That he meant no disparagement to Shakspere is manifest from his immediately calling upon Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, on Aristophanes, and on the tragic and comic poets of Rome, to rise and admire Shakspere's masterpieces in both kinds. To time Shakspere is no tributary, nor are his works subject to comparisons based on considerations of chronology or nationality:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!

I have dwelt upon this elegy, not merely to disprove the false inference which some have drawn from it to Jonson's disadvantage, but also to show how a great contemporary poet regarded Shakspere's relation to his comrades in the dramatic art. If Shakspere is to be judged by 'years,' by chronological parallelism, says Jonson, he must be compared with that group of playwrights of whom Lyly, Marlowe, and Kyd are representatives. But Shakspere is amenable to no such jurisdiction. He belongs to the world and to all ages. The incarnation of his spirit at that precise moment is a matter of indifference.

The group of six dramatists enumerated above must further be distinguished. Marlowe stands apart, as a vastly superior genius, the true founder of Shaksperian drama, a pioneer and creator in the highest sense. Kyd is separated from the rest by the comparative insignificance of what remains to us of his

GREENE'S COTERIE.

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work. Greene heads a little coterie of writers bound together by ties of personal comradeship, and animated by a common spirit. Greene, Peele, Nash, and Lodge attach themselves to the past rather than the future. They submit to Marlowe's unavoidable dictatorship, and receive him into their society. But they belong to a school which became doubly antiquated in their lifetime. Marlowe outshone them; and Shakspere, as they were uneasily conscious, was destined to eclipse them altogether. I propose, therefore, to treat now of these four friends, having already given a word to Kyd in isolation, while I reserve a separate study for the greatest poet of the group. This method conforms to the evolution of the Drama. But it has the disadvantage, of anticipating what properly belongs to the criticism of Marlowe. He revolutionised the English stage during Greene's ascendency, and forced his predecessors to adapt their style to his inventions.

II.

The men of letters who form the subject of this study were respectably born and highly educated. They prided themselves on being gentlemen and scholars, Masters of Arts in both Universities. Robert Greene was the son of well-to-do citizens of Norwich, where he was born perhaps about the year 1550.1 He took his Bachelor's degree at Cambridge in 1578, and passed Master in 1583. George Peele was a gentleman of Devonshire, born about 1558, instructed in the rudiments at Christ's Hospital, elected Student

1 This date is quite uncertain.

of Christ Church in 1573, and admitted Bachelor of Arts in 1577. While still at Oxford, he acquired considerable literary reputation, and was praised by Dr. Gager—no mean judge-for his English version of an Iphigeneia.' Thomas Lodge was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London, by his wife Anne, a daughter of Sir William Laxton. Born in 1557, he took his degree at Oxford in 1577, and entered the Society of Lincoln's Inn next year. Being of a roving nature, Lodge never settled down to literature. After wasting the time which ought to have been given to law studies, he joined the expeditions of Captain Clarke and Cavendish, visited the Canary Islands, and penned a fashionable romance in the Straits of Magellan. On his return to England he adopted medicine as a profession, studied at Avignon, and established himself as a practitioner in London. Upon his title-pages he was always careful to describe himself 'Thomas Lodge of Lincoln's Inn Gentleman.' Greene assumed the style of Magister utriusque Academiæ,' and Pecle insisted on his Master of Arts degree. Thomas Nash, descended from an honourable family in Herefordshire, was born at Lowestoft in 1567. He took his degree at Cambridge in 1585, and after travelling in Italy, came up to London, where we find him engaged in literary work with Greene about the year 1587.

Unlike Lyly, these four friends did not attach themselves to the Court. They worked for booksellers and public theatres, selling their compositions, and living on the produce of their pen. They seem to have been diverted from more serious studies and a settled career by the attractions of Bohemian life in

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London. What we know of their biography, proves how fully some of them deserved the stigma for vagrancy, loose living, and profanity, which then attached to players and playwrights. Excluded from respectable society, depending on the liberality of booksellers and managers, with no definite profession, enrolled in no acknowledged guild or corporation, they passed their time at taverns, frequented low houses of debauchery, and spent their earnings in the company of thieves and ruffians. In this general description it would not be quite safe to insert the name of Thomas Lodge, though we may presume that he shared in the amusements, and possibly also, if we ascribe biographical value to his Alarum against Usurers,' in the pecuniary troubles of his literary friends. But Lodge was almost too scrupulous to keep aloof from the set before the public, describing himself as 'Gentleman' and 'of Lincoln's Inn.' From the degradation which then attached to professional literature no one did so much to elevate the playwright's calling as Shakspere. He found it sunk below contempt, not only in the estimation of Puritans, but also in fact, patent to every observer of the lives of men like Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Styling themselves scholars, and boasting their academical degrees, they chose a theatrical career because of its lawlessness and jollity. Shakspere came from Stratford with no such pretensions, adopted the stage as a profession, and dignified it by his honest labour.1

1 Notice the curious praise bestowed upon Shakspere for respectability by Chettle in his Kind-Harts Dreame. He apologises for having printed some offensive passages in Greene's posthumous Groatsworth of Wit, and distinctly asserts Shakspere's superiority to the Bohemian playwrights. Quoted by Dyce in his edition of Marlowe (1858), p. xxix.

III.

The romance of Greene's life has been often told; but it so exactly illustrates the conditions under which our playwrights at this epoch laboured, that I cannot omit to pass it in review. The details are gathered not only from uncontradicted statements of his literary enemies, but also from his own autobiographical writings, Never too Late,' A Groatsworth of Wit,' and The Repentance of Robert Greene.' Laboriously pieced together from the extracts furnished by Alexander Dyce, and illustrated by gleanings from contemporary tracts, the record of Greene's brief career and miserable end may be presented with some completeness.

After taking his degree as Bachelor of Arts in 1578, Greene left England, persuaded by some college associates, to wander over Spain and Italy. For being at the University of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth; who drew me to travel into Italy and Spain, in which places I saw and practised such villany as is abominable to declare.' His early friends and comrades are described in the following sentence: Being then conversant with notable braggarts, boon companions, and ordinary spendthrifts, that practised sundry superficial studies, I became as a scion grafted into the same stock, whereby I did absolutely participate of their nature and qualities.' When he returned to England he took up his residence again at Cambridge, 'ruffling out in silks, in the habit of malcontent, and