, strongly
suggestive of Shylock in _The Merchant of Venice_. The first part of the
play is well constructed, showing a decided advance, but the last part is
an accumulation of melodramatic horrors. Barabas is checked in his
murderous career by falling into a boiling caldron which he had prepared
for another, and dies blaspheming, his only regret being that he has not
done more evil in his life.
Marlowe's last play is _Edward II_, a tragic study of a king's weakness and
misery. In point of style and dramatic construction, it is by far the best
of Marlowe's plays, and is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare's historical
drama.
Marlowe is the only dramatist of the time who is ever compared with
Shakespeare.[143] When we remember that he died at twenty-nine, probably
before Shakespeare had produced a single great play, we must wonder what he
might have done had he outlived his wretched youth and become a man. Here
and there his work is remarkable for its splendid imagination, for the
stateliness of its verse, and for its rare bits of poetic beauty; but in
dramatic instinct, in wide knowledge of human life, in humor, in
delineation of woman's character, in the delicate fancy which presents an
Ariel as perfectly as a Macbeth,--in a word, in all that makes a dramatic
genius, Shakespeare stands alone. Marlowe simply prepared the way for the
master who was to follow.
VARIETY OF THE EARLY DRAMA. The thirty years between our first regular
English plays and Shakespeare's first comedy[144] witnessed a development
of the drama which astonishes us both by its rapidity and variety. We shall
better appreciate Shakespeare's work if we glance for a moment at the plays
that preceded him, and note how he covers the whole field and writes almost
every form and variety of the drama known to his age.
First in importance, or at least in popular interest, are the new Chronicle
plays, founded upon historical events and characters. They show the strong
national spirit of the Elizabethan Age, and their popularity was due
largely to the fact that audiences came to the theaters partly to gratify
their awakened national spirit and to get their first knowledge of national
history. Some of the Moralities, like Bayle's _King Johan_ (1538), are
crude Chronicle plays, and the early Robin Hood plays and the first
tragedy, _Gorboduc_, show the same awakened popular interest in English
history. During the reign of Elizabeth the popular Chronicle plays
increased till we have the record of over two hundred and twenty, half of
which are still extant, dealing with almost every important character, real
or legendary, in English history. Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven dramas, ten
are true Chronicle plays of English kings; three are from the legendary
annals of Britain; and three more are from the history of other nations.
Other types of the early drama are less clearly defined, but we may sum
them up under a few general heads: (1) The Domestic Drama began with crude
home scenes introduced into the Miracles and developed in a score of
different ways, from the coarse humor of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ to the
Comedy of Manners of Jonson and the later dramatists. Shakespeare's _Taming
of the Shrew_ and _Merry Wives of Windsor_ belong to this class. (2) The
so-called Court Comedy is the opposite of the former in that it represented
a different kind of life and was intended for a different audience. It was
marked by elaborate dialogue, by jests, retorts, and endless plays on
words, rather than by action. It was made popular by Lyly's success, and
was imitated in Shakespeare's first or "Lylian" comedies, such as _Love's
Labour's Lost_, and the complicated _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. (3) Romantic
Comedy and Romantic Tragedy suggest the most artistic and finished types of
the drama, which were experimented upon by Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and
were brought to perfection in _The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet_,
and _The Tempest_. (4) In addition to the above types were several
others,--the Classical Plays, modeled upon Seneca and favored by cultivated
audiences; the Melodrama, favorite of the groundlings, which depended not
on plot or characters but upon a variety of striking scenes and incidents;
and the Tragedy of Blood, always more or less melodramatic, like Kyd's
_Spanish Tragedy_, which grew more blood-and-thundery in Marlowe and
reached a climax of horrors in Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_. It is
noteworthy that _Hamlet, Lear_, and _Macbeth_ all belong to this class, but
the developed genius of the author raised them to a height such as the
Tragedy of Blood had never known before.
These varied types are quite enough to show with what doubtful and unguided
experiments our first dramatists were engaged, like men first setting out
in rafts and dugouts on an unknown sea. They are the more interesting when
we remember that Shakespeare tried them all; that he is the only dramatist
whose plays cover the whole range of the drama from its beginning to its
decline. From the stage spectacle he developed the drama of human life; and
instead of the doggerel and bombast of our first plays he gives us the
poetry of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In a word,
Shakespeare brought order out of dramatic chaos. In a few short years he
raised the drama from a blundering experiment to a perfection of form and
expression which has never since been rivaled.
IV. SHAKESPEARE
One who reads a few of Shakespeare's great plays and then the meager story
of his life is generally filled with a vague wonder. Here is an unknown
country boy, poor and poorly educated according to the standards of his
age, who arrives at the great city of London and goes to work at odd jobs
in a theater. In a year or two he is associated with scholars and
dramatists, the masters of their age, writing plays of kings and clowns, of
gentlemen and heroes and noble women, all of whose lives he seems to know
by intimate association. In a few years more he leads all that brilliant
group of poets and dramatists who have given undying glory to the Age of
Elizabeth. Play after play runs from his pen, mighty dramas of human life
and character following one another so rapidly that good work seems
impossible; yet they stand the test of time, and their poetry is still
unrivaled in any language. For all this great work the author apparently
cares little, since he makes no attempt to collect or preserve his
writings. A thousand scholars have ever since been busy collecting,
identifying, classifying the works which this magnificent workman tossed
aside so carelessly when he abandoned the drama and retired to his native
village. He has a marvelously imaginative and creative mind; but he invents
few, if any, new plots or stories. He simply takes an old play or an old
poem, makes it over quickly, and lo! this old familiar material glows with
the deepest thoughts and the tenderest feelings that ennoble our humanity;
and each new generation of men finds it more wonderful than the last. How
did he do it? That is still an unanswered question and the source of our
wonder.
There are, in general, two theories to account for Shakespeare. The
romantic school of writers have always held that in him "all came from
within"; that his genius was his sufficient guide; and that to the
overmastering power of his genius alone we owe all his great works.
Practical, unimaginative men, on the other hand, assert that in Shakespeare
"all came from without," and that we must study his environment rather than
his genius, if we are to understand him. He lived in a play-loving age; he
studied the crowds, gave them what they wanted, and simply reflected their
own thoughts and feelings. In reflecting the English crowd about him he
unconsciously reflected all crowds, which are alike in all ages; hence his
continued popularity. And in being guided by public sentiment he was not
singular, but followed the plain path that every good dramatist has always
followed to success.
Probably the truth of the matter is to be found somewhere between these two
extremes. Of his great genius there can be no question; but there are other
things to consider. As we have already noticed, Shakespeare was trained,
like his fellow workmen, first as an actor, second as a reviser of old
plays, and last as an independent dramatist. He worked with other
playwrights and learned their secret. Like them, he studied and followed
the public taste, and his work indicates at least three stages, from his
first somewhat crude experiments to his finished masterpieces. So it would
seem that in Shakespeare we have the result of hard work and of orderly
human development, quite as much as of transcendent genius.
LIFE (1564-1616). Two outward influences were powerful in developing the
genius of Shakespeare,--the little village of Stratford, center of the most
beautiful and romantic district in rural England, and the great city of
London, the center of the world's political activity. In one he learned to
know the natural man in his natural environment; in the other, the social,
the artificial man in the most unnatural of surroundings.
From the register of the little parish church at Stratford-on-Avon we learn