Chapter 6 TRAGEDY LODGE, KYD, MARLOWE, ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM.

Great as was the advance made by Lyly and Greene in Comedy, the advance made by Kyd and Marlowe in Tragedy was greater. Indeed it may almost be said that they created Tragedy as we know it. We have only to recall the dull speeches of Gorboduc, the severe formality of The Misfortunes of Arthur, to recognize the change that had to take place before the level of such a tragedy as Romeo and Juliet could be reached. Yet between the two last-mentioned tragedies, if 1591 be accepted as the date of Shakespeare's play, there lies a period of but four years.

The nature of the change was foreshadowed by the tragi-comedy, Damon and Pythias. In an earlier chapter we dealt with the divergence of that play from the English Senecan school of tragedy. This divergence, accepted as right, set Tragedy on its feet. Great things, however, still remained to be done.

The supreme quality of Tragedy is in its power to raise feelings of intense emotion, of horror or grief, or of both. Failing in this, it fails altogether. To this end Seneca introduced his Ghost, and his disciples filled their speeches with passionate outcry and lurid pictures of horrible events unfit to be presented in actuality. Gorboduc rained death upon a whole nation, Tancred and Gismunda invoked every awful epithet and gruesome description of dungeon and murder, for the same purpose. But the purpose remained unfulfilled-at least, for an English audience nurtured on more vigorous diet than mere words. The ear cannot comprehend horror in its fullness as can the eye. Even the author of Tancred and Gismunda was conscious of this, for at the end he placed the deaths of both father and daughter, with horrible accompaniments, upon the stage. He gave his audience what it wanted. Nor were the English people slow to demand the same from others. We shall find, in fact, that tragedy continued to borrow the exaggerated violence of the Senecan school, even when it was most emphatically rejecting its dramatic principles. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the work of Kyd and Marlowe was merely to substitute actions for descriptions, and sights for sounds. The difference between classic and romantic tragedy is not so simple. We shall understand their task more readily if we pause to consider what are the chief elements of Shakespearian tragedy.

Approximately they may be stated thus: an overwhelming catastrophe, clearly drawn characters which appeal to our sympathy or hate, impressive scenes, and a strong, eventful plot. Of these the first had never been lost since Sackville and Norton. The second had been attempted in The Misfortunes of Arthur, not without a measure of success. But both called for improvement, the former particularly having struck too tremendous a pitch. The third and fourth elements were almost unknown, thanks to the exclusion of all action from the stage; and finally, no appeal could be wholly successful which wearied the audience with so stiff and monotonous a diction. Verse, plot, scenes, characters, catastrophe-these are the features which we must watch if we would know what Kyd and Marlowe did for tragedy.

Before we turn to their plays, however, there is one other of the University Wits whose chief dramatic work is tragic and who must therefore be included in this chapter. Since his tragedy stands, in its inferiority, quite apart from the tragedies of the other two, we shall dispose of it first.

* * *

Apart from his undefined share in A Looking-Glass for London and England, all that we have of Thomas Lodge's dramatic work is The Wounds of Civil War, or, as its other title ran, The Most Lamentable and True Tragedies of Marius and Sylla (about 1588). The author went to Plutarch for his facts and characters, and shows, in his treatment of the subject, that he caught at least a measure of inspiration from that famous biographer's vivid portraits. Marius and Sylla are clearly, though not impartially, discriminated, the former appearing as the dauntless veteran, ready to die sooner than acknowledge himself too old for command, the latter figuring as the man of resistless force and intense pride. Partiality is seen in the allocation of most of the insolence and cruelty to Sylla, while our sympathy is constantly being evoked on the side of Marius. It is Sylla who first draws his sword against the peace of the state; it is Marius who magnanimously sends Sylla's wife and daughter to him unharmed. Moreover, wooden as they sometimes are, these great antagonists and their fellow-senators show the right Roman nature at need. Marius sleeping quietly under the menace of death; his heroic son, with his little band of soldiers, committing suicide rather than surrender at Praeneste; Octavius scorning to imitate the vacillation and cowardice of his colleagues; Sylla plunging back alone into battle, that his example may reanimate the courage of his fleeing army: these are scenes that recall the best traditions of Rome. They are taken from Plutarch, it is true; but they are presented sympathetically and with stimulating effect. Thus, though the order of events has necessarily to be mainly historical, each is intimately related to the central clash of ambitions, with the result that singleness of interest is never lost until the death of Marius. In carrying history down to Sylla's abdication and death, the author betrays that ignorance of dramatic unity common to most of his contemporaries.

The play is divided into five acts, but though there are obviously more than that number of scenes, the subdivisions are not formally distinguished. By the stiff, rhetorical style of its verse we seem to be taken back to the days of Gorboduc rather than to the year of Marlowe's Edward the Second. Save in two quite uncalled-for humorous episodes, the language used maintains a monotonous level of stateliness or emotion. The plot is eminently suited for indignant and defiant speeches, but Lodge's poetic inspiration has not the wings to bear him much above the 'middle flight'. The following passage fairly illustrates his style.

[Cornelia and Fulvia, expecting close imprisonment, if not death, are set at liberty.]

Marius. Virtue, sweet ladies, is of more regard

In Marius' mind, where honour is enthron'd,

Than Rome or rule of Roman empery.

[Here he puts chains about their necks.]

The bands, that should combine your snow-white wrists,

Are these which shall adorn your milk-white necks.

The private cells, where you shall end your lives,

Is Italy, is Europe-nay, the world.

Th' Euxinian Sea, the fierce Sicilian Gulf,

The river Ganges and Hydaspes' stream

Shall level lie, and smooth as crystal ice,

While Fulvia and Cornelia pass thereon.

The soldiers, that should guard you to your deaths,

Shall be five thousand gallant youths of Rome,

In purple robes cross-barr'd with pales of gold,

Mounted on warlike coursers for the field,

Fet[63] from the mountain-tops of Corsica,

Or bred in hills of bright Sardinia,

Who shall conduct and bring you to your lord.

Ay, unto Sylla, ladies, shall you go,

And tell him Marius holds within his hands

Honour for ladies, for ladies rich reward;

But as for Sylla and for his compeers,

Who dare 'gainst Marius vaunt their golden crests,

Tell him for them old Marius holds revenge,

And in his hands both triumphs life and death.

* * *

Only two plays, The Spanish Tragedy (before 1588) and Cornelia (printed 1594), are definitely known to have been written by Thomas Kyd. There are two others, however, which are commonly attributed to him, Jeronimo and Soliman and Perseda. The Spanish Tragedy continues the story of Jeronimo with so much care in the perpetuation of each character-Villuppo and Pedringano are examples-that it is natural to suppose them both by the same author; in which case 1587 may be guessed as the date of the latter. Different but strong internal evidence points to Kyd's authorship of Soliman and Perseda. It has many features corresponding to those found in The Spanish Tragedy. The Chorus of Love, Fortune and Death, in its attitude to the play, closely resembles that of the Ghost and Revenge. Most of the characters come to a violent end, and in each play the list of deaths is carefully enumerated by the triumphant spirit, Death or the Ghost. Then there are similarities of lines and phrases and remarkable identity in certain tricks of style, notably in the love of repetition and in a peculiar form of reasoning after the fashion of a sorites.-Curiously enough, these same tricks are found, in equally emphatic form, in Locrine, an anonymous play of somewhat later date.-We may compare, for example, the two following extracts:

(1)

Erastus. No, no; my hope full long ago was lost,

And Rhodes itself is lost, or else destroy'd:

If not destroy'd, yet bound and captivate;

If captivate, then forc'd from holy faith;

If forc'd from faith, for ever miserable:

For what is misery but want of God?

And God is lost if faith be overthrown.

(Soliman and Perseda, Act IV.)

(2)

Balthazar. First, in his hand he brandished a sword,

And with that sword he fiercely waged war,

And in that war he gave me dangerous wounds,

And by those wounds he forced me to yield,

And by my yielding I became his slave.

(The Spanish Tragedy, Act II.)

Finally, the play acted at the close of The Spanish Tragedy comprises the main characters and general drift (with marked differences) of the plot of Soliman and Perseda. This, in itself no proof of authorship, provides us with a clue to date. It is not likely that the author deliberately altered the plot of a well-known play. Yet we know from Ben Jonson that Kyd's tragedies were very popular. We shall be more safe in concluding that the wide popularity of that scene in The Spanish Tragedy led him to extend the minor play to the proportions of a complete drama, making such changes as would then be most suitable to a larger groundwork. This view is supported by the decreased use of rhyme, intermingled with the blank verse, in Soliman and Perseda. The play, then, may be approximately dated 1588-90.

It would be as well to dismiss Cornelia at once. Wholly Senecan and dull, it is merely a translation of a French play of the same name by Garnier. As such it has no interest for us here.

Jeronimo derives its name from one of the principal characters, but it is really the tragedy of Andrea. This nobleman's appointment as ambassador from Spain to Portugal arouses the jealous enmity of the Duke of Castile's son, Lorenzo: it is also the means of his introduction to the man who is to bring about his death at the end, Prince Balthezar of Portugal. The catastrophe, therefore, may be said to start from that point. Lorenzo's intrigues begin at once. Casting around for some one apt for villainous deeds, he bethinks him of Lazarotto,

A melancholy, discontented courtier,

Whose famished jaws look like the chap of death;

Upon whose eyebrows hangs damnation;

Whose hands are washed in rape and murders bold.

Him he suborns to murder Andrea on his return. At the same time he schemes a secret stab at the love that exists between his own sister, Bell'-Imperia, and Andrea. To this end he arranges that a rival lover, Alcario, shall have access to her in the disguise of the absent nobleman, and in order to avert her suspicions he has it noised about the Court that Andrea is about to return. Fortunately it is just here that his plans conflict. Lazarotto, hearing the false rumour, loiters about in expectation of seeing Andrea, and, perceiving the disguised Alcario exchanging affectionate greetings with Bell'-Imperia, has no doubt of his man. Alcario falls. But Lorenzo is on the spot to cover up his traces. Promising Lazarotto a certain pardon, he leads the unsuspecting villain into foolhardy lies until sentence of instant execution is passed, when a check upon his further speech is immediately applied and his tongue silenced for ever. Meanwhile, Andrea has been carrying a bold front in Portugal, passing swiftly from the tactful speech of diplomacy to the fierce language of defiance. Herein he arouses the hot spirit of Balthezar. Word leaps to word, challenge to challenge. Each recognizes the honour and valiancy of the other, and it is arranged that they shall seek each other out in battle, to settle their rivalry by single combat. Andrea returns to Spain. War follows. Twice Andrea and Balthezar meet. On the first occasion Andrea is saved only by the intervention of a gallant youth, his devoted friend, Horatio. On the second occasion he overthrows his opponent but, in the moment of victory, is slain by the pikes of Portuguese soldiery. Horatio arrives on the scene in time to witness Balthezar's exultation over the corpse. Taking the combat upon himself he forces the prince to the ground, but is robbed of the full glory of such a capture by the baseness of Lorenzo, who darts in and himself receives Balthezar's surrendered sword. Victory ultimately rests with the Spaniards. Andrea's body is buried with full military honours, his Ghost personally attending, with Revenge, to indicate to Horatio, by gestures, his sensibility of his friend's kindness. The epilogue is spoken by Horatio's father, Jeronimo, even as the opening lines of the play are concerned with his promotion to the high office of marshal.

The weak point of the play lies in the second half of the plot; Andrea's death, lamentable as a catastrophe, achieves nothing, except, perhaps, the satisfaction of a hidden destiny. Those purposes which openly aim at his death are left incomplete. Lorenzo's deep schemes, from which much is expected, come to nothing; his revenge is certainly not glutted. Balthezar seeks to gain honour in victory, but is robbed of it by Horatio and his own soldiers. Then, too, the interest excited by Lorenzo's hatred leads us into something like a blind alley; Andrea escapes and the whole scene is transferred to the battle-field. Nevertheless, the play offers compensations. It provides one or two striking scenes, possibly the best being that in which we watch, in suspense, the mutual destruction of Lorenzo's plans. The verse, again, has many fine lines and vigorous passages. On the whole it is perhaps less studied, more natural and animated than Kyd's later verse. Rhyme is used freely, yet without forcing itself upon our notice with leaden pauses. From among many quotable passages the following may be selected for their energy.

(1)

[The Portuguese Court. Andrea and Balthezar exchange defiance.]

Andrea. Prince Balthezar, shall's meet?

Balthezar. Meet, Don Andrea? yes, in the battle's bowels;

Here is my gage, a never-failing pawn;

'Twill keep his day, his hour, nay minute, 'twill.

Andrea. Then thine and this, possess one quality.

Balthezar. O, let them kiss!

Did I not understand thee noble, valiant,

And worthy my sword's society with thee,

For all Spain's wealth I'd not grasp hands.

Meet Don Andrea? I tell thee, noble spirit,

I'd wade up to the knees in blood, I'd make

A bridge of Spanish carcases, to single thee

Out of the gasping army.

Andrea. Woot thou, prince?

Why, even for that I love [thee].

Balthezar. Tut, love me, man, when we have drunk

Hot blood together; wounds will tie

An everlasting settled amity,

And so shall thine.

(2)

[On the battle-field Andrea searches for Balthezar.]

Andrea. -Prince Balthezar!

Portugal's valiant heir!

The glory of our foe, the heart of courage,

The very soul of true nobility,

I call thee by thy right name: answer me!

Go, captain, pass the left wing squadron; hie:

Mingle yourself again amidst the army;

Pray, sweat to find him out.- [Exit Captain.]

This place I'll keep.

Now wounds are wide, and blood is very deep;

'Tis now about the heavy tread of battle;

Soldiers drop down as thick as if death mowed them;

As scythe-men trim the long-haired ruffian fields,

So fast they fall, so fast to fate life yields.

Jeronimo has given us a really notable villain. From the first this character gains and holds our attention by the intellectuality of his wickedness. He is no common stabber, nor the kind of wretch who murders for amusement. Jealousy, the darkest and most potent of motives, lies behind his hate. He would have Andrea dead. But his position as the Duke of Castile's son forbids the notion of staining his own hands in blood. A hired creature must be his tool, whose secrecy may be secured either by bribery or death, preferably by death. A double plot, too, must be laid, so that, if one part fails, the other may bring success. So we watch the net being spread around the feet of the unwary victim, and hold our breath as the critical moment approaches when a chance recognition will decide everything. Undoubtedly the author has achieved a genuine triumph in all this. Some of us may see the germ of his villain in Edwards's Carisophus; there is the same element of craft and double-dealing, of laying unseen snares for the innocent. But it is no more than the germ. The advance beyond the earlier sketch is immense. Lazarotto, the perfect instrument for crime, has not Lorenzo's position, wealth or motive; nevertheless a family likeness exists between the two. Lazarotto's cynicism is of an intellectual order, as is his ready lying to avert suspicion from his master. Perhaps the most shuddering moment of the play is when he leans carelessly against the wall, waiting for his victim, 'like a court-hound that licks fat trenchers clean.' We fear and loathe him for the callous brutality of that simile and for that careless posture. Yet even he cannot fathom the blackness of Lorenzo's soul, and falls a prey to a greater treachery than his own. This cunning removal of a lesser villain by a greater is repeated in The Spanish Tragedy and is closely imitated by Marston in Antonio's Revenge (or The Second Part of Antonio and Mellida). Lorenzo and Lazarotto together are the first of a famous line of stage-villains. Amongst their celebrated descendants may be named Tourneur's D'Amville and Borachio, Webster's Ferdinand and Bosola, and the already referred-to Piero and Strotzo of Marston.

All the other characters, except one, reproduce familiar types of brave soldiers and proud monarchs. Jeronimo himself, however, stands apart. Though completely overshadowed in our memory by his terrible development in the next play, he has here a certain independent interest on account of age and humour. True, he announces that he is just fifty, which is no great age. But he is old, as Lear is old; he is called the father of his kingdom. Vague, fleeting yet recurrent is the resemblance between him and Polonius. Tradition bids us regard Polonius as an intentionally humorous creation. Jeronimo's humour is of the same family. We feel sure that this newly appointed Marshal of Spain pottered about the Court, wagging his beard sagaciously over the unwisdom of youth, his mind full of responsibility, his heart of courage, but his tongue letting fall, every now and then, simple half-foolish sayings which betrayed the approach of dotage. He is very short, and exhibits a childish vanity in constantly referring to his shortness. 'As short my body, short shall be my stay.' 'My mind's a giant, though my bulk be small.' By such quaint speeches does he excite our smiles. And yet, by a very human touch, he is represented as furiously resenting any slighting allusion, by any one else, to his stature. In the pourparlers before battle Prince Balthezar grows impertinent. But we will quote the lines, and so take leave of Jeronimo.

