Christopher Marlowe. 71 all of which show his peculiar vein of talent: his often happy verbal ingenuities, his love of punning (in which he found a frequent imitator in Shakespeare), and his occasional grace and tenderness of fancy. But Lyly was not a great writer: no one need read his plays who does not wish to make a special study of the Elizabethan drama, and it is not, therefore, requisite that we should go into detail regarding his productions. The first of Shakespeare's predecessors who possessed really great dramatic and poetical genius was Christopher Marlowe. Like too many of his contemporary playwrights, he lived a wild, reckless, dissolute life, at one time indulging in gross debauchery, at another time writing plays which, though disfigured sometimes by mere bombast, bear on them the imperishable stamp of genius. He was born at Canterbury in 1564. His father followed the humble calling of a shoemaker, but, perhaps owing to the liberality of some wealthy relation, Marlowe received a liberal education, graduating M.A. at Cambridge in 1587. Some three years before this date he is supposed to have come to London and commenced his career as a writer for the stage. None of his plays were printed in his lifetime, and their order of production can only be conjectured. "Tamburlaine the Great" is believed to have been the first; then came "Doctor Faustus," "Jew of Malta," "Edward II.,” and "Massacre at Paris." In 1593 he lost his life in a wretched tavern brawl. Had he lived longer, it is very probable that he would have been the greatest of the Elizabethan dramatists, next to Shakespeare. As the hot ferments of youth subsided, his genius would have become more temperate, and his rich prodigality of fancy would have been turned into more profitable channels than the piling up of high-sounding words, too often signifying nothing. In Marlowe's plays we find all the wantonness of imagination, all the colossal rant, all the prodigality of fancy, characteristic of a hot and fevered youth unrestrained by law, and of a mind ill at ease yet conscious of and aspiring after better things. "There is a lust of power in his writings," writes Hazlitt, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by anything but its own energies. His thoughts burn within him like a furnace with bickering flames, or throwing out black smoke and mists that hide the dawn of genius, or, like a poisonous mineral, corrode the heart." In many respects he resembles Byron: both lived wild and passionate lives; both possessed an energy and strength which cover a multitude of literary sins; both died young, just as they seemed on the eve of accomplishing better things. Marlowe's finest play is "Doctor Faustus," founded on the legend which also gave birth to the greatest work of the greatest modern poet, Goethe's "Faust." Nothing could well be imagined more different than the treatment by these two great dramatists of the same subject. In Goethe's play we find the genius of a great poet united with the wisdom, the self-restraint, the knowledge of the world possessed by a clear, cold, elaborately cultivated mind; in Marlowe's we find also the genius of a great poet, but disfigured by the want of self-restraint, the extravagance and the turbulence of a fiery and ill-regulated mind. But the general conception of his work is very powerful and striking, and passages of great beauty occur not unfrequently. Take, for example, the following, which we make bold to say has been matched by none of the Elizabethan dramatists save Shakespeare. It is the address of Faustus to the apparition of Helen "Faustus. Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless tow'rs of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul! See where it flies. Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Peele. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter And none but thou shall be my paramour." 73 If Marlowe was dissipated, Greene and Peele, the two other most famous pre-Shakespearean dramatists, were yet more so. Greene, born at Norwich about 1560, was, like Marlowe, a Cambridge man, graduating M. A. at Clare Hall in 1583. He then travelled in Spain, Italy, Germany, and other countries. of the Continent. From his own account he did not benefit by his tour, for he tells us that he acquired in Italy luxurious, profligate, and abominable habits. Settling in London, he became "an author of plays and a penner of love pamphlets." He was also an actor, and indeed appears to have been ready to turn his hand to anything in order that he might acquire the wherewithal to gratify his vicious desires. He died in 1592, in the most abject poverty, in the house of a poor shoemaker, who had pity on him, and took him in and nursed him. Before his death he seems to have sincerely repented of his sins, and wrote two pamphlets, "A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance" and the "Repentance of Robert Greene," setting them forth. The former we shall have occasion to refer to in dealing with Shakespeare. His last letter was to his wife, whom he had deserted for six years: "Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth and my soul's rest that you will see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the streets.