semblance which renders a caricature most effective: "I was altogether unacquainted with the man, and never once saluted him by name: but who in London hath not heard of his dissolute and licentious living; his fond disguising of a Master of Art with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company; his vainglorious and Thrasonical braving; his fripperly extemporizing and Tarletonizing; his apish counterfeiting of every ridiculous and absurd toy; his fine cozening of jugglers, and finer juggling with cozeners; his villainous cogging and foisting; his monstrous swearing and horrible forswearing; his impious profaning of sacred texts; his other scandalous and blasphemous raving; his riotous and outrageous surfeiting; his continual shifting of lodgings; his plausible mustering and banqueting of roysterly acquaintance at his first coming; his beggarly departing in every hostess's debt; his infamous resorting to the Bankside, Shoreditch, Southwark, and other filthy haunts; his obscure lurking in basest corners; his pawning of his sword, cloak, and what not, when money came short; his impudent pamphleting, fantastical interluding, and desperate libelling, when other cozening shifts failed?"* This is the bitterness of revenge, not softened even by the penalty which the wretched man had paid for his offence, dying prematurely in misery and solitariness, and writing from his lodging at a poor shoemaker's these last touching lines to the wife whom he had abandoned: "Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid: for if he and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streets." As a writer he was one amongst the most popular of his day. His little romances of some fifty pages each were the delight of readers for amusement, for half a century. They were the companions of the courtly and the humble, -eagerly perused by the scholar of the University and the apprentice of the City. They reached the extreme range of popularity. In Anthony Wood's time they were mostly sold on ballad-monger's stalls ;' and Sir Thomas Overbury describes his Chambermaid *Four Letters, &c., 1592.' as reading "Greene's works over and over." Some of these tales are full of genius, illregulated no doubt, but so pregnant with invention, that Shakspere in the height of his fame did not disdain to avail himself of the stories of his early contemporary. The dramatic works of Greene were probably much more numerous than the few which have come down to us; and the personal character of the man is not unaptly represented in these productions. They exhibit great pomp and force of language; passages which degenerate into pure bombast from their ambitious attempts to display the power of words; slight discrimination of character; incoherence of incident; and an entire absence of that judgment which results in harmony and proportion. His extravagant pomp of language was the characteristic of all the writers of the early stage except Shakspere; and equally so were those attempts to be humorous which sank into the lowest buffoonery. In the lyrical pieces which are scattered up and down Greene's novels, there is occasionally a quiet beauty which exhibits the real depths of the man's genius. Amidst all his imperfections of character, that genius is fully acknowledged by the best of his contemporaries. THOMAS LODGE was Greene's senior in age, and greatly his superior in conduct. He had been a graduate of Oxford; next a player, though probably for a short time; was a member of Lincoln's Inn; and, finally, a successful physician of the name of Thomas Lodge is held to be identical with Lodge the poet. He was the author of a tragedy, "The Wounds of Civil War: lively set forth in the true Tragedies of Marius and Sylla.' He had become a writer for the stage before the real power of dramatic blank verse had been adequately conceived. His lines possess not the slightest approach to flexibility; they invariably consist of ten syllables, with a pause at the end of every line-"each alley like its brother;" the occasional use of the triplet is the only variety. Lodge's tragedy has the appearance of a most correct and laboured performance; and the result is that of insufferable tediousness. In conjunction with Greene he wrote 'A Looking Glass for London,' one of the most extraordinary pro- | the heavenly Bull by the dewlap."* Another of the chosen companions of Robert Greene was THOMAS NASH, who in his "beardless years" had thrown himself upon the town, having forfeited the honours which his talents would have commanded in the due course of his University studies. In an age before that of newspapers and reviews, this young man was a pamphleteering critic; and very sharp, and to a great extent very just, is his criticism. The drama, even at this early period, is the bow of Apollo for all ambitious poets. It is Nash who, in the days of Locrine, and Tamburlaine, and perhaps Andronicus, is the first to laugh at "the servile imitation of vainglorious tragedians, who contend not so seriously to excel in action, as to embowel the clouds in a speech of comparison; thinking themselves more than initiated in poets' immortality if they but once get Boreas by the beard, and It is he who despises the "idiot art-masters that So That impatient spirit, with the flashing eye and the lofty brow, is CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. It is he who addressed his first audience in *Epistle prefixed to Greene's 'Menaphon.' † Ibid. words which told them that one of high pre- | petual trumpet, perpetual scarlet. tensions was come to rescue the stage from the courtiers of Tamburlaine says,— the dominion of feebleness and buffoonery : "From jiggling veins of rhyming mother wits, As such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine, Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms."* His daring was successful. It is he who is accounted the "famous gracer of tragedians."+ It is he who has "gorgeously invested with rare ornaments and splendid habiliments the English tongue." It is he who. after his tragical end, was held "Fit to write passions for the souls below."§ It is he of the "mighty line." The name of Tamburlaine was applied to Marlowe himself by his contemporaries. It is easy to imagine that he might be such a man as he has delighted to describe in his Scythian Shepherd "Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned, Like his desire lift upward and divine; So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, bear Old Atlas' burthen. Pale of complexion, wrought in him with Thirsting with sovereignty and love of arms. Making it dance with wanton majesty. His arms and fingers, long and snowy-white, The essential character of his mind was that One of "You see, my lord, what working words he hath." Hear a few of these "working words:" "The god of war resigns his room to me, Meaning to make me general of the world: throne. Where'er I come the fatal sisters sweat, Been oft resolv'd in bloody, purple showers, A meteor that might terrify the earth, And make it quake at every drop it drinks." Through five thousand lines have we the same pompous monotony, the same splendid exaggeration, the same want of truthful simplicity. But the man was in earnest. His poetical power had nothing in it of affectation and pretence. There is one speech of Tamburlaine which unveils the inmost mind of Tamburlaine's author. It is by far the highest passage in the play, revealing to us something nobler than the verses which "jet on the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-Bell." "Nature that form'd us of four elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds; Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all.”++ The "ripest fruit of all," with Tamburlaine, was an "earthly crown;" but with Marlowe, there can be little doubt, the "climbing after knowledge infinite" was to be rewarded with wisdom, and peace, the fruit of wisdom. But he sought for the "fruit" in dark and for**Tamburlaine,' Part I., Act v tt Ibid. Part I., Act II. "What hell it is in suing long to bide." He had been a dreary time waiting and petitioning for the place of Master of the Revels. In his own peculiar phraseology he tells the Queen, in one of his petitions,— "For these ten years I have attended with an unwearied patience, and now I know not what crab took me for an oyster, that in the middest of your sunshine, of your most gracious aspect, hath thrust a stone between the shells to rate me alive that only live on dead hopes."§ Drayton described him truly, at a later period, when poetry had asserted her proper rights, as bidden paths. He plunged into the haunts to Nash, "he is but a little fellow, but he of wild and profligate men, lighting up their | hath one of the best wits in England."‡ murky caves with his poetical torch, and The little man knew gaining nothing from them but the renewed power of scorning the unspiritual things of our being, without the resolution to seek for wisdom in the daylight track which every man may tread. If his life had not been fatally cut short, the fiery spirit might have learnt the value of meekness, and the daring sceptic have cast away the bitter "fruit of half-knowledge. He did not long survive the fearful exhortation of his dying companion, the unhappy Greene:-"Wonder not, thou famous gracer of tragedians, that Greene, who hath said with thee, like the fool in his heart, there is no God, should now give glory unto His greatness: for penetrating is His power, His hand lies heavy upon me, He hath spoken unto me with a voice of thunder, and I have felt He is a God that can punish enemies. Why should thy excellent wit, His gift, be so blinded that thou shouldest give no glory to the giver?" Marlowe resented the accusation which Greene's words conveyed. We may hope that he did more; that he felt, to use other words of the same memorable exhortation, that the " liberty" which he sought was an "infernal bondage." "Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, times confounded. What should we think of a prologue, addressed to a gaping pit, and Eloquent and witty Jonx LYLY" was hushing the cracking of nuts into silence, called, by a bookseller who collected his which commences thus ?" They that fear plays