[The Portuguese have already made a demonstration, with drums and colours.]

Jeronimo. What, are you braving us before we come!

We'll be as shrill as you. Strike 'larum, drum!

[They sound a flourish on both sides.]

Balthezar. Thou inch of Spain!

Thou man, from thy hose downward scarce so much!

Thou very little longer than thy beard!

Speak not such big words; they'll throw thee down,

Little Jeronimo! words greater than thyself!

It must not [be].

Jeronimo. And thou long thing of Portugal, why not?

Thou, that art full as tall

As an English gallows, upper beam and all;

Devourer of apparel, thou huge swallower,

My hose will scarce make thee a standing collar.

What! have I almost quited you?

Andrea. Have done, impatient marshal.

The Spanish Tragedy continues the story of Jeronimo. Balthazar (the spelling has changed) is brought back to Spain, the joint captive of Horatio and Lorenzo: to the former, however, is allotted the ransom, while to the latter falls the privilege of guarding the prisoner in honourable captivity. The Portuguese prince now falls in love with Bell'-Imperia, and has her brother's full consent to the match. But that lady has already transferred her affections to young Horatio. Lorenzo encourages Balthazar to solve the difficulty by the young man's death. While Bell'-Imperia and Horatio are making love together by night in a garden-bower, Lorenzo, Balthazar and two servants (Serberine and Pedringano) surprise them and hang Horatio to a tree beside the entrance. They then decamp with the lady, whom they forthwith shut up closely in her room at home. Old Hieronimo (formerly Jeronimo), alarmed by the outcry, rushes into the garden, closely followed by his wife Isabella. The body is instantly cut down, but life is extinct.-The rest of the play, from the beginning of the third act, is concerned with Hieronimo's revenge. It is a terrible story. His first information as to the names of the murderers reaches him in a message, written in blood, from Bell'-Imperia. This, however, he fears as a trap, and attempts to corroborate it from the girl's own lips. Unfortunately he only succeeds in awakening the suspicions of Lorenzo, who, to make the secret surer, bribes Pedringano to murder Serberine, at the same time arranging for watchmen to arrest Pedringano. Balthazar is drawn into the matter that he may press forward the execution of Serberine's murderer, while Lorenzo poses to the wretch as his friend with promises of pardon. Pedringano consequently is beguiled to death. Lorenzo is now at ease, and enlarges his sister's liberty. The suggestion of a political marriage between her and Balthazar is warmly supported by the king. Alone among the courtiers Hieronimo is plunged in unabated grief, uncertain where to seek revenge. By good fortune Pedringano, before his trial, wrote a confession, which the hangman finds and delivers to the Marshal. This corroborates the statement of Bell'-Imperia. Yet it brings small comfort, as it seems impossible to strike so high as at Lorenzo and Balthazar. In his despair Hieronimo contemplates suicide, until he remembers that the act would leave the murderers unpunished. He cries aloud before the king for justice, digs frantically into the earth with his dagger in mad excess of misery, then hurries away without telling his wrong. He haunts his garden at night-time; and in the silence of that darkness at last hits upon a scheme: under the appearance of quietness and simplicity he will return to Lorenzo's society, awaiting his time to strike. As if to soothe him with the thought that his griefs are shared by others, chance brings before him one, Bazulto, an old man also bereaved of his son by murder. The reminder, however, is too sharp: Hieronimo becomes temporarily mad, mistaking Bazulto for Horatio and uttering pathetic laments over the change that has passed over his youthful beauty.

Sweet boy, how art thou chang'd in death's black shade!

Had Proserpine no pity on thy youth,

But suffer'd thy fair crimson-colour'd spring

With withered winter to be blasted thus?

Horatio, thou art older than thy father.

When the fit passes, he and Bazulto go off together, one in their misery. But the guileful scheme is not forgotten. Some one has observed the strained relations between the Marshal and Lorenzo: Lorenzo's father insists on a reconciliation, and Hieronimo cordially agrees. Even when the final ratification is given to Bell'-Imperia's marriage with Balthazar, Hieronimo is all smiles and acquiescence. He is willing to heighten the festivities with a play. Lorenzo, Balthazar, Bell'-Imperia and himself are to be the actors, though two of them demur at first at the choice of a tragedy. Still Lorenzo suspects no harm, for he is not present at the interview between the girl and the old man, in which she denounces his apparently weakening thirst for revenge, only to learn the secret of that gentle exterior. Unhappily, the delay of justice has preyed too grievously upon the mind of Isabella. There have been moments when she ran frantic. In a final throe of madness, having hacked down the fatal tree, she thrusts the knife into her own breast. The great day comes, and before the Viceroy of Portugal (father of Balthazar), the Spanish king, the Duke of Castile, and their train, Hieronimo's tragedy is acted. Real daggers, however, have been substituted for wooden ones. As the play proceeds, Bell'-Imperia kills Balthazar and herself, while Hieronimo slays Lorenzo. The only one left alive, Hieronimo, now explains the terrible realism behind all this seeming. Castile and the Viceroy learn that their children are dead, two of them killed to revenge the murder of Horatio. The drawing aside of the curtain at the back of the stage reveals that youth's corpse, avenged at last. Horrible scenes follow, Hieronimo being prevented from hanging himself as he intended. But, desperate, he bites out his tongue, stabs the Duke of Castile, and succeeds in killing himself. The Ghost of Andrea and Revenge, who opened the play and served as chorus to three previous acts, now close the play in triumph.

We may omit from our consideration the additions to the original supplied by Ben Jonson or some other dramatist of genius. These include the famous 'Painter' episode, part of the scene where Hieronimo finds his son's body hanging to a tree, his wonderful discourse to the 'two Portingals' on the nature of a son, and a section of the last scene. The strange hand is easily recognizable in the rugged irregularity and forcefulness of the lines. Attributable to it is the major portion of Hieronimo's madness, which accordingly occupies but a small space in our outline of the play. Structurally, the plot gains nothing by the additions; indeed, the 'Painter' episode duplicates and thereby weakens the effect of the conversation between Hieronimo and Bazulto. Nevertheless we will venture to quote a few lines from the speech to the Portingals, inasmuch as they aptly describe the underlying principle of the tragedy:

Well, heaven is heaven still!

And there is Nemesis and furies,

And things call'd whips;

And they sometimes do meet with murderers:

They do not always escape, that's some comfort.

Ay, ay, ay, and then time steals on, and steals, and steals,

Till violence leaps forth, like thunder, wrapp'd

In a ball of fire,

And so doth bring confusion to them all.

From the hour of Horatio's dastardly murder we wait for Nemesis to fall upon the murderers. We see Lorenzo fortifying himself against detection; we watch, while 'time steals on, and steals, and steals'; Isabella, tired of waiting, kills herself; Hieronimo himself threatens to fail us, so terrible are his sufferings; the crime seems forgotten by those who committed it; its reward is about to drop into Balthazar's hands; and then, at last, 'violence leaps forth, like thunder, ... and so doth bring confusion to them all'.

When we remember the date, as early as, or earlier than, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, we may be excused if we call The Spanish Tragedy a triumph of dramatic genius. Fully to appreciate its greatness we have only to compare the plot with that of any preceding tragedy, or of any play by Lyly, Greene, or Peele. In none of them shall we find anything approaching the masterful grip upon its spectators, the appeal to their sympathies, the alternation of fear and hope, the skilful subordination of many incidents to one purpose, the absolute rightness yet horror of the conclusion (the inset play), of Kyd's tragedy. It will repay us to examine some of the details of its workmanship.

The crisis begins, for the first time, to gravitate towards the centre of the play. In Classical Drama tragedies open with the crisis. English tragedies of the Senecan type tend to adopt the same practice: Gorboduc begins with Videna's report of the proposal to divide the kingdom; The Misfortunes of Arthur begins with the king's return, referred to as imminent. Even the first scene of Doctor Faustus presents Faustus rejecting divinity for magic, while Mephistophilis enters in the third scene. By delaying the crisis, however, two great advantages are secured: the necessity of the catastrophe is more fully recognized by the spectators; and their capacity for emotion is not strained to the point of weariness before the last great scene is reached. Yet the sense of tragedy must not be entirely absent from the first part; otherwise the gravity of the crisis will come with too great a shock. Kyd's purpose in introducing the Villuppo incident is here discovered. He uses it with much skill as a counterbalance to the aspect of the main plot. Thus, immediately after the apparent satisfaction of the rival claims of Horatio and Lorenzo, he places the unsuspected treachery of Villuppo to Alexandro, as if to warn us not to judge merely from the surface: but when the wickedness of Lorenzo attains its blackest moment in the murder of Horatio, he supplies a ray of hope by the presentment of Villuppo's punishment, to let us know that justice still reigns in the world. Further, the intense (though needless) grief of the Viceroy over the supposed death of his son prepares us for the agony of Hieronimo, while the narrow escape of the innocent Alexandro excites our repugnance for hasty revenge and makes us sympathetically tolerant of Hieronimo's equally extreme caution in ascertaining that Lorenzo really is the murderer. We could wish, perhaps, that Kyd had found material for these two scenes in the Spanish Court: the transition to the Portuguese palace is a far and sudden flight. But his recognition of the artistic need of such scenes is notable and sound.

It is worth while to observe the close interweaving, the subtle irony and contrasts, the perfect harmony of the details. We must review them quite briefly. To illustrate the first, Pedringano's letter is not the 'wonderful discovery' that usually saves lost situations in weak novels: it has been referred to by him as already written before the Page takes Lorenzo's message, and its incriminating contents have been clearly indicated; nothing, moreover, could be more in order than that it should be found on him by the hangman and delivered to the judge who passed sentence. Or again, the success of Hieronimo's masque in the first act supplies the reason for Balthazar's request for a play at his wedding; that last tragedy is not suggested fortuitously to accommodate some previous scheme of Hieronimo's. The powerful nature of the meeting between Hieronimo and Bazulto was recognized by that other writer who added the 'Painter' episode in close imitation of it. But almost as bitter in its irony is the position of Hieronimo as judge, executing justice upon Serberine's murderer while his own son's murderers go scot free. Grimly ironical, too, is Castile's satisfaction in the reconciliation of Lorenzo and the Marshal, and grimmer and more ironical still the request for the fatal play by Lorenzo and Balthazar themselves, who of all men should most have shrunk from it. The most critical element in the general harmony of the play is the character of Bell'-Imperia. Kyd's women are his weak point, and this heroine is no brilliant exception. We certainly do not fall in love with her. But his sense of what is needed for the right tragic effect carries him through successfully in essential matters. Were Bell'-Imperia weak, irresolute, had she the feeble constancy of Massinger's or Heywood's famous heroines, there would be a wrecking flaw in the accumulated, resistless demand for revenge. As it is, her love for Horatio is passionate (though lacking delicacy), her responses to Balthazar's advances are cold, and her reproachful words to Hieronimo, for his delay in striking, proclaim her entirely at one with him in his final action. The part played by Isabella is also subordinated to the total effect. It may be questioned whether her madness does not weaken by exaggeration the impression made by Hieronimo's frenzy; but it must be remembered that her part was provided before the additional mad scenes, the work of the later hand, were included in the play. Kyd deliberately chose that her madness should precede and prepare us for the madness of Hieronimo, and it must be admitted that the interpolator's departure from this order has little to be said in its favour. As the weaker character, Isabella should be the first to collapse. Her frantic death, just before the 'play', emphasizes the imperative necessity that the long postponement of justice should be ended at last. With never failing watchfulness of his audience Kyd softens the tension directly afterwards with a few light touches on the staging and disguises required for the forthcoming performance. Lastly, the choice of a court tragedy as the instrument of Hieronimo's revenge is admirable alike for its naturalness and for dramatic effect as a flashlight re-illumination of Lorenzo's and Balthazar's crime in all its horror, in the very hour of their punishment. Lorenzo, under the figure of Erastus, is forced to occupy the position once held by Horatio; Hieronimo, for the time being, becomes a second Lorenzo, abettor to the treacherous guest; thus Lorenzo falls by the same fate that he visited upon Horatio. Balthazar plays his own part under a new name; he is still the stranger basely seeking the love given to another; but this time he meets the reward due to treachery, slain by the hand of Bell'-Imperia.-The death of Hieronimo, badly mismanaged, is the only real blot upon the artistry of the play. It must be passed over with a sigh of regret, in the same way as we accept, as inexplicable, the 'Out, vile jelly!' of King Lear. To seize upon it as typical of the nature of the tragedy would be very unfair.

Hieronimo is the great character of the play. Most of the others are mere continuations, serviceable enough but without improvement, of those in Jeronimo, Pedringano being a second edition of Lazarotto. But from the outline sufficient may be gathered to make unnecessary a long analysis of the author's new and greatest creation. We see in it originality of conception; we are touched by its intense humanness and by its inherent simplicity; but we are startled by its change, its growth, under the influence of circumstances, to a certain subtle complexity. All are great qualities, but the last is the greatest. Growth, the reaction of events upon character-not the easily portrayed action of character upon events-are the marks by which we recognize the work of the master-artists in characterization. We can guess at the tragic intensity of human sorrow from the difference between the simple-minded little Marshal who acts as Master of the Revels in arranging a 'show' and illustrates his reason for preferring Horatio's claim to be Balthazar's captor by quaint parallels from some old fable, and the arch-deceiver who can converse easily with the Duke of Castile as he fixes up the curtain that is to conceal Horatio's corpse and be the background to the murder of the duke's only son and daughter. Hieronimo's smallest claim to greatness, yet a considerable one, is the fact that he revealed to playwrights the strength and horror of madness on the stage. Of the extent to which Shakespeare made use of this character and certain scenes a reminder may be added. In Hamlet is found madness, assumed simplicity, delay in action, the invisible influence of the supernatural, and sacrifice of the avenger's life in the attainment of revenge, besides the ordinarily remembered adoption of an inset play. King Lear, in the scene between the king and Edgar on the heath, echoes the scene between Hieronimo and Bazulto.

Humour is absent from the play, unless we extend the courtesy of that name to the grim hoax (explained to us by a chuckling page, who thoroughly enjoys his part in it) practised by Lorenzo upon Pedringano, and the consequently mocking spirit of jest which pervades the hall of judgment during the misguided wretch's trial. The pert confidence of the prisoner, at the foot of the gallows, in the saving contents of a certain box, which the audience knows to be empty, is dramatic irony in its bitterest form.

Hard words have been written about the horrible scenes in the play, as though it were a huddled-up bundle of bloodshed and ghosts. Such a conception is far from the truth. Horror is an element in almost all powerful tragedies; it is hardly to be separated from any unexpected or violent death. We reject it as monstrous only when its cause is the product of a vile and unnatural motive, or of a motive criminally insufficient to explain the impulse. What is repulsive in Arden of Feversham, and in such recognized 'Tragedies of Blood' as have Tourneur, Marston and Webster for their authors, is the utter callousness of the murderers, and their base aims, or disgusting lack of any reasonable excuse for their crimes. When D'Amville pushes his brother over the edge of the quarry, or Antonio stabs the child Julio, or Bosola heaps torments upon the Duchess of Malfi, we turn away with loathing because the deed is either cruelly undeserved or utterly unwarranted by the gain expected from it. Alice Arden's murder of her husband is mainly detestable because her ulterior motive is detestable. Again, the ghosts which Marston and Chapman give us are absurd creatures of 'too, too solid flesh', who will sit on the bed to talk comfortably to one, draw the curtains when one wishes to sleep, or play the scout and call out in warning whenever danger threatens. Kyd does not serve up crime and the supernatural world thus. He shows us terrible things, it is true. But the causes are to be found deep down in the primary impulses of man, in jealousy, in fear, in despair, in blood-revenge. These impulses are not vile; our moral code does not cry out against them as it does against lust, greed, and motiveless cruelty. When we rise from the play it is not with a sense that we have moved amongst base creatures. Lorenzo repels us; but it is Hieronimo who dominates the stage, filling us with pity for his wrongs and weakness. The supernatural remains outside nature, crude, as all stage representations of it must be, but unobtrusive (and, in the prologue, at least, thoroughly dignified), serving a useful purpose in keeping before us the imminence of Nemesis biding its appointed hour. It is not easy to suggest how better an insistence upon this lofty motif could have been maintained.

If we now revert to our former statement of the essential elements of a successful tragedy we find that each has been included and lifted to a high level in Kyd's masterpiece. The catastrophe is not only overwhelming but greatly just. The figure of Hieronimo has set a new standard in characterization. Scene after scene stamps itself on our memory. And the procrastinating evolution of the plot keeps us in fear, in hope, in uncertainty to the last. If this estimate of the greatness of the play seems exaggerated, we may fairly ask what other tragedy, before its date, combines all four qualities in the same degree of excellence. Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta contain far more wonderful verse, and the former holds within it grander material for tragedy, but as an example of tragic craftmanship The Spanish Tragedy is inferior to neither. It can be shown that both suffer very seriously from the neglect of one or more of the four essentials which we have named.

