The Odyssey appeared in 1614-15, and the various Homeric fragments in 1624. The Iliad was rendered into long rhyming lines of fourteen syllables-a metre which in some respects was admirably chosen. Its best passages are not unworthy of the original. It moves with the rapidity and vigour, energy and spirit, that the work called for, and the story runs on with a good deal of the Homeric charm. Chapman was competent by his life-long study and his high respect for the original to perform the translation. But it is not merely as a translation that his book lives, though it is probably the best verse translation of Homer that has yet been made. It is also a splendid poem, and not unworthy of Keats's praise. Through Chapman's speaking "loud and bold," the lover of poetry who does not read Greek may enjoy something of "the pure serene" of Homer. The Odyssey, written in heroic couplets, is hardly less deserving of the same high praise.

Chapman's Plays.-In his plays Chapman has most of the faults of his poems, but a richer dower of their virtues. He was not a dramatist by nature; his mistress, as his "coronet" of sonnets declares, was Philosophy, and Learning was the mental store upon which he drew. But he had not Jonson's power of observation to give his ideas dramatic vitality. He could not construct a plot, and he could not carry out a dialogue, like that of Bartholomew Fair for instance, which had the semblance of real life. In his own day the "proud full sail" of his verse, and its "free and heightened style," received notice and admiration from the judicious. But the speeches are not in character; and in spite of their beauty they fail in dramatic effect. Besides, they readily lose themselves in excess of rhetoric and passion; they bring us back to the worst passages of Marlowe, without his youthful energy and sincerity; and frequently they are obscure. With his studious character and contempt for ordinary humanity, Chapman could not be a great dramatist, and is not.

Title-page of Chapman's "Homer."

His first play was a comedy, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596), which, like its successor, A Humorous Day's Mirth (1599), is but feeble stuff. On the other hand, All Fools (1605) is a really amusing comedy, with sprightly characters, excellent situations, and an ingenious plot. The Gentleman Usher (1606) and Monsieur d'Olive

After these

(1606) have some good points, but are deficient in construction. came the tragedies: Bussy d'Ambois (1607), followed in 1613 by a sequel, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois. Between these we have the double play on a single theme, The Conspiracy of Byron and The Tragedy of Byron (1608). These plays deal with contemporary French affairs in a strangely tolerant spirit. They are melodramas of blood, with many horrors, much rant and little power of characterization, but with a liberal display of the "full and heightened style."

JOHN MARSTON (?1575-1634)

Romances and Miscellaneous Drama. Little is known of the life of John Marston, who, more than any other literary figure of his time, drew the contemptuous satire of Jonson. He was born at Coventry about 1575, and educated at Oxford, where he took his degree in 1594. His first appeal to the literary public was through the sensual love-romance Pygmalion's Image, in 1598. Its coarseness caused it to meet the censure of Hall, the satirist; consequently in his next work Marston adopted a new attitude, and in The Scourge of Villainy himself appears as a violent and bitter satirist. His style drew upon him the severe criticism of Jonson in Cynthia's Revels and The Poetaster; and he united with one of his fellow-victims in Satiromastix (1602), a satirical drama in which Jonson himself is roughly but not ineffectively treated. For several years Marston continued to write plays, producing Antonio and Mellida (1602), a high-flown tragedy of blood and horrors; The Malcontent (1604); The Dutch Courtesan (1605); What You Will (1607), and other dramas of very small merit. After this he seems to have given up writing; he entered the Church, lived quietly in a country living, and died in 1634.

His Best Plays. A certain amount of cleverness and wit cannot be denied to Marston, but it is obscured by his violence and his pose. There is a false and insincere ring about his best passages, a forced note, a straining after effect, which vitiates them, and defeats their aim. He was vain, affected, and ambitious; he was aware of his own limitations, but by the vigorous use of high-sounding words he tried to "bounce" the public into taking him seriously as a satirist. In a famous scene of The Poetaster, Jonson makes Horace give Crispinus a pill to relieve him of his impurities of diction; and Crispinus vomits a whole succession of Marston's big words, such as inflate, turgidous, ventosity, obcœcate, prorumped, lubrical, and a host of their like, drawn from Marston's works. Of the plays, Antonio and Mellida and The Malcontent are the best. The former begins fairly well, and has the material of a reasonably pleasant love-story; but the second part is a confusion of melodramatic horrors, incredible ghost scenes, black revenge, rant, and fustian; and what might have been a moving tragedy loses itself in mere foulness and a very revelry of murders. The Malcontent also has elements of greatness in its fundamental idea; it is a not unpleasant comedy, with one excellent character in Malevole; but it does not, as

Hazlitt suggested, bring Marston into the sphere of Molière. Both Lamb and Hazlitt were misled by the power and eloquence of Marston's best passages into ranking him far too high. In spite of his cleverness and occasional wit, Marston was too deficient in the sense of proportion and moderation to be a great dramatist. He was guilty of all the romantic excesses and improbabilities at which Jonson railed. Such as he is, however, we may see at the best in The Malcontent.

THOMAS DEKKER (c. 1570-c. 1640)

Dramatic and Descriptive Works. The life of Thomas Dekker is even more vaguely known than Marston's. There is no record either of his birth or of his death. A hint or two gathered from the diary of Philip Henslowe and from his own plays allow us to make a few assertions of a general kind about him, but no more. He was a Londoner, intimately acquainted by personal experience with the squalid aspects of the courts and taverns; he was perhaps either a tailor or a shoemaker by trade, but an industrious literary hack by profession: neither trade nor profession could keep him from poverty, or, it may be added, from gaol. He was an active collaborator with other dramatists-e.g. with Marston in Satiromastix, with Middleton in The Roaring Girl (1611) and other plays, with Webster in Northward Ho, and with Massinger in The Virgin Martyr (1622). In all these conjoint efforts, except Satiromastix, he probably played the rôle of junior partner; his own work shows that he had a very rudimentary sense of the art of construction, but could impart vigour and vitality to individual scenes, especially those of life in London, and he had a vein of homely pathos and tender sentiment which surprises us when we remember the roughness of his life.

Dekker's Comedies. His first unaided play, as far as we know, was The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600). This jolly comedy, which "purposed nothing but mirth," certainly fulfils its purpose. It has little or no plot, and its characterization is weak enough; but it is full of hearty fun and rough wit, and gives us a most valuable picture of London life, centring in the career of Simon Eyre the shoemaker, who became Lord Mayor. Jonson has given us a more artistic picture in Bartholomew Fair; but Dekker, in spite of the crudeness of his literary methods, has a far greater geniality. Dekker is boisterous and coarse, but he atones for this by his humour, his humanity, his cordial jollity.

His Realism. Realism is the note of The Shoemaker's Holiday; but in Old Fortunatus (1600) the romantic influence of Marlowe is strong. The play