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declaimed by its author, who was arrayed in antique costume. Black drapery hung around the stage, was the symbol of a tragedy; and rushes strewn on the stage, enabled the best patrons of the company to sit upon the floor. Dancing and singing took place between the acts; and, as a rule, a comic ballad, sung by a clown with accompaniment of tabor and pipe and farcical dancing, closed the entertainment.

The social position of an actor and playwright, even at the end of the sixteenth century, was not enviable. He was still regarded by many as scarcely a shade removed above the "rogues and vagabonds" of former generations; but this drawback seems to have been fully compensated for by extraordinary profits. That these were unusually great is proved, not only by historical evidence, such as the frequent allusions made by the preachers and moralists of the day to the pride, luxury, and magnificence in dress of the successful performers, but also by the rapidity with which many of them, as Shakespeare, Burbadge, and Alleyn, amassed considerable fortunes.

Notwithstanding the social discredit that attached to the actor's profession, the drama had reached such popularity, and the employment was so lucrative, that it soon became the common resort of irregular genius in search of a livelihood. Indeed nothing is more remarkable than the marvellously rapid growth of this department of our literature. It passed from infancy to maturity in a single generation. Twenty years after the appearance of the first rude tragedy, the theatre entered upon the most glorious period of its history, bursting forth into a majesty and strength without parallel in the literature of any country. This was mainly the work of a small band of poets, whose careers all began about the same time. They were most of them men of liberal education, but of dissolute lives. One or two of them left rural homes to seek their fortunes in London, and were lured by the prospect of swift gain into the new profession. They all possessed abilities of a high order. One of them, William Shakespeare, is the giant of the group, beside whom the others dwindle into comparative insignificance. These men, George Chapman, John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Kyd, are often spoken of as the predecessors of Shakespeare; but as none of them preceded him by more than a year or two, and as all were fellow-workers with him

for a time, it seems proper to style them the contemporaries of his early literary life.

The careers of these men in their general outlines were the same. They attached themselves as dramatic actors and poets to one of the numerous companies, and after a short apprenticeship passed in rewriting and rearranging plays, they gradually rose to original works, written either alone or in partnership with a brother playwright. As there was no dramatic copyright at this time, the playwrights had the strongest motive for taking every precaution that their pieces should not be printed, publication instantly annihilating their monopoly, and allowing rival companies to profit by their labors; and this is the reason why so few of the dramas of this period, in spite of their unequalled merit and their great popularity, were given to the press during the lives of their authors. It also explains the singularly careless execution of such copies as were printed, these having been published in many cases surreptitiously, and contrary to the wishes and interests of the author. Only the briefest mention can be made of the subordinate members of this remarkable group of writers.

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John Lyly (1553–1601 ?), educated at Oxford, a man of classical culture, composed plays for the court, and pageants. His writings exhibit genius, though strongly tinctured with a peculiar affectation, with which he infected the language of elegant conversation, and even of literature, till it fell under the ridicule of Shakespeare. This pedantic, superfine use of language is known as Euphuism.* The name was taken from the title of one of Lyly's works, "Euphues; the Anatomy of Wit." Without drinking from this fountain of affectation, one can know its flavor from the language of Sir Piercie Shafton, in Scott's novel, "The Monastery."

George Peele (1552–1598?), like Lyly, had received a liberal education at Oxford. He was one of Shakespeare's fellow-actors and fellow-shareholders in the Blackfriars Theatre. His earliest work, The Arraignment of Paris, was printed anonymously in 1584. His most celebrated dramatic works were the David and Bethsabe, and Absolom, in which there are great richness and beauty of language, and indications of a high order of pathetic and elevated

"To this day every man who has anything of the coxcomb in his brain, who desires a dress for his thought more splendid than his thought, slides unconsciously into Euphuism."-E. P. Whipple.

emotion. His Edward I. is supposed to be our first historical play.

Thomas Kyd, the "sporting Kyd" of Ben Jonson, was possibly the author of the famous play called Jeronimo, to which, in consequence of the many recastings it received, so many authors have been ascribed. The Spanish Tragedy, which is a continuation of Jeronimo, was undoubtedly his.