It is only fair to the reader to add that entirely opposite views to those set forth above have been expressed by other writers. Perhaps the most slashing criticism of the play is that by Mr. Courthope.[64]

It remains to illustrate Kyd's verse. In The Spanish Tragedy it still clings to the occasional use of rhyme, as in Jeronimo. Moreover it is becoming, if anything, more restrained, less spontaneously natural. The weight of tragedy seems to oppress the poetic inspiration, so that it rarely ventures outside the limits of melancholy dignity or regulated passion. Kyd's formalism is, unfortunately for him, magnified by its contrast with the superb freedom of the interpolated passages. If we resolutely shut our eyes to these patches of fierce irregularity, we shall be better able to criticize the author's own work by the standard of his contemporaries. The uncertainty of priority in time encourages a comparison between Kyd and Marlowe. It is fairly clear that the former was not much influenced by the latter, or he would have caught the taint of rant and bombast which infected Greene and Peele. If, then, Kyd's blank verse is an original development of the verse of Gorboduc and other Senecan plays, and if he is the author of Jeronimo-the verse of which, as may have been seen from the quotations offered, is very much freer than that of The Spanish Tragedy-he must share some of the honour accorded to Marlowe as the father of dramatic blank verse. The two men are not on the same level as poets. Marlowe's muse soars repeatedly to heights which Kyd's can only reach at rare moments. Nevertheless, a comparison of Kyd's better passages with those of Sackville and Hughes will demonstrate how much blank verse might have owed to his creative spirit had not Marlowe arisen at the same time to eclipse him by his greater genius. Isolated extracts offer a poor criterion, but the following-to be read in conjunction with those selected from Jeronimo and Soliman and Perseda-will help the reader to form at least an idea of Kyd's originality and ability:

(1)

[Isabella rejects all medicine for her grief.]

Isabella. So that you say this herb will purge the eye,

And this the head. Ah, but none of them will purge the heart!

No, there's no medicine left for my disease,

Nor any physic to recure the dead. [She runs lunatic.

Horatio! O, where's Horatio?

Maid. Good madam, affright not thus yourself

With outrage for your son Horatio;

He sleeps in quiet in the Elysian fields.

Isabella. Why, did I not give you gowns and goodly things?

Bought you a whistle and a whipstalk[65] too,

To be revenged on their villanies?

Maid. Madam, these humours do torment my soul.

Isabella. My soul, poor soul; thou talk'st of things-

Thou know'st not what: my soul hath silver wings,

That mount me up unto the highest heavens:

To heaven! ay, there sits my Horatio,

Back'd with a troop of fiery cherubims,

Dancing about his newly-healed wounds,

Singing sweet hymns, and chanting heavenly notes,

Rare harmony to greet his innocence,

That died, ay, died a mirror in our days.

But say, where shall I find the men, the murderers,

That slew Horatio? Whither shall I run

To find them out that murdered my son? [Exeunt.

(2)

[Hieronimo, recovering his mental balance, perceives that Bazulto is not his son.]

Ay, now I know thee, now thou nam'st thy son:

Thou art the lively image of my grief;

Within thy face my sorrows I may see:

Thy eyes are gumm'd with tears, thy cheeks are wan,

Thy forehead troubled, and thy muttering lips

Murmur sad words abruptly broken off;

By force of windy sighs thy spirit breathes;

And all this sorrow riseth for thy son.

And selfsame sorrow feel I for my son.

Come in, old man, thou shalt to Isabel;

Lean on my arm; I thee, thou me, shalt stay;

And thou and I, and she, will sing a song,

Three parts in one, but all of discords fram'd.-

Talk not of chords, but let us now be gone,

For with a cord Horatio was slain.

Soliman and Perseda invites little further attention than that which one scene and one character alone demand. Its sharp descent from the tremendous force of The Spanish Tragedy is, however, slightly redeemed by the poetic warmth of its love passages. Love is the motive of the plot. Apart from that it sins unforgivably against probability, good taste, reason, and justice. Its reckless distribution of death is such that every one of the fourteen named characters come to a violent end, besides numerous nameless wretches referred to generically as witnesses or executioners. Nor is any attempt made to show just cause for their destruction. We could almost deny that the author of the previous tragedy had any hand in this play, did we not know, on the authority of his own signature, that the same author thought it worth his labour to translate Cornélie for the English stage. The fact was that dramatists had not yet the courage always to place their own artistic inclinations above the need of gratifying an unformed public taste, so that the same man may be found composing plays of widely differing natures for, presumably, different audiences.

The single character deserving mention is the boastful knight, Basilisco, whose incredible vaunts and invariable preference for the very freest of blank verse, in a play almost entirely exempt from either, read like an intentional burlesque of Tamburlaine. If so, and the suggestion is not ill-founded or improbable, it may be interpreted as an emphatic rejection of the influence of Marlowe and as a claim, on Kyd's part, to sole credit for his own form of tragedy and blank verse.

The only scene of conspicuous merit is that in which the Turkish Emperor, Soliman, attempts to kill his fair captive, Perseda, for rejecting his love, but is overcome by her beauty. It is quite short, but is handled with power and embellished with touches of delicate poetry. The best of it may be quoted here, together with a specimen of the Basilisco burlesque.

(1)

[Soliman's Bashaw brings to him the two fairest captives from Rhodes.]

Soliman. This present pleaseth more than all the rest;

And, were their garments turn'd from black to white,

I should have deem'd them Juno's goodly swans,

Or Venus' milkwhite doves, so mild they are,

And so adorn'd with beauty's miracle.

Here, Brusor, this kind turtle shall be thine;

Take her, and use her at thy pleasure.

But this kind turtle is for Soliman,

That her captivity may turn to bliss.

Fair looks, resembling Phoebus' radiant beams;

Smooth forehead, like the table of high Jove;

Small pencill'd eyebrows, like two glorious rainbows;

Quick lamplike eyes, like heav'n's two brightest orbs;

Lips of pure coral, breathing ambrosy;

Cheeks, where the rose and lily are in combat;

Neck whiter than the snowy Apennines:

A sweeter creature nature never made;

Love never tainted Soliman till now.

. . . . . . . . .

[Perseda, however, will not yield to his amorous proposals.]

Soliman. Then kneel thee down,

And at my hands receive the stroke of death,

Doom'd to thyself by thine own wilfulness.

Perseda. Strike, strike; thy words pierce deeper than thy blows.

Soliman. Brusor, hide her; for her looks withhold me.

[Then Brusor hides her with a veil.]

O Brusor, thou hast not hid her lips;

For there sits Venus with Cupid on her knee,

And all the graces smiling round about her,

So craving pardon, that I cannot strike.

Brusor. Her face is cover'd over quite, my lord.

Soliman. Why, so. O Brusor, seest thou not

Her milkwhite neck, that alabaster tower?

'Twill break the edge of my keen scimitar,

And pieces, flying back, will wound myself.

Brusor. Now she is all covered, my lord.

Soliman. Why, now at last she dies.

Perseda. O Christ, receive my soul!

Soliman. Hark, Brusor; she calls on Christ:

I will not send her to him. Her words are music,

The selfsame music that in ancient days

Brought Alexander from war to banqueting,

And made him fall from skirmishing to kissing.

No, my dear love would not let me kill thee,

Though majesty would turn desire to wrath:

There lies my sword, humbled at thy feet;

And I myself, that govern many kings,

Entreat a pardon for my rash misdeed.

(2)

[Basilisco is asked to declare his country and past achievements.]

Basilisco. Sooth to say, the earth is my country,

As the air to the fowl or the marine moisture

To the red-gill'd fish. I repute myself no coward,

For humility shall mount; I keep no table

To character my fore passed conflicts.

As I remember, there happened a sore drought

In some part of Belgia, that the juicy grass

Was sear'd with the Sun-God's element.

I held it policy to put the men-children

Of that climate to the sword,

That the mother's tears might relieve the parched earth:

The men died, the women wept, and the grass grew;

Else had my Friesland horse perished,

Whose loss would have more grieved me

Than the ruin of that whole country.

* * *

Christopher Marlowe, the greatest of all the University Wits, has been reserved to the last because in his work we rise nearest to the excellence of Shakespearian drama. By the inexhaustible force of his poetic genius he created literature for all time. We read the plays of his contemporaries chiefly for their antiquarian interest; we are pleased to discover in them the first beginnings of many features popular in later productions; one or two appeal to us by their own beauty or strength, but the majority are remembered only for their relationship to greater plays. This is not so with Marlowe's works. Having once been so fortunate as to have had our attention directed to them, we return again and again for the sheer joy of reading his glorious outbursts of poetry, of being thrilled with the intensity of his greater scenes.

Marlowe placed upon the stage men who live intensely, terrible men, for the most part, endued with surpassing power for good or evil. Around them he grouped hostile, enchaining circumstances, which they confront fearlessly and, for a time perhaps, master, until the hour comes when they can no longer conquer. Their lips he touched with a live coal from the altar of his muse, so that their words fire the heart with their flaming zeal or sear it with their despair. In the dramas of Peele we lamented the weakness of his characters, his inability to provide a dominant central figure for his action; we also saw how something of the same weakness softened his verse almost to effeminacy. Greene drew the outline of his characters more strongly. But Marlowe alone possessed the power, in its fullest degree, of projecting himself into his chief character, of filling it with his own driving force, his own boundless imagination, his own consuming passion and profound capacity for gloomy emotion. Each of his first three plays-counting the two parts of Tamburlaine as one play-is wholly given up to the presentment of one man; his tongue speaks on nearly every page, his purpose is the mainspring of almost every action; by mere bulk he fills our mental view as we read, and by the fervour, the poetry of his language, he burns the impression of himself upon our memory. It is not by what they do that we remember Marlowe's heroes or villains. Their deeds probably fade into indistinctness. Few of us quite remember what were Tamburlaine's conquests, or Faustus's wonder-workings, or Barabas's crimes. But we know that if we would recall a mighty conqueror our recollections will revive the image of the Scythian shepherd; if we would picture a soul delivered over to the torments of the lost there will rush back upon us that terrible outcry of Faustus when the fatal hour is come; if we would imagine the feelings of one for whom wealth is the joy, the meaning, the whole of life, we shall recite one of the speeches of Barabas.

Marlowe masters us by his poetry, and is lifted by it above his fellows, reaching to the pedestal on which Shakespeare stands alone. It is an astonishing thing to pass from the dramas which occupied our attention in the previous chapter to one of Marlowe's, and then realize that his were written first. Whereas before it was a matter of difficulty to find passages beautiful enough to quote, it now becomes a problem to select the best. It has been said, indeed, that he is too poetical for a dramatist, but a very little consideration of the plays of Shakespeare will tell us how much the greatest dramatic productions owe to poetry. When, therefore, we say that Marlowe's greatness as a dramatist depends on his poetry, that outside his poetry his best known work reveals almost every kind of weakness, we have not denied his claim to be the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors. Into indifferent material poetry can breathe that quickening flame without which the most dramatic situations fail to satisfy. Marlowe had a supreme gift for creating moments, sometimes extended to whole scenes; he had to learn, from repeated failures, the art of creating plays.

Essentially a man of tragic temperament, if we may venture to peer through the printed page to the author, Marlowe lacked the sense of humour. This has been cast up against him as a serious weakness; but it is possible that just here lies the strength of his contribution to drama. His work in literature was to set a standard in the portrayal of deep emotions, and it may have been as well that the first models (Doctor Faustus excepted) should not be weakened by apparent inconsistencies.

The list of Marlowe's dramas is as follows: The First and Second Parts of Tamburlaine (possibly before 1587), Doctor Faustus (1588), The Jew of Malta (? 1588-90), The Massacre at Paris (about 1590), Edward the Second (about 1590), Dido, Queen of Carthage (printed 1549). Fortunately for the reader, he can now obtain a volume containing all these plays in one of the cheap modern editions of the English classics. There will, therefore, be no attempt here to provide the details of plots with which every student of drama is doubtless well acquainted. A limited number of quotations, however, are supplied for the pleasure of the reader.

The First and Second Parts of Tamburlaine the Great may be discussed together, although they did not appear together, the second owing its existence to the immediate success of the first. Nevertheless there is such unbroken continuity in their representation of the career of the hero, and their style is so uniform, that it will be more convenient to refer to them conjointly under the one title. Reference has already been made to this famous production in the early portion of our discussion of Greene's work. The reader will recall what was said there of its contents, its popularity and influence, and of the meaning of the term Marlowesque, an adjective referring more directly to Tamburlaine than to any other of Marlowe's plays. It is in this play that our ears are dinned almost beyond sufferance by the poet's 'high astounding terms', that the hero most nearly 'with his uplifted forehead strikes the sky': incredible victories are won, the vilest cruelties practised; vast empires are shaken to their foundations, kings are overthrown and new ones crowned as easily as the wish is expressed; everywhere pride calls unto pride with the noise of its boastings. There is no plot, unless we give that name to a succession of battles, pageants and camp scenes. There is not the least attempt at characterization: in their glorious moments Bajazeth, the Soldan of Egypt, Orcanes are indistinguishable from the Scythian shepherd himself. The popularity of Tamburlaine was not won by fine touches, but by spectacular magnificence, by the pomp and excitement of war, and by the thrills of responsive pride and boastfulness awakened in the hearers by the convincing magniloquence of the speeches. This was possibly the first appearance upon the public stage of matured drama as opposed to the moralities and interludes. Udall and Still wrote for school and college audiences; Sackville, Edwards, Hughes and their compeers presented their plays at court; so did Lyly; and it was there that The Arraignment of Paris was acted. But Marlowe, like Kyd, laid his work before a larger, more unsophisticated audience, unrolling before its astonished gaze the full sweep of a five act play, crowded with warriors, headlong in its changes of fortune, and irresistible in its 'drum and trumpet' appeal to man's fighting instincts. From men of humble birth, in that age of adventure and romance, the victorious career of the Scythian shepherd won instant applause; with him they too seemed to rise; they shared in his glory, exulted with him in the chariot drawn by kings, forgave his savage massacres, and echoed his vaunts.

Yet there is something beyond all this, which has a lasting value, and appeals to the modern world as it appealed to Elizabethan England. Through the smoke of 'frantic boast and foolish word' may be discerned the fiery core of an idealized human grandeur. Breathing the intoxicating air of the Renaissance, Marlowe conceives man equal to his loftiest ideals, able to climb to the highest point of his thoughts. Choosing imperial conquest as the most striking theme he bids the shepherd aim at a throne, then bears him on the wings of unwavering resolution straight to his goal. The creation of Tamburlaine is the apotheosis of man on the earth. In such words as these does the conqueror announce his equality with the gods:

The god of war resigns his room to me,

Meaning to make me general of the world:

Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan,

Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.

These are wild words, chosen from a passage of ridiculous bombast. But the author, magnificent in his optimism, believed in the thought beneath the imagery. The same idea in different guises proclaims itself aloud throughout the play. Sometimes it chooses simple language, sometimes it is clothed in expressions of noble dignity, most often it hurls itself abroad in foaming rant. But everywhere the message is the same, that man's power is equal to the achievement of the aspiration planted within his breast, and that, to realize himself, he must follow it, with undivided effort, until it is reached. Tamburlaine, contemplating the possibility of kingship, says,

Why, then, Casane, shall we wish for aught

The world affords in greatest novelty,

And rest attemptless, faint, and destitute?

Methinks we should not.

Two scenes later, in the hour of triumph, he utters these fine lines, which may be accepted as Marlowe's most deliberate statement of his message:

Nature, that framed us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,[66]

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,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

We have used the extreme superlative, but in reality a point just below it should have been struck. For the dramatist, sending his imagination beyond earth to heaven, reserves one peak unscalable in the ascent of man towards the summit of his aspirations.

There is one potentate whom even Tamburlaine cannot overcome-Death. Zenocrate dies, nor will 'cavalieros higher than the clouds', nor cannon to 'batter the shining palace of the sun, and shiver all the starry firmament', restore her. Tamburlaine himself must die, defiantly, it may be, yielding nothing through cowardice, but as certainly as time must pass and age must come. Techelles seeks to encourage him with the hope that his illness will not last. But he brushes the deception aside with scorn.

Not last, Techelles! no, for I shall die.

See where my slave, the ugly monster Death,

Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,

Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart,

Who flies away at every glance I give,

And, when I look away, comes stealing on!-

Villain, away, and hie thee to the field!

I and mine army come to load thy back

With souls of thousand mangled carcasses.-

Look, where he goes! but see, he comes again

Because I stay!

