Elizabethan Playhouses and Actors.-During the youth of the drama, the performance of plays had been chiefly in the hands of strolling companies, who, attaching themselves nominally to the household of some great lord, and using his name to protect them, wandered about the country, wherever, on village green, at market fair, or in the hall of some noble house, they could find an audience. But shortly before the period we are now studying, regular companies had begun to establish themselves in the suburbs of London, and to erect permanent theatres. The first of these playhouses, known simply as "The Theatre," was built in Finsbury Fields, to the north of the city, by James Burbage, in 1576. It was at this play-house that Shakespeare first found employment. Burbage's company, on the destruction of The Theatre, built the Globe, on the south bank of the Thames; and here, on the Bankside, other places of theatrical entertainment rapidly sprang up. After a time the actors became bold enough to push into the city itself. Burbage built the Blackfriars, as a winter theatre. A rival company built the Fortune, also in the city limits. By the end of the century, eleven theatres existed in the city and in the free lands or "liberties" adjoining. Performances usually took place at three in the afternoon, and were announced by the hanging out of a flag and the blowing of trumpets. The theatres were round, square, or octagonal structures, unroofed except for a shed or canopy over the stage. The winter theatres, such as the Blackfriars, were entirely roofed in. The stage extended out into the body of the house, was open on three sides, and was sufficiently elevated so that the main bulk of the audience, standing on the bare ground which formed the floor or pit of the theatre, could have a fair view. Persons who could afford to pay a higher price than the "groundlings," took advantage of the boxes built round the pit. Young gallants, for an extra fee, could have seats upon the stage itself, where they smoked their pipes, peeled oranges, cracked nuts, and often interfered with the performance by chaffing a poor actor, or by flirting ostentatiously with the fair occupant of a neighboring box. In accordance with the luxurious taste of the age in dress, the costumes of the actors were often very rich. All women's parts were played by boys; actresses were not seen in England until after the Restoration. The stage-setting was of the simplest, a change of scene being indicated often merely by a placard, or at most by a roughly painted piece of pasteboard and a few stage properties. A tree and a bench did duty for a garden; a wooden cannon and a paste-board tower indicated a siege. This meagreness of stage-setting, so far from being a misfortune, was in no small measure responsible for the literary greatness of the Elizabethan drama; for it threw the dramatist back upon vivid poetic expression, as the only means of stimulating the imagination of his audience. The Pre-Shakespearean Playwrights.-The group of young dramatists which sprang up to supply the demand made by the early stage included Robert Greene, George Peele, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Nash, and Christopher Marlowe. Of these Marlowe stands as undisputed leader. He is the true founder of the popular English drama, though himself an outgrowth of the long period of preparation which we have been studying. IV. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: 1564-1593 Marlowe's Life.-Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker in the old cathedral town of Canterbury, was born in 1564, two months before Shakespeare. He was sent to Cambridge by a patron, who had noticed his quick parts. He graduated at nineteen; and four years later (1587) he astonished London with his first play, Tamburlaine, which he brought out with the Lord Admiral's Men, the rival company to the Lord Chamberlain's Men, whom Shakespeare had joined a short time before. During the six years which intervened between the production of Tamburlaine and his death, Marlowe brought out three more plays, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II. He was killed in 1593, in a tavern-brawl, at Deptford, whither he had gone to take refuge from the plague then devastating London. Marlowe's" Programme."-In the brief and haughty prologue prefixed to Tamburlaine, Marlowe not only an nounced clearly the character of that play, but hinted at the programme which he proposed to carry out in the future: "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword." The "jigging veins of rhyming mother wits," is a sneer at the use of rhyme and awkward tumbling lines of fourteen syllables, which was customary with the popular playwrights of the time. For this "jigging vein" he proposes to substitute blank verse, which, though it had been employed previously by Sackville and Norton, in Gorboduc, had not established itself. It is a sign of Marlowe's artistic insight that he should have recognized at once the value of blank verse for dramatic poetry; and we can see, beneath the surface of his words, a proud consciousness of his own power over this almost untried form of verse. Out of it he built that "mighty line," which astounded