some forty years or more after their the stinging of wasps make fans of peacocks' appearance, "the only rare poet of that tails, whose spots are like eyes : and Lepidus, time, the witty, comical, facetiously quick, which could not sleep for the chattering of and unparalleled John Lyly, Master of Arts." birds, set up a beast whose head was like a Such is the puff-direct of a title-page of dragon: and we, which stand in awe of re1632. The title-pages and the puffs have port, are compelled to set before our owl parted company in our day, to carry on their Pallas's shield, thinking by her virtue to partnership in separate fields, and sometimes cover the other's deformity." Shakspere looking loftily on each other, as if they were was a naturalist, and a true one; but Lyly not twin-brothers. He it was that took hold was the more inventive, for he made his own of the somewhat battered and clipped but natural history. The epilogue to the same sterling coin of our old language, and, mint-play informs the confiding audience that ing it afresh, with a very sufficient quantity of alloy, produced a sparkling currency, the very counters of court compliment. It was truly said, and it was meant for praise, that he "hath stepped one step further than any either before or since he first began the witty discourse of his 'Euphues.""+ According * Meres. + Webbe's Discourse of English Poetry, '1586. "Where the rainbow toucheth the tree no caterpillars will hang on the leaves; where Apology of Pierce Pennilesse.' § Petition to the Queen in the Harleian MSS.: Dodsley's Old Plays, 1825, vol. i. D higher talent, he had to endure poverty and disappointment, doomed to spin his "pithy sentences and gallant tropes" for a thankless Court and a neglectful multitude; and, with a tearful merriment, writing to his Queen, “In all humility I intreat that I may dedicate to your Sacred Majesty Lyly de Tristibus, wherein shall be seen patience, labours, and misfortunes." the talk is everything. Hephæstion exhorts | hard one. Without the vices of men of Alexander against the danger of love, in a speech that with very slight elaboration would be long enough for a sermon. Apelles soliloquizes upon his own love for Campaspe in a style so insufferably tedious, that we could wish to thrust the picture that he sighs over down his rhetorical throat (even as Pistol was made to swallow the leek), if he did not close his oration with one of the prettiest songs of our old poetry:— THOMAS KYD was the author of Jeronimo,' which men long held as the only best and judiciously penned play in Europe."* Wherever performed originally, the principal character was adapted to an actor of very small stature. It is not impossible that a precocious boy, one of the children of Growing on 's cheek (but none knows how), Paul's, might have filled the character. 'Cupid and my Campaspe play'd With these the crystal of his brow, And then the dimple of his chin; All these did my Campaspe win. At last he set her both his eyes, She won, and Cupid blind did rise. O Love! has she done this to thee? What shall, alas! become of me?" The dramatic system of Lyly is a thing unique in its kind. He never attempts to deal with realities. He revels in pastoral and mythological subjects. He makes his gods and goddesses, his nymphs and shepherds, all speak a language which common mortals would disdain to use. In prose or in verse, they are all the cleverest of the clever. They are, one and all, passionless beings, with no voice but that of their showman. But it is easy to see how a man of considerable talent would hold such things to be the proper refinements to banish for ever the vulgarities of the old comedy. He had not the genius to discover that the highest drama was essentially for the people; and that its foundations must rest upon the elemental properties of mankind, whether to produce tears or laughter that should command a lasting and universal sympathy. Lyly came too early, or too late, to gather any enduring fame; and he lived to see a new race of writers, and one towering above the rest, who cleared the stage of his tinselled puppets, and filled the scene with noble copies of humanity. His fate was a Jeronimo the Spanish marshal, and Balthazar the Prince of Portugal, thus exchange compliments : "Balthazar. Thou inch of Spain, Thou man, from thy hose downward scarce so much, Thou very little longer than thy beard, Little Jeronimo: words greater than thyself! Jeronimo. And thou, long thing of Por- Thou that art full as tall As an English gallows, upper beam and all, What have I almost quited you?" There can be no doubt that Jeronimo,' whatever remodelling it may have received, belongs essentially to the early stage. There is killing beyond all reasonable measure. Lorenzo kills Pedro, and Alexandro kills Rogero: Andrea is also killed, but he does not so readily quit the scene. After a decent interval, occupied by talk and fighting, the man comes again in the shape of his own direction :-"Enter two, dragging of enghost, according to the following stagesigns; then the funeral of Andrea: next * Jonson's Induction to 'Cynthia's Revels.' |