When we consider Doctor Faustus we shall see the same thought. In electing to follow his desires to the uttermost Faustus reaps the reward but also incurs the punishment of all who choose the upper road of complete self-expression. He approaches the last gate, confident that his strength will suffice to open it; he finds it locked and keyless. In that hour of bitter disappointment that which is withheld seems more desirable than the total of all that has preceded it.

The dramatic greatness of Tamburlaine lies in the perfect harmony of the central figure with the general purpose of the play. Marlowe sought to present a world conqueror and he creates no less a man. Outwardly the shepherd is formed in a mould of strength and grace; his countenance might serve as a model for a bust of Achilles. Inwardly his mind is full of towering ambition, supported by courage and inflexible resolution. Those who meet him are profoundly impressed with a sense of his power. Theridamas murmurs in awe to himself, 'His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods.' Menaphon reports, 'His lofty brows in folds do figure death.' Cosroe describes him as 'His fortune's master and the king of men.' His own speeches and actions reveal no unsuspected flaw, no unworthy weakness; rather they almost defeat their own purpose by their exaggeration of his greatness. It would be possible to show by numerous quotations how Marlowe has everywhere selected epithets and imagery of magnitude to enhance the impressiveness of his hero in proportion to his astounding achievements. We will be content with only one more. It describes Tamburlaine's attitude towards those that resist him, and, by its slow, measured intensification of colour to a terrible climax, forces home resistlessly the suggestion of invincible power and relentlessness.

The first day when he pitcheth down his tents,

White is their hue, and on his silver crest

A snowy feather spangled-white he bears,

To signify the mildness of his mind,

That, satiate with spoil, refuseth blood:

But, when Aurora mounts the second time,

As red as scarlet is his furniture;

Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood,

Not sparing any that can manage arms:

But, if these threats move not submission,

Black are his colours, black pavilion;

His spear, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes

And jetty feathers menace death and hell;

Without respect of sex, degree or age,

He razeth all his foes with fire and sword.

Much has been said of Marlowe's poetry. His originality in the use of blank verse has probably been over-estimated. Quite good blank verse had been used in drama some years before his plays were written. Gorboduc, the 1572 version of Tancred and Gismunda, and at least two long speeches in The Arraignment of Paris arise in one's mind as containing very creditable examples of it. Moreover it would be wrong to suppose that this earlier blank verse was always stilted and cut up into end-stopt lines and unrhymed couplets. True, the overflow of one line into another was not common, but neither is it so in Tamburlaine. Marlowe accepts the end-stopt line almost as naturally as did his predecessors. Overflow may be found in Gorboduc. The following passage from Tancred and Gismunda is worth quoting to show how far liberty in this respect had been recognized by 1572.

[Tancred protests against any second marriage of his young widowed daughter, Gismunda.]

Sister, I say, ...

Forbear, and wade no farther in this speech.

Your words are wounds. I very well perceive

The purpose of this smooth oration:

This I suspected, when you first began

This fair discourse with us. Is this the end

Of all our hopes, that we have promised

Unto ourself by this her widowhood?

Would our dear daughter, would our only joy,

Would she forsake us? would she leave us now,

Before she hath clos'd up our dying eyes,

And with her tears bewail'd our funeral?

No other solace doth her father crave

But, whilst the fates maintain his dying life,

Her healthful presence gladsome to his soul,

Which rather than he willing would forego,

His heart desires the bitter taste of death.

If the reader will refer to the extract from Diana's speech he will see how completely free Peele was from any inherited bondage of the couplet measure. It is not easy to define exactly what Marlowe did give to blank verse. His famous Prologue to the First Part of Tamburlaine makes it quite clear that the general public were indebted to him for the introduction of blank verse upon their unpolished stage, it having previously been heard only at court or at the universities. But while this attempt on his part to displace the 'jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits' by the mere roll and crash of his 'high astounding terms' was a courageous step, it cannot be counted for originality in the development of the verse itself. Two features of his verse, however, are original and of his own creation. The first, its conversational ease and freedom, will be found more perfectly developed in Doctor Faustus and the later tragedies. Tamburlaine and the other mighty kings, emperors and captains have little skill in converse; when they speak they orate. This is true of the speeches in the earlier plays. Peele's are long monologues, and when Sackville's or Wilmot's characters discourse it is in the fashion of a set debate. Faustus and Mephistophilis, on the other hand, meet in real conversation, and it is in their question and answer that the flexibility and naturalness of blank verse are shown to advantage for the first time by Marlowe. The second feature is the infusion of pure poetry into drama. Hitherto the opinion seems to have held that dramatic verse must keep as close to prose as possible in order to combine the grace of rhythm with the solid commonsense of ordinary human speech. Nothing illustrates this more remarkably than a comparison of Sackville's poetry in his Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates with his verse in Gorboduc. We have remarked before on the tendency of all Senecan dramas to sententiousness and argument, than which nothing could be less poetical. The poetry of The Arraignment of Paris, again, is more lyrical than dramatic, harmonizing with the general approximation of that play to the nature of a masque. Marlowe was the first to demonstrate that imagination could riot madly in a wealth of imagery, or soar far above the realms of logic and cold philosophy to summon beautiful and terrible pictures out of the cloud-land of fancy, without losing hold upon earth and the language of mortals. He knew that the unspoken language of the impassioned heart is charged with poetry, however the formality of utterance, the fear of derision and the unreadiness of our vocabulary may freeze its expression on our lips; and he trusted to the hearts of his hearers to understand and appreciate the intense humanness of the feelings that forced themselves to the surface in that form. Nor was he mistaken. His 'raptures' are more truly natural, more sympathetic and truthful expressions of human emotion than the most stately and reasonable declamations of those earlier writers who clung to what they believed to be natural. Often quoted as it has been, Drayton's eulogy of Marlowe may be quoted again-it merits a place in every discussion of Marlowe's verse-as the finest appreciation of his poetry.

Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,

Had in him those brave translunary things

That the first poets had; his raptures were

All air and fire, which made his verses clear;

For that fine madness still he did retain,

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

(An Elegy: Of Poets and Poesie.)

From Tamburlaine one could extract passages to illustrate Marlowe's fondness for classical allusions, his use-Miltonic, if we may anticipate the term-of the sonorous effect of names, his introduction of sustained similes, his trick of repeating a sound at intervals (a trick borrowed by Greene later), his habit of letting a speaker refer to himself in the third person (Tamburlaine loves to boast the greatness of Tamburlaine), and his occasional slovenliness, especially in the insertion of a few lines of prose into the midst of his verse. All these and others are minor features which the student will search out for himself. Some of them, however, may be detected in the following excerpt from the Second Part:

[Tamburlaine is in his chariot drawn by captive kings. Techelles has just urged that the armies should hasten to the siege of Babylon.]

Tamburlaine. We will, Techelles.-Forward, then, ye jades!

Now crouch, ye kings of greatest Asia,

And tremble, when ye hear this scourge will come

That whips down cities and controlleth crowns,

Adding their wealth and treasure to my store.

The Euxine sea, north to Natolia;

The Terrene, west; the Caspian, north north-east;

And on the south, Sinus Arabicus;

Shall all be loaden with the martial spoils

We will convey with us to Persia.

Then shall my native city, Samarcanda,

And crystal waves of fresh Jaertis' stream,

The pride and beauty of her princely seat,

Be famous through the furthest continents;

For there my palace royal shall be placed,

Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens,

And cast the fame of Ilion's tower to hell:

Thorough the streets, with troops of conquered kings,

I'll ride in golden armour like the sun;

And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,

Spangled with diamonds, dancing in the air,

To note me emperor of the three-fold world;

Like to an almond tree y-mounted high

Upon the lofty and celestial mount

Of ever-green Selinus, quaintly decked

With blooms more white than Erycina's brows,

Whose tender blossoms tremble every one

At every little breath that thorough heaven is blown.

Then in my coach, like Saturn's royal son

Mounted his shining chariot gilt with fire

And drawn with princely eagles through the path

Paved with bright crystal and enchased with stars,

When all the gods stand gazing at his pomp,

So will I ride through Samarcanda-streets,

Until my soul, dissevered from this flesh,

Shall mount the milk-white way and meet him there.

To Babylon, my lords, to Babylon!

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus sets forth the well-known story of the man who sold his soul to the devil in return for complete gratification of his desires during his life on earth. Something of its fame is due to its association, through its main plot, with Goethe's masterpiece; something may be attributed to the fascination of its theme; something must be granted to the terrible force of one or two scenes. It is hard to believe that its own artistic and dramatic qualities could have secured unaided the reputation which it appears to possess among some critics. More even than Tamburlaine, this play hangs upon one central figure. There is no Bajazeth, no Soldan, no Orcanes, no Zenocrate to help to bear the weight of impressiveness. The low characters, who are intended to be humorous, drag the plot down instead of buoying it up. Other figures are hardly more than dummies, unable to excite the smallest interest. Mephistophilis deserves our notice, but his is a shadowy outline removed from humanity. One figure alone stands forth to hold and justify our attention; and he proves himself unfit for the task. Those who insist on tracing one guiding principle in all Marlowe's plays have declared that Faustus is the personification of 'thirst for knowledge' or of 'intellectual virtù', just as Tamburlaine personifies, for them, the 'thirst for power' or 'physical virtù'. Surely, if this is so, Marlowe has failed absolutely in his presentment of the character; in which case the play may be condemned out of hand, seeing that the character of Faustus is its all in all. But the more we study Marlowe's other principal figures, the more convinced we become of his absorption in them while they are in the making. With Tamburlaine he himself grows terrible and glorious; the spirit of pride and conquest colours every phrase, speech and description, so that, as we have pointed out, the character of Tamburlaine is masterfully consistent and attuned to the purpose of the play. It is better, then, to examine the character of Faustus, as revealed in his desires, requests, and prominent actions, and thence educe the purpose of the play, than, by deciding upon this purpose, to discover that the central figure is in continual discord with it.

Faustus is introduced to us by the Chorus at the commencement of the play as a scholar of repute, 'glutted now with learning's golden gifts,' and about to turn aside to the study of necromancy. Accordingly he appears in his study rejecting logic as no end in itself, law as servile, medicine because he has exhausted its possible limits, divinity because it tells him that the reward of sin is death. Upon sin his mind is set all the time, so that the reminder from Jerome's Bible annoys him. He flings the book aside because it warns him of what he affects to disbelieve and would be glad to forget. Magic wins him by its unknown possibilities 'of profit and delight, of power, of honour, and omnipotence'.

Lest we should suppose that his choice has anything heroic in it, that he is deliberately accepting a terrible debt of eternal torment in exchange for what necromancy can give, we are informed that he has no belief in hell or future pain, that to him men's souls are trifles. Deep down in his conscience he has a fear of 'damnation', which only makes itself felt, however, in unexalted moments. Such thoughts are set aside as 'mere old wives' tales' in the triumphant hour of his signing the contract.

With curiosity and longing, then, he enters unshudderingly into a bargain that will give him what he seeks. We can readily discover, from his own lips, what that is. He exults over the prospect of having spirits to do his bidding:

I'll have them fly to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,

And search all corners of the new-found world

For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;

I'll have them read me strange philosophy,

And tell the secrets of all foreign kings.

Many other things his fancy pictures. But we observe that philosophy stands below wealth and feasting in his wishes. He dismisses Mephistophilis back to Lucifer with this report of himself:

Say, he surrenders up to him his soul,

So he will spare him four and twenty years,

Letting him live in all voluptuousness.

For a moment his enthusiastic outlook upon limitless capacity wakens in him a desire for military glory: he would be 'great emperor of the world', he would 'pass the ocean with a band of men'. But from what we know of his subsequent career he never attempted to win such renown. No; in his heart he confesses,

The god thou servest is thine own appetite.

Mephistophilis, with a profound and melancholy insight into the reality of things, sees hell in every place where heaven is not. Faustus, on the other hand, with flippant superficiality laughs at the idea. An intellectual, a moral hell is to him incomprehensible.

Nay, an this be hell, I'll willingly be damned:

What! sleeping, eating, walking, and disputing!

But, leaving this, let me have a wife,

The fairest maid in Germany;

For I am wanton and lascivious,

And cannot live without a wife.

Sometimes conscience forces him to listen to its fearful whispers, and then suicide offers its dreadful means as a silencer of their disturbing warnings. Why does he not accept the relief of rope or dagger?

-Long ere this I should have done the deed,

Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me

Of Alexander's love and Oenon's death?

And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes

With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,

Made music with my Mephistophilis?

Why should I die, then, or basely despair?

I am resolved; Faustus shall not repent.

The mood of fear and regret passes. He plunges back to the gratification of his senses.

Whilst I am here on earth let me be cloyed

With all things that delight the heart of man:

My four-and-twenty years of liberty

I'll spend in pleasure and in dalliance.

The end is drawing near. Appetite is becoming sated: rarer and rarer delicacies are needed to satisfy his craving. Repentance!-that is thrust aside, postponed to a later hour.

One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,

To glut the longing of my heart's desire-

That I may have unto my paramour

That heavenly Helen which I saw of late,

Whose sweet embraces may extinguish clean

Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow.

When at last the hour to fulfil his part of the contract arrives, he confesses in bitterness of spirit, 'for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity.'

This man is not one consumed with a thirst of knowledge. Once he asks Mephistophilis a few questions on astrology; at another time he evinces some curiosity concerning Lucifer and Hell, idle curiosity because he regards it all as foolishness. We are told of a journey through the heavens and of voyages about the world, but we see him exercising his supernatural gifts in the most puerile and useless fashion. It is impossible, therefore, to regard his ambition as a lust for knowledge in the usual meaning of that term, differentiating it from sensual experience. If Faustus is to be labelled according to his dominant trait, then let us describe him as the embodiment of sense-gratification. He is a sensualist from the moment that he takes up the book of magic and ponders over what it may bring him. A degraded form of him has been sketched in the Syriac scholar of a modern work of fiction, who cherished, side by side with a world-wide reputation for learning, a bestial appetite for profligacy. The message of Tamburlaine holds as true in the pursuit of pleasure as in that of conquest. Faustus denies that there is a limit to pleasure, and the horror of his career grows darker as his mounting desires bear him further and further on, far beyond the reach of less eager minds, to the impassable point whence he may only see the heaven beyond. That point is the hell which once he laughed at as an old wives' tale.

The weakness of Doctor Faustus appears exactly where Tamburlaine is strongest. In spite of his prodigious boasting and his callous indifference to suffering, Tamburlaine appeals to us most powerfully as the right titanic figure for a world-conqueror; his soul is ever above his body, looking beyond the victory of to-day to the greater conquests of the future: there is nothing sordid or commonplace about him. Unfortunately, though it is given to few of us to be conquerors, it is possible for all of us to gratify our senses if we will. Tamburlaine gathers golden fruit, Faustus plucks berries from the same bush as ourselves: only, he must have them from the topmost boughs. The following passage has probably never been surpassed in its magic idealization of that which is essentially base and carnal:

[Enter Helen, passing over the stage between two Cupids.]

Faustus. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?-

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.-[Kisses her.]

Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!-

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

I will be Paris, and for love of thee,

Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sacked;

And I will combat with weak Menelaus,

And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,

And then return to Helen for a kiss.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

When he appeared to hapless Semele;

More lovely than the monarch of the sky

In wanton Arethusa's azured arms;

And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

Poetry such as this has power to blind us for a moment to the underlying meaning: Faustus enjoys a temporary transfiguration. But Marlowe's muse flags in the effort to sublimate dross. Such a character as Faustus is unfitted to support tragedy. His creator inspires him with his own Bohemian joy in mere pleasure, his own thirst for fresh sensations, his own vehement disregard of restraint-a disregard which brought Marlowe to a tragic and unworthy end. But, as if in mockery, he degrades him with unmanly, ignoble qualities that excite our derision. His mind is pleased with toys that would amuse a child: at the conclusion of an almost incredibly trivial Show of the Seven Deadly Sins he exclaims, 'O, how this sight doth delight my soul!' His practical jokes are unworthy of a court jester. The congealing of his blood agitates his superstitious mind far more than the terrible frankness of Mephistophilis. Miserably mean-spirited, he seeks to propitiate the wrath of the fiend by invoking his torments upon an old man whose disinterested appeal momentarily quickened his conscience into revolt. Finally, when we recall the words with which Tamburlaine faced death, what contempt, despite the frightful anguish of the scene, is aroused by Faustus's screams of terror at the approach of Lucifer to claim him as his own! Instinctively we think of Byron's Manfred and his scorn of hell and its furies. It is his cowardice that spoils the effect of the backward glances and twinges of conscience, the intention of which has been rightly praised by so many. Marlowe probably wished to represent the strife of good and evil in a man's soul. Under other circumstances it is fair to suppose that he would have achieved success, and so have anticipated Goethe. But his Faustus moves on too low a level. Of a moral sense, independent of the dread of punishment, he knows nothing. Four times his Good Angel suggests to him a return to the right path; once an Old Man warns him; twice Mephistophilis says that which might fairly have bid him pause; twice, at least, his own conscience advises repentance. Yet only on two occasions is there any real revolt, and then only because his cowardice has been enlisted on the side of righteousness by the sudden thought of the devils that will tear him in pieces or of the hell that 'claims his right, and with a roaring voice says, "Faustus, come".' In proof of this we see his hesitation scared away by the greater terrors of a present devil, a Lucifer clothed in horror, or a threatening Mephistophilis. In his vacillations we see, not the noble conflict of good and evil impulses, but an ignoble tug-of-war between timidity and appetite.

