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24. But the progress of literature soon excited in one person an emulation of the ancient drama. Sack- Gorboduc of ville has the honour of having led the way. His Sackville. tragedy of Gorboduc was represented at Whitehall before Elizabeth in 1562. It is written in what was thought the classical style, like the Italian tragedies of the same age, but more inartificial and unimpassioned. The speeches are long and sententious; the action, though sufficiently full of incident, passes chiefly in narration; a chorus, but in the same blank-verse measure as the rest, divides the acts; the unity of place seems to be preserved, but that of time is manifestly transgressed. The story of Gorboduc, which is borrowed from our fabulous British legends, is as full of slaughter as was then required for dramatic purposes; but the characters are clearly drawn and consistently sustained; the political maxims grave and profound; the language not glowing or passionate, but vigorous; and upon the whole it is evidently the work of a powerful mind, though in a less poetical mood than was displayed in the Induction to the Mirror of Magistrates. Sackville, it has been said, had the assistance of Norton in this tragedy; but Warton has decided against this supposition from internal evidence.

25. The regular form adopted in Gorboduc, though not wholly without imitators, seems to have had little Preference success with the public." An action passing given to the visibly on the stage, instead of a frigid narrative,

irregular

form.

a copious intermixture of comic buffoonery with the gravest story, were requisites with which no English audience would dispense. Thus Edwards treated the story of Damon and Pythias, which, though according to the notions of those times, it was too bloodless to be called a

The 18th of January, 1561, to which date its representation is referred by Mr. Collier, seems to be 1562, according to the modern style; and this tallies best with what is said in the edition of 1571, that it had been played about nine years before. See Warton, iv. 179.

Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iv. 194. Mr. Collier supports the claim of Norton to the first three acts, which would much reduce Sackville's glory, ii. 481. I incline to Warton's opinion, grounded upon

the identity of style, and the superiority of the whole tragedy to any thing we can certainly ascribe to Norton, a coadjutor of Sternhold in the old version of the Psalms, and a contributor to the Mirror of Magistrates.

The Jocasta of Gascoyne, translated with considerable freedom, in adding, omitting, and transposing, from the Phoenissæ of Euripides, was represented at Gray's Inn in 1566. Warton, iv. 196. Collier, iii. 7. Gascoyne had the assistance of two obscure poets in this play.

tragedy at all, belonged to the elevated class of dramatic compositions. Several other subjects were taken from ancient history; this indeed became an usual source of the fable; but if we may judge from those few that have survived, they were all constructed on the model which the mysteries had accustomed our ancestors to admire.

First

26. The office of Master of the Revels, in whose province it lay to regulate, among other amusements theatres. of the court, the dramatic shows of various kinds, was established in 1546. The inns of court vied with the royal palace in these representations, and Elizabeth sometimes honoured the former with her presence. On her visits to the universities, a play was a constant part of the entertainment. Fifty-two names, though nothing more, of dramas acted at court under the superintendence of the Master of the Revels, between 1568 and 1580, are preserved. In 1574 a patent was granted to the Earl of Leicester's servants to act plays in any part of England, and in 1576 they erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It will be understood, that the servants of the Earl of Leicester were a company under his protection; as we apply the word, Her Majesty's Servants, at this, day, to the performers of Drury Lane."

Plays of Whetstone and others.

27. As we come down towards 1580, a few more plays are extant. Among these may be mentioned the Promos and Cassandra of Whetstone, on the subject which Shakspeare, not without some retrospect to his predecessor, so much improved in Measure for Measure." But in these early dramas there is hardly anything to

Collier, iii. 2.

* Collier, i. 193, et post, iii. 24. Of these fifty-two plays eighteen were upon classical subjects, historical or fabulous, twenty-one taken from modern history or romance, seven may by their titles, which is a very fallible criterion, be comedies or farces from real life, and six may, by the same test, be moralities. It is possible, as Mr. C. observes, that some of these plays, though no longer extant in their integrity, may have formed the foundation of others; and the titles of a few in the list countenance this supposition.

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Shakspeare, vol. i., which having superseded the earlier works of Langbaine, Reid, and Hawkins, so far as this period is concerned, it is superfluous to quote them.

n Promos and Cassandra is one of the Six Old Plays reprinted by Steevens. Shakspeare found in it not only the main story of Measure for Measure, which was far from new, and which he felicitously altered, by preserving the chastity of Isabella, but several of the minor circumstances and names, unless even these are to be found in the novels, from which all the dramatists ultimately derived their plot.

praise; or, if they please us at all, it is only by the broad humour of their comic scenes. There seems little reason, therefore, for regretting the loss of so many productions, which no one contemporary has thought worthy of commendation. Sir Philip Sidney, writing about 1583, treats our English stage with great disdain. His censures, indeed, fall chiefly on the neglect of the classical unities, and on the intermixture of kings with clowns. It is amusing to reflect that this contemptuous reprehension of the English theatre (and he had spoken in as disparaging terms of our general poetry) came from the pen of Sidney, when Shakspeare had just arrived at manhood. Had he not been so prematurely cut off, what would have been the transports of that noble spirit which the ballad of Chevy Chase could "stir as with the sound of a trumpet," in reading the Faery Queen or Othello!

his contem

28. A better era commenced not long after, nearly coincident with the rapid development of genius Marlowe and in other departments of poetry. Several young poraries. men of talent appeared, Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lily, Lodge, Kyd, Nash, the precursors of Shakspeare, and real founders, as they may in some respects be called, of the English drama. Sackville's Gorboduc is in blank verse, though of bad and monotonous construction; but his first followers wrote, as far as we know, either in rhyme or in prose. In the tragedy of Tamburlaine, referred by Mr. Collier to 1586, and the production wholly or principally of Marlowe, a better kind of blank verse is first employed; the lines are interwoven, the occasional hemistich and redundant syllables break the monotony of the measure, and give more

"Our tragedies and comedies, not without cause, are cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor skillful poetry;" and proceeds to ridicule their inconsistencies and disregard to time and place. Defence of Poesy.