and fascinated his contemporaries; and his success with it fixed it firmly henceforth as the vehicle of serious drama. By his sneer at the "conceits" that "clownage keeps in pay," Marlowe showed his determination not to pander to the pit by means of vulgar comedy and horse-play, but to treat an elevated theme with seriousness. By the "stately tents of war," to which he promises to lead his hearer, he typified the dignity and largeness of scope which he proposed to give to all his work. By the last three lines of the prologue, he foreshadowed his plan of giving unity to his dramas, by making them revolve around some single great personality, engaged in some titanic struggle for power; and likewise of treating this struggle with the rhetorical splendor, the "high astounding terms," without which Elizabethan tragedy is now inconceivable. This programme he carried out in the main with consistency. Marlowe's Plays: "Tamburlaine."-Tamburlaine is a pure "hero-play." The hero is a Scythian shepherd, who conquers, one after another, the kingdoms of the East, forcing kings to harness themselves to his chariot, and carrying with him a great cage in which a captive emperor is kept like a wild beast. The huge barbaric figure of Tamburlaine is always before our eyes, and the action of the play is only a series of his triumphs. His character, half-bestial, half-godlike, dominates the imagination like an elemental force of nature, and lends itself admirably to those "high astounding terms," which fill whole pages of the play with thunderous monologue. "Doctor Faustus."-Doctor Faustus, Marlowe's second work, is also a hero-play, and is cast on even larger lines. It is a dramatized story of the life and death of a mediæval scholar, who sells his soul to the devil, in return for a life of unlimited power and pleasure. For a space of years, he has at his command all the resources of infernal magic. He can transport himself in a twinkling from one region of the earth to another; himself unseen, he can play pranks in the palaces of popes and emperors; he can summon up the ancient dead to minister to his delight. But at last the fearful price is demanded, and he must render up his soul to everlasting torment. The play, as it has come down to us, is disfigured by comic passages of a coarse and tasteless sort, those very "conceits of clownage" which Marlowe had formerly declared war against. But even where the workmanship is poor there is always something imposing in the design; and certain passages have hardly been surpassed for power and beauty. When Mephistopheles raises from the dead the spirit of Helen of Troy, Faustus utters one rapturous exclamation, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And on his death-bed he starts up with the cry, "Lo, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!" -three lines which would alone serve to stamp Marlowe as of the company of imperial poets. "The Jew of Malta" and "Edward II."--Marlowe's third play, "The Jew of Malta," is again a study of the lust of power-this time the power bestowed by great riches. Barabbas, the old Jewish merchant of Malta, is the first vigorous sketch of which Shakespeare was to make in Shylock a finished masterpiece. The first two acts are conceived on a large scale, and carefully worked out; but after these Marlowe seems again to have fallen from his own ideal, and the play degenerates into melodrama of the goriest kind. Nevertheless it shows a remarkable advance over Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, in the knitting together of cause and effect. Marlowe's growth in dramatic skill is even more apparent in his last play, Edward II. This is his masterpiece, so far as play-making goes, though for the very reason that it discards rhetorical monologue for rapid dramatic dialogue, it contains fewer passages of pure poetry than any of the others. Marlowe a Type of the English Renaissance.-Marlowe is one of the most striking figures of the English Renaissance. He represents the Renaissance passion for life, grasping after the infinite in power, in knowledge, and in pleasure. There is something in the meteor-like suddenness of his appearance in the skies of poetry, and in the swift flaming of his genius through its course, which seems to make inevitable his violent end. When he died, at twenty-nine, he was probably only upon the threshold of his achievement; but he had already laid broad and deep the foundation of English drama, and Shakespeare was already at work rearing upon this foundation an incomparable edifice. REVIEW OUTLINE.--The drama was the greatest and the most popular literary form of the Elizabethan age. But before it came to full flower in the work of Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists it had to go through a long process of growth. In this chapter we go back to the earliest beginnings of the drama in England, and trace its origin from forms of entertainment and religious ceremonies only rudely dramatic in character. We then follow its development through the Miracle play, the Morality play, and the Interlude, to the time when the English drama put itself to school, during the middle of the sixteenth century, to Latin comedy and tragedy. By following |