If Faustus himself falls short of success as a tragic character, if his aspirations are too mean, his qualities too contemptible to win our sympathy save at rare moments of transcendent poetry, what shall be said of the setting provided for the story of his career? Once more we are offered the stale devices of the Moralities, the Good and Bad Angels, the Devil, the Old Man (formerly known as Sage Counsel), the Seven Deadly Sins, Heaven, Hell, and the carefully-pointed moral at the end. Even the Senecan Chorus has been forced into service to tell us of Faustus's early manhood and of the marvellous journeys taken in the intervals. There are no acts, but that is not a great matter; they were added later in the edition of 1616. What does matter very much is the introduction of stupid scenes of low comedy into which Faustus is dragged to play a common conjuror's part and which almost succeed in shattering the impression of tragic intensity left by the few scenes where poetry triumphs over facts. Here again, however, our criticism of the author is softened by the knowledge that Dekker and Rowley made undefined additions to the play, and may therefore be responsible for the crudities of its humour. Nevertheless, even with this allowance, Marlowe must be blamed for the utter incongruity of so many scenes with high tragedy. The harmony which rules the construction of Tamburlaine, giving it a lofty coherence and consistency, is lamentably absent from Doctor Faustus.

Doctor Faustus is not a great play. Yet it will never be forgotten. Though mismanaged, it has the elements of a tremendous tragedy. In discerning the suitability of the Teutonic legend for this purpose Marlowe showed a far truer understanding of what tragedy should be, of the superior terrors of moral over material downfall, than he displayed in his more successful later tragedy.

Most of the poetry is of a less fiery kind, it flares less, than the poetry of Tamburlaine. There is also more use of prose. But at least two purple passages exist to give immortality to Faustus's passion and despair. The first has already been quoted at length. The second is the even more famous soliloquy, the terror-stricken outcry rather, of Faustus in his last hour of life. With frightful realism it confirms the fiend's scornful prophecy of a scene of 'desperate lunacy', when his labouring brain will beget 'a world of idle fantasies to overreach the devil, but all in vain'.

Marlowe's adaptation of blank verse to natural conversation has been spoken of as one of his contributions to the art of dramatic poetry. The following passage illustrates this:

[The compact has just been signed.]

Meph. Speak, Faustus; do you deliver this as your deed?

Faustus. Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good of it!

Meph. So, now, Faustus, ask me what thou wilt.

Faustus. First I will question with thee about hell.

Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

Meph. Under the heavens.

Faustus. Ay, so are all things else; but whereabouts?

Meph. Within the bowels of these elements,

Where we are tortured and remain for ever.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self-place; but where we are is hell,

And where hell is, there must we ever be:

And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

Faustus. I think hell's a fable.

Meph. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

Faustus. Why, dost thou think that Faustus shall be damned?

Meph. Ay, of necessity, for here's the scroll

In which thou hast given thy soul to Lucifer.

Faustus. Ay, and body too; and what of that?

Thinkest thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine

That, after this life, there is any pain?

No, these are trifles and mere old wives' tales.

Meph. But I am an instance to prove the contrary,

For I tell thee I am damned and now in hell.

Faustus. Nay, an this be hell, I'll willingly be damned.

The Jew of Malta repeats the fundamental failure of Doctor Faustus, but partially redeems it by avoiding its errors of construction. In this play the dramatist has recovered his sense of harmony: he places his central figure in circumstances that befit him, and maintains a consistent balance between the strength of his character and the nature of his deeds. The Jew does nothing that really jars on our conception of him as a great villain. Nor in the minor scenes is there anything to disturb the general impression of darkness. The gentleness of Abigail, whose love and obedience alone draw her into the net of crime, only makes her surroundings appear more cruel; while the introduction of the Governor, the Grand Seignior's son, and a Vice-Admiral of Spain raises the level of wickedness to something like dignified rank. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the play is fundamentally unsound. True tragedy should present more than a great change between the first and last scenes; the change should be lamentable. We should feel that a much better ending might, and would, have come but for the circumstance that forms the crisis, or for other circumstances at the beginning of the play. If we consider such tragic careers as those of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Othello we recognize that each might have come to a different conclusion if it had not been for the blight of a father's death or a single act of folly, of ambition or jealousy. These men all excite our sympathy, especially Hamlet, whose tragedy is due not at all to himself but to the overshadowing of another's crime. Macbeth and Othello are each introduced as men of the noblest qualities, with one flaw which events have not yet revealed. But Barabas the Jew is deliberately painted as vile. We learn from his own lips of previous villany atrocious enough in itself, without any of his subsequent crimes, to justify his horrible fate. Moreover, he does not actually lose his wealth. If that were all swept away we could understand resentment boiling up into savage hate. But the truth is, he is so little hurt financially that soon after the confiscation of his goods he is able to say:

In spite of these swine-eating Christians ...

Am I become as wealthy as I was.

They hoped my daughter would ha' been a nun;

But she's at home, and I have bought a house

As great and fair as is the governor's.

Hence his action against the governor's son, Lodowick, is inexcusably vindictive, quite apart from the vile share in it which he forces upon his daughter. The nunnery crime, again, is monstrous in its gross injustice to Abigail's constancy and in its Herodian comprehensiveness. After this his other murders and intrigues seem more justified. The two friars, his servant Ithamore and the rest can well be spared by any exit; his betrayal of the town is not unreasonable, considering the treatment meted out to him within it; and his proposed second treachery is based on sound policy.-We may observe, in passing, that the self-righteous governor takes no steps to prevent, by a timely warning, the massacre of the enemy's soldiers, availing himself of the atrocity, instead, to secure a victory for his side.-Consequently, when the final doom does fall upon Barabas, we have begun to be vaguely doubtful whether it is altogether deserved. Yet we feel that it is impossible to let him live. Thus the conclusion, however horrible spectacularly, neither excites pity for the Jew nor entirely satisfies justice. Barabas is victimized by the governor at the beginning of the play; it seems hardly fair that the two men should occupy the same relative positions at the end. It may be urged that the early scenes do present Barabas as meriting our pity, that our compassion does go out to him in his oppression. But the sympathy that is won at first is falsely won by the prominence given to his distress when he fears all is lost: touched by the pain caused by the governor's injustice, we almost overlook the recovery effected by the Jew's cunning.

If we look for passages of tragic intensity we find a splendid hope weakening to dreary disappointment. The whole of the first act and the opening scene of the second act ring true to tragedy. Nothing could be better planned than the swift transition from the golden harvesting of wealth to its confiscation by the state. The contrast, too, between the dignified resistance of Barabas and the weak surrender of his companions artistically emphasizes the former's splendid isolation. For the brief scene in which the Jew, haunting the vicinity of the nunnery like 'ghosts that glide by night about the place where treasure hath been hid', regains his bags of gold and precious jewels, no praise can be too high. After that, however, the ennobling mantle of human sorrow and pain falls away; the crimes that follow are hideous in their nakedness-murders or massacres, nothing more. Not the least attempt is made to enlist our sympathy for any one of the murdered, except Abigail. If we are asked, then, to define the true nature of the play, we shall call it not a tragedy proper, in the sense in which Macbeth is a tragedy, but rather a narrative play presenting the criminal career of a villain acting under provocation. As has been well pointed out by Mr. Baker in his Development of Shakespeare, there is a difference between 'the tragic' and 'tragedy'. We might describe The Jew of Malta as a tragic narrative play.

In characterization Marlowe has made a distinct advance. With the creation of Barabas he brings upon the stage a person of many commanding qualities. The Jew is great in his own terrible way. He is far-seeing, bold, subtle, relentless. He loves his daughter much, his gold immeasurably. Tempests of emotion shake his frame when restraint is thrown aside. But at need he can be calm and conciliatory in the face of intense annoyance and blustering threats. In the hour of death he is own brother to defiant Tamburlaine. The points of resemblance between him and Shylock may be searched out by any curious student: the reality of the likeness, scoffed at by a few whose admiration for Shakespeare is inclined to prejudice their judgment, has been effectively demonstrated by Professor Ward.[67] It would be an interesting exercise to pursue Professor Ward's hint at the insincerity of the Jew's recital to Ithamore of his early crimes. We might work back to an initial conception of Barabas as an upright merchant, and so discover a real tragedy in the moral downfall which results from the governor's injustice. Such a point of view is attractive, and would raise the character of the play considerably. But it has many obstacles in its way, not the least being the Machiavellian prologue and the difficulty of believing that any dramatist of the sixteenth century would wish, or dare, to present to an English audience the picture of an honest, ill-treated Jew. The confiscation which we regard as an injustice was probably viewed in that day as an eminently sound and Christian act of political economy.

Leaving Abigail and Ithamore to the liking or loathing of readers of the play, we hasten to conclude this discussion with examples of Marlowe's verse. His poetry is once more the refining element, beautifying the ugly, ennobling the mean, a vein of gold in the quartz. Having grown more generous since the days of Doctor Faustus, the poet scatters gems with lavish hand throughout the play. Rhymes begin to appear, as though he scorned to seem dependent upon blank verse alone. Extensive as is the choice, it is impossible, in fairness to those readers who have not the play, to omit entirely the often-quoted opening scene of the second act. After it, however, we quote a passage which, almost more than the other, illustrates the purifying influence of the author's imagination: the fact that it is partly in rhyme gives it an additional interest.

(1)

[Barabas wanders in the streets about his old home where his treasure lies concealed.]

Barabas. Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls

The sick man's passport in her hollow beak,

And in the shadow of the silent night

Doth shake contagion from her sable wings,

Vexed and tormented runs poor Barabas

With fatal curses towards these Christians.

The incertain pleasures of swift-footed time

Have ta'en their flight, and left me in despair;

And of my former riches rests no more

But bare remembrance; like a soldier's scar,

That has no further comfort for his maim....

Now I remember those old women's words,

Who in my wealth would tell me winter's tales,

And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night

About the place where treasure hath been hid:

And now methinks that I am one of those;

For, whilst I live, here lives my soul's sole hope,

And, when I die, here shall my spirit walk.

(2)

[Bellamira, a courtesan, and Ithamore, a cut-throat slave from Thrace, are together.]

Bell. Now, gentle Ithamore, lie in my lap.-

Where are my maids? provide a cunning banquet;

Send to the merchant, bid him bring me silks;

Shall Ithamore, my love, go in such rags?

Ithamore. And bid the jeweller come hither too.

Bell. I have no husband; sweet, I'll marry thee.

Ithamore. Content: but we will leave this paltry land,

And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece;-

I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;-

Where painted carpets o'er the meads are hurled,

And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world;

Where woods and forests go in goodly green;-

I'll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love's Queen;-

The meads, the orchards, and the primrose-lanes,

Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes:

Thou in those groves, by Dis above,

Shalt live with me and be my love.

Bell. Whither will I not go with gentle Ithamore?

The Massacre at Paris is a poor play and therefore need not detain us long. Its only interest is in its attempt to represent quite recent events (1572-89). As a history play it manages to reproduce the French atmosphere of distrust, rivalry, intrigue and indiscriminate massacre, but at the expense of unity. The hurried succession of scenes leads us blindly to an unexpected conclusion: from first almost to last no indication is given that the consummation aimed at is the ascent of Navarre to the throne of France. Rarely has the merely chronological principle been adhered to with so little meaning. Navarre, whose marriage opens the play and whose triumph closes it, might be expected to figure largely as the upholder of Protestantism in opposition to Guise; instead he is relegated to quite a subordinate part. Anjou, again, the later opponent of Guise, makes a very belated bid for our favour after displaying a brutality equal to his rival's in the massacre. The author is careful to paint Catherine in truly inky blackness. But the only character which we are likely to remember is the Duke of Guise. Yet his portrait is of inferior workmanship. The murders by which he tries to reach the throne are too treacherous to be ranked in the grander scale of crime. Even the vastness of his organized massacre is belittled for us by the stage presentment of individual assassination in which Guise himself plays a butcher's part. Greatness is more often attributed to outward aloofness and inactivity than to busy participation in the execution of a plot. Moreover, it was a tactical error to give prominence to the personal quarrel between Guise and Mugeroun, for it dissipates upon a private matter the force which, devoted to an exalted ambition, might have been impressive. However, there are one or two touches which give a cold grandeur to this character and seem half to anticipate the Mortimer of the next play. The following lines are taken from the second scene of the first act-there are only three acts altogether:

Guise. Now Guise begins those deep-engendered thoughts

To burst abroad, those never-dying flames

Which cannot be extinguished but by blood.

Oft have I levelled, and at last have learned

That peril is the chiefest way to happiness,

And resolution honour's fairest aim.

What glory is there in a common good,

That hangs for every peasant to achieve?

That like I best, that flies beyond my reach.

Set me to scale the high Pyramides,

And thereon set the diadem of France;

I'll either rend it with my nails to naught,

Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,

Although my downfall be the deepest hell....

Give me a look, that, when I bend the brows,

Pale death may walk in furrows of my face;

A hand that with a grasp may gripe the world;

An ear to hear what my detractors say;

A royal seat, a sceptre, and a crown;

That those which do behold them may become

As men that stand and gaze against the sun.

Edward the Second is undoubtedly Marlowe's masterpiece. It marks the elevation of the Chronicle History Play to its highest possibilities, and is, at the same time, a deeply moving tragedy. One wonders how Peele could write the medley of incongruous and ill-connected scenes which we know under the abbreviated title of Edward the First after having once seen his rival's 'history' acted. For the strength of Marlowe's play lies in its concentration upon the figure of the king and its skilful omission of details not dramatically helpful. If there were any balance of advantage in the choice of subject one must feel that it did not lie with the earlier writer, who was undertaking the extremely difficult task of presenting an inglorious monarch sympathetically without allowing him to appear contemptible. We can imagine how magnificently he could have set forth the masterful career of Edward I. His courage in attempting a character less congenial to his natural temperament deserved the success it achieved. The Tamburlaine element is not withheld; the fierce baron, young Mortimer, inherits that conqueror's ambitious nature, and fully maintains the great traditions of strength, pride and defiance. But Mortimer is only the second figure in order of importance. Upon the king Marlowe pours all the fruits of his experience in dramatic work.

From the historical point of view the dramatist is signally successful in making the men of the past live over again. His weak monarch is more intensely human than any mightier, more kingly ruler would probably have been in his hands. And the barons, in their haughtiness and easy aptitude for revolt, are, to the life, the fierce men whose grandfathers and fathers in turn fought against their sovereigns and whose descendants fell in the fratricidal Wars of the Roses. Moreover the chronicle of the reign is followed with reasonable accuracy, if we make due allowance for dramatic requirements. It can hardly be said that the author's representation of Edward is impartial: a kindly veil is drawn over the lawlessness of his government and the disgrace brought upon English arms by his military incapacity. But the political intrigue, the friction between monarch and subjects, the helplessness of the king to enforce his wishes, are all brought back vividly.

However, it is Marlowe's adaptation of a historical subject to a loftier purpose than the mere renewal of the past which gives real greatness to the play. Here at last his work attains to the full stature and noble harmony of a tragedy, not on the highest level, it is true, but dignified and moving. The catastrophe is physical, not moral, and thus the play lacks the awful horror half-revealed in Doctor Faustus. But whereas the latter, reaching after the greatest things, falls short of success, Edward the Second, content with less, easily secures a first place in the second rank.

By a neat device we are introduced, at the outset, to the king, his favourite, and the fatal choice from which springs all the misery of the reign. For the opening lines, spoken by Gaveston himself, are no less than the royal message bidding him return to 'share the kingdom' with his friend. From that point the first portion of the play easily unfolds: it deals with the strife, the brief triumphs and the bitter defeats which fill the eventful period of this ill-starred friendship. The actual crisis falls within the third act: it is marked by the murder of Gaveston and the resolution of the king at last to offer armed resistance to the tyranny of the barons. The oath by which he seals his decision is royally impressive.