It may be a slight exception to this, that some portions of the second part of Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra are in blank verse. This play is said never to have been represented. Collier, iii. 64.

Nash has been thought the author of Tamburlaine by Malone, and his in

q

Tamburlaine

flated style, in pieces known to be his,
may give some countenance to this hy-
pothesis. It is mentioned, however, as
"Marlowe's. Tamburlaine" in the con-
temporary diary of Henslow, a manager
or proprietor of a theatre, which is pre-
served at Dulwich College. Marlowe
and Nash are allowed to have written
"Dido Queen of Carthage," in conjunc-
tion. Mr. Collier has produced a body
of evidence to show that Tamburlaine
was written, at least principally, by the
former, which leaves no room, as it
seems, for further doubt.
Vol. iii. p.

113.

Blank verse of Marlowe.

of a colloquial spirit to the dialogue. Tamburlaine was ridiculed on account of its inflated style. The bombast, however, which is not so excessive as has been alleged, was thought appropriate to such oriental tyrants. This play has more spirit and poetry than any which, upon clear grounds, can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figurative style, with a far more varied and skilful versification. If Marlowe did not re-establish blank verse, which is difficult to prove, he gave it at least a variety of cadence, and an easy adaptation of the rhythm to the sense, by which it instantly became in his hands the finest instrument that the tragic poet has ever employed for his purpose, less restricted than that of the Italians, and falling occasionally almost into numerous prose, lines of fourteen syllables being very common in all our old dramatists, but regular and harmonious at other times as the most accurate ear could require.

29. The savage character of Tamburlaine, and the Marlowe's want of all interest as to every other, render this Jew of Malta, tragedy a failure in comparison with those which speedily followed from the pen of Christopher Marlowe. The first two acts of the Jew of Malta are more vigorously conceived, both as to character and circumstance, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakspeare; and perhaps we may think that Barabas, though not the prototype of Shylock, a praise of which he is unworthy, may have suggested some few ideas to the inventor. But the latter acts, as is usual with our old dramatists, are a tissue of uninteresting crimes and slaughter. Faustus is better known it contains nothing, perhaps, so dramatic as the first part of the Jew of Malta; yet the occasional glimpses of repentance and struggles of alarmed conscience in the chief

and Faustus.

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character are finely brought in. It is full of poetical beauties; but an intermixture of buffoonery weakens the effect, and leaves it on the whole rather a sketch by a great genius than a finished performance. There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe's Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is wanting; and Marlowe has hardly earned the credit of having breathed a few casual inspirations into a greater mind than his own.

t

II.

30. Marlowe's Life of Edward II., which was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company in 1593, His Edward has been deemed by some the earliest specimen 11. of the historical play founded upon English chronicles. Whether this be true or not, and probably it is not, it is certainly by far the best after those of Shakspeare." And it seems probable that the old plays of the Contention of Lancaster and York, and the True Tragedy of Plays whence Richard Duke of York, which Shakspeare re- was taken. modelled in the second and third parts of Henry VI., were in great part by Marlowe, though Greene seems to put in for some share in their composition. These plays

The German story of Faust is said to have been published for the first time in 1587. It was rapidly translated into most languages of Europe. We need hardly name the absurd supposition, that Fust, the great printer, was intended.

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Collier observes, that "the character of Richard II. in Shakspeare seems modelled in no slight degree upon that of Edward II." But I am reluctant to admit that Shakspeare modelled his characters by those of others; and it is natural to ask whether there were not an extraordinary likeness in the dispositions as well as fortunes of the two kings.

These old plays were reprinted by Steevens in 1766. Malone, on a laborious comparison of them with the second and third parts of Henry VI., has ascertained that 1771 lines in the latter plays were taken from the former unaltered, 2373 altered by Shakspeare, while 1899 were altogether his own. It remains to inquire, who are to claim the credit of these other plays, so great a portion of which has passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakspeare. The solution seems to be given, as well as

X

Henry VI.

we can expect, in a passage often quoted from Robert Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit, published not long before his death in September, 1592. "Yes," says he, addressing himself to some one who has been conjectured to be Peele, but more probably Marlowe, "trust them (the players) not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country." An allusion is here manifest to the tyger's heart, wrapt in a woman's hide," which Shakspeare borrowed from the old play, The Contention of the Houses, and which is here introduced to hint the particular subject of plagiarism that prompts the complaint of Greene. The bitterness he displays must lead us to suspect that he had been one himself of those who were thus preyed upon. But the greater part of the plays in question is in the judgment, I conceive, of all competent critics, far above the powers either of Greene or Peele, and

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