The Facts About Shakespeare

CHAPTER IV

The fact, so often to be insisted upon, that at the beginning of Shakespeare's career stage plays were hardly regarded as literature at all and were not published by their authors, deprives us of the evidence usually afforded by date of publication. We are thus forced to have recourse to a variety of more or less casually recorded data, and to indications of differences of maturity in style and matter which are often much less clear than could be wished. Before giving the results of the research that has been pursued for a century and a half, it will be worth while to enumerate the most fruitful methods which have been employed, and the sorts of evidence available.

Of purely external evidence, the chief kinds are these: records of the performance of plays in letters, diaries, accounts, and the like; quotation, allusion, imitation, or parody in other works; entries in the books of the Master of the Revels at Court, and in the Register of the Stationers' Company; dates on the title-pages of the plays themselves; facts and traditions about the life of the author; dates in the lives of actors and in the careers of companies known to have performed the plays, and in the histories of theaters in which they were presented. Instances of some of these are the manuscript which tells of a performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn in 1594; the diary of the quack, Dr. Simon Forman, who witnessed performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale at the Globe in 1610 and 1611; the appreciation of Shakespeare, with a list of a dozen plays by him, in the Palladis Tamia[4] of Francis Meres, 1598; and the pamphlets on Somers's voyage to Virginia, which offered suggestions for The Tempest.

Partly external and partly internal are the evidences derived from allusions in the plays to current events, personal or political, such as the reference in the Prologue to Henry V to the expedition of Essex to Ireland in 1599; references to other books, like the quotation from Marlowe in As You Like It, III. v. 82; Kinds of Evidencereferences from one play of Shakespeare's to another, like the promise in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV to "continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France."

The purely internal evidence is seldom as specific as the external, and requires to be handled with much judgment and caution. Most difficult in this class is the weighing of considerations of a moral or esthetic nature; for, though these are often powerful in their effect on the individual reader, they are usually incapable of proof to another person with different tastes and a different point of view. Of such tests, those afforded by a study of the methods used in the treatment of plot and in the development of character are perhaps the least subjective. Somewhat more palpable are the changing characteristics of style. The number and nature of classical allusions and Latin words and quotations; the kind and degree of elaboration of figures of speech, puns, conceits, and the like; diffuseness or concentration in the expression of thought; artificiality or lifelikeness in the treatment of dialogue; the use of prose or verse; the employment of oaths, checked by statute shortly after the accession of James I: these are the main aspects of style which can be used in determining, not exact dates, but the period of Shakespeare's activity within which a given work falls. More capable of mechanical calculation than the tests of either matter or style are those derived from changes in versification, though here too there is often a subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most valuable, the position of the pause in the line ("end-stopped" or "run on"), and feminine endings or hypermetrical lines, such as

Many of these variable features were not consciously manipulated by the author; and, even when a general drift in a certain direction is clearly observable in his practice with regard to them, it is not to be assumed that his progress was perfectly regular, without leaps forward and occasional returns to an earlier usage. It is to be noted also that the subject and atmosphere of a particular play might induce a metrical treatment of a special kind, in which case the verse tests would yield evidence not primarily chronological at all. Nevertheless, when all allowances have been made and all due caution exercised, it will be found that the indications of the versification corroborate and supplement the external evidences in a valuable way.

Metrical Tests

TABLE I

TABLE II

Collaborated Plays

The accompanying Tables[5] give the detailed results of investigations along these lines, and a study of the data therein contained will reveal both their possibilities and their limitations. In Tables I and II the order of the plays is approximately that of the dates of their composition (virtually the same as the dates of first performance). The second and third columns cannot be regarded as giving any clue to chronology, except that they show that in the dramas written under the influence of Marlowe prose is comparatively Metrical Testsrare. Elsewhere Shakespeare employed prose for a variety of purposes: for low comedy, as in the tavern scenes in Henry IV, and the scenes in which Sir Toby figures in Twelfth Night; for repartee, as in the wit-combats of Beatrice and Benedick; for purely intellectual and moralizing speeches, such as Hamlet's over the skull of Yorick. On the other hand, highly emotional scenes are usually in verse, as are romantic passages like the conversation of Lorenzo and Jessica in the moonlight at Belmont, or the dialogues of Fenton and Anne Page, which contrast with the realistic prose of the rest of the Merry Wives and also the artificial pastoralism of Silvius and Phœbe in As You Like It. Few absolute rules can be laid down in the matter, but study of Shakespeare's practice reveals an admirable tact in his choice of medium.

The frequency of rhyme, as shown in the fourth column, has more relation to date. While there is no very steady gradation, it is clear that in his earlier plays he used rhyme freely, while at the close of his career he had practically abandoned it. The large number of rhymes in A Midsummer-Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet is accounted for mainly by the prevailing lyrical tone of a great part of these plays, while, on the other hand, in All's Well it probably points to survivals of an earlier first form of this comedy. It ought to be noted that, in the figures given here, the rhyming lines in the play scene in Hamlet, the vision in Cymbeline, the masque in The Tempest, and the Prologue and Epilogue of Henry VIII are not reckoned.

