Book: A History of English Literature

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From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

Tamburlaine himself as Marlowe presents him is a titanic, almost
superhuman, figure who by sheer courage and pitiless unbending will raises
himself from shepherd to general and then emperor of countless peoples, and
sweeps like a whirlwind over the stage of the world, carrying everywhere
overwhelming slaughter and desolation. His speeches are outbursts of
incredible arrogance, equally powerful and bombastic. Indeed his
blasphemous boasts of superiority to the gods seem almost justified by his
apparently irresistible success. But at the end he learns that the laws of
life are inexorable even for him; all his indignant rage cannot redeem his
son from cowardice, or save his wife from death, or delay his own end. As
has been said, [Footnote: Professor Barrett Wendell, 'William Shakspere,'
p. 36.] 'Tamburlaine' expresses with 'a profound, lasting, noble sense and
in grandly symbolic terms, the eternal tragedy inherent in the conflict
between human aspiration and human power.'

For several other reasons 'Tamburlaine' is of high importance. It gives
repeated and splendid expression to the passionate haunting Renaissance
zest for the beautiful. It is rich with extravagant sensuous descriptions,
notable among those which abound gorgeously in all Elizabethan poetry. But
finest of all is the description of beauty by its effects which Marlowe
puts into the mouth of Faustus at the sight of Helen of Troy:


Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Much of Marlowe's strength, again, lies in his powerful and beautiful use
of blank verse. First among the dramatists of the popular stage he
discarded rime, and taking and vitalizing the stiff pentameter line of
'Gorboduc,' gave it an immediate and lasting vogue for tragedy and high
comedy. Marlowe, virtually a beginner, could not be expected to carry blank
verse to that perfection which his success made possible for Shakspere; he
did not altogether escape monotony and commonplaceness; but he gained a
high degree of flexibility and beauty by avoiding a regularly end-stopped
arrangement, by taking pains to secure variety of pause and accent, and by
giving his language poetic condensation and suggestiveness. His workmanship
thoroughly justifies the characterization 'Marlowe's mighty line,' which
Ben Jonson in his tribute to Shakspere bestowed on it long after Marlowe's
death.

The greatest significance of 'Tamburlaine,' lastly, lies in the fact that
it definitely established tragedy as a distinct form on the English popular
stage, and invested it with proper dignity.

These are Marlowe's great achievements both in 'Tamburlaine' and in his
later more restrained plays. His limitations must also be suggested. Like
other Elizabethans he did not fully understand the distinction between
drama and other literary forms; 'Tamburlaine' is not so much a regularly
constructed tragedy, with a struggle between nearly equal persons and
forces, artistically complicated and resolved, as an epic poem, a
succession of adventures in war (and love). Again, in spite of the prolog
in 'Tamburlaine,' Marlowe, in almost all his plays, and following the
Elizabethan custom, does attempt scenes of humor, but he attains only to
the coarse and brutal horse-play at which the English audiences had laughed
for centuries in the Mystery plays and the Interludes. Elizabethan also
(and before that medieval) is the lack of historical perspective which
gives to Mongol shepherds the manners and speech of Greek classical
antiquity as Marlowe had learned to know it at the university. More serious
is the lack of mature skill in characterization. Tamburlaine the man is an
exaggerated type; most of the men about him are his faint shadows, and
those who are intended to be comic are preposterous. The women, though they
have some differentiating touches, are certainly not more dramatically and
vitally imagined. In his later plays Marlowe makes gains in this respect,
but he never arrives at full easy mastery and trenchantly convincing
lifelikeness either in characterization, in presentation of action, or in
fine poetic finish. It has often been remarked that at the age when Marlowe
died Shakspere had produced not one of the great plays on which his
reputation rests; but Shakspere's genius came to maturity more surely, as
well as more slowly, and there is no basis for the inference sometimes
drawn that if Marlowe had lived he would ever have equalled or even
approached Shakespere's supreme achievement.

THEATRICAL CONDITIONS AND THE THEATER BUILDINGS. Before we pass to
Shakspere we must briefly consider those external facts which conditioned
the form of the Elizabethan plays and explain many of those things in them
which at the present time appear perplexing.

[Illustration: TIMON OF ATHENS, v, 4. OUTER SCENE.