Robert Greene (1560-1592) was a Cambridge man, and the author of a multitude of tracts and pamphlets on miscellaneous subjects. Sometimes they were tales, often translated or expanded from the Italian novelists; sometimes amusing exposures of the various arts of cony-catching, i. e. cheating and swindling, practised at that time in London, and in which, it is to be feared, Greene was personally not unversed; sometimes moral confessions, like the Groatsworth of Wit, or Never too Late, purporting to be a warning to others against the consequences of unbridled passions. In this group of dramatists his place is next below Marlowe.

But by far the most powerful genius among them was Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). On leaving the University of Cambridge he joined a troop of actors, among whom he was remarkable for vice and debauchery; and he was strongly suspected by his contemporaries of being an atheist. His career was as short as it was disgraceful: he was stabbed in the head with his own dagger, which he had drawn in a quarrel with an antagonist, and he died of this wound at the age of thirty. His works are not numerous; but they are strongly distinguished from those of preceding and contemporary dramatists by an air of astonishing energy and elevation—an elevation, it is true, which is sometimes exaggerated, and an energy which occasionally degenerates into extravagance. He established the use of blank verse in the English drama. His first work was the tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great. The declamation in this piece, though sometimes bombastic, led Ben Jonson to speak of "Marlowe's mighty line." But in spite of the bombast, the piece contains many passages of great power and beauty. Marlowe's best work is the drama of Faustus (71), founded upon the same popular legend which Goethe adopted as the groundwork of his tragedy; and though the German poet's work is on the whole vastly superior, there is certainly no passage in the tragedy of Goethe in which terror, despair, and remorse are

painted with such a powerful hand as in the great closing scene of Marlowe's piece. The tragedy of the Jew of Malta, though inferior to Faustus, is characterized by similar merits and defects. The hero, Barabas, is the type of the Jew as he appeared to the rude and bigoted imaginations of the fifteenth century—a monster halfterrific, half-ridiculous, impossibly rich, inconceivably bloodthirsty, cunning, and revengeful, the bugbear of an age of ignorance and persecution. The intense expression of his rage, however, his triumph and his despair, give occasion for many noble bursts of Marlowe's powerful declamation. The tragedy of Edward II. (70), which was the last of this great poet's works, shows that in some departments of his art, and particularly that of moving terror and pity, he might, had he lived, have become no insignificant rival of Shakespeare himself.

Marlowe is honorably known in other departments of poetry also. His charming poem of The Passionate Shepherd had the rare distinction of being quoted by Shakespeare, and of being answered in "The Nymph's Reply," by Sir Walter Raleigh.

The merits of GEORGE CHAPMAN (1557-1634) as a translator have so entirely eclipsed his dramatic fame, that but few of his plays are now ever referred to. His Bussy d'Amboise is perhaps the best known of them.

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Richard Grant White's admirable "Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Drama to the time of Shakespeare," and Rev. H. N. Hudson's "Historical Sketch of the Origin and Growth of the Drama in England," are the finest discussions to be found by the student upon the topic treated of in this chapter.

CHAPTER IX.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

"I loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature."-Ben Jonson.

"And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock herselfe and Truth to imitate."-Spenser.

"Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child."-Milton.

"But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be,

Within that circle none durst walk but he."-Dryden.

"I hold a perfect comedy to be the perfection of human composition; and I firmly believe that fifty Iliads and Aeneids could be written sooner than such a character as Falstaff's."-Horace Walpole.

"I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakespeare over all other writers."-R. W. Emerson.

"I cannot account for Shakespeare's low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the super-humanity of his genius."-Wordsworth.

"Shakespeare is of no age. He speaks a language which thrills in our blood in spite of the separation of two hundred years. His thoughts, passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day as they were of his own; and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every generation for a thousand years to come."— Prof. Wilson.

"More full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity than all the moralists and satirists that ever existed, Shakespeare is more mild, airy and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world, and has all those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason, nor the most sensitive, for defect of ornament or ingenuity." -Lord Jeffrey.

"The name of Shakespeare is the greatest in our literature-it is the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near him in the creative powers of the mind; no man ever had such strength at once, and such variety of imagination. Coleridge has most felicitously applied to him a Greek epithet, given before to I know not whom, certainly none so deserving of it,-μvpióvovs, the thousand-souled Shakespeare."-Hallam.

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