More significant are the percentages in columns five, six, and seven. Before 1598, feminine endings never reach twenty per cent of the total number of pentameter lines; after that date they are practically always above that number, and show a fairly steady increase to the thirty-five per cent of The Tempest. The variations of run-on lines (which, of course, carry with them the frequency of pauses within the line, and inversely the growing rarity of end-stopped lines) are closely parallel to those of the feminine endings; while the increase in the proportion of speeches ending within the line is still more striking. In The Comedy of Errors this phenomenon hardly occurs at all; in The Tempest it happens in over eighty-four per cent of the speeches, the increase being especially regular after 1598. Yet in some cases other causes are operative. Thus cuts and revisions of plays were apt to leave broken lines at the ends of speeches, and the comparatively high percentages in Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and All's Well are probably in part due to these causes.

The phenomena recorded in the last column are peculiar. Previous to the date of Macbeth it appears that Shakespeare practically avoided ending a line with light or weak words such as prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs, but that from about 1606 to the end he employed them in proportions ranging Risks of Errorfrom 3.53 per cent in Antony and Cleopatra to 7.14 per cent in his part of Henry VIII.

The figures for plays not wholly written by Shakespeare are naturally less significant, and have therefore been given separately; yet, on the whole, they show the same general tendencies in the use of meter.

It will be observed that while the developments suggested by the different columns are fairly consistent, they do not absolutely agree in any two cases, and can obviously be used, as has been said, only to corroborate other evidence in placing a play in a period, not to fix a precise year. Further, in the calculations involved, there are many doubtful cases calling for the exercise of individual judgment, especially as to what constitutes a run-on line, or a light or weak ending. Thus Professor Bradley differs from König in several cases as to the figures given in the seventh column, counting the percentage of speeches ending within the line as 57 for Hamlet, 54 for Othello, 69 for King Lear, and 75 for Macbeth. For Acts III, IV, and V of Pericles, the 71 per cent is Bradley's, for which König's 17.1 is clearly a mistake. Serious as are such discrepancies, and suggestive of a need for a general re-counting of all the more significant phenomena, they are not so great as to shake the faith of any scholar who has seriously studied the matter in the usefulness of metrical tests as an aid in the settling of the chronology.

TABLE III

Table III gives a summary of the results of all the kinds of evidence available as recorded in the introduction to individual plays in the Tudor Shakespeare. The First Periodclassification into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies draws attention at once to the changes in the type of drama on which Shakespeare concentrated his main attention, and suggests the usual division of his activity into four periods. In the first of these, extending from the beginning of his writing (perhaps earlier than 1590) to the end of 1593, he attempted practically all the forms of drama then in vogue. Plays which were given him to revise, or in which he was invited to collaborate, may naturally be supposed to have preceded independent efforts, and his still undetermined share in Henry VI is usually regarded as his earliest dramatic production. What he learned in this field of tragic history from his more experienced fellows may be seen in Richard III, in which he can be observed following in the footsteps of Marlowe in the treatment of meter, in the rhetorical and lyrical nature of the dialogue, and in the conception of the central character. Even less of his individual quality is to be discerned in the field of tragedy, for the most that can be claimed for him in Titus Andronicus is the re-combination of the repellent episodes of that crude specimen of the tragedy of blood, and the rewriting of the lines which occasionally cloak the horrors with passages of poetry. If, as is unlikely, the first form of Romeo and Juliet was written in this period, the extant form must show it so radically revised that it leaves us little ground for generalization as to his power in tragedy in this first period.

It was in comedy that Shakespeare first showed originality. Love's Labour's Lost is one of the few plays whose plots seem to have been due to his own invention; and full of sparkle and grace as it is, it bears obvious marks of the tour de force, the young writer's conscious testing of his powers in social satire, in comic situation, and most of all in verbal mastery and the manipulation of dialogue. In The Comedy of Errors he had the advantage of a definite model in the well-defined type of the Plautian comedy; but here again in the doubling of the twins and the elaboration of the entanglements there are traces of the beginner's delight in technic for its own sake. The clearly contrasted types in the two pairs of heroes and heroines of The Two Gentlemen of Verona point to a conscious effort in characterization, as the author's attention had been concentrated on dialogue and on situation in the other two comedies of this group. Thus, regarding the variety of kind and the nature of his achievement in these first eight or nine plays, we can hardly fail to acquiesce in the general opinion that views the first period as one of experiment.

The chronicle history was the Elizabethan dramatic form whose possibilities were first exhausted. King John had been only a making over of an earlier work, and perhaps the most significant single change Shakespeare made was the excision of the anti-Romanist bias which in the older play had made John a Protestant hero. Yet this history voices, too, in the speeches of Second PeriodFaulconbridge, that patriotic enthusiasm which finds fuller expression in the dying Gaunt's eulogy of England in Richard II, and culminates in the triumphant heroics of Henry V. This national enthusiasm, especially ebullient in the years following the Great Armada, is justly to be regarded as an important condition of the flourishing of these plays on English history; and it is natural to suppose that the ebbing of this spirit in the closing years of Elizabeth's reign is not unconnected with the decline of this dramatic type. There are, however, other causes clearly perceptible. The material was nearly exhausted. Almost every prominent national figure for the three hundred years before the founding of the Tudor dynasty had been put upon the stage; and to come down to more recent times was to meddle with matters of controversy, the ashes of which were not yet cold. The reign of Henry VIII was not touched till after the death of Elizabeth, and the nature of the treatment given to the court of her father by Shakespeare and Fletcher corroborates our view. Further, the growing mastery of technic which is so clearly perceptible in the comedies of the second period must have been accompanied by a restlessness under the hampering conditions as to the manipulation of character and plot which were imposed by the less plastic material of the chronicles. Some effort towards greater freedom the dramatist made in the later histories. The earlier plays of this class had been prevailingly tragic; but now he supplemented and enlivened the political element with the comic scenes which gave us Falstaff; yet these scenes, brilliant as they are in dialogue and superb in characterization, are of necessity little more than episodes. The form had served its purpose as an outlet for national feeling, but it was now outgrown. So distinguished, however, is Shakespeare's achievement in this kind that we might be almost justified in calling this second period that of the culmination of the chronicle history.

The main objection to this title lies in his contemporary accomplishment in comedy. A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice, the one in its graceful poetic fancy and dainty lyricism, the other in its balanced treatment of all the elements of dramatic effectiveness—action, character, and dialogue,—exhibit the dramatist in complete control of his technical instruments, the creator of masterpieces of romantic comedy. The Taming of the Shrew is a more or less perfunctory revision, probably in collaboration, of an older farce comedy; The Merry Wives of Windsor bears on its face corroboration of the tradition that it was written to order in a fortnight. The power in high comedy first fully shown in The Merchant of Venice reaches its supreme pitch in the three plays composed at the turn of the century, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. In each of these a romantic love-tale, laid in some remote holiday world, is taken up, given a specific atmosphere, Third Periodacted out by a group of delightful creations who are endowed with intellect, wit, and natural affection, bathed in poetic imagination, and yet handled with sufficient naturalism to awaken and hold our human sympathies. No more purely delightful form of dramatic art has ever been contrived; none has ever been treated so as to yield more fully its appropriate charm; so that in view of the completeness of the artist's success we are bound to call the period which closed with the first year of the seventeenth century the triumph of comedy.

Julius Cæsar, the first of the plays dealing with Roman history, may have been written before 1600, but, whether it preceded Hamlet by one year or three, it forms a gradual introduction to the group of the great tragedies. Masterly as it is in its delineation of types, rich in political wisdom and the knowledge of human nature, splendid in rhetoric, it still fails to rise to the intensity of passion that marks the succeeding dramas. In Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, Shakespeare at length faced the great fundamental forces that operate in individual, family, and social life, realized especially those that make for moral and physical disaster, took account alike of the deepest tendencies in character and of the mystery of external fate or accident, exhibited these in action and reaction, in their simplicity and their complexity, and wrought out a series of spectacles of the pity and terror of human suffering and human sin without parallel in the modern world. In these stupendous tragedies he availed himself of all the powers with which he was endowed and all the skill which he had acquired. His verse has liberated itself from the formalism and monotony that had marked it in the earlier plays, and is now free, varied, responsive to every mood and every type of passion; the language is laden almost to the breaking point with the weight of thought; the dialogue ranges from the lightest irony to heart-rending pathos and intolerable denunciation; the characters lose all semblance of artificial creations and challenge criticism and analysis like any personage in history; the action is pregnant with the profoundest significance. Hardly, if at all, less powerful are the later tragedies of the Roman group. Antony and Cleopatra is unsurpassed for the intensity of its picture of passion, for its superb mastery of language, for its relentless truth. The more somber scenes of Coriolanus convey a tragedy which either on its personal or its political side scarcely yields to its predecessors in poignancy and gloom. Whatever else he may have written in these years, here is surely the period of tragedy.

Nor do the plays classed as comedies and falling in the first three years of the new century seriously modify this impression of the prevailing tone of the period. Troilus and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure present a marked contrast to the romantic comedy of the preceding stage. The love-story of the first deals with a coquette and ends sordidly; Fourth Periodwhile in the political plot, though it gives occasion for speeches full of weighty thinking, jealousy and intrigue overwhelm the heroic element. The second, alone of Shakespeare's comedies, has a hero who is a rake; and, skilful as is the delineation of Helena, it needs all the dramatist's power to hold our sympathy and to force us to an unwilling assent to the title. Measure for Measure has its scene laid in a city seething in moral corruption: out of this rises the central situation of the play; and the presence of the most idealistic of Shakespeare's heroines does not avail to counterbalance the atmosphere of sin and death that mocks the conventional happy ending, and makes this play, even more than the two others, seem more in place among the tragedies than among the comedies.

The plays of the last period are, in the Folio, classed with comedies, and such no doubt they are if judged merely by the nature of their dénouements. But if we consider their characteristic note, and the fact that through the greater part of each play the forces and passions involved are rather those operative in tragedy than in comedy, we easily perceive why they have been classed as tragi-comedies or dramatic romances. Pericles in many respects stands apart from the other three in nature as well as in date, for it is a dramatization of an old Greek romance, and in it the hand of another than Shakespeare is only too evident. Yet it shares with the others certain common features: like The Tempest it has scenes at sea; all four deal with the separation and reuniting of families; all show us sympathetic figures deeply wronged and finally overcoming their injurers by forgiveness. The abounding high spirits of the earlier comedies are here replaced by a mood of calm assurance of the ultimate triumph of good and a placid faith that survives a rude acquaintance with the evil that is in men's hearts. No period has a more distinctive quality than this of the dramatic romances, in which the dramatist, on the eve of his retirement from London, gave his imagination free play, and in both character and action stamped his last creations with the mark of a lofty idealism.

The obvious fitness of this fourfold division into periods inevitably raises the question of its causes, and attempts at an answer have run along two main lines. One of these has been followed out with much eloquence and persuasiveness by Professor Dowden, whose phrases "In the Workshop," "In the World," "In the Depths," "On the Heights," to describe the four periods, point clearly enough to the kind of significance which he finds in the changes in mood and type of play. With the first of these phrases few will be disposed to quarrel. In his period of experiment Shakespeare's style was as yet comparatively unformed, and his attention was so much occupied with problems of technic that even the most psychological of critics finds here little revelation of personality, and must be content to describe the stage as one of professional apprenticeship. In the terms used of the three later periods, however, Interpretation of Periodsthere is an implication that the tone and mood of the plays in each are the direct reflection of the emotional experiences through which the poet himself was passing at the period of their composition. But this is to take for granted a theory of the relation between artist and production which has against it the general testimony of creator and critic alike. It is not at the pitch of an emotional experience that an artist successfully transmutes his life into art, but in retrospect, when his recollective imagination reproduces his mood in a form capable of being expressed without being dissipated. Of course, Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account of personal experience in the writing of drama. His boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, about the time that he was writing The Merchant of Venice and the rollicking farce of The Taming of the Shrew, and just before he conceived Falstaff; it was fourteen years later that he gave us the pathetic figure of the young Mamillius in The Winter's Tale. From all we know of his personal life, the years of King Lear and Othello were years of abounding prosperity. The lacrimæ rerum that touch the mind in these stupendous tragedies are the outcome of profound meditation and vivid imagination, not the accompaniment of a cry of instant pain. However we are to reconstruct the spiritual biography of Shakespeare, it is clear that it is by no such simple reading of his life in terms of his treatment of comic or tragic themes.

The other line of explanation will suggest itself to any thoughtful student who contemplates the facts summed up in Chapter V on the Elizabethan drama. Whatever Shakespeare's preëminence in the quality of his work, he was not singular for innovations in kind. Not only are the plays of his experimental stage preceded by models easily discerned, but throughout his career one can see him eagerly taking up and developing varieties of drama on which less capable men had stumbled and for which the public had shown relish. Chronicle history, romantic comedy, tragedies of blood and revenge, dramatic romance, had all been invented by others, and Shakespeare never hesitated to follow their trail when it promised to lead to popular success. This does not mean that he did not put conscience into his work, but only that the change in type of play perceptible from period to period is more safely to be explained by changes of theatrical fashion and public taste than by conjectures as to the inner life of the dramatist. Nor are we prevented from finding here too that great good fortune as to occasion and opportunity that is needed, along with whatever natural endowment, to explain the achievement of Shakespeare. The return of the vogue of tragedy after he had attained maturity and seen life was indeed happy for him and for us; as was the rise of the imaginative type of dramatic romance when the storm and stress of his youth had gone by. Had the theatrical demand called for tragedy when Shakespeare was in the early Dates of the Poemsthirties and light comedy when he was in the forties, it seems likely that he would have responded to the demand, though we can hardly suppose that the result would have been as fortunate as in the existing state of things it proved to be.

The foregoing discussion has been confined to Shakespeare's plays; the poems present problems of their own. Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), indeed, resemble the plays of the first period, with which they are contemporary, both in conforming to a familiar type then much in vogue, the re-telling in ornate style of classical legends drawn chiefly from Ovid, and in exhibiting marks of the conscious exercise of technical dexterity. They show the Shakespeare of the dramas mainly in their revelation of a remarkable power of detailed observation and their richness of phrase and fluency of versification. Vivid and eloquent though they are, they can hardly be regarded as affording a sure prophecy of the passion and power of characterization that mark his mature dramatic production.

The case of the Sonnets is very different. From Meres's mention of them in 1598 we know that some had been written and were being circulated in manuscript by that date, and certain critics have sought to assign the main body of them to the first half of the last decade of the sixteenth century. But they were not published till 1609, and many of the greatest strike a note of emotion more profound than can be heard before the date of Hamlet. In writing them, Shakespeare was, to be sure, following a vogue, but as Professor Alden has pointed out in his introduction to them in the Tudor Shakespeare, they stand apart in important respects from the ordinary sonnet sequences of the time. All our researches have failed to tell us to whom they were addressed, if, indeed, they were addressed to any actual person at all; it is hardly necessary to urge that Shakespeare was capable of profound and passionate utterance under the impulse of imagination alone. The probability is that they were produced at intervals over a period of perhaps a dozen years, and that they represent a great variety of moods, impulses, and suggestions. While some of them betray signs of youth and remind us of the apprentice workman of Loves Labour's Lost, others display in their depth of thought, intensity of feeling, and superb power of incisive and concentrated expression, the full maturity of the man and the artist. Hardly in the great tragedies themselves is there clearer proof of Shakespeare's supremacy in thought and language.

CHAPTER V

When Shakespeare was twelve years old the first public playhouse was built in London. For a time literature held aloof from this public stage. Plays aiming at literary distinction were written for schools or court, or for the choir boys of St. Paul's and the royal chapel, who, however, gave plays in public as well as at court. But the professional companies prospered in their permanent theaters, and university men with literary ambitions were quick to turn to these theaters as offering a means of livelihood. By the time that Shakespeare was twenty-five, Lyly, Peele, and Greene had made comedies that were at once popular and literary; Kyd had written a tragedy that crowded the pit; and Marlowe had brought poetry and genius to triumph on the common stage—where they had played no part since the death of Euripides. A native literary drama had been created, its alliance with the public playhouses established, and at least some of its great traditions had been begun.

The development of the Elizabethan drama for the next twenty-five years is of exceptional interest to students of literary history, for in this brief period, in connection with the half-dozen theaters of a growing city and the demands of its varied population, we may trace the beginning, growth, florescence, and decay of many kinds of plays, and of many great careers. Actors, audiences, and dramatists all contributed to changes in taste and practice and to a development of unexampled rapidity and variety. In every detail of dramatic art there was change and improvement, a constant addition of new subject-matter, a mastery of new methods of technic, and an invention of new kinds of plays. The popular successes of Marlowe and Kyd Elizabethan Dramaand the early plays of Shakespeare himself seemed old-fashioned and crude to the taste of twenty years after, yet the triumphs of Shakespeare's maturity failed to exhaust the opportunities for innovation and advance. We are amazed to-day at the mere number of plays produced, as well as by the number of dramatists writing at the same time for this London of two hundred thousand inhabitants. To realize how great was the dramatic activity, we must remember further that hosts of plays have been lost, and that probably there is no author of note whose entire work has survived. By the time, however, that Shakespeare withdrew from London to Stratford the drama had reached its height. The dozen years from 1600 to 1612 included not only Shakespeare's great tragedies, but the best plays of Jonson, Chapman, and Webster, and the entire collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher. The only other decades comparable with this in the history of the drama are that which heard plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes and that other which saw the masterpieces of Racine and Molière.

The greatness of the drama, however, by no means ended with the retirement and death of Shakespeare. Some of those who had been his early associates continued to write for the stage, and younger men, as Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley, carried on the traditions of their predecessors. If, as in other forms of literature, there was decline and decadence during the next twenty-five years, the drama also retained initiative, poetry, and intellectual force until the end. It was not dead or dying when the outbreak of the Civil War cut short its course; in fact, its plays, its traditions, even some of its theaters, actors, and dramatists survived the suppression of twenty years and helped to start the drama of the Restoration. Had Shakespeare lived to the age of seventy-eight he would have seen the closing of the theaters, and his lifetime would have covered the crowded history of the drama's development from such semi-moralities as Cambises and The Nice Wanton to the last plays of Massinger and Shirley.

For nearly a quarter of a century he was a sharer in this dramatic movement, working in London as actor, manager, and playwright. While no playwright was more desirous than he to find in the stage full opportunity for his genius, he was as keen as any in gauging the immediate theatrical demand and in meeting the varying conditions of a highly competitive profession. As we have already noted, he began by imitating those who had won success, and to the end he was adroit in taking advantage of a new dramatic fashion or discovery. Like his fellows, he often took his plots from novels, histories, or other narratives; but his very choice of stories might be determined by the theatrical taste of the moment, and in his treatment of those stories he shows in person, situation, or scene, a consideration of current practices, traditions, and conventions. In every field of literature, a writer is conditioned by the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and this Beginnings of the Dramadependence on current taste is especially important in the drama, where practice tends to fix itself in convention, and where innovation to be successful requires coöperation from the actors and approval from the audience as well as genius from the author. Though Shakespeare is for all time, he is part and parcel of the Elizabethan drama. If his plays are Elizabethan in their defects and limitations, such as their trivial puns and word-play, their overcrowded imagery, their loose and broken structure, their paucity of female rôles, their mixture of comic and tragic, their reliance on disguise and mistaken identity as motives, their use of improbable or absurd stories; they are Elizabethan also in the qualities of their greatness, their variety of subject, their intense interest in the portrayal of character, the flexibility and audacity of their language, their noble and opulent verse, the exquisite idealism of their romantic love, and their profound analysis of the sources of human tragedy.

The Elizabethan drama was a continuation of the medieval drama transformed by the influence of classical models, especially the comedies of Terence and Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca. In England, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Miracle and Mystery plays were declining and were soon to disappear. The most common type of drama for the next sixty years was the Morality, which symbolized life as a conflict of vices and virtues or of the body and the soul. The drama was rapidly changing from long out-door performances to brief plays that could be given almost anywhere by a few actors. The term Interludes became common for all such entertainments, and allegorical frameworks served to contain a wide variety of matter, farce, pedagogy, politics, religion, history, or pageant. Close imitations of the classical forms were soon attempted by scholars and men of letters; but as the professional actors grew in importance the development of a national comedy and tragedy went on without much direction from critics or theorists, but rather in response to the demands of actors and audiences and to the initiative of authors.

The developments of comedy were numerous. Allegory gradually disappeared, and the Morality ceased to exist as a definite type, though its symbolization of life and its concern with conduct were handed along to the later drama. The plays of Robert Wilson, about 1580, show an interesting use of allegory for the purposes of social satire, and realism and satire long continued to characterize Elizabethan comedy, though for a time confined mostly to incidental scenes. Common and incidental also was farce, which is found in most plays of the century whether tragic, comic, or moral in their main purpose. Further, it was soon discovered that the Plautian scheme of comedy was well suited to farcical incident, as in Gammer Gurton's Needle (1552).[6] The classical models or their Italian imitations also produced Influence of Plautusother and less domestic imitations, as in Gascoigne's translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi (pr. 1566) and Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1540); a little later, Lyly's Mother Bombie, Munday's Two Italian Gentlemen, and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Indeed such adaptations continued much later and resulted in some of the best farces, or realistic comedies of intrigue, as Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (1598), Heywood's Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), Jonson's Epicene (1609) and Alchemist (1610).

The Plautian model, however, was far more influential than can be indicated by these close adaptations or by any list of direct imitations or borrowings. For the Elizabethan it offered a standard of comedy, and its plots, persons, and devices were freely used in all kinds of plays, romantic as well as realistic, sentimental as well as satirical or farcical. The plots of Plautus and Terence offer a series of tricks in which the complications are often increased by having the trickster tricked. Certain fixed types of character play the parts of gulls or gullers, as the old parents, the young lovers, the parasite, the braggart soldier, and the clever slave. The intrigue is forwarded by the use of disguise, mistaken identity, and most surprising coincidences; and it is accomplished by dialogue, often gross and abusive, but usually lively. This model served every nation of western Europe, reappearing with prolonged vitality in the inventions of Lope de Vega, the "commedia del arte" of Italy, and in the masterpieces of Molière. Much in its scheme that seems artificial and theatrical to-day was, we must remember, accepted without question by Europe of the sixteenth century as essential and desirable in comedy, especially in realistic comedy of intrigue or manners.

The plots of Terence, notably that of the Andria, also gave some encouragement to the modern fondness for adventure and sentimental love, and some classical sanction to the abundant romantic material that was knocking at the doors of comedy. If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. It included the medieval stories of knights and their gests, and also the fresher tales of classical mythology; the Americas and Indies of contemporary adventure and the artificial Arcadias of humanist imitators of Virgil and Theocritus. Ovid and Malory, Homer and Boccaccio, Drake and Sanazzaro, were all contributors. The union of this romance with comedy on the stage began in two ways, and principally under the innovation of two writers, Lyly and Greene.

The taste for pageants, processions, and tableaux grew and flourished under the patronage of the court; and music, dancing, and spectacle were combined with dialogue in various court exhibitions and plays given by the child actors. John Lyly, writing for these choir boys, developed this type of entertainment into a distinct Lyly and Greenespecies of comedy. Of his eight plays, written at intervals from 1580 to 1593, all but one were in prose, and all except the Plautian Mother Bombie adhere loosely to a common formula. Classical myth or story, with pastoral elements, and occasionally an allegory of contemporary politics, furnish the basis of plots with similar love complications. Gods, goddesses, nymphs, fairies, and many others add to the spectacle and mingle in the love intrigue, and all rise to a graceful dialogue, which quickens to brisk repartee when the pages or servants appear. The witty page supersedes the rude buffoon of earlier plays, and everything is graceful and ingenious, slight in serious interest, but relieved by movement and song.

This is the form of comedy which Shakespeare adopted for Love's Labour's Lost and perfected in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. But Lyly's contribution should not be defined merely by this type of drama, original as it is in its departure from medieval or classical precedents. He showed how comedy might be a courtly and literary entertainment and also the playground of fancy and wit.

The second development of romantic comedy came through the dramatization of stories of love, adventure, and marvels. To such stories Robert Greene gave a heightened charm through the idealization of his heroines. His Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1590) is a magic play with an historical setting; but the interest gathers and centers on the love story of Margaret, the Keeper's daughter. In James IV (c. 1591) the pseudo-historical setting frames the stories of the noble Ida and the wronged but faithful Dorothea. In the incidents of the plot, with its woman disguised as a page, the faithless lover, and the final reconciliation, and also in the sweetness, modesty, and loyalty of the heroine, the play reminds us of Shakespeare's comedies and is indeed very close to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which he was clearly adopting Greene's formula.

Tragedy naturally lagged somewhat behind comedy as a form of popular entertainment. So far as we can judge from the extant plays, there was until the appearance of Kyd and Marlowe no real union between Senecan imitations like Gorboduc (1562), Jocasta (1566), and The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), on the one hand, and popular medleys of morality, tragedy, and farce like Cambises (1565), Horestes (pr. 1567), and Appius and Virginia (1563), on the other. Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1587) was an epoch-making play because it brought to the popular drama true poetry and genuine passion; but it and its successors also established a new type of tragedy. Marlowe made no effort to retain the structure or themes of classical tragedy; on the contrary, he made his plays loosely connected series of scenes dealing with the life and death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action. In this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that pleased the theaters. But each play Marlowe and Kydcenters its dramatic interest on a mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their inevitable disappointment. With the spectacle and sensation, the rant and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and their direful catastrophes. These plays set the key for all Elizabethan tragedy, including Shakespeare's Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. They were immediately followed by dozens of imitators. All blank verse echoed Marlowe's mighty line, and tragedy was filled with ranting conquerors like Tamburlaine, monstrous villains like Barabbas, and murders like that of Edward II. Shakespeare was his pupil in the 2 and 3 Henry VI, mastered his methods in Richard III, and still wrote in emulation, though no longer in imitation, in Richard II and The Merchant of Venice.

Within a few months of Tamburlaine, appeared a play of almost equal influence on subsequent drama, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Kyd was a student of Seneca, a translator of Garnier's Cornelia, a Senecan imitation; and he adapted some elements of classical tragedy to the English stage. The ten plays ascribed to Seneca were the accepted models of tragedy in the Renaissance. Their presentation of the more horrible stories of Greek tragedy, their rhetorical and aphoristic style, their moralizing and their psychology, were all greatly admired. They were believed by the Elizabethans to have been acted, and their murders and violence seemed to warrant such action on the modern stage; though the Elizabethans found less adaptable their use of the chorus, the restriction of the number of persons speaking, their long monologues, and the limitation of the action to the last phase of a story. Kyd modeled his rhetoric on Seneca and retained a vestige of the chorus, long soliloquies, and some other traits of Senecan structure; but his main borrowing was the essential story of a crime and its punishment. He thus brought to the Elizabethan stage the classical theme of retribution. In his Spanish Tragedy, a murder is avenged under the direction of a ghost, by a hesitating and soliloquizing protagonist, who is driven through doubt and speculation almost to madness, and then to craft, with which he outwits the wily villain and brings all the leading dramatis personæ to a final slaughter.