_Trumpets sound. Enter Alcibiades with his
Powers before Athens._

"_Alc_. Sound to this Coward, and lascivious
Towne, Our terrible approach."

_Sounds a parly. The Senators appears upon
the Wals._

Reproduced from _The Shakespearean Stage_, by V. E. Albright, through
the courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press.

AN ELIZABETHAN STAGE]

The medieval religious drama had been written and acted in many towns
throughout the country, and was a far less important feature in the life of
London than of many other places. But as the capital became more and more
the center of national life, the drama, with other forms of literature, was
more largely appropriated by it; the Elizabethan drama of the great period
was altogether written in London and belonged distinctly to it. Until well
into the seventeenth century, to be sure, the London companies made
frequent tours through the country, but that was chiefly when the
prevalence of the plague had necessitated the closing of the London
theaters or when for other reasons acting there had become temporarily
unprofitable. The companies themselves had now assumed a regular
organization. They retained a trace of their origin (above, page 90) in
that each was under the protection of some influential noble and was
called, for example, 'Lord Leicester's Servants,' or 'The Lord Admiral's
Servants.' But this connection was for the most part nominal--the companies
were virtually very much like the stock-companies of the nineteenth
century. By the beginning of the great period the membership of each troupe
was made up of at least three classes of persons. At the bottom of the
scale were the boy-apprentices who were employed, as Shakspere is said to
have been at first, in miscellaneous menial capacities. Next came the paid
actors; and lastly the shareholders, generally also actors, some or all of
whom were the general managers. The writers of plays were sometimes members
of the companies, as in Shakspere's case; sometimes, however, they were
independent.

Until near the middle of Elizabeth's reign there were no special theater
buildings, but the players, in London or elsewhere, acted wherever they
could find an available place--in open squares, large halls, or,
especially, in the quadrangular open inner yards of inns. As the profession
became better organized and as the plays gained in quality, such makeshift
accommodations became more and more unsatisfactory; but there were special
difficulties in the way of securing better ones in London. For the
population and magistrates of London were prevailingly Puritan, and the
great body of the Puritans, then as always, were strongly opposed to the
theater as a frivolous and irreligious thing--an attitude for which the
lives of the players and the character of many plays afforded, then as
almost always, only too much reason. The city was very jealous of its
prerogatives; so that in spite of Queen Elizabeth's strong patronage of the
drama, throughout her whole reign no public theater buildings were allowed
within the limits of the city corporation. But these limits were narrow,
and in 1576 James Burbage inaugurated a new era by erecting 'The Theater'
just to the north of the 'city,' only a few minutes' walk from the center
of population. His example was soon followed by other managers, though the
favorite place for the theaters soon came to be the 'Bankside,' the region
in Southwark just across the Thames from the 'city' where Chaucer's Tabard
Inn had stood and where pits for bear-baiting and cock-fighting had long
flourished.

The structure of the Elizabethan theater was naturally imitated from its
chief predecessor, the inn-yard. There, under the open sky, opposite the
street entrance, the players had been accustomed to set up their stage.
About it, on three sides, the ordinary part of the audience had stood
during the performance, while the inn-guests and persons able to pay a
fixed price had sat in the open galleries which lined the building and ran
all around the yard. In the theaters, therefore, at first generally
square-built or octagonal, the stage projected from the rear wall well
toward the center of an unroofed pit (the present-day 'orchestra'), where,
still on three sides of the stage, the common people, admitted for sixpence
or less, stood and jostled each other, either going home when it rained or
staying and getting wet as the degree of their interest in the play might
determine. The enveloping building proper was occupied with tiers of
galleries, generally two or three in number, provided with seats; and here,
of course, sat the people of means, the women avoiding embarrassment and
annoyance only by being always masked. Behind the unprotected front part of
the stage the middle part was covered by a lean-to roof sloping down from
the rear wall of the building and supported by two pillars standing on the
stage. This roof concealed a loft, from which gods and goddesses or any
appropriate properties could be let down by mechanical devices. Still
farther back, under the galleries, was the 'rear-stage,' which could be
used to represent inner rooms; and that part of the lower gallery
immediately above it was generally appropriated as a part of the stage,
representing such places as city walls or the second stories of houses. The
musicians' place was also just beside in the gallery.

The stage, therefore, was a 'platform stage,' seen by the audience from
almost all sides, not, as in our own time, a 'picture-stage,' with its
scenes viewed through a single large frame. This arrangement made
impossible any front curtain, though a curtain was generally hung before
the rear stage, from the floor of the gallery. Hence the changes between
scenes must generally be made in full view of the audience, and instead of
ending the scenes with striking situations the dramatists must arrange for
a withdrawal of the actors, only avoiding if possible the effect of a mere
anti-climax. Dead bodies must either get up and walk away in plain sight or
be carried off, either by stage hands, or, as part of the action, by other
characters in the play. This latter device was sometimes adopted at
considerable violence to probability, as when Shakspere makes Falstaff bear
away Hotspur, and Hamlet, Polonius. Likewise, while the medieval habit of
elaborate costuming was continued, there was every reason for adhering to
the medieval simplicity of scenery. A single potted tree might symbolize a
forest, and houses and caverns, with a great deal else, might be left to
the imagination of the audience. In no respect, indeed, was realism of
setting an important concern of either dramatist or audience; in many
cases, evidently, neither of them cared to think of a scene as located in
any precise spot; hence the anxious effort of Shakspere's editors on this
point is beside the mark. This nonchalance made for easy transition from
one place to another, and the whole simplicity of staging had the important
advantage of allowing the audience to center their attention on the play
rather than on the accompaniments. On the rear-stage, however, behind the
curtain, more elaborate scenery might be placed, and Elizabethan plays,
like those of our own day, seem sometimes to have 'alternation scenes,'
intended to be acted in front, while the next background was being prepared
behind the balcony curtain. The lack of elaborate settings also facilitated
rapidity of action, and the plays, beginning at three in the afternoon,
were ordinarily over by the dinner-hour of five. Less satisfactory was the
entire absence of women-actors, who did not appear on the public stage
until after the Restoration of 1660. The inadequacy of the boys who took
the part of the women-characters is alluded to by Shakspere and must have
been a source of frequent irritation to any dramatist who was attempting to
present a subtle or complex heroine.

Lastly may be mentioned the picturesque but very objectionable custom of
the young dandies who insisted on carrying their chairs onto the sides of
the stage itself, where they not only made themselves conspicuous objects
of attention but seriously crowded the actors and rudely abused them if the
play was not to their liking. It should be added that from the latter part
of Elizabeth's reign there existed within the city itself certain 'private'
theaters, used by the boys' companies and others, whose structure was more
like that of the theaters of our own time and where plays were given by
artificial light.

SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616. William Shakspere, by universal consent the
greatest author of England, if not of the world, occupies chronologically a
central position in the Elizabethan drama. He was born in 1564 in the
good-sized village of Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, near the middle of
England, where the level but beautiful country furnished full external
stimulus for a poet's eye and heart. His father, John Shakspere, who was a
general dealer in agricultural products and other commodities, was one of
the chief citizens of the village, and during his son's childhood was
chosen an alderman and shortly after mayor, as we should call it. But by
1577 his prosperity declined, apparently through his own shiftlessness, and
for many years he was harassed with legal difficulties. In the village
'grammar' school William Shakspere had acquired the rudiments of
book-knowledge, consisting largely of Latin, but his chief education was
from Nature and experience. As his father's troubles thickened he was very
likely removed from school, but at the age of eighteen, under circumstances
not altogether creditable to himself, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman
eight years his senior, who lived in the neighboring village of Shottery.
The suggestion that the marriage proved positively unhappy is supported by
no real evidence, but what little is known of Shakspere's later life
implies that it was not exceptionally congenial. Two girls and a boy were
born from it.

In his early manhood, apparently between 1586 and 1588, Shakspere left
Stratford to seek his fortune in London. As to the circumstances, there is
reasonable plausibility in the later tradition that he had joined in
poaching raids on the deer-park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a neighboring country
gentleman, and found it desirable to get beyond the bounds of that
gentleman's authority. It is also likely enough that Shakspere had been
fascinated by the performances of traveling dramatic companies at Stratford
and by the Earl of Leicester's costly entertainment of Queen Elizabeth in
1575 at the castle of Kenilworth, not many miles away. At any rate, in
London he evidently soon secured mechanical employment in a theatrical
company, presumably the one then known as Lord Leicester's company, with
which, in that case, he was always thereafter connected. His energy and
interest must soon have won him the opportunity to show his skill as actor
and also reviser and collaborator in play-writing, then as independent
author; and after the first few years of slow progress his rise was rapid.
He became one of the leading members, later one of the chief shareholders,
of the company, and evidently enjoyed a substantial reputation as a
playwright and a good, though not a great, actor. This was both at Court
(where, however, actors had no social standing) and in the London dramatic
circle. Of his personal life only the most fragmentary record has been
preserved, through occasional mentions in miscellaneous documents, but it
is evident that his rich nature was partly appreciated and thoroughly loved
by his associates. His business talent was marked and before the end of his
dramatic career he seems to have been receiving as manager, shareholder,
playwright and actor, a yearly income equivalent to $25,000 in money of the
present time. He early began to devote attention to paying the debts of his
father, who lived until 1601, and restoring the fortunes of his family in
Stratford. The death of his only son, Hamnet, in 1596, must have been a
severe blow to him, but he obtained from the Heralds' College the grant of
a family coat of arms, which secured the position of the family as
gentlefolks; in 1597 he purchased New Place, the largest house in
Stratford; and later on he acquired other large property rights there. How
often he may have visited Stratford in the twenty-five years of his career
in London we have no information; but however enjoyable London life and the
society of the writers at the 'Mermaid' Tavern may have been to him, he
probably always looked forward to ending his life as the chief country
gentleman of his native village. Thither he retired about 1610 or 1612, and
there he died prematurely in 1616, just as he was completing his
fifty-second year.

Shakspere's dramatic career falls naturally into four successive divisions
of increasing maturity. To be sure, no definite record of the order of his
plays has come down to us, and it can scarcely be said that we certainly
know the exact date of a single one of them; but the evidence of the
title-page dates of such of them as were hastily published during his
lifetime, of allusions to them in other writings of the time, and other
scattering facts of one sort or another, joined with the more important
internal evidence of comparative maturity of mind and art which shows
'Macbeth' and 'The Winter's Tale,' for example, vastly superior to 'Love's
Labour's Lost'--all this evidence together enables us to arrange the plays
in a chronological order which is certainly approximately correct. The
first of the four periods thus disclosed is that of experiment and
preparation, from about 1588 to about 1593, when Shakspere tried his hand
at virtually every current kind of dramatic work. Its most important
product is 'Richard III,' a melodramatic chronicle-history play, largely
imitative of Marlowe and yet showing striking power. At the end of this
period Shakspere issued two rather long narrative poems on classical
subjects, 'Venus and Adonis,' and 'The Rape of Lucrece,' dedicating them
both to the young Earl of Southampton, who thus appears as his patron. Both
display great fluency in the most luxuriant and sensuous Renaissance
manner, and though they appeal little to the taste of the present day
'Venus and Adonis,' in particular, seems to have become at once the most
popular poem of its own time. Shakspere himself regarded them very
seriously, publishing them with care, though he, like most Elizabethan
dramatists, never thought it worth while to put his plays into print except
to safeguard the property rights of his company in them. Probably at about
the end of his first period, also, he began the composition of his sonnets,
of which we have already spoken (page 119).

The second period of Shakspere's work, extending from about 1594 to about
1601, is occupied chiefly with chronicle-history plays and happy comedies.
The chronicle-history plays begin (probably) with the subtile and
fascinating, though not yet absolutely masterful study of contrasting
characters in 'Richard II'; continue through the two parts of 'Henry IV,'
where the realistic comedy action of Falstaff and his group makes history
familiarly vivid; and end with the epic glorification of a typical English
hero-king in 'Henry V.' The comedies include the charmingly fantastic
'Midsummer Night's Dream'; 'The Merchant of Venice,' where a story of
tragic sternness is strikingly contrasted with the most poetical idealizing
romance and yet is harmoniously blended into it; 'Much Ado About Nothing,'
a magnificent example of high comedy of character and wit; 'As You Like
It,' the supreme delightful achievement of Elizabethan and all English
pastoral romance; and 'Twelfth Night,' where again charming romantic
sentiment is made believable by combination with a story of comic realism.
Even in the one, unique, tragedy of the period, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the
main impression is not that of the predestined tragedy, but that of ideal
youthful love, too gloriously radiant to be viewed with sorrow even in its
fatal outcome.