-ROBERT GREENE." Greene's best productions are the lyrics interspersed through his works, which show a fine ear for verse and a delight in beauty and innocence strange to find in a man of his character. One of his tales, "Dorastus and Fawnia," supplied the plot for Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale." George Peele, a gentleman by birth, was born in Devonshire in 1558. He graduated M.A. at Oxford in 1579, and went to London in 1581. There, as was very common in those days, he united the occupations of poet, dramatist, and actor. seems to have been a shifty, unscrupulous man, "without the faintest desire to use honest means in procuring a livelihood," always anxious to get his purse filled, and caring little or nothing by what means he did so. His best work is "The Arraignment of Paris," full of sprightly wit. He died about 1592. Passing over the other dramatists who flourished about the time when Shakespeare came to London, we come to Shakespeare himself, the greatest writer the world has ever seen, or is ever likely to see. Of his personal history we know little compared to what we should like to know; yet the laborious accumulation of small facts, and the patient sifting of the traditions regarding him, have furnished us with information sufficient to enable us to judge with some degree of accuracy. We know, or at least we have some degree of certainty, that his youth was wild and passionate; that his marriage was not a very happy one; that when the ferments of youth had subsided he became prudent and industrious; that his manners were amiable and his conversational powers great; that he was rather looked down upon by college-bred contemporaries as having "small Latin and less Greek;" that he frequently felt bitterly the hardships and indignities of an actor's career; that he shared to the full the ordinary English dislike of being cheated of anything which was his due; that he was careless of literary fame; that his chief ambition, like Sir Walter Scott's, was to be the founder of a family; that he spent the closing years of his life in happiness and prosperity; and that before his death he had come to be generally recognised as the greatest living writer. We know, too, from his portraits, that he was an eminently handsome man, with a sweet serene face, full of intellect, yet also full of gentleness and kindliness. The bare facts of his life, when disinterred from the mounds of conjecture and disputation in which successive commentators have buried them, are soon told. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon on or about April 23, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was a prosperous burgess there, carrying on business as a glover, and engaged also, it would seem, in corn-dealing or farming. His Shakespeare's Youth. 75 mother, Mary Arden, whom his father had married in 1557, was the daughter of a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood, at whose death she became heiress to a small farm called Ashbies. William, the third child and eldest son of his parents, was, in all probability, educated at the Free Grammar School of Stratford, where he acquired the "small Latin and less Greek" Ben Jonson speaks about, and where doubtless he was a prominent figure in all schoolboy sports and amusements. At the earliest date at which Shakespeare could have entered the school-his seventh year-his father had attained the summit of municipal ambition by being appointed chief alderman. For some six or seven years after this John Shakespeare continued prosperous, but about 1577 his fortunes began to decline. In that year half his borough taxes were remitted; in 1578 his wife's property of Ashbies was mortgaged; in 1579 he was returned as a defaulter for not paying a certain tax. Bad luck steadily pursued him for many years; in 1592 he was set down in a list of those who did not come to church through fear of "process for debt." Owing to his father's pecuniary difficulties Shakespeare was, it is likely, withdrawn from school about his fourteenth year. What occupation he engaged in after he left school affords matter for boundless conjecture, as nothing certain is known about it. One tradition says that he became a schoolmaster; another that he was bound apprentice to a butcher; another that he entered a lawyer's office. The last hypothesis was strongly advocated by Lord Campbell, with whom Mr. Furnivall agrees. "That he was so at one time of his life," writes Mr. Furnivall, “I, as a lawyer, have no doubt. Of the details of no profession does he show such an intimate acquaintance as he does of law. The other books in imitation of Lord Campbell's prove it to any one who knows enough law to be able to judge. They are just jokes; and Shakespeare's knowledge of insanity was not got in a doctor's shop, though his law was (I believe) in a lawyer's office." But, as has often been said, the difficulties in which his father was involved must have early given Shakespeare an unfortunate experience of legal documents, and a |