Blood revenge was established as the favorite motive of tragedy; the conflict of craft between protagonist and villain made up the action, and the speculations of the avenger gave a chance for wisdom and eloquence. One other play, probably by Kyd, the lost Hamlet, also presented these features and later formed the basis for Shakespeare's tragedy. Other plays, as Soliman and Perseda, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and Locrine immediately adopted Kyd's theme and technic; indeed the stage for half a dozen years abounded in avenging heroes, diabolical villains, shrieking ghosts, and long soliloquies on fate, death, retribution, and kindred themes. Titus Andronicus is quite in the English History PlaysKydian vein. Many plays combined the salient traits of Marlowe and Kyd, and henceforth no one wrote tragedy without paying homage to their inventions.

We have now noticed the most important developments in comedy and tragedy made by the time that Shakespeare began writing for the theaters; and he made quick use of the progress accomplished by Plautian and Lylyan comedy, by Greene's romances, and by the tragedies of Kyd and Marlowe. There were other plays not easily classified under these names and of less service to Shakespeare. But to the critical playgoer of 1590 few plays would have seemed either 'right comedies' or 'right tragedies.' The majority were mere dramatizations of story without close construction or selection of material, seeking merely varied and abundant action. They drew their material from all kinds of narrative sources, Italian novelle, current pamphlets, Latin historians, or English chronicles; and, whether historical or fictitious, were usually known as Histories, i.e., stories.

The patriotic interest in English history fostered the presentation of its scenes upon the stage. The chronicles of Halle and Holinshed furnished abundant material; and embassies, processions, and pitched battles filled the stage with movement. Historical plays might, indeed, draw from classical history or from current foreign history, but from 1590 to 1603 a very large number of plays give scenic representation to the reigns of English kings.

Some of these form a distinct class, since, however mixed with comic matter, they imitate Kyd or Marlowe and recast the chronicle of a reign to fit the accepted subjects of tragedy, the downfall of a prince, the revenge for a crime, the overthrow of a tyrant, or the retribution brought upon a conspirator or usurper. Conceived under Marlowe's influence, and perhaps owing something to his hand, is the tetralogy that includes the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.

Those history plays, however, that do not follow the formulas for tragedy, are a heterogeneous group not easily classified. They usually keep to the loose chronicle method that presented a series of scenes without much regard to unity or coherence. Farce, comedy, magic, spectacle, heroics, and everything that might have happened was permissible in these plays, and perhaps the only thing indispensable was a pitched field with opposing armies. Biographical, comic, popular, patriotic, or what not, these plays brought a variety of scenes to the theaters, but offered only a loose and flexible form rather than any dramatic direction or model to the creator of Falstaff.

The early deaths of Greene and Marlowe and the retirement of Lyly left Shakespeare the heir of their inventions. Though his plays were at first imitative, he soon surpassed his predecessors in gift of expression, in depiction of character, and in deftness of dramatic technic. The years from 1593 to near the turn of the century are particularly lacking in records of Shakespeare's Leadershipplays or theaters; but it seems clear that the main developments of the drama were in romantic comedy and chronicle history; and it is also clear that Shakespeare was the unquestioned leader in both of these forms.

In comparison with his associates, he was now the master, relying on his own experience rather than on their innovations. Neither the crude but popular Mucedorus (1595) nor Dekker's poetical extravagance, Old Fortunatus (1596), could contribute to his development of romantic comedy; and domestic comedy could not instruct the inventor of Launce and Launcelot. Incidental relationships may indeed be noted. As You Like It, for example, dramatizes a pastoral novel with the addition of scenes that recall Robin Hood's forest life, and may owe something to the suggestion of two Robin Hood plays by Chettle and Munday, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598). But, on the whole, the indebtedness was on the other side, and imitations indicate that men of Shakespeare's day realized that romantic comedy and history could not be carried farther.

In fact, a certain reaction set in against these forms of drama. Near the close of the century new tendencies became manifest. Comedy tended to become more realistic and satiric. Chapman, Marston, Middleton, and Jonson, all began writing romantic comedy, but changed shortly to realistic. Jonson, in his Every Man in His Humour (1598), announced his opposition to the lawless drama which had preceded—whether romantic comedy or chronicle history—and proposed the creation of a new satirical comedy of manners. He was moved partly by a desire to break from past methods in order to bring comedy closer to classical example, and partly by a desire for realism, a faithful presentation, analysis, and criticism of current manners. The growth of London and the increase in luxury and immorality seem to have encouraged such a movement, and for the decade after 1598 there were many comedies of London life, mostly satiric, and nearly all realistic. Many varieties are to be found, from gross representation of the seamy side of city life to serious discussion of social questions, and from sympathetic picturing of certain trades to satiric exposure of the evils of society.

