From Chaucer to Tennyson
throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakspere's;
but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary value.
There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy
noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players,
who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until stationary
theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and
established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of
literature. In 1576 the first London play-houses, known as the Theater
and the Curtain, were erected in the suburb of Shoreditch, outside the
city walls. Later the Rose, the Hope, the Globe, and the Swan were built
on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers resorting to them
were accustomed to "take boat." These locations were chosen in order to
get outside the jurisdiction of the mayor and corporation, who were
Puritans, and determined in their opposition to the stage. For the same
reason the Blackfriars, belonging to the company that owned the
Globe--the company in which Shakspere was a stockholder--was built,
about 1596, within the "liberties" of the dissolved monastery of the
Blackfriars.
These early theaters were of the rudest construction. The six-penny
spectators, or "groundlings," stood in the yard or pit, which had
neither floor nor roof. The shilling spectators sat on the stage, where
they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence they
chaffed the actors or the "opposed rascality" in the yard. There was no
scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys. Plays were acted in
the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or "Rome," or
whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude appliances
must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight battlements of
Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The dramatists had to
throw themselves upon the imagination of their public, and it says much
for the imaginative temper of the public of that day, that it responded
to the appeal. It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals
of space and time, and "with aid of some few foot and half-foot words,
fight over York and Lancaster's long jars." Pedantry undertook, even at
the very beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, to shackle it with the
so-called rules of Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place, to
make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from
tragedy. But the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer
sympathies of the audience, and they decided for feedom and action,
rather than restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of
Shakspere and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in
London in full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred
and fifty thousand inhabitants.
Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the
Englishmen of that time than it has ever been before or since. It was
his club, his novel, his newspaper, all in one. No great drama has ever
flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the
Elizabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors, and familiar
with stage effect. Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and Fletcher,
who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not dependent on their
pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived in a theatrical
atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be put on.
It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and
playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of
their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough
from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence,
some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome property in
his native Stratford. Accordingly, shortly after 1580, a number of men
of real talent began to write for the stage as a career. These were
young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly,
Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors
and playwrights. Most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in
wretchedness. Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses;
Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and
pickled herring, and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl.
The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays between 1584 and 1601. They were
written for court entertainments, mostly in prose and on mythological
subjects. They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk and
vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them. All the
characters talk Ephuism. The best of these was _Alexander and Campaspe_,
the plot of which is briefly as follows. Alexander has fallen in love
with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the artist Apelles to
paint her portrait. During the sittings Apelles becomes enamored of his
subject and declares his passion, which is returned. Alexander discovers
their secret, but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the
lovers' hands. The situation is a good one, and capable of strong
treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But Lyly slips smoothly over
the crisis of the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives us
clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of
question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings.
For example:
"_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world?"
"_Camp_. He that made me last in the world."
"_Apel_. That was God."
"_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc.
Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and
sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's
indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit
combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_,
greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.
The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere's forerunners,
or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly
called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he
died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have
written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's
Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of
tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent
plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left
little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. _Tamburlaine_
was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with
passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's
phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his
_Discoveries_, the "scenical strutting and furious vociferation" of
Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere put a quotation from _Tamburlaine_ into
the mouth of his ranting Pistol. Marlowe's _Edward II_. was the most
regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays. It was the best
historical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and not undeserving of
the comparison which it has provoked with the latter's _Richard II._ But
the most interesting of Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the
_Tragical History of Doctor Faustus_. The subject is the same as in
Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as
greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to
Goethe's. His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a
mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to
the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power. The tragic
irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus
makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and
feats of legerdermain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The
love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is
entirely wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of
Goethe's Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is
materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in
witchcraft. The greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the last
scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician
awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully
drawn.
O, _lente, lente currite, noctis equi_!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike....
O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!
Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the
comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery.
George Peele's masterpiece, _David and Bethsabe_, was also, in many
respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than
dramatic, consisting not in the characterization--which is feeble--but
in the Eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one noble chorus--
O proud revolt of a presumptuous man,
which reminds one of passages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and
occasionally Peele rises to such high AEschylean audacities as this:
At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.
Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and
careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the
mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and
want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage. He has,
notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness and grace
than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_,
there is a fresh breath, as of the green English country, in such
passages as the description of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and
the picture of the dairy in the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield.
In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art
proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared not
only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable
advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection,
hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the
equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are
certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more developed state of
the art. But the work of this early school settled the shape which the
English drama was to take. It fixed the practice and traditions of the
national theater. It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole
of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in
the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action. It
decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue,
bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions,
hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle,
murder, and sudden death. It established blank verse, with occasional
riming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech, as the
language of the tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the language
of the low comedy and "business" parts. And it introduced songs, a
feature of which Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like
all great poets, invented no new form of literature, but touched old
forms to finer purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even
the old chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the
old jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.
Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the
world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious