and dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their appearance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which have reached us of an earlier date are either cold imitations of the classical and Italian comedy, or rude farces like "Ralph Roister Doister," or tragedies such as "Gorbuduc," where, poetic as occasional passages may be, there is little promise of dramatic development. But in the year which preceded the coming of the Armada, the whole aspect of the stage suddenly changes, and the new dramatists range themselves around two men of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his perception of character and the relations of social life, the playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an influence on his contemporaries which was equaled by that of none but Marlowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights. He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring back the debauchery of the one and the skepticism of the other. In the words of remorse he wrote before his death, he paints himself as a drunkard and a roisterer, winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to waste it on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs. Hell and the after world. were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he had not feared the judges of the queen's courts more than he feared God, he said, in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed, though he could not live without them. But wild as was the life of Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him. The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his skepticism even more daring, than the life and skepticism of Greene. His early death alone saved him, in all probability, from a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with calling Moses a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to write a new religion, it should be a better religion than the Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as a creator of English tragedy. Born in 1564, at the opening of Elizabeth's reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge, Marlowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the triumph over the Armada with a play which at once wrought a revolution in the English stage. Bombastic and extravagant as it was-and extravagance reached its height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia," drew their conqueror's car across the stage-"Tamburlaine not only indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed him. He perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his brief career he had struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward the Second" the series of historical plays which gave us "Cæsar" and "Richard the Third." His "Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for pleasure, but it was the first dramatic attempt to touch the problem of the relations of man to the unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping even to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion, which sets him above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty line," he is inferior to Shakespeare alone. A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab make up the life of Marlowe; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of William Shakespeare. Of hardly any great poet, indeed, do we know so little. For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was still remembered in his native town; but the minute diligence of the inquirers of the Georgian time was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most trivial order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement before his death. It is owing, perhaps, to the harmony and unity of his temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace on the memory of his contemporaries; it is the very grandeur of his genius which precludes us from discovering any personal trait in his works. His supposed self-revelation in the sonnets is so obscure that only a few outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he is all his characters, and his characters range over all mankind. There is not one, or the act or word of one, that we can identify personally with the poet himself. THE DEATH OF KING LEAR. BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. [Crazed by many miseries, Lear dies over the body of his daughter Cordelia, who has been strangled in prison.] Enter LEAR with CORDELIA dead in his arms; EDGAR, Captain, and others following. Lear Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever! This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, Kent Lear Prithee, away. Edgar Lear O my good master! "Tis noble Kent, your friend. A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! - What is't thou sayʼst? · Her voice was ever soft, 'Tis true, my lords, he did. Lear Did I not, fellow ? If fortune brag of two she loved and hated, One of them we behold. ? He's a good fellow, I can tell you that; He'll strike, and quickly too. He's dead and rotten. That from your first of difference and decay Lear Kent You are welcome hither. Nor no man else. All's cheerless, dark, and deadly. Lear Albany Ay, so I think. You lords and noble friends, know our intent. During the life of this old majesty, To him our absolute power. - [To EDGAR and KENT] You, to your rights; With boot, and such addition as your honors Have more than merited. All friends shall taste The wages of their virtue, and all foes The cup of their deservings. — O, see, see! Lear And my poor Fool is hanged! No, no, no life! And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come po more, - her lips, Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir. [Dies. My lord, my lord! Look up, my lord. Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. Edgar Kent He is gone, indeed. The wonder is that he hath endured so long: Albany Bear them from hence. Our present business Is general woe. - [To KENT and EDGAR] Friends of my soul, you twain Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain. The weight of this sad time we must obey; [Exeunt, with a dead march. |