Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow
May all manner of enemies quite overthrow.

In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our English tongue in avoiding barbarous rhyming may as well receive right quantity of syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means "quantity" as opposed to accent, as if one said carpenter.) As an example he quotes Mr. Watson's rendering of the third line of the "Odyssey" into two English hexameters

All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities.

Obviously if we are to say "men's manners," making "man" in "manners" long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to

Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the travellers.

This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment, nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses, alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly's "Euphues!"

Lyly's Euphues.

The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining decoration and far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous and the exotic, the taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, as we see in the strange over-gaudy costumes of the period, the various ruffs, the jewelled velvets and silks, worn by men and women. A like dressing for thoughts was demanded, and the supply was provided by John Lyly, whose plays are to be mentioned later. Lyly was born a Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen, in Oxford, was his college; his plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul's, are of 1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier, as a prose writer, in his "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit" (1579), and the sequel, "Euphues and his England" (1580). The style became a fashion, a fashion which affected even those who, like Sidney, were in would-be revolt against it. Lyly, like all writers of the periods just before and after him, was copious in classical allusions. He was not the first to hunt in all directions, especially in fictitious natural history, for similes, and needless decorations; but he hunted further and more assiduously: emphatically his style is that of the unresting Bird of Paradise. Every sentence is a thing bristling with points and antitheses and alliterations. The first part of the book was a kind of novel; two friends, at Naples, woo the same woman, quarrel, write long letters, and the question of education, in the wide sense in which the Renaissance understood education, is always prominent. There is endless conversation and discussion of life, love, and learning, always in the same style of fantastic decoration and allusion: all continued when Euphues arrives in England, all conveying general information not verified by experiment. "I have read that the bull, being tied to a fig tree, loseth his strength; that a whole herd of deer stand at the gaze if they smell a sweet apple"; facts on which the cattle-breeder or the hunter would not, if well advised, rely. This was the kind of science against which Bacon uprose. But Lyly appealed, in his Dedication, and with success, "To the Ladies and Gentlewomen of England," who found in the book a kind of love-story, much philosophizing on that dear theme; and a pleasurable example of a new way of being witty and romantic. Lyly was the chief cause of the difficulty in telling a plain tale plainly which besets the minor writers of the age of Elizabeth.

Before approaching the chief prose writers of Elizabeth's time, we must turn aside to her greatest poet, and his friend, to Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, and to the Drama.

Sidney.

Spenser did not more surely attain immortality by his verse than Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) by his life, writings, and character. He was one of those who, as Plato says, are born good, exemplars of natural charm and excellence. He is the ideal gentleman of the type which Spenser professed to educate by the examples of his virtuous knights, brave, pious, courteous, and just. The son of Sir Henry Sidney and nephew of Elizabeth's Leicester, Philip Sidney was born into the Court, but was not of it; his heart was set on other things than pleasure, splendour, flattery, and promotion. Educated at Shrewsbury School, he went to Christ Church at 14, being already the friend of the noble Fulke Greville, who, however, went from Shrewsbury to Cambridge. In 1572 he was attached to the English embassy in France, and, on the night of the Bartholomew massacre was sheltered in the house of his future father-in-law, Walsingham. Till 1575 he travelled, chiefly in Germany, and made the acquaintance of his constant correspondent and adviser, Languet, whom he celebrates as a shepherd of the Ister, and as his own religious Mentor. In Venice his portrait was painted by Veronese; at Vienna he perfected himself in horsemanship under Pugliano, whose enthusiasm he describes so amusingly in his "Defence of Poesie". For a man so earnest as Sidney was, he had a fine sense of humour.

Returning to England in 1575, he, like Gascoigne, was with Elizabeth at the famous pastimes at Kenilworth, now best known through Scott's novel, "Kenilworth". Afterwards, at the house of the Earl of Essex, he met the Earl's daughter, Penelope, later Lady Rich, the Stella of his sonnets. Essex desired their marriage, but fate decided otherwise. In 1577 Sidney went, a young diplomatist, to the Emperor and the German Princes, and later, was obliged to attend the Court, while his mind was set on adventures beyond the Atlantic; on failing in that, he trifled with the idea of introducing Greek metres into English poetry. In 1579, he quarrelled with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court. A duel was not permitted, but as Sidney also gave Elizabeth his opinion about her distasteful flirtation with the odious Duc d'Anjou, the worst of the bad Valois Princes, he retired to Wilton, the house of his sister, Lady Pembroke, and there wrote the pastoral romance, "Arcadia".

He was recalled to Court, sat in Parliament for Kent, and in 1583 parried a daughter of Walsingham. He was forbidden to join Drake's American expedition of 1585, in fact he was always thwarted in his desire for action and for such deeds of chivalry as the conditions of his age permitted—they leaned somewhat to piracy and filibustering. At length, as Governor of Flushing, while Leicester commanded the forces engaged against Spain in the Low Countries, he fell in a cavalry charge against a superior force at Zutphen. His leg was broken by a musket bullet from the Spanish trenches: it was now that he handed the cup of water that was at his lips to the soldier whose need was greater than his. He lingered for some weeks, and died on 17 October, 1586.

The beautiful character of Sidney cannot be more strongly attested than by the agony of grief exhibited, at his death, by the handsome and wicked Master of Gray. He was about to be sent on the Scottish embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, while his desire was to be fighting under Sidney's banner. He expresses, in a touching letter, the sudden revulsion of his nature from his wonted treacheries; and, contrary to the falsehood of tradition, he did not betray, but, to his own loss, did his best to save the Queen whose cause he had previously deserted.

As a poet, Sidney, whose works were all published after his death, is best remembered for the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella, Lady Rich. There is a controversy as to whether these are mere exercises in gallant but "platonic" love-verse, or whether they reveal a true passion, as Charles Lamb maintained. The sonnet in which he says that he has found his fortune too late, and has lost what he had unwittingly won,

O punisht eyes
That I had been more foolish or more wise,

seems to set forth a truly tragic situation. Perhaps only poets can be the critics in such a case as this of Sidney.

The sonnets vary much in poetic value; some are written in Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the English Muse.

Sidney's "Defence of Poesie."

Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary poetry between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to note that Sir Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted as he was with the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he could see nothing to admire in the efforts and experiments of such writers as Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and Turbervile. His "Defence of Poesie" (or, according to the title of the first edition (1595), his "Apologie for Poesie") was elicited by the unauthorized dedication to himself of Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young Oxford man who had tried his hand as a playwright, and been disgusted, he says, by the disorders of the playhouses, where his comedy and morality may have been hooted. He therefore tried to make himself notorious, or he expressed his penitence, by assailing poets who deal in the silly conceits of Lyly's "Euphues".

"The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in a cow-shard... it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields and wallow in the mire: and the whole practice of poets, either with fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief, discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison through the world". Gosson chooses Virgil as one of his terrible examples, and whether he is a genuine or a hypocritical puritan, or a mere fribble in search of notoriety, he made a mistake when he thought to find a patron or a butt in Sidney, who does not advertise Gosson's name in the "Defence of Poesie".

After a general defence of poetry furnished with precedents drawn from every quarter, even from the respect paid to their minstrels by the Irish, Sidney defines the final end of poetry as being "to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of...." If poetry does not always attain this end, "it is not the fault of the art, but that by few men that art can be accomplished". He quotes Aristotle's "Poetics" to the effect that poetry is more philosophical and more serious than philosophy. Nothing in history is so noble but that "the poet may, if he list, make it his own, beautifying it both for further teaching, and more delighting, as it please him, having all, from Dante's heaven to his hell, under the authority of his pen". Here Sidney seems to differ from Scott, who regarded some examples of human fortunes, for example in the case of Mary Stuart, as beyond the range of the poetic art. But Sidney, foreseeing the objection, adds, "I speak of the art, not of the artificer". Sidney then discusses the various Kinds of poetry. As to the Comedy, "naughty play-makers and stage-keepers have made it justly odious,"—so far he sides with the Puritans of his time. In speaking of the lyric, he says: "I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas" ("Chevy Chase"), "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet". Indeed the true spirit of poetry did dwell, disregarded by wits and courtiers, in the popular poetry and the ballads. But poetry, he knows not why, finds, in our time, a hard welcome in England: "I think the very earth laments it, and therefore decks our soil with fewer laurels than it was accustomed, for heretofore poets have in England also flourished". If poets are not esteemed it is because they do not deserve esteem, for we are "taking upon us to be poets in despite of Pallas," invita Minerva. Our would-be poets are destitute of genius—which was very true. "Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his 'Troilus and Cressida': of whom truly I know not whether to marvel more either that he, in that misty time, could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, go so stumblingly after him."

What ailed Sidney's age was lack of terseness and clearness. Most poets did not know what they would be at; they were confused by the tumult of religion, the loss of old ideals, the language in transition, the tyranny of the misunderstood classics, the constant effort to imitate Greece, Rome, France, and Italy. They could not yet see life and literature steadily, and see them whole. Sidney found little that "had poetical sinews," except in Chaucer; parts of "The Mirror for Magistrates," the Earl of Surrey's lyrics, and Spenser's "'Shepherd's Calendar' hath much poetry in his 'Eclogues,' indeed worthy the reading, if. I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I cannot allow..."

Sidney then banters the absurdities of the lawless stage, of the alliterative writers, of the seekers after unnatural history, like Lyly in his "Euphues," and of the love poets. "If I were a mistress never would they persuade me that they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches," "swelling phrases" learned from books.

It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney defended, and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which devotes time and scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments by men who wished to be poets without possessing the poetic genius.

Sidney's best poems and his "Defence of Poesie" retain their freshness; but that book of his which was most popular suffers from the changes of time and taste. At most periods prose fiction is more welcome to human nature than poetry or criticism. Sidney's book "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," is a novel, written by the author at Wilton, when, as we saw, he was neither in favour at Court nor permitted to risk himself in adventures on sea or land. The book was to Sidney what "The Faery Queen" was to Spenser, a wilderness of delights of his own creation, a retreat into a world of fantasy. He wrote it in sheets read, or sent as soon as finished, to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke; the book was meant for her, not for the world. Not long after his death, an unauthorized copy was published (1590), and unauthorized edition followed, and the general delight in the romance is attested by its constant reissues.

The author did not construct any regular plot, he allowed his fancy to wander among the shipwrecks and piratical adventures of the late Greek romances; and in an Arcadia which never existed, and a Laconia most unhistorical. But the high and chivalrous ideals of the author, in his rural prose idylls, as in his battles and combats; the truth and constancy of his lovers; the beauty of his descriptions, made this mixture of the Spanish heroic romances that infatuated Don Quixote with the Arcadian pastorals, the delight of four generations. Milton blamed the captive Charles I for copying the beautiful and appropriate prayer of the captive Pamela, long after Shakespeare had interwoven with the story of King Lear, Sidney's tale of the blind King of Paphlagonia.

In its new mode "The Arcadia" was to four generations what Malory's "Morte Arthur" had been in its day. As late as 1660, we find Sir George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in his heroic and historic romance, "Aretina," where Argyll and Montrose play their parts. Indeed the "Arcadia" was a fruitful parent of the interminable heroic French romances which Major Bellenden laughs at in "Old Mortality," and from which Scott did not disdain to borrow a description in "Ivanhoe". It is indeed curious to compare Sidney's description of an Amazon (Book I, Chap, XII.) with an actual representation of a genuine Amazon by a Hittite artist, discovered on the stone work of a gate at Boghaz Keui. That lady-warrior wears a corslet of scale armour, while Sidney's has a doublet of sky-coloured satin, covered with plates of gold. Her feet are shod in crimson velvet buskins, while the massive legs of the real Amazon are naked. The contrast of fact and fancy are violent, of course, throughout the romance. The style is less conceited than that of "Euphues," and is always noble, but the long sentences and overabundance of parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste. The profusion of love-passages and of martial adventures, "with notable images of virtues, vices, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed fancies, were what the world demanded from a novel, and what Sidney gave in the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of the amœbean verse of the shepherds of Theocritus.

Spenser.

After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the second great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599). We know from his "Prothalamion" that Spenser was born in London—

my most kyndly Nurse,
That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of auncient fame—

that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the ancestry of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills.