Jonson's emulation of Aristophanes led him into arrogant personal satire in the Poetaster (1601), and there ensued the so-called war of the theaters, in which Marston, Dekker, and, according to report, Shakespeare were Jonson's opponents. If Shakespeare, indeed, had a share in this war, he showed only slight interest in the prevailing comedy. Measure for Measure uses the device of a spying duke employed in Marston's Malcontent, and discusses sexual relationships somewhat in the tone of the time, while the scenes dealing with houses of ill fame are not unlike similar scenes in the contemporary plays of Middleton, Webster, and others. Troilus and Cressida, also, show more of a satiric temper Realistic Comedythan is usual in Shakespeare. But neither of these plays partakes to any extent of the prevailing satire on contemporary London. Wide as was the range of Shakespeare's genius, it seems to have avoided the field of satire.

A review of the drama must, however, at least remark the importance of this development of realistic comedy which flourished in the decade after 1598 and continued to the end. Jonson's comedy of 'humors' includes Volpone (1605), which overstepped the bounds of comedy in its denunciation of evil, the Alchemist (1611), perhaps the best English play on the Latin model, and Bartholomew Fair (1614), most original and English of them all. Dekker's fine drama of middle class life, The Honest Whore (1604), and Heywood's masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play suggesting both the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century and the problem play of to-day, also belong to this very remarkable era of domestic themes and serious realism.

If Shakespeare did not turn to satire or realism or current social problems, he did turn away from chronicle history plays and romantic comedies. As we saw in the last chapter, for a period of eight or nine years, from Julius Cæsar to Antony and Cleopatra, he gave his best efforts of his maturity to tragedy. The day for mere imitation of Seneca, Kyd, or Marlowe, was past; and scholars like Jonson and Chapman as well as Shakespeare sought in the tragedy of the public theater, an opportunity for wisdom and poetry and a criticism of life.

For models, Shakespeare did not need to go back farther than his own Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, nor to imitate any other than himself. Yet his great plays may have seemed to his contemporaries to adopt rather than to depart from current dramatic practices. They belong to the Elizabethan 'tragedy of blood'; against a background of courts and battles they present the downfall of princes; they rest on improbable stories that end in fearful slaughter; they invariably set forth great crimes, compact of murder, lust, villainous intrigue, and ferocious cruelty. Some of them follow Kyd in recounting a story of blood vengeance presided over by ghosts, or discover the retribution due for crime in physical torments. Nearly all follow Marlowe in centering the tragic interest in the fate of a supernormal protagonist who is swayed by an overpowering emotion, and in elevating these human desires and passions into tremendous forces that work their waste of devastation and ruin on character and life.

The contemporary tragedy is brought closest to Shakespeare in the relations of the revenge plays to Hamlet. The type, introduced by Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet, underwent a special development in Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1598) and several other plays appearing from 1598 to 1603, that dealt with the blood vengeance of a son for a father. At the same time Shakespeare turned to the Tragedyremaking of the old Hamlet and to a new treatment of the old theme, yet retained many of the old accessories. Marston reproduces the essential story of blood vengeance, presided over by a ghost, crossed by both lust and sentimental love, commented on by long soliloquies, and accompanied by pretended madness. Chettle, in Hoffman, amplifies the horrors and villainy and brings the story of the mad girl into closer juncture with the main plot than is the case in Hamlet. Tourneur, writing independently of Shakespeare, introduces, among all sorts of horrors, a Christian ghost who forbids blood vengeance and commands submission to Providence. Ben Jonson, in his additions to the old Spanish Tragedy, gives fine imaginative interpretation of the wavering moods of meditation, irony, and frenzy with which Kyd had dealt only crudely. The later development of this type proceeded without much regard to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but rather in the direction started by Marston's tragedies and his influential tragi-comedy, The Malcontent. While Hamlet may be described as centering attention on a meditative and high-minded avenger, Tourneur, Webster, Middleton, and later dramatists found greater interest in the study of villainy and intrigue. Revenge is born of depravity rather than duty, and given a setting of physical horrors and unnatural lust. Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy (1606) and Webster's White Devil (1610) and Duchess of Malfi (1611) represent the culmination of this play of revenge, lust, and horror, and supply a sort of standard for tragedy until the Civil War. Webster, it must be added, was hardly less interested than Shakespeare in character and motive, though he chose to study these in a chamber of horrors.

Shakespeare's Roman tragedies also suggest comparison with contemporary plays, those either on Roman or on contemporary foreign history. Tragedies dealing with Roman history had preceded Julius Cæsar, but that play doubtless stimulated Jonson's Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). Both these plays attempted an approach to classical structure and a thorough study and digest of classical history. This effort to make tragedy a serious and authoritative interpretation of history was also shared by Chapman in his plays dealing with contemporary French history, 1 and 2 Bussy D'Ambois (1601-1607) and 1 and 2 Biron (1608). While Jonson strove to free his style from the abundance of conceits, figures, and passages of description that had characterized earlier drama, Chapman used every chance to crowd his verse with far-stretched figure and weighty apothegm. At its worst it is peculiarly representative of Elizabethan confusion and bombast; at its best it is closest of all in its resemblance to Shakespeare's. Like Jonson and Chapman, Shakespeare sought historical backgrounds for his characters and found a fascination in the interpretation of the motives of the great protagonists of the world of antiquity. It is worthy of note, however, that he seems to have taken no interest in another class of subjects much Beaumont and Fletcherfavored by his contemporaries. Contemporary crimes treated with an excess of realism and didactic conclusions are common in drama from Arden of Feversham (1590) on, and engaged the services of Jonson, Webster, Ford, Dekker, and others.