[Kneeling] By earth, the common mother of us all,

By heaven, and all the moving orbs thereof,

By this right hand, and by my father's sword,

And all the honours 'longing to my crown,

I will have heads and lives for him as many

As I have manors, castles, towns and towers!

From that oath is born the catastrophe that immediately ensues. A temporary victory, followed up by revengeful executions, is succeeded by defeat, captivity, loss of the crown, and a fearful death.

King Edward is not portrayed as weak mentally or morally. Gaveston, in the first scene, speaks of his master's effeminacy, and on more than one occasion there are hints from the royal favourites that the king should assert his majesty more vigorously. But over and over again Edward breaks out into anger at the insolence of his subjects and only fails to crush them through the impossibility of exacting obedience from those about him. In Act I, Scene 4, it is Mortimer's order for the seizure of Gaveston that is obeyed, not the king's command for Mortimer's arrest. When the warrant for his minion's exile is submitted to him, the king refuses point blank, in the face of threatening insistence. 'I will not yield', he cries; 'curse me, depose me, do the worst you can.' He only gives way at last before a threat of papal excommunication, the crushing power of which had been made abundantly clear by its effect on King John just a century before. Indeed we need not go further than the first scene to find that Marlowe is resolved to put the right spirit of wilfulness and angry determination in his fated monarch. There we find this speech by him:

Well, Mortimer, I'll make thee rue these words;

Beseems it thee to contradict thy king?

Frownest thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster?

This sword shall plane the furrows of thy brows,

And hew these knees that now are grown so stiff.

I will have Gaveston; and you shall know

What danger 'tis to stand against your king.

And again, when the barons have withdrawn, he bursts out-

I cannot brook these haughty menaces;

Am I a king, and must be over-ruled!-

Brother, display my ensigns in the field:

I'll bandy with the barons and the earls,

And either die or live with Gaveston.

Nor is this pride of sovereignty lost even in defeat. We see it still as strong, though forced by circumstances and coaxed to give way, in the pathetic scene where he is compelled to surrender his crown to Mortimer's delegate. Nevertheless the weakness that brings and justifies his downfall is placed prominently before us from the first. King Edward prefers his own pleasure before the unity of his kingdom and the strength of his rule. There is even something a little ignoble in his love for Gaveston, something unmanly and contemptible, if the reports of such prejudiced persons as the queen and Mortimer are to be believed. But the fault is not a criminal or unnatural one. One can sympathize with a heart that yearns for the presence of a single friend in a world of cold-blooded critics or harsh counsellors. The not unattractive character of Gaveston, too, affectionate, gay, proud, quick-tempered, brave-with faults also, of deceit, vanity and vindictiveness-preserves the royal friendship from the sink of blind dotage upon an unworthy creature. The tragedy follows, then, from the king's preferment of private above public good, or, we may say, from the conflict between the king's wishes as a man and his duty as a monarch. It is to Marlowe's perception of this vital struggle underlying the hostility between King Edward and his nobles that the play owes its greatness. We pity the king, we can hate those who beat him down to the mire, because his fault appeals to us in its personal aspect as almost a virtue; he is willing to sacrifice so much to keep his friends. At the same time we perceive the justice of his dethronement, for we recognize that the duty of a king must take precedence over everything else. He has brought his punishment upon himself. Yet, inasmuch as Mortimer, serviceable to the state as an instrument, offends our sense of what is due from a subject to his sovereign, we applaud the justice of his downfall; we, perhaps, secretly rejoice that this bullying young baron is humbled beneath a king's displeasure at last. As a final touch Marlowe rescues the sovereignty of the throne from the taint of weakness by the little prince's vigorous assertion of his authority at the end.

Queen Isabella presents certain difficulties. The king's treatment of her reflects little credit upon him, although one can hardly demand the same affection in a political as in a voluntary union. Apparently she really loves the king until his continued coldness chills her feelings and drives them to seek return in the more responsive heart of Mortimer. After that she even sinks so low as to wish the king dead. Yet to the end she cherishes a warm love for her son. Probably the author intended that her degeneracy should be attributed to the baneful influence of Mortimer and so strengthen the need for his death.

Mortimer, as the great antagonist, has a very strong character. Imperious, fiery, he is the real leader of the barons. From the first it is apparent that he is actuated by personal malice as much as by righteous indignation on behalf of his misgoverned country. He confides to his uncle that it is Gaveston's and the king's mocking jests at the plainness of his train and attire which make him impatient. But the unwisdom of the king serves him for a stalking-horse while secretly he pursues the goal of his private ambition. In adversity he is uncrushed. When he returns victorious he ruthlessly sweeps aside all likely obstacles to his supremacy, the Spensers, Kent, and even the king being hurried to their death. Then, just as he thinks to stand at the summit, he falls-and falls grandly.

Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel

There is a point, to which when men aspire,

They tumble headlong down: that point I touched;

And seeing there was no place to mount up higher,

Why should I grieve at my declining fall?-

Farewell, fair queen: weep not for Mortimer,

That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,

Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

Marlowe wisely-for him-departs from the growing custom of diversifying the hard facts of history with homely fiction of a more or less comic nature. He declines to mingle clowns and courtiers. Variety is secured by a slightly fuller delineation of the secondary characters than is usual with him, with its consequent effect on the dialogue, and by abrupt changes in the political situation. Two great scenes, King Edward's abdication and his death, remain as memories with us long after we have laid the book down; but while we are reading it there are many others that touch the chords of indignation and sorrow. The verse throughout is admirable: it has shaken itself free of rant and extravagance; no longer are adjectives and nouns of splendour heaped recklessly one upon another. Yet there is nothing prosy or commonplace. The spirit of poetry and strength is everywhere.

Our last extract is from the famous abdication scene (Act V, Scene 1).

Leicester. Call them again, my lord, and speak them fair;

For, if they go, the prince shall lose his right.

K. Edward. Call thou them back; I have no power to speak.

Leicester. My lord, the king is willing to resign.

Bishop of Winchester. If he be not, let him choose.

K. Edward. O, would I might! but heavens and earth conspire

To make me miserable. Here, receive my crown.

Receive it? no, these innocent hands of mine

Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime:

He of you all that most desires my blood,

And will be called the murderer of a king,

Take it. What, are you moved? pity you me?

Then send for unrelenting Mortimer,

And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel,

Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear.

Yet stay; for, rather than I'll look on them,

Here, here! [Gives the crown.]-Now, sweet God of heaven,

Make me despise this transitory pomp,

And sit for aye enthronised in heaven!

Come, death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,

Or, if I live, let me forget myself.

In the writing of Dido, Queen of Carthage Nash had a share. Unfortunately, it is impossible to say how much was his or to what portion of the play his work belongs. The supposition that Nash finished the play does not necessarily imply that he wrote the last part. It may have been that Marlowe originally conceived of a three act play-like The Massacre at Paris-and that Nash filled it out to five acts by the addition of scenes here and there. The unusual shortness of the play rather supports this theory. But it is best to let it stand uncertain. At least this much is clear, that the genius of Marlowe is strongly present both in the character of the queen and in the splendid passages of poetry.

Again we have a well-constructed tragedy based on the loss of a dear friend and ending in death. But here the friendship is elevated to the passionate affection of a woman for her lover, and the conclusion moves our pity with double force by its picture of suffering and by the fact that the queen is the unhappy victim of a cruel fate. It is the old story of love ending in desertion and a broken heart, only the faithless lover would be true if the gods had not ordered otherwise; his regret at parting is not the simulated grief of a hollow deceiver, but the sincere emotion of a lover acting under compulsion. Constructively the play is well balanced, although the incidents of the first two acts form, perhaps, a rather too elaborate introduction to the main plot. Some initial reference to the gods is necessary to set Aeneas's action in the right light. The writer is inclined, however, to turn the occasion into an opportunity for fine picture painting when he should be pressing forward to the essential theme. The long story of the destruction of Troy, also, has no proper place in this drama, inasmuch as Aeneas's piety and prowess at that time are not even converted to use as an incentive to Dido's love. Nevertheless it must be admitted that some of the most charming passages are to be found in these first two acts. The commencement of the third act at once sets the real business of the tragedy in motion: by a delicate piece of deception Queen Dido is persuaded to clasp young Cupid, instead of little Ascanius, to her bosom-with fatal results. Before the act is over Dido and Aeneas have plighted troth, romantically, in a cave where they are sheltering together from a storm. With the fourth act comes the first warning of impending shipwreck to their loves. Aeneas has a dream, and prepares to sail for Italy. On this occasion, however, the queen is able to overcome his doubts by bestowing upon him her crown and sceptre, thus providing him with a kingdom powerful enough to content his ambitions. Yet the gods are not to be satisfied so; Hermes himself is sent to command the Trojan's instant departure for another shore. In vain now does Dido plead. Aeneas departs, and there is nothing left for her in her anguish but to fling herself upon the sacrificial fire raised on the pretence of curing her love. A grim pretence, verily.

Besides the two principal characters there are Dido's sister Anna, and a visiting king, Iarbas, several friends of Aeneas, Ascanius (as himself and as impersonated by Cupid), and various gods and goddesses. None of these are developed beyond a secondary pitch; but Ascanius (or Cupid) is quite invaluable for the lightness and freedom which his presence conveys to the atmosphere about him; while the unrequited loves of Anna and Iarbas soften for us the severity of the blow that crushes the Carthaginian queen. Aeneas himself is presented in a subdued light, his soldier's heart being fairly divided between his mistress and empire. Thus we have the figure of Dido set out in high relief. Marlowe was fond of experiments in characterization, but he never diverged more completely from the path marked out by his previous steps than when he decided to give the first place in a tragedy to a woman. Hitherto his women have not impressed us: Abigail is probably the best of a shadowy group. Suddenly, in the Queen of Carthage, womankind towers up in majesty, to hold our attention fixed in wonder and pity as she walks with strong, unsuspecting tread the steep descent to death. She is sister to Shakespeare's Cleopatra, yet with marked individual differences. Her feelings startle us with their fierce heat and swift transitions. The fire of love flames up abruptly, driving her speech immediately into wild contradictions. She herself is amazed at the change within her. Burning to tell Aeneas her secret, yet withheld by womanly modesty, she endeavours to betray it indirectly by heaping extravagant gifts upon him. She counts over the list of her former suitors before him that he may see from the shrug of her shoulders that her affections are not placed elsewhere. Like Portia to Bassanio before he chooses the casket, she throws out hints, calls them back hastily, half lets fall the word, then breaks off the sentence, laying bare her heart to the most ordinary observer, yet despairing of his understanding her. When at last, from the tempest of desire and uncertainty, she passes into the harbour of his assured love, a rapture of content, such as the divinest music brings, fills her soul. Then the shadows begin to fall. At first the sincerity of Aeneas's love unites with her startled and clinging constancy to dispel the gathering gloom. With splendid gifts she dims the alluring brightness that draws him from her. A little longer Jove holds his hand; Aeneas's promise is till death.

Aeneas. O Dido, patroness of all our lives,

When I leave thee, death be my punishment!

Swell, raging seas! frown, wayward Destinies!

Blow, winds! threaten, ye rocks and sandy shelves!

This is the harbour that Aeneas seeks:

Let's see what tempests can annoy me now.

Dido. Not all the world can take thee from mine arms.

But the second call is imperative. With constraining pathos Dido implores him not to go. When that cannot melt his resolution the resentment of thwarted love breaks out in passionate reproach. This again changes to the wailing of sorrow as he turns and leaves her. Anna is sent after him to beseech his stay.

Dido. Call him not wicked, sister: speak him fair,

And look upon him with a mermaid's eye....

Request him gently, Anna, to return:

I crave but this-he stay a tide or two,

That I may learn to bear it patiently;

If he depart thus suddenly, I die.

Run, Anna, run; stay not to answer me.

Anna returns alone. Frantic schemes of pursuit, dangerously near to madness, at length crystallize into the last fatal resolve. The pile is made ready. Her attendants are all dismissed. One by one the articles left behind by Aeneas are devoted to the flames.

Here lie the sword that in the darksome cave

He drew, and swore by, to be true to me:

Thou shalt burn first; thy crime is worse than his.

Here lie the garment which I clothed him in

When first he came on shore: perish thou too.

These letters, lines, and perjured papers, all

Shall burn to cinders in this precious flame.

When all have been consumed she leaps into the fire and so perishes.

The character of the Queen of Carthage sufficiently demonstrates that Marlowe could paint a faithful and impressive likeness of a woman when he chose. Possibly his fiery spirit would have proved less sympathetic to a gentler type. Yet there are touches in the slighter portraits of Abigail and Queen Isabella which reveal flashes of true insight into the tender emotions of a woman's heart. Had Marlowe died before writing Edward the Second we should have said that he was incapable of portraying any type of man but the abnormal and Napoleonic. He showed himself to be a daring and brilliantly successful voyager into untried seas. In the face of what he has left behind him it would be a bold critic indeed who named with confidence any aspect of tragedy as outside the empire of his genius.

The verse of Dido, Queen of Carthage shows no signs of retrogression from the steady advance to a more natural and perfect style which we have traced in the progress from Tamburlaine to Edward the Second. An exception to this improvement will be found in certain portions of Aeneas's long speech in the second act, of which it is probably not unjust to surmise that Nash was the author. There are in Dido's own speeches elements of wild extravagance, but they are natural to the intensity of her passion. Does not Shakespeare's Cleopatra rave in a manner no less fervid and hyperbolic? and in Enobarbus's description of her magnificence when she met Antony is there not a reminiscence of the oriental splendour of Dido's proposed fleet?

We quote part of the farewell scene between Dido and Aeneas.

Dido. But yet Aeneas will not leave his love.

Aeneas. I am commanded by immortal Jove

To leave this town and pass to Italy:

And therefore must of force.

Dido. These words proceed not from Aeneas' heart.

Aeneas. Not from my heart, for I can hardly go;

And yet I may not stay. Dido, farewell.

Dido. Farewell! is this the 'mends for Dido's love?

Do Trojans use to quit their lovers thus?

Fare well may Dido, so Aeneas stay;

I die, if my Aeneas say farewell.

Aeneas. Then let me go, and never say farewell;

Let me go: farewell: I must from hence.

Dido. These words are poison to poor Dido's soul:

O, speak like my Aeneas, like my love!

Why look'st thou toward the sea? the time hath been

When Dido's beauty chained thine eyes to her.

Am I less fair than when thou saw'st me first?

O, then, Aeneas, 'tis for grief of thee!

Say thou wilt stay in Carthage with thy queen,

And Dido's beauty will return again.

Aeneas, say, how canst thou take thy leave?

Wilt thou kiss Dido? O, thy lips have sworn

To stay with Dido! Canst thou take her hand?

Thy hand and mine have plighted mutual faith.

Therefore, unkind Aeneas, must thou say,

'Then let me go, and never say farewell'?

Aeneas. O queen of Carthage, wert thou ugly-black,

Aeneas could not choose but hold thee dear!

Yet must he not gainsay the gods' behest.

Dido. The gods! what gods be those that seek my death?

Wherein have I offended Jupiter,

That he should take Aeneas from mine arms?

O, no! the gods weigh not what lovers do:

It is Aeneas calls Aeneas hence.

Summarizing, in one short paragraph, the advance in tragedy inaugurated by Kyd and Marlowe, we record the progress made in characterization, plot structure, and verse, and in the treatment of history. A play has now become interesting for its delineation of character, not merely for its events or 'story'. One or two figures monopolize the attention by their lofty passions, their sufferings, and their fate. We look on at a tremendous conflict waged between will and circumstance, between right and wrong, or we watch the gradual decay of goodness by the action of a poisonous thought introduced into the mind. The plot has undergone a similar intensification. With resistless evolution it bears the chief characters along to the fatal hour of decision or action, then drags them down the descent which the wrong choice or the unwise deed suddenly places at their feet. Our sympathies are drawn out, we take sides in the cause, and demand that at least justice shall prevail at the end. There is an art, too, in this evolution, a close interweaving of events, a chain of cause and effect; a certain harmony and balance are maintained, so that our feelings are neither jerked to extremes nor worn out by strain. Even the history play has freed itself to some extent from the leading strings of chronology, claiming the right to make the same appeal to our common instincts as any other play. Verse has taken a mighty bound from formalism to the free intoxicating air of poetry and nature. Men and women no longer exchange dull speeches; they converse with easy spontaneity and delight us by the beauty of their language. A poet may be a dramatist at last without feeling that his imagination must be held back like a restive horse lest the decorum of human speech be violated.

* * *

Arden of Feversham (? 1590-2), by its persistent but almost certainly mistaken association with Shakespeare's name, has received a wider fame than some better plays. Into the question of its authorship, however, we need not enter. Of itself it has qualities that call for reference in this place. Its early date, also, brings it within the sphere of our discussion of the growth of English drama.