Spenser was certainly their kinsman, in what degree is unknown, but his own family must have been poor. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, was aided by the munificent Robert Nowell, and obtained a Sizarship (corresponding to the old Oxford servitorship), at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (1569). Here he made two friends, Gabriel Harvey, a true friend, if a rather pedantic don (the Hobbinol of his "Shepherd's Calendar"), and E. Kirke, the E. K. who furnished the notes explanatory of old English words in that poem. Spenser also gained the good graces of Grindal, then Bishop of London, later Primate, a puritan, who fell into Elizabeth's disgrace, and is applauded as Algrind by Spenser in the "Shepherd's Calendar".

Spenser's youth was passed in an England disturbed by the claims of the captive Mary Stuart to the Crown; by the rebellion of her adherents in the North; by the papal excommunication of Elizabeth, and by the pretensions of the extreme puritan exiles who, driven abroad by the Marian persecution, had imbibed at Geneva the doctrines of Calvin. In their attacks on the English Bishops they out-wearied even the successors of Calvin in Geneva, who regarded them as men not to be satisfied by any concessions; "a sect of perilous consequence who would have no king but a presbytery," said Elizabeth. Here were all the elements which caused Elizabeth's cruel persecution of Catholics, the long struggle of the puritans under Elizabeth and James I, the wars under Charles I, and the strife with Spain and Catholic Ireland. In the words of James VI, it was "a world-wolter," and Spenser, as a poor young man, eager to make his fortune, had to swim as best he might in the cross-currents of this troublesome world. He never enjoyed the peaceful leisure of a Tennyson or a Wordsworth; he had to play an active part in strenuous and most unhappy affairs.

His nature, too, was divided. With all his love of pleasure and of beauty he leaned, though not virulently, towards the puritan party, and, as a good patriot, loathed and detested Rome.

It is probable that, when a freshman at the age of 17, he contributed to a Miscellany, Van der Noodt's "Theatre of Worldlings" (1569), translations in blank verse of certain sonnets of the French poet Joachim du Bellay, and of Petrarch. These, re-cast into the form of sonnets, recur in a volume of Spenser's, of 1591.

After taking his Master's degree (1576) Spenser visited Lancashire, and if his words as Colin Clout in the "Shepherd's Calendar" be autobiographical, lost his heart to a lady whom he calls Rosalind, "the widow's daughter of the glen". According to Gabriel Harvey she "christened him her Signior Pegaso," though neither his poetry nor his wooing won her from her cruelty. Many years later he still writes of her with chivalrous affection, so, like Scott, he had his heart broken and cleverly pieced again.

By 1579 Spenser was in London, a literary retainer or protégé of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester; while he also enjoyed the friendship of Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, the Flower of Chivalry, himself a poet, and the best beloved man of his time. Now (1579) Spenser published, and dedicated to Sidney, his "Shepherd's Calendar," a set of twelve eclogues or pastoral poems, one for each month. The pastoral had wandered far from the rural beauty of Theocritus, and, in the hands of Mantuan and Clement Marot, had become a vehicle for allegory, and even of Protestant argumentation. Spenser does not stray far into party and puritanic politics, but they are not unknown to his shepherds. In January, as Colin Clout, he bewails the coldness of Rosalind,

She laughs the songs that Colin Clout doth make,

which is carrying cruelty very far. February is occupied with a rustic dispute between youth and age: the metre is one of the measures of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel":—

Who will not suffer the stormy time,
Where will he live tyll the lustry prime?
(Shepherd's Calendar, Feb., 11. 15, 16.)
They burn'd the chapel for very rage
And cursed Lord Cranstoun's Goblin-page.
(Lay of the Last Minstrel, C. II., Stanza, 33).

March, with the dialogue of Willie and Thomalin about the strange bird, Love, is adapted from the Greek of Bion in a most pleasant manner, and April contains a melodious song of fair Eliza, a Maiden Queen; which probably procured Spenser's presentation to Elizabeth. The great variety of melodious verse of which Spenser was already a perfect master is, for us, perhaps the chief merit of his pastorals. Through life Spenser keeps up the shepherd's mask, and Raleigh, in his verse, is "The Shepherd of Ocean". The rival Protestant and Catholic clergy also appear as shepherds, good or bad, while in another eclogue the perfect poet, Cuddie, complains, like Theocritus, of public indifference, and is advised to sing of redoubted knights: and, indeed, Spenser had already conceived the idea of his knightly romantic poem "The Faery Queen," and was ambitious to excel his model, Ariosto. In this Harvey discouraged him; "Hobgoblin" must not "run away with the garland from Apollo".

Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he dallied with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English words, as in the English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he dropped many projects at which he had glanced, and was constant to his "Faery Queen".

The manuscript of that great poem must have been the companion of Spenser in many strange wanderings,

In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount,

as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the household of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his to France. To be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring the enmity of Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's brilliant and wavering favourite—who once so nearly brought her into a plight almost as bad as that of Mary Stuart—and her sagacious counsellor, Sir William Cecil (Lord Burleigh)—who now and again saved his Queen "as by fire"—might have furnished Spenser with a high theme for a poetic allegory. But chance had made him Leicester's man, not Burleigh's man, so that he never won the fortune for which he sought. Who, indeed, would seek fortune in Ireland? Spenser did, accompanying Lord Grey of Wilton to an isle more than commonly distressful.

To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English invaders was now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion after rebellion was punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is notorious for his massacre of six hundred disarmed Italian and Spanish filibusters at Smerwick (November, 1580), and the poet of the "Faery Queen" was present at this abominable deed. It was neither without precedent nor imitation. Seventy years later David Leslie, urged on by a preacher, massacred the remnant of Montrose's Irish contingent at Dunaverty. Spenser himself in his most Interesting "View of the Present State of Ireland" says concerning the foreign prisoners, "there was no other way but to make that short way with them which was made". He defends Grey's ruthless policy; he had made Ireland "ready for reformation" when he was recalled, on the charge of being "a bloody man" who had left the country in ashes (1582). Grey was pursued by the clamour of a horrified people, that is, he was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, molested by the Blatant Beast, the public. The idea of the public is a Blatant Beast is borrowed from Plato.

It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that Spenser, acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war in Munster, wrote part of the "Faery Queen". He held public posts, was Clerk of Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, he received 3000 acres of land, and a ruinous castle of the Desmond family, Kilcolman, between Mallow and Limerick (1586).

Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he had the advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical literary society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, its satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conversation of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his friends the aim and scope of the "Faery Queen". Each virtue was to be incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it by example. In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, Spenser says that Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be a perfect exemplar of "the twelve private virtues". The Faery Queen herself is, first, Glory in general and next Gloriana, the royal and "most virtuous and beautiful" Queen Elizabeth, who also appears as Belphœbe. He is to begin in the middle, before telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs, and a palmer bearing an infant with bloody hands came seeking adventures to a festival of the Faery Queen. "Many other adventures are intermeddled."

The "Faery Queen" is not, and does not aim at being an epic. It is without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six books were not written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser was driven from Kilcolman.

The original scheme is that of the "Morte d'Arthur," moralized, and intermingled with allegory. The poem is an allegorical romance adapted to the state of England, Ireland, and the Continent under Elizabeth, and to the war of the Reformation against the dragon of Rome and the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills, the seeming fair and inwardly filthy Duessa, who is occasionally meant for Mary Stuart. Such unity as the poem possesses is given by the conflict of Good, as Spenser understood it, against Evil, private and public, the vices, and the Church of Rome. The Red Cross Knight wears the armour which St. Paul describes, and in which Bunyan equipped Christian and Greatheart.

There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue "sermoned at large, as they use". But while Spenser insists on being taken as a moral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, and it is the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with knights and ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". Like the knights in the "Morte d'Arthur" he "rides at adventure"; in every page a new adventure opens, and leads to others endlessly, through conflicts with Saracens,—Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy,—with the wily Magician, Archimage, and his glamour; with Despair, in a wonderful passage; with dragons and dragonettes, with Acrasia and all the charms of her abode of wanton bliss, which is depicted with great enthusiasm (Book II, Canto XII). This canto is remote indeed from the puritan taste, despite its moral ending

Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind,
But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind.

The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of Circe in the Tenth book of the "Odyssey," and it is curious to compare the severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless luxury of the Italian Renaissance in Spenser.

The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, which is perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is a garden of endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for there is a perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing is constant but the long and ever-varying music of the verse, Spenser's own measure, in which each stanza is a poem, while the strong stream of melody carries the half-dreaming reader down the enchanted river, and forth into the fairy seas.

The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the stanza may not be the best vehicle for narrative. But Spenser's stream does flow from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of Lotusland occasionally lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of the the reader. The stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens

One day, as they all three together went
To the greene wood to gather strawberries,
There chaunst to them'a dangerous accident:
A Tigre forth out of the wood did rise,

narrates an accident as unexpected as dangerous! We cannot but be reminded of the "Swiss Family Robinson," and when Spenser makes Sir Calidore kill the tiger and cut off its head with a shepherd's crook, he is plainly overcome by "drowsihead".[2]

It is true that Spenser soon lost hold of his main allegory, and allegorized the moving events and some of the personages of his time. The gods, in Euripides, make a false Helen of clouds and sunbeams and for her the Trojans and Achæans war and die. So, in Spenser's poem, the witch makes a false Florimel of snow, informed by "a wicked spright" with burning eyes for the destruction of mankind, and the false Florimel is another form of the white witch, Mary Stuart. The affairs of Ireland, France, "Belge," and Spain appear in knightly or magical disguise in the procession of dissolving views; a pageant of the rivers of Ireland and England anticipates Drayton's "Polyolbion": the romance becomes, like "Piers Plowman," a farrago of all that is in the poet's mind.

Of Spenser, Ben Jonson might have said, as of Shakespeare, Sufflaminandus erat, "he needed to have the drag put on". Like Pindar in youth, "he sowed from the sack, not from the hand". His archaic words and unsuccessful imitations of archaic words annoyed the critics of his time more than they vex us. If he "writ no language," "writ the language of no time," as Ben Jonson said, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," too, are in the language of no time, represent no one dialect that ever was actually spoken. But Spenser was writing about no actual time: his own age is confused with the fairy age of chivalry, and the ages of the "Morte d'Arthur," and of Greek mythology. With Spenser we are "out of space, out of time," and of his adoration of Chaucer, his ancient words keep us in mind. That great and noble effort towards perfection, the spirit of chivalry, was his ideal; and in Sir Philip he saw the last of the gentle and perfect knights. To the flattery of Elizabeth we must submit: she needed it all if to her subjects she was to, stand for England and their love of England.

Spenser's blemishes are of his age; no pure and perfect work of immaculate art could arise in a poetry which was only emerging from a kind of chaos, too much learning being the successor of too much ignorance, and a divine genius being left at large with no control from sane and temperate criticism.

Somewhat eclipsed by the new star of Elizabeth's fresh favourite, Essex, Raleigh visited his Irish lands in 1589, met Spenser, read the "Faery Queen" in manuscript, and brought "Colin Clout Home again". The poem of that name (1591) while full of sugared compliments to Elizabeth, is also touched with satire of her new courtiers. Sidney was dead, Leicester was dead, Burleigh "hated poetry and painting". The first part of the "Faery Queen" (1590) had made Spenser famous, but had won him no prize of Court favour save a small pension.

His "Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and the Fox" may have been written earlier and now was published; in this the satire is much more keen; the poet finds even "the Comic Stage defaced and vulgarized, in his 'Tears of the Muses,' where "our pleasant Willy that is dead of late," cannot conceivably be Shakespeare—the silence of John Lyly may be intended.

When Spenser returned to Ireland a collection of his miscellaneous poems was published, containing, among other things, "Mother Hubberd's Tale," "The Tears of the Muses," "The Ruines of Rome" (sonnets from the French of Joachim du Bellay).

The "Ruines of Time," dedicated to "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," Lady Pembroke, begins with a vision of the genius of the ruined Roman city, Verulam, and in a far-off way reminds us of the Anglo-Saxon poem on the Ruined City. There is a lament for the fall of ancient empires, and the sorrows of the House of Dudley.

Spenser's mood was that of melancholy and disappointment, presently cheered by his marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. From his love came his sonnets, and his matchless "Epithalamion," his "love-learned song". If the "Faery Queen," and all else that Spenser did were lost, the "Epithalamion" and the "Prothalamion" would win for him the crown of the chief of English poets before Shakespeare. The marriage occurred in June, 1594: then troubles with the Irish whom he had supplanted, or some other cause, sent him to England, with the last three books of his romance. The affair of Duessa's treatment caused James VI to remonstrate through Bower, the English ambassador to Holyrood, and though the poet was not punished, his designs may not have been advanced. He now published his Hymns to Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, the latter under the influence of Plato, and his "Prothalamion" for the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset. These splendid poems were his swan-song; Ireland called him, and in October, 1598, the natives whom he had despoiled drove him from Kilcolman, which they burned. Spenser died, a ruined man, in Westminster (16 January, 1599), Essex paid for his funeral, he lies in Westminster Abbey.

As Hephæstus, when he fashioned the arms of Achilles, melted bronze and gold and silver in his furnace, so Spenser combined the wealth of Greece and Italy, France, Rome, and England in the great crucible of his genius. In the "Epithalamium," for example, we find a translation of four lines from a sonnet of Ronsard, mingling with notes from Theocritus and the Song of Songs, with all the beautiful things of all the creeds. It would, perhaps, be unfair to call the style of Spenser, as it appears in the "Faery Queen," "Corinthian". Yet the metal in which he works is like that "Corinthian bronze" formed, at the conflagration of the city, from the molten gold and silver and copper of the sacred vessels and images of the gods. The spoils of all old poetry are mingled with his own. He has been called "the poets' poet"; his successors have taken from him his very tones. As has been said well, when Spenser writes—

Scarcely had Phœbus in the glowing East
Yet harnessëd his fiery-footed team,

that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of "Romeo and Juliet".

And taking usury of time forepast
Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights,

that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets.

Many an Angel's voice
Singing before the eternal Majesty
For their triune triplicities on high:

that is the younger voice of Milton.

And ever and anon the rosy red
Flasht thro' her face,

one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.[3]

English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried and forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till Thomson revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, and English poetry came fully to her own again when the magic book of Spenser was opened by Keats.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AND PLAYWRIGHTS.

The rejoicing age of Elizabeth was fond of "variety entertainments". The Court Masques, such as those of Lyly, and George Peele's "Arraignment of Paris," abounded in songs, music, and dancing, and were expensively furnished. The Universities had their own amateur authors and performers. The "children" of St. Paul's and other schools acted so naturally that, as we read in "Hamlet," they became serious rivals of the professional actors.[1] "An aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for it, these are now the fashion". Polonius indicates the many sorts of plays, "tragedy, comedy, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individual, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy or Plautus too light." From authors of the heavy Senecan school came blank verse: "the light people" continued, when Shakespeare wrote "Love's Labour's Lost," to employ rhymes in many measures; till Peele, and above all Marlowe, introduced a more free and varied and accomplished blank verse. The general taste turned from many imitations of the ponderous Seneca to plays of more freedom, but even moralities and interludes of the old sort continued to be played in the age of the Shakespearean drama.

There were countless troops of players, vagabonds in the eyes of the law—those who held no licence from a noble (as "the Earl of Leicester's men," "the Admiral's men," and many others), "hardly scaped whipping". In "Ratsei's Ghoaste" a company of strollers, Bottoms and Snugs, stage-stricken, are licensed by a highwayman. They acted where they could, mere "barnstormers," mainly in the yards of inns, under the galleries.

The City was puritanic, or, at all events, was adverse to the nuisance caused by crowds of roisterers and hangers-on of the theatre, and by 1577 James Burbage built his theatre beyond the municipal bounds, in Shoreditch. The Curtain and the Fortune were in the same region. Southwark, south of the river, a noisy quarter, gave hospitality to the Rose, and, in 1599, to the Globe, built by Burbage's son, the famous Richard, Shakespeare's friend.

The Diary of Philip Henslowe, who financed players and authors, among his other enterprises, contains the jottings of this avaricious and uneducated patron. There were many small "private theatres," which had a scrambling existence.

The pit was unseated, and open to the rain and sun, the galleries above were less uncomfortable. The noble and wealthy sat in galleries round the pit, or on the stage, which was covered over or partly covered from the air. The arras, or tapestry hangings, concealed the prompter—and Polonius in "Hamlet". Scenes in bedrooms were at the back, and when such a scene closed, the hangings fell over it. There was no scene-shifting, as with us, pasteboard rocks and trees were easily moved about. A painted frame with a name over it in large letters, stood for town-gate, and for the town.[2]

There were no women actors, boys took women's parts till the Restoration.

Such clowns, dancers, singers, and practical jokers as Tarleton and Kemp, and such actors as held shares in their theatres, made good livelihoods. The authors, who sold them dramas for a sum down, and had no more profit from them in any way, were paid sums ranging from £6 to £20: according to modern rate of purchasing power from £50 to £160. The play then became the property of the speculator, like Henslowe, or manager, or company of authors, which had paid for it. Robert Greene, the celebrated literary man of whom we have to speak presently, was accused of selling a copy of a play to one company, and then, when that company went "on tour" through provincial towns, of selling another copy to another company. "He was very capable of having it happen to him." When any speculator or company had once bought a play, they could hand it over to any author with orders to alter it as he pleased. This was annoying to the first author or authors, for sometimes two men, sometimes three, sometimes five or six would combine to make a play. The consequence is that modern critics spend much time and ink in trying to discover which author wrote each part of a comedy or tragedy, and how much of the original work of the first author, or authors, was kept in a play which, perhaps, Shakespeare himself took up and re-wrote.

We have no space for such discussions, which seldom lead to any certain conclusions, but we must remember that the actors much objected to the printing of any plays which they owned, for, once printed, it was not easy to prevent other companies from acting them. But publishers sent shorthand reporters to take down the words during the performance, and wild work they often made of it. These printed plays, small cheap square volumes or "quartoes," may be very correct or very incorrect copies of the author's words; some of Shakespeare's quartos are good texts, some are execrable.

The playwrights were usually young men who had been at one of the Universities, and had picked up all that they could learn of the newest French and Italian literature, ideas, and manners. They were very scornful of play writers who, like Kyd, Shakespeare, and even Ben Jonson, far more learned than any of them, had not been at Oxford or Cambridge. The pamphlets of the University men tell us much of the little we know about their rivals, often their betters, who had not studied at Oxford or Cambridge.

John Lyly.

From the University wits whose plays preluded to Shakespeare, John Lyly (?1554-1606) of Magdalen, Oxford, stands a little apart. He wrote dramas to be acted before the maiden Queen by the boy singers of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's. Unlike some of his brethren, he remembered the reverence due to boys and virgins, and his pieces are remarkable for delicacy of tone, while the refined and romantic sentiment, the pure and hopeless passion of his "Endymion," for example, and the style of the prose in his dialogue, are all in the manner of his "Euphues". When he aimed at broad mirth, he was not broad enough or facetious enough to be amusing. His characters usually, as in "Endymion" and "The Woman in the Moon," are the gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines of classical mythology, but their manners are those of the Court of Elizabeth, though more refined.

Allegory on events of the day is suspected of lurking in the plays: Cynthia, for example, has always some complimentary reference to Elizabeth. "Mother Bombie" is not a successful essay in low comedy: "Campaspe," a love story of the Court of Alexander the Great (where Plato finds himself, somehow), is quite a pretty approach, as is "Galatea," towards the romantic comedy; but in Shakespeare's early "Love's Labour's Lost" we see that, at the first attempt, he far surpassed his predecessor. Puns, alliteration, and anecdotes of unnatural history are nearly as prevalent in the plays as in the "Euphues" of Lyly. Several of his songs are pretty; some of his scenes of love-making when the lady, though coy, is willing to be won, are graceful, and the prose of the dialogue, conceits apart, is lucid and in good taste. His blank verse in "The Woman in the Moon," is not specially characteristic.

Peele.

George Peele would have a far better claim than Kyd to the title of "sporting" if there were even a little truth in the tract about him called "Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman"; while to the title of "gentleman" he would have no moral pretensions. The jests are rough and far from honest practical jokes, but the author had some knowledge of Peele's position as a director of pageants and masques. There is no smoke without fire, and the contemporary stories of the "Bohemian" life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University wits connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely be baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire: he was born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates Hall, now Dr. Johnson's college of Pembroke in Oxford, took his Bachelor's degree about 1577, his Master's in 1579.

His "Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 1589), he probably wrote at Oxford. It is a pocket epic, and summary of the Trojan war—based partly on the "Iliad," partly on the later Ionian legends, as of Palamedes, and the love of Achilles for Polyxena, daughter of Priam. By 1581 Peele was in London. In 1584 his "Arraignment of Paris" was published; it was acted in that year before Elizabeth by the "children" of the Chapel Royal. It is strange sport for ladies, and Mrs. Quickly might have said, "You do ill to teach the child such words". The piece in which Paris is arraigned for giving the apple to Venus, is a pastoral written in a variety of rhymed metres, with some speeches in creditable blank verse: there is a pretty song,

Fair, and fair, and twice as fair,
And fair as any may be.

At the close Diana presents the famous apple, with the assent of Venus, Juno, and Pallas, to Queen Elizabeth. Peele also arranged pageants for the Lord Mayor, and wrote (1593) a "Chronicle History of Edward I," a play based on an absurd ballad about the profligacy and fabulous cruelty of Eleanor, the worthy Queen of "Longshanks". Friar David ap Tuck provides a comic part, in prose. John Baliol, King of Scotland, brags and submits in blank verse: the best of the blank verse is assigned to the wicked Eleanor: the lines are not usually "stopped" in the stiff old style.

In 1593 Peele also wrote his "Honour of the Garter," a poetic vision of "lovely knights" of old days. The Prologue contains a lament for Marlowe,

the Muses' darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below.

"The Old Wives' Tale" is thought to have suggested a poem very unlike it, Milton's "Comus". The date of Peele's "David and Bathsheba," "a remain of the fashion of Scripture plays," is uncertain (published in 1599). This is the best of Peele's extant work, and the blank verse is not unworthy of Marlowe. David says of the dead Absalom—

touch no hair of him,
Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds
Delight to play, and love to make it curl,
Wherein the nightingales would build their nests,
And make sweet bowers in every golden tress,
To sing their lover every night to sleep.

With Peele and Marlowe we are coming close to the perfection of the verse of Shakespeare. Peele died in 1597(?); two years earlier he was poor and in sickness. Probably some of his plays are lost; the "Battle of Alcazar" is but doubtfully assigned to him. Peele cannot have taught Shakespeare much: though he greatly improved blank verse, he only proves that spectators were not intolerant of real poetry in plays.

Greene.

Robert Greene was a Norwich man (born about 1560), the son of parents of substance; at St. John's College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1578. Norwich was a puritan town, but the indulgence of Greene's mother, as he tells us, enabled him to make the Italian tour, probably between 1578 and 1580,

An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,

said the proverb, and Greene, a man greatly given to fits of repentance, describes his dissipations much as St. Augustine describes his own. At all events he learned Italian and could borrow from novels in that language. He lived among "wags as loose as myself," both in Italy and London. Neither the effects of a rousing sermon nor an early marriage (1585, 1586) to a wife with whom he soon parted company could withdraw Greene from the bottle and his wild comrades. He was the conventional "gentleman of the press," living by a very rapid pen, "yarking up a pamphlet" with unprecedented speed, says Nash, and his wares, we learn, were well paid. He had also many noble patrons, at least he dedicated his "love pamphlets," romances in the manner of Lyly, to many ladies. They are pure in tone, and his favourite female character is a chaste and long-suffering Patient Grizel, like Enid in the Welsh "Mabinogion," and Enid in the "Idylls of the King". Between 1583 and 1589 he wrote at least eight of those love stories and pamphlets, including "Euphues, his Censure to Philautus," and, as five were dedicated to ladies of rank, they were probably of the sort which women enjoyed. Later he was either remorseful, or affected remorse, for his way of living, and turned his experience of the town to use, in tracts on "Cosenage" and "Cony-catching," exposures of the devices of courtesans, usurers, and other harpies.

His "Repentance," and his "Groatsworth of Wit" (1592), with the notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last efforts. The "Groatsworth of Wit" describes the jealousies between the playwrights and the actors, who, then as always, gained most of the popularity, and then gained most of the money yielded by the stage. It is almost impossible for unbiased readers to avoid detecting in Greene's "Johannes Factotum," "the only Shake-scene in the country," an allusion to Shakespeare. Whether he partook too freely of pickled herrings and Rhine wine, as gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness, and died in debt to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592.

Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even according to Nash he was a "ruffler". "Penning of plays," Greene says, was his "continual exercise," but at what date he began it is uncertain. He appears to have been stung by some comment in a play by two other authors on the unfashionable character of his own dramas, "for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins"; that is, apparently, he did not try to write the sonorous blank verse of Marlowe; or tried and failed to produce in Nash's words "the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse".

If "Alphonsus, King of Arragon" be his first play, as it gives Tamburlaine on a small scale it may have been suggested by Marlowe's drama: however Alphonsus, after Napoleonic victories, marries his own true love, the daughter of the Sultan and Greene's play, like the tragedies preferred by Charles II, "ends happily". The blank verse is inferior to that of the Ninevite play in which Lodge took part, "A Looking Glass for London and England".

"Orlando Furioso" is a strange medley; there is prose, blank verse, and even a speech in Latin: the materials are drawn, of course, from Ariosto; the Paladins deal enormously in classical allusions.

In "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward I, falls in love with a gamekeeper's daughter, and describes her charms in blank verse, and in a very pretty pastoral manner. By the old trick of novels and of the stage he sends Lacie, a courtier, to woo for him (as in "Much Ado about Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the usual consequences follow.

The Friars Bacon and Bungay are shown at their pranks, with a devil, and Lacie, "in country apparel," flirts with the keeper's daughter in talk of Apollo's courtship of Semele (mother of Dionysus by Zeus). The king beholds their courtship by dint of crystal-gazing; while they are also on the stage.

The plot becomes extremely complicated, and poor Margaret, the keeper's daughter, has to play the patient Grizel to Lacie. She is cruelly treated, but marries Lacie in the end, while Edward pairs off with Eleanor. The servant of Friar Bacon, Miles, and a devil provide some comic matter. The blank verse is now much more accomplished, and imitates the cadences of Marlowe.

The play of "James IV" is so absurdly unhistorical (it transfers the plot of an Italian novel by Cinthio to the Court of Holyrood), that it can hardly be read with patience, but Greene's sweet, patient, long-enduring heroine, Dorothea, appears again, in the part historically filled by a very different person, Margaret Tudor, whose passion for being alternately married (finally to "Lord Muffin") and divorced, was rebuked by her brother, Henry VIII, himself no model of constancy. Greene introduced and Shakespeare continued the practice of taking plots for romantic comedies, (such as "As You Like It") from Italian novels; and, like Shakespeare, he is the poet of good women, "the Homer of women," as his friend Nash said with hyperbole of compliment.

Lodge.

The Memoirs of Thomas Lodge, had he left them to us, would be of more interest than are his writings. He "had an oar in every paper-boat," says the Cambridge satirist in the play, "The Return from Parnassus," but he had oars in other boats that were not of paper. Born about 1558, he was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, an eminent grocer. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, being by one academic generation junior to Lyly. Going to the Inns of Court, London, he answered Gosson's attack on poetry, "The School of Abuse," in an abusive style very unlike that of Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy". He and Barnaby Rich (the supposed author of a most vivacious translation of two books of Herodotus), were friends, and wrote commendatory verses, each for the other's work (1581).

If in his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), Lodge is speaking from his personal experience, he already knew "the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment," thanks to the expensive acquaintance of "Mrs. Minx," and long bills due to his tailor. He warns the young against the temptations of the town, at tedious length and with overabundance of classical allusions. In an unreadable romance (1584) (Lyly's "Euphues" being the model), "Forbonius and Prisceria," he inserts many not unreadable verses.

"Glaucus and Scilla" is a work of the same genre as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas of six lines.

"Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences"

says Lodge, and his tale is too prolix, verbose, and full of "delayes". There are harmonious cadences, and pretty descriptions, but Lodge's poetic vein is best in his brief lyrics. He found time, on sea or land, to write "Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy". This contains the tale which Shakespeare made immortal by transfiguring it in "As You Like It". The vagrant and affected prolixity of this kind of story had a popularity that endured for a century, and surprises us as much as our popular novels will doubtless astonish future generations. Such as the style was, Lodge had mastered it, and redeemed it by the intercalated verses. "Rosalynde" had vogue, and Lodge, who had set forth on a freebooting expedition with young Thomas Cavendish, wrote probably the only novel, "A Margarite of America" (1596), ever composed in the frosty Straits of Magellan. His next novel was "Euphues's Shadow," the euphuism of the shadow is equal to that of the substance. His play, "A Looking Glass for London and England," written in collaboration with Greene, was acted in 1592. We are introduced to Rasni, King of Nineveh, with three Kings of Cilicia, Crete, and Paphlagonia, returning from the overthrow of Jeroboam, King of Jerusalem..

Greene and Lodge are magnificently disdainful of local colour. The Cilician King, in very sonorous blank verse, proclaims the Assyrian monarch to be more beautiful than Hyacinthus and Endymion, personages of Greek mythology. Oseas the prophet, brought in by an angel, listens to an angelic harangue of some thirty lines, and tersely replies: "The will of the Lord be done!" To him enter "Clown and a crew of Ruffians," and we have several pages of humours in prose; mainly the talk is of ale and horses. After a prolonged and chaotic performance, Nineveh repents under the preaching of Jonah, and these amiable moralists, Greene and Lodge, bid London go and do likewise. That the blank verse is not bad, and that the satire of Rasni's flatterers may be a hit at the adulators of Elizabeth, is the best that can be said for this Scriptural drama. After all it is not so tedious as Lodge's play from Roman history, "The Wounds of Civil War".

It is needless to speak of such mere hackwork as his books on William Longbeard and Robert the Devil, but his "Fig for Momus," satires in rhyming heroic couplets, accredit him, contrary to the boast of Joseph Hall, as the first English satirist.

Not popular in literature, Lodge (1600) turned physician, taking his M.D. degree at Avignon. Now he really flourished, and was in good practice, till his death in 1625. His reputation rests on his lyrics; for the advance of the drama he did nothing.

Nash.

With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, or Nashe, made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the history of Elizabethan literature. The son of "William Nash, minister" (not improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk in November, 1567. The Christian names of his brothers and sisters, Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are of the Biblical sort favoured by "the Brethren".

Nash made no claim to the title "gentleman" then used in the heraldic sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar" (at Oxford "servitor") or Lady Margaret's Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, and was in residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 he was in London, a literary hack, employed, for example, to write an "Introduction" to Greene's "Menaphon". He addresses the students of both Universities in his irrepressibly rattling way, and it is hardly possible to doubt that in a long passage he rails at the unfortunate Kyd in his capacities as playwright and translator from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed contemporary literature and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings of Gabriel Harvey.

With him Nash later had a war of pamphlets, the best known is "Have with You to Saffron Walden," containing a full answer to the eldest son of the Halter-maker (1596). The pamphlets are only of interest for their personal hints: the feud arose from a slighting allusion by Greene to Harvey's parentage ("Quip for an Upstart Courtier"). Nash took up the cudgels (as his weapons of wit may be called) for Greene; Harvey pursued Greene's memory beyond the tomb, and Government at last put an end to the publication of the pamphlets.

Nash and Marlowe worked together at the play of "Dido," mainly based on the "Æneid" of Virgil, with an opening scene in un-Virgilian bad taste, and highly unedifying to the players, "the Children of her Majesty's Chapel The play is in blank verse, usually better than Nash's own in his "Summer's Last Will and Testament". Much of this is in Nash's hasty prose; a blank verse tirade in praise of dogs is amusing:—

To come to speech, they have it questionless,
Although we understand them not so well,
They bark as good old Saxon as may be.

In 1597, Nash was imprisoned for a play "The Isle of Dogs".

It is impossible to enumerate his tracts, of which his turbulent prose satire, "Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil," is the most spirited. His "Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton" (1594) is a crude anticipation of "Gil Blas," and the novel of unscrupulous wandering adventurers, and contains the feigned story of the loves of Surrey and his Geraldine, which was taken to be historical. Nash lived a scrambling life, a bookseller's hack, destitute of patrons, and died about 1601. For the advance of the drama, despite his play-writing, Nash did nothing.

Marlowe.

Christopher Marlowe is happily on the right side of the line which separates poets who may be read from poets who must be written about. He was born on 6 February, 1564, being the son of an eminent shoemaker at Canterbury. He was educated at the King's School of that city, where he held a little scholarship of a pound, quarterly, and went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with one of the scholarships founded there for Canterbury boys by Archbishop Parker (1581). In 1584 he took his Bachelor's degree, being a contemporary of Nash and Greene, and three years later put on his Master's gown. His translations of Ovid's "Amores" may have been executed at Cambridge; he did not publish them. His first public work was the first part of the play of "Tamburlaine," acted in 1587 or 1588. The drama, in both parts, is destitute of construction; the hero, Tamburlaine, "the scourge of God," merely overruns a vast extent of country, subduing kings, massacring maidens, and glutting his unbounded rage for universal conquest. His only human weakness is his passion for "divine Zenocratê," his wife, and he might be called a martyr to "megalomania," trampling on divine names no less than on the backs of Emperors. The scene in which he enters in his chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizond and Soria, bit in mouth, and cries:—

Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!

was matter of constant jest and parody, a proof of the popularity of the drama.

In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays, Marlowe was "a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with the thought of what man may achieve. "Nature," he makes Tamburlaine say,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all...

but after this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine sinks to finding felicity in "an earthly crown".

The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, places in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines on the aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful:—

If all the pens that poets ever held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.

This is the vision of beauty which haunts and evades Marlowe, as the shadow of the mother of Odysseus in Hades fades away from his embrace. Sometimes it appears to him

like women or unmarried maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.

Again, in "Dr. Faustus," a new Tamburlaine who seeks the impossible in magic, not by arms, and sells his soul to the Adversary, the vision arises in the form of Helen of Troy, that ancient symbol of the World's Desire.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium...
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

In this absolute perfection of the magic of verse, we see the true conquest of Marlowe: as in the agonies of the last hour of Faustus,

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo's Laurel Bough.

The last act is full of pity and of terror.

The dagger-thrust that slew Marlowe in a Deptford tavern, at the end of May, 1593, robbed English poetry of a genius whose future performance cannot be measured, nor can the form which it might have taken be guessed. The comic prose scenes in "Faustus" are very stupid and may perhaps be by another hand, but nothing in Marlowe indicates the gift of humour.

In "The Jew of Malta" Barabas, on a scale less disproportionate than Tamburlaine, represents immeasurable desire of wealth, not of royalty. In the earlier scenes the speeches of Barabas, with the recurrence of romantic and sonorous names, in a way remind us of Milton. The Jew, ill-treated as he is, is not allowed to be sympathetic, and the monstrosity of his crimes reminds the modern reader of Aytoun's "Firmilian": with a touch of the story of the Hunchback in the "Arabian Nights". Though Barabas has a beloved daughter, rapidly converted to Christianity, though his ducats and his daughter are all that he loves, he lags very far behind Shylock. The play was well calculated for popularity, but, save Barabas, it contains no character of marked merit.

"Edward II" has been much praised in modern times, and even preferred to the "Richard II" of Shakespeare. Neither King was a good subject for tragedy, though both endured the extremes of misfortune. But in Richard there were noble elements, debased by a long struggle with some of his uncles, and undermined by a period of absolute power. In Edward II we know nothing estimable, save a moment of princely valour when he was all but taken at Bannockburn. His doting devotion to Piers Gaveston, who is well sketched by Marlowe, his intolerable insults to his Queen, place him quite beyond sympathy, till his awful last hours and appalling end. The instantaneous change of the Queen from a loving, forgiving, and intolerably wronged woman to a monster of cruel hypocrisy cannot be called artistic; and though the play, compared with Marlowe's other dramas, is "regular," and opens the path to what we may call the legitimate drama, without the monstrosities of "The Jew of Malta," it does not contain such surprising excellencies as occur in "Tamburlaine" and "Faustus". The noblest passage, the speech of the fallen King to Leicester, could scarcely come from the Edward of the earlier acts. The "Massacre of Paris" (the Bartholomew massacre of 1572) is of no importance among Marlowe's works.

If we could agree with his too fond biographer that Marlowe wrote the passages of "Henry VI," in which Jeanne d'Arc is worthy of herself, and that Shakespeare contributed the scandalous scenes of her debasement, we might regard Marlowe as a wonder of clear-sighted appreciation. But nothing in their works confirms this conjecture. What share, if any, Marlowe had in "Henry VI" and "Titus Andronicus," and precisely what Shakespeare did for both of these dramas is unknown. Marlowe's beautiful lyric, "Come live with me and be my Love," is for ever fragrant, and his "Hero and Leander" (stiffly finished by Chapman, it is said at Marlowe's own dying request) is at least the equal of, and may even be preferred by many readers to, the first fruits of Shakespeare's invention, "Venus and Adonis".