The third period, extending from about 1601 to about 1609, includes
Shakspere's great tragedies and certain cynical plays, which formal
classification mis-names comedies. In these plays as a group Shakspere sets
himself to grapple with the deepest and darkest problems of human character
and life; but it is only very uncertain inference that he was himself
passing at this time through a period of bitterness and disillusion.
'Julius Casar' presents the material failure of an unpractical idealist
(Brutus); 'Hamlet' the struggle of a perplexed and divided soul; 'Othello'
the ruin of a noble life by an evil one through the terrible power of
jealousy; 'King Lear' unnatural ingratitude working its hateful will and
yet thwarted at the end by its own excess and by faithful love; and
'Macbeth' the destruction of a large nature by material ambition. Without
doubt this is the greatest continuous group of plays ever wrought out by a
human mind, and they are followed by 'Antony and Cleopatra,' which
magnificently portrays the emptiness of a sensual passion against the
background of a decaying civilization.

Shakspere did not solve the insoluble problems of life, but having
presented them as powerfully, perhaps, as is possible for human
intelligence, he turned in his last period, of only two or three years, to
the expression of the serene philosophy of life in which he himself must
have now taken refuge. The noble and beautiful romance-comedies,
'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest,' suggest that men do
best to forget what is painful and center their attention on the pleasing
and encouraging things in a world where there is at least an inexhaustible
store of beauty and goodness and delight.

Shakspere may now well have felt, as his retirement to Stratford suggests,
that in his nearly forty plays he had fully expressed himself and had
earned the right to a long and peaceful old age. The latter, as we have
seen, was denied him; but seven years after his death two of his
fellow-managers assured the preservation of the plays whose unique
importance he himself did not suspect by collecting them in the first folio
edition of his complete dramatic works.

Shakspere's greatness rests on supreme achievement--the result of the
highest genius matured by experience and by careful experiment and
labor--in all phases of the work of a poetic dramatist. The surpassing
charm of his rendering of the romantic beauty and joy of life and the
profundity of his presentation of its tragic side we have already
suggested. Equally sure and comprehensive is his portrayal of characters.
With the certainty of absolute mastery he causes men and women to live for
us, a vast representative group, in all the actual variety of age and
station, perfectly realized in all the subtile diversities and
inconsistencies of protean human nature. Not less notable than his strong
men are his delightful young heroines, romantic Elizabethan heroines, to be
sure, with an unconventionality, many of them, which does not belong to
such women in the more restricted world of reality, but pure embodiments of
the finest womanly delicacy, keenness, and vivacity. Shakspere, it is true,
was a practical dramatist. His background characters are often present in
the plays not in order to be entirely real but in order to furnish
amusement; and even in the case of the chief ones, just as in the treatment
of incidents, he is always perfectly ready to sacrifice literal truth to
dramatic effect. But these things are only the corollaries of all
successful playwriting and of all art.

To Shakspere's mastery of poetic expression similarly strong superlatives
must be applied. For his form he perfected Marlowe's blank verse,
developing it to the farthest possible limits of fluency, variety, and
melody; though he retained the riming couplet for occasional use (partly
for the sake of variety) and frequently made use also of prose, both for
the same reason and in realistic or commonplace scenes. As regards the
spirit of poetry, it scarcely need be said that nowhere else in literature
is there a like storehouse of the most delightful and the greatest ideas
phrased with the utmost power of condensed expression and figurative
beauty. In dramatic structure his greatness is on the whole less
conspicuous. Writing for success on the Elizabethan stage, he seldom
attempted to reduce its romantic licenses to the perfection of an absolute
standard. 'Romeo and Juliet, 'Hamlet,' and indeed most of his plays,
contain unnecessary scenes, interesting to the Elizabethans, which
Sophocles as well as Racine would have pruned away. Yet when Shakspere
chooses, as in 'Othello,' to develop a play with the sternest and most
rapid directness, he proves essentially the equal even of the most rigid
technician.

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