Far more than any play of Kyd's, this drama, though it has no ghost and slays but one man on the stage, merits the title of a Tragedy of Blood. Murder is the theme, murder and adulterous love, and it is 'kill! kill! kill!' all the time. From the pages of Holinshed the writer carefully gathered up every horrible detail, every dreadful revelation concerning a brutal crime which had horrified England forty years before; and while the red and reeking abomination was still hot in his mind, sat down to the awful task of re-enacting it. The victim was summoned from his grave, the murderers from the gallows, the woman from the charred stake at Canterbury, to glut the appetite of a shuddering audience. Too revolting to be described in detail, the plot sets forth the story of Alice Arden's illicit love for Mosbie, her determination to win liberty by the murder of her husband, the many unsuccessful attempts to bring about that end, and the final act which brought death upon them all.

The art of sensationalism in drama, as in anything else, is not a great one; it is not to be measured by its effect upon the mind, for the crudest appeal to our instinctive dread of death will often suffice to hold our attention spellbound. It deals in uncertainty, darkness, unsuspecting innocence, hair-breadth escapes, and an ever-impending but still delayed ruin. None of these are wanting to this play; in this respect the dramatist was fortunate in his subject. No less than seven times the spectator-for the effect upon the reader is naturally much less-feels his nerves tingle, his pulse beat faster, as he waits in instant expectation of seeing murder committed. The realism of everyday scenery, the street, the high road, the ferry, the inn, the breakfast room, cry out with telling emphasis that it is fact, hard deadly fact, which is being shown, not the idle invention of an overheated brain. But while these features impress the action upon our memory, they do not raise it to the level of great drama. For this the supreme requirement is truth to human nature. It is not enough that the actors arrest our attention by their appearance, their speeches and their deeds. Freaks and lunatics might do that. They must be human as we are, moved by impulses common, in some degree, to us all. Generally speaking, abnormality is weakness. It needs to be strongly built upon a foundation of natural qualities to achieve success. Especially is this so when the surrounding conditions are such as belong to ordinary existence. The application of this principle reveals the essential weakness of Arden of Feversham. Carefully, almost minutely, the details of everyday life are gathered together. The merchant sees to the unloading of his goods at the quay, the boatman urges his ferry to and fro, the apprentice takes down his shutters, the groom makes love to the serving-maid, travellers meeting on the road halt for a chat and part with no more serious word spoken than a hearty invitation to dine; on all sides life is seen flowing in the ordinary current, with nothing worse than a piece of malicious tittle-tattle to disturb the calmness of the surface. Into this setting the author places as monstrous a group of villains as ever walked the earth. Black Will and Shakbag belong to the darkest cesspool of London iniquity. Clarke the Painter has no individuality beyond a readiness to poison all and sundry for a reward. Michael would be a murderer were he not a coward. Greene is a revengeful sleuth-hound, tracking his victim down relentlessly from place to place. Arden is a miser in business, and a weak, gullible fool at home, alternately raging with jealous suspicion, and fawning with fatuous trustfulness upon the man who is wronging him. Mosbie is a cold-blooded, underhand villain whose pious resolutions and protestations of love could only deceive those blinded by fate, and whose preference for crooked, left-handed methods is in tune with his vile intention of murdering the woman who loves him. Alice, the representative of womankind among these beast-men, the wife, the passionately loving mistress, is an arch-deceiver, an absolutely brazen liar and murderess, unblushing and tireless in soliciting the affection of a man who hardly cares for her, desperately enamoured. Alone in the group Franklin is endowed with the ordinary human revulsion from folly and wickedness, but his character is sketched too lightly to relieve the darkness. Such creatures may fascinate us by their defiance of the laws that bind us. Alice, particularly, does so. She possesses-as Michael does, to a less degree-at least a few natural traits; her conscience is not quite dead, and her love is strong, although even this is represented as a huge deformity, driving her to the negation of that womanhood to which it should belong. Single scenes, too, if seen or read in isolation from the main body of the play, have a certain individual strength, giving us glimpses of the workings of a human heart. But the play as a whole offers no inspiration, presents no aspects of beauty, holds up no mirror to ourselves. One lesson it teaches, that happiness cannot be won by crime. Alice and Mosbie are never permitted to escape from the consequences of their sin, in the form of anxiety, suspicion, remorse, fear, mutual recrimination, and death. But, throughout, the dramatist's purpose is not art. He is the apostle of realism, coarsened by a love of the horrible and unclean. The power of his realism is undeniable. His two protagonists are line for line portraits of the beings they are intended to represent. The silhouettes of Black Will and Shakbag are almost as perfect. It is when we compare Arden of Feversham with Macbeth that we realize how the meanness of the action and the comparative absence of morality outweigh any accuracy of detail, degrading the dramatist to the level of a mere purveyor of excitement. The truth is, even the interest palls, for there is no skill displayed in the evolution of the plot. The story is merely unrolled in a series of murderous attempts which agitate us less and less as they are repeated, until, at the end, we are in danger of not caring whether Arden is killed or not.

Among the eccentricities of this anonymous author's misdirected ability is the disregard of appropriateness in the allocation of speeches to the various characters. He is a poet; we can hardly believe that his work would otherwise have survived the acting of it. Yet, as has been frequently pointed out, one of the most delicate passages in the play is spoken by the detestable ruffian, Shakbag, while Mosbie and even Michael soliloquize in language of poetic imagery. In his handling of blank verse he has not travelled beyond the limits of end-stopt lines, and too often he gives it the false balance of unrhymed couplets; nevertheless much that is vigorous and impressive forces the rhythm into a firm and brisk response. The art of conversation in verse has advanced to complete mastery. These features will be seen in the following extracts.

(1)

[Mosbie regretfully compares his past and present states.]

Disturbed thoughts drives me from company

And dries my marrow with their watchfulness;

Continual trouble of my moody brain

Feebles my body by excess of drink,

And nips me as the bitter North-east wind

Doth check the tender blossoms in the spring.

Well fares the man, howe'er his cates do taste,

That tables not with foul suspicion;

And he but pines amongst his delicates,

Whose troubled mind is stuffed with discontent.

My golden time was when I had no gold;

Though then I wanted, yet I slept secure;

My daily toil begat me night's repose,

My night's repose made daylight fresh to me.

But since I climbed the top bough of the tree

And sought to build my nest among the clouds,

Each gentle starry gale doth shake my bed,

And makes me dread my downfall to the earth.

But whither doth contemplation carry me?

The way I seek to find, where pleasure dwells,

Is hedged behind me that I cannot back,

But needs must on, although to danger's gate.

Then, Arden, perish thou by that decree.

(2)

[The last arrangements have been made for the murder and only Arden is awaited.]

Will. Give me the key: which is the counting house?

Alice. Here would I stay and still encourage you,

But that I know how resolute you are.

Shakbag. Tush, you are too faint-hearted; we must do it.

Alice. But Mosbie will be there, whose very looks

Will add unwonted courage to my thought,

And make me the first that shall adventure on him.

Will. Tush, get you gone; 'tis we must do the deed.

When this door opens next, look for his death.

[Exeunt Will and Shakbag.]

Alice. Ah, would he now were here that it might open!

I shall no more be closed in Arden's arms,

That like the snakes of black Tisiphone

Sting me with their embracings: Mosbie's arms

Shall compass me; and, were I made a star,

I would have none other spheres but those.

There is no nectar but in Mosbie's lips!

Had chaste Diana kissed him, she, like me,

Would grow love sick, and from her watery bower

Fling down Endymion and snatch him up:

Then blame not me that slay a silly man

Not half so lovely as Endymion.

[Here enters Michael.]

Michael. Mistress, my master is coming hard by.

Alice. Who comes with him?

Michael. Nobody but Mosbie.

Alice. That's well, Michael. Fetch in the tables,

And when thou has done, stand before the counting-house

door.

Michael. Why so?

Alice. Black Will is locked within to do the deed.

Michael. What? shall he die to-night?

Alice. Ay, Michael.

Michael. But shall not Susan know it?

Alice. Yes, for she'll be as secret as ourselves.

Michael. That's brave. I'll go fetch the tables.

Alice. But, Michael, hark to me a word or two:

When my husband is come in, lock the street door;

He shall be murdered or[68] the guests come in.

Arden of Feversham is a play which cannot be passed over unnoticed in any historical treatment of the drama. For it opened up a new and rich field to writers of tragedies by its selection of characters from the ordinary paths of life to reveal the passions of the human heart. Kyd and Marlowe had sought for subjects in the little known world of kings' courts or the still less familiar regions of immeasurable wealth and power. This other writer found what he wanted in his neighbour's house. His most direct disciples are the authors (uncertain) of A Yorkshire Tragedy and A Warning for Fair Women, but his influence may be traced in the work of many well-known later dramatists. On the other hand the play marks a retreat from the standard set by previous tragedies. In its deliberate use of horror for horror's sake it fell away-dragging others after it-from the conception of drama as a noble instrument in the instruction and elevation of the people.

* * *

APPENDIX

THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

A word remains to be added with regard to the 'Stage' for which Lyly and Marlowe wrote. When we took leave of the Miracle Plays we left them with a movable 'pageant', open-air performances, and a large body of carefully trained actors, who, however, normally followed a trade, only turning aside to the task of rehearsing when the annual festival drew near. The whole business of dramatic representation was in the hands of public bodies-the Mayor and Corporation, if the town could boast of such. Later years saw the appearance of the professional actor, by more humble designation termed a strolling player. Many small companies-four or five men and perhaps a couple of boys-came into existence, wandering over England to win the pence and applause guaranteed by the immense popularity of their entertainments. But the official eye learnt to look upon them with suspicion, and it was not long before they fell under condemnation as vagrants. In 1572 all but licensed companies were brought within the scope of the vagrancy laws. Those exempt were the few fortunate ones who had secured the patronage of a nobleman, and, greedy of monopoly, had pressed, successfully, for this prohibitory decree against their irregular rivals. From this date onwards we read only of such companies as the Queen's Company, the Earl of Leicester's Company, the Chamberlain's Company and the Admiral's Company. Yet while their duties would primarily be concerned with the amusement of their patrons, they found many occasions to offer their services elsewhere. Travelling companies, therefore, still continued to carry into every part of England the delights of play-acting. It is a pleasing conjecture that the genius of the boy, Shakespeare, was first quickened by seeing a performance in his native town.

We have said that a few men and one or two boys would suffice for a company. The boys, of course, were to take the female parts, as women-actors were not seen on the stage until some time after Shakespeare's death, and only came into general favour after the Restoration. Although some plays included a large number of characters, the author was generally careful so to arrange their exits and entrances that not more than four or five were required on the stage at one time. Thus, in the list of dramatis personae for Like Will to Like the twelve characters are distributed amongst five actors: four actors are shown to be sufficient for the eleven characters of New Custom; and the thirty-eight characters of Cambyses are grouped to fit eight players.

When on tour a company began its stay in any town with a visit to the mayor (or his equivalent), before whom a first performance was given. His approval secured for the company a fee and the right of acting. Thus the practice of public control over the Guild 'Miracles' was extended to these independent performances in the form of a mayoral censorship. This control, in London, was placed in the hands of the Court Master of the Revels, who thereby became the State dramatic censor with power to prohibit the performance of any play that offended his taste.

In addition to these companies of men there were, in and near London, companies of boys carefully trained to act. At the public schools of Eton and Westminster histrionics was included amongst the subjects taught. The singing school at St. Paul's studied the art with equal industry. Most famous of all, the choir boys of the royal chapel took rank as expert performers. It was doubtless for Eton, Westminster, Merchant Taylors' and other schools that such plays as The Disobedient Child and The Marriage of Wit and Science were written. It was, we may remember, the head-master of Eton who wrote Ralph Roister Doister. Lyly's plays, acted at Court, were all performed either by 'the children of Paul's' or 'Her Majesty's children'. This may partly account for the great number and prominence of his female characters as compared with those found in the comedies of Greene and Peele; it will also suggest a reason for his liberal introduction of songs.

Court performances, however, were also given by young men of rank for amusement or to honour the queen. Gorboduc was presented before Elizabeth by 'the gentlemen of the Inner Temple'. 'The Gentlemen of Gray's Inn' performed The Misfortunes of Arthur at the Court at Greenwich; Francis Bacon was one of the actors. In the latter part of the reign the queen's own 'company' consisted of the best London professional actors, and these were summoned every Christmas to entertain Her Majesty with the latest plays. At Oxford and Cambridge many plays were staged, the preference for some time apparently lying with classical representation in the original tongue.

On these Court and University performances large sums of money were spent. It may be assumed therefore that considerable attention was paid to the mounting and staging of a play. Possibly painted scenery and even the luxury of a completely curtained-off stage were provided. Every advantageous adjunct to the dramatist's art known in that day would be at the service of Lyly. But it was otherwise with Marlowe and those who wrote for the public stage. It is this last which we must consider.

In Exeter at least, and possibly in other towns, a playhouse was built long before such a thing was known in the vicinity of London. We shall probably be right, however, in judging the major portion of the country by its metropolis and assuming that, until 1572 or thereabouts, actors and audiences had to manage without buildings specially designed for their purpose. Very probably the old 'pageants' (or 'pagonds') were refurbished and brought to light when the need arose; and in this case the actors would have the spectators in a circle around them. Inn-yards, however-those of that day were constructed with galleries along three sides-proved to be more convenient for the audience, inasmuch as the galleries provided comfortable seats above the rabble for those who cared to pay for them. The stage was then erected either in the midst or at the fourth side, projecting out into the yard. In such surroundings the popular Morality-Interludes and Interludes proper were performed.

In the midst of the wide popularity of the drama arose Puritanism, full of condemnation. Keeping our attention upon London as the centre of things, we see this new enemy waging a fierce battle with the supporters of the stage. The latter included the Queen and her Privy Council; the former found spokesmen in the mayor and City Fathers. Between Privy Council and Corporation there could be no compromise, for the Corporation insisted that within its jurisdiction dramatic performances should be entirely suppressed. The yearly outbreaks of the plague, with its weekly death-roll of thirty, forty, fifty, periodically compelled the summer performances to cease, and lent themselves as a powerful argument against packed gatherings of dirty and clean, infected and uninfected, together. At last one of the leading companies, fearing that time would bring victory to the Puritans and to themselves extinction, decided to solve the difficulty by migration beyond the jurisdiction of the mayor. Accordingly, about the year 1572, 'The Theatre' was built outside the city boundary and occupied by Leicester's company. Not long afterwards other companies followed suit, and 'The Curtains' and 'Newington Butts' were erected. After that many other theatres rose. In 1599 was built the famous Globe Theatre in which most of Shakespeare's plays were represented. But the three earlier theatres (and perhaps 'The Rose') were probably all that Marlowe ever knew.

What we know of the Elizabethan theatre is based on information concerning the Globe, Fortune and Swan Theatres. From this a certain clear conception-not agreed upon, however, in all points by critics-may be deduced with regard to the earlier ones. They were round or hexagonal in shape. The stage was placed with its back to the wall and projected well into the centre. The spectators were gathered about its three sides, the poor folk standing in the area and crushing right up to it, the rich folk occupying seats in the galleries that formed the horse-shoe round the area. A roof covered the galleries but not the rest of the building-the first completely roofed theatre was probably not built before 1596. Performances took place between two and five o'clock in the afternoon. The title of the piece was posted outside; a flag flying from a turret informed playgoers in the city that a performance was about to take place, and the sound of a trumpet announced the commencement of the play. An orchestra was in attendance, not so much to enliven the intervals-for they were few and brief-as to lend its aid to the effect of certain scenes, in exactly the same way as it is used to-day.

Of the stage itself little can be said positively, nor are surmises about the Swan or Globe stage necessarily applicable to its predecessors. But the following description will serve as a fair conjecture. It was divided into two parts, a front and back stage, separated by a curtain. By this device the back scene could be prepared while the front stage was occupied, or two scenes could be presented together, as in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, or a second scene could be added to the main one, as occurs when Rasni, in A Looking-Glass for London and England, 'draws the curtains' and reveals Remilia struck with lightning. There was no curtain before the front stage. At the rear of the back stage was a fixed structure like the outside of a house with doors and an upper balcony. The doors led into the dressing rooms, and through them, as through the curtain if the front stage only were in use, the exits and entrances were made. The balcony was used in many ways familiar to us in Shakespeare's works; when, in the Second Part of Tamburlaine, the Governor of Babylon enters 'upon the walls' we recognize that he is on the balcony. A roof extended over the whole or part of the stage to protect the actors from rain; but it was also made use of as a hiding-place from which angels or goddesses could descend. In Alphonsus, King of Arragon Venus's exit is managed thus: 'If you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up.' The stage floor was fitted with a trap-door; through it Queen Elinor, in Edward the First, disappears and re-appears; through it 'a flame of fire' appears and 'Radagon is swallowed', in A Looking-Glass for London and England.

As far as can be gathered from records, there was no great attempt to preserve, in the actor's dresses, the local colouring of the play. Nevertheless various easy and obviously required concessions would be made. Kings and queens would dress magnificently, mechanics and serving-men humbly. In Orlando Furioso we read that Orlando is to enter 'attired as a madman' and that Marsilius and Mandricard are to appear 'like Palmers'; in Alphonsus, King of Arragon 'Calchas rises up in a white surplice and a cardinal's mitre', and in Edward the First Longshanks figures 'in Friar's weeds'. The list could be continued. It is practically certain that there was no painted scenery, the absence of which would greatly facilitate the expeditious passage from scene to scene. Stage properties, however, were probably a valuable part of the theatrical belongings. If we glance over the stage-directions in the plays of Greene, Peele, Kyd and Marlowe, we come upon such visible objects as a throne, a bower, a bed, a table, a tomb, a litter, a cage, a chariot, a hearse, a tree; more elaborate would be Alphonsus's canopy with a king's head at each of three corners, Bungay's dragon shooting fire, Remilia's 'globe seated in a ship', the 'hand from out a cloud with a burning sword' (A Looking-Glass), and the Brazen Head casting out flakes of fire (Alphonsus).

Considering Marlowe's plays in the light of this information we shall be obliged to admit that they stood a good chance of having very fair justice done to them. The points in which the staging differed from our modern methods were in favour of greater realism. Daylight is more truthful than foot-lights are; and if there was any poverty in the setting, so much the more was attention centred upon the actors, who are declared, by the authors themselves, to have attained a high level of excellence. Fame has not yet forgotten the names of Burbage and Alleyn.

* * *

INDEX

I. AUTHORS

Aeschylus, 97, 101-2.

Ariosto, 127.

B., R., 99, 113.

Bale, Bishop, 79, 80-1.

Chapman, George, 214.

Dekker, Thomas, 241.

Drayton, Michael, 231.

Edward VI, 79.

Edwards, Richard, 115, 203, 224.

Gascoigne, George, 127.

Geoffrey, Abbot, 22.

Greene, Robert, 124, 146-67, 169, 170, 172, 173, 179, 180, 193, 221, 224, 276.

Hardy, Thomas, 30.

Heywood, John, 61, 68, 81, 82-4, 117.

Heywood, Thomas, 211.

Hilarius, 15.

Hroswitha, 10.

Hughes, Thomas, 110-15, 216, 224.

Jonson, Ben, 71, 72, 161, 198, 207.

Kyd, Thomas, 124, 193, 194, 197-221, 225, 262, 263, 269, 276.

Lodge, Thomas, 124, 148, 193, 195-7.

Lyly, John, 124-46, 148, 157, 161, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 193, 209, 224, 270, 272, 273.

Marlowe, Christopher, 61, 107, 117, 124, 148, 167, 180, 187, 188, 193, 194, 196, 209, 216, 218, 221-63, 269, 270, 273, 276.

Marston, John, 203, 214.

Massinger, Philip, 211.

Milton, John, 107, 185.

Nash, Thomas, 124, 188-92.

Norton, Thomas, 103-10, 118, 194.

Peele, George, 124, 140, 161, 167-88, 209, 221, 230, 250, 276.

Plautus, 90, 91.

Preston, Thomas, 97-9.

Rowley, 241.

Sackville, Thomas, 103-10, 114, 118, 124, 194, 216, 224, 230.

Seneca, 96, 101, 102, 193.

Shakespeare, William, 70, 110, 115, 121, 157, 173, 181, 193, 213, 222, 223, 246, 259, 261, 263, 271, 275.

Sidney, Sir Philip, 102.

Sophocles, 109.

Stevenson, 91-5.

Still, Bishop, 91-5, 224.

Terence, 10.

Tourneur, Cyril, 203, 214.

Udall, Nicholas, 88-91, 224.

Webster, John, 203, 214.

Whetstone, George, 115.

Wilmot, Robert, 230.

II. PLAYS

Adam, 16-18, 45.

Agamemnon, 111.

Alphonsus, King of Arragon, 147, 149-51, 168, 180, 275, 276.

Antonio's Revenge, 203.

Appius and Virginia, 99-101, 107, 108-9, 113.

Arden of Feversham, 193, 214, 263-9.

Arraignment of Paris, The, 168, 169, 171, 173-6, 187, 224, 229, 231.

As You Like It, 140.

Battle of Alcazar, The, 170-1, 180-3.

Cain and Abel, 18, 25.

Calisto and Melibaea, 87, 90.

Cambyses, 97-9, 100, 103, 107, 108, 112, 113, 271.

Campaspe, 127, 128-32, 136, 146, 157.

Castell of Perseverance, 51, 53, 54, 57, 61, 66, 67, 95.

Chester Miracle Play, The, 23, 38.

Christ's Passion, 10.

Comus, 185.

Cornelia, 197, 199.

Cornélie, 218.

Coventry Miracle Play, The, 21, 23, 25-38, 42, 46, 47.

Damon and Pythias, 112, 115, 134, 193.

Daniel, 15.

David and Bethsabe, 170-3, 186-8.

Devil is an Ass, The, 71.

Dido, Queen of Carthage, 223, 256-62.

Dido, The Tragedy of, 188.

Disciples of Emmaus, The, 15.

Disobedient Child, The, 76-7, 272.

Edward the First, The famous Chronicle History of, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177-80, 250, 275, 276.

Edward the Second, 196, 223, 250-6, 261.

Endymion, 127, 132-8.

Epiphany Plays, 14, 15, 21.

Euphues, 125.

Everyman, 51, 55, 61.

Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The, 120.

Faustus, Doctor, 61, 107, 117, 209, 215, 223, 227, 230, 233-42, 246, 251.

Ferrex and Porrex, The Tragedy of, 101-10, 111, 115, 118, 193, 209, 216, 229, 230.

Four Elements, The, 76.

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 147, 148, 155-9, 165, 171, 189, 275.

Gallathea, 127, 138-44, 169, 176.

Gammer Gurton's Needle, 91-5, 172.

George à Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield, 147, 163.

Gorboduc, 101-10, 111, 115, 118, 193, 209, 216, 229, 230.

Hamlet, 213.

Henry IV, 181-3.

Henry the Fifth, The Famous Victories of, 120.

Hick Scorner, 61, 69, 70.

James IV, 147, 149, 159-63, 165, 190.

Jeronimo, 197, 199-204, 212, 215, 216.

Jew of Malta, The, 215, 223, 242-8.

Johan Johan, 84-6, 87, 90.

John, The Troublesome Reign of King, 120, 121, 122-3.

King John, 79.

King Lear, 212, 213.

Lazarus, 15.

Like Will to Like, 67-76, 118, 271.

Locrine, 198.

Looking Glass for London and England, A, 147, 151-3, 163, 195, 275, 276.

Love's Metamorphoses, 127.

Macbeth, 245, 266.

Magi, 15, 23, 25, 45.

Marriage at Cana, 9.

Marriage of Wit and Science, The, 77-8, 272.

Massacre at Paris, The, 223, 248-9, 256.

Meretrice Babylonica, De, 79.

Merry Play between Johan Johan the Husband, Tyb his Wife, and Sir Jhon the Priest, The, 84-6, 87, 90.

Midsummer-Night's Dream, A, 45.

Miles Gloriosus, 90.

Miracle of the Sacrament, The, 49.

Mirror for Magistrates, The, 230.

Misfortunes of Arthur, The, 35, 110-15, 118, 124, 193, 194, 272.

Mother Bombie, 127, 144-5.

Mydas, 146.

New Custom, 74, 79, 80, 81, 271.

Nice Wanton, 76.

Oedipus Tyrannus, 109-10.

Old Wives' Tale, The, 168, 173, 183-6, 190.

Orlando Furioso, 147, 153-5, 276.

Pammachius, 79.

Pardoner and the Friar, The, 81-4.

Pastores, 14, 15, 22, 23.

Peregrini, 15.

Pericles, 103.

Promus and Cassandra, 115.

Prophetae, 15, 18.

Prophets, 15, 18.

Quem Quaeritis, 12, 13, 15, 22, 25.

Quem Quaeritis in Praesepe, Pastores? 14.

Ralph Roister Doister, 89-91, 92, 95, 124, 172, 272.

Resurrection, 12, 13, 15, 22, 25.

Romeo and Juliet, 193.

Saint Katharine, 22.

Saint Nicholas, 15, 16, 22.

Samson Agonistes, 107.

Sapho and Phao, 127, 146.

Second Part of Antonio and Mellida, The, 203.

Shepherds, 14, 15, 22, 23.

Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 140, 168, 170, 173, 176-7, 186.

Soliman and Perseda, 197, 198, 216, 218-21.

Spanish Tragedy, The, 35, 197, 198, 203, 205-18.

Staple of News, The, 72.

Stella, 15, 23, 25, 45.

Summer's Last Will and Testament, 188-92.

Supposes, The, 127.

Suppositi, I, 127.

Tamburlaine, 148, 150, 151, 154, 180, 218, 222, 223-8, 229, 230, 231-3, 237, 241, 261, 275.

Taming of the Shrew, The, 161.

Tancred and Gismunda, 115, 193, 194, 229.

Thersites, 90.

Towneley Miracle Play, 23, 39, 43.

Tres Reges, 15, 23, 25, 45.

Trial of Christ, The, 25, 35.

Trial of Treasure, The, 74.

Troublesome Reign of King John, The, 120-3.

Twelfth Night, 70, 86, 157.

Wakefield Miracle Play, The, 23, 39, 43.

Warning to Fair Women, A, 269.

Wise Men Presenting Gifts to the Infant Saviour, The, 9.

Woman in the Moon, The, 127.

Wounds of Civil War, The, 195.

Yorkshire Tragedy, A, 269.

III. PROMINENT CHARACTERS

Abraham, 27-9.

Adam, 17, 18, 19, 27, 34.

Adam in A Looking Glass for London and England, 151-3, 163, 184.

Aeneas, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262.

Alexander, 128, 129.

Alphonsus, 149, 150, 151, 168.

Andrea, 199-202, 204.

Angels, 13.

Angels, Good and Bad, 57, 61, 67, 240.

Apelles, 129, 130, 131, 140, 168.

Arden, Alice, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269.

Arran, Countess of, 159, 162, 163.

Arthur, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114.

Balthazar or Balthezar, 198, 199, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211, 212.

Barabas, 222, 243, 247.

Barbarian in St. Nicholas, 15, 16.

Basilisco, 218, 219, 220-1.

Bellamira, 247, 248.

Bell'-Imperia, 199, 205, 206, 207, 211, 212.

Bombie, Mother, 145.

Cambyses, 97, 98, 99.

Campaspe, 129, 130, 131, 140.

Christ, 12, 13, 30, 33, 37.

Contemplation, 61, 64, 65, 66.

Corsites, 133, 134, 135.

Cupid, 143, 144, 257, 258.

Custance, Dame, 89, 90, 91, 93.

Cutpurse, Cuthbert, 68, 76.

Damon, 116, 117, 118, 119.

David, 186, 187, 188.

Death, 31, 197.

Delia, 183, 185.

Devil, The, 17, 18, 19, 70, 71, 73, 84, 85.

Diana, 173, 175, 176, 229.

Dido, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262.

Diogenes, 128, 129, 136, 146, 168.

Dipsas, 133, 134.

Dorothea, Queen, 159, 160, 161, 168, 171.

Edward II, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256.

Edward, Prince, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159.

Endymion, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136.

Erastus, 198.

Eve, 17, 18, 27.

Everyman, 55, 56, 58, 59, 66, 95.

Faulconbridge, 120, 121, 122.

Faustus, 209, 222, 230, 234-42.

Fellowship, 58, 59, 60.

Ferrex, 104, 105.

Freewill, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66.

Friar, 82, 83.

Gallathea, 141, 142, 143.

Genus, Humanum, 54, 55.

George, 163, 164, 165, 166.

Gloucester, 179.

Gorboduc, 104, 105.

Guise, 248, 249.

Gurton, Gammer, 92, 93, 94, 95.

Hance, 69, 70.

Hephestion, 131, 132.

Herod, 14, 20, 31, 35, 46, 117.

Hieronimo, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218.

Hodge, 92, 93, 94, 95, 126.

Humankind, 57, 67, 95.

Ida, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163.

Imagination, 62, 63, 65, 66, 71.

Isaac, 27, 28, 29, 36.

Isabella, 207, 208, 211, 216, 217.

Ithamore, 246, 247, 248.

Jeffate, 38.

Jeronimo, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205.

Jhon, Sir, 85.

Joan, 179-80.

Johan Johan, 84, 85.

Jonathas, 49, 50.

Joseph, 30, 31, 36.

Juno, 173, 175.

King John, 80, 81, 120, 123, 252.

Lacy, 155, 156, 158, 159, 168.

Lorenzo, 199, 200, 201, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214.

Magi, The, 14.

Mahamet, Muly, The Moor, 180, 181, 182-3.

Mak, 40, 41, 42, 51.

Margaret of Fressingfield, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168.

Marius, 195, 196, 197.

Mary, 30, 31, 33, 36.

Mary Magdalene, 13.

Mephistophilis, 230, 233, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242.

Michael, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269.

Modred, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115.

Mortimer, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255.

Mosbie, 264, 265, 266, 267.

Newfangle, Nichol, 70, 72, 73, 74.

Nicholas, St., 15, 16.

Noah, 38.

Noah's Wife, 35, 38.

Oenone, 168, 174.

Orion, 191-2.

Orlando, 153, 154.

Pardoner, 82, 83, 84.

Paris, 168, 173, 174.

Perseda, 219-20.

Perseverance, 61, 64, 65, 66.

Perverse Doctrine, 79, 82.

Phillida, 141, 142, 143.

Pity, 61, 64, 66, 67.

Porrex, 104, 105.

Pythias, 116, 118, 119.

Ralph Roister Doister, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 137.

Scorner, Hick, 63, 64, 66.

Sem, 38.

Shepherds, 40, 41.

Simnel, Ralph, 157.

Soliman, 219, 220.

Summer, Will, 188, 189, 190.

Tamburlaine, 222, 226, 227, 232, 233, 234, 238, 239, 246.

Tophas, Sir, 134, 136, 137, 138, 146.

Vice, The, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 85, 89, 97, 99, 117, 177.

Virginius's Wife, 100.

Will, 77, 78.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr. E.K. Chambers's translation.

[2] Mr. E.K. Chambers's translation.

[3] go.

[4] being.

[5] destroy.

[6] pleasure.

[7] might.

[8] power.

[9] wrought.

[10] one.

[11] realms.

[12] more worthy.

[13] injure.

[14] how.

[15] offended.

[16] those.

[17] their.

[18] sorrow.

[19] See the stage-direction at the end of 'The Trial of Christ', 'Here enteryth Satan into the place in the most orryble wyse, and qwyl (while) that he pleyth, thei xal don on Jhesus clothis'.

[20] lowly.

[21] obedient.

[22] counsel.

[23] young.

[24] courtly.

[25] counsel.

[26] each one.

[27] crippled.

[28] overtaxed.

[29] overreached.

[30] rob.

[31] curse.

[32] done.

[33] star.

[34] Translation by W.C. Robinson, Ph.D. (Bohn's Standard Library).

[35] aright.

[36] world's.

[37] company.

[38] wealth.

[39] know.

[40] know not.

[41] solace.

[42] stealing.

[43] lying.

[44] fright.

[45] glad.

[46] alehouse sign.

[47] The reader is warned against chronological confusion. In order to follow out the various dramatic contributions of the Interludes one must sometimes pass over plays at one point to return to them at another. Care has been taken to place approximate dates against the plays, and these should be duly regarded. The treatment of so early an Interlude writer as Heywood (his three best known productions may be dated between 1520 and 1540) thus late is justified by the fact that he is in some ways 'before his time', notably in his rejection of the Morality abstractions.

[48] sweet.

[49] boasting.

[50] I am.

[51] counsel.

[52] Oedipus Tyrannus (Lewis Campbell's translation).

[53] In Damon and Pythias, see p. 117 above.

[54] ready.

[55] resent.

[56] See Flora's second speech, Act 1, Sc. 1.

[57] James the Fourth.

[58] enjoy.

[59] dwells.

[60] is called.

[61] bugbears.

[62] Jehovah's.

[63] fetched.

[64] History of English Poetry, ii. p. 424.

[65] whipstock.

[66] rule.

[67] English Dramatic Literature, i, p. 188.

[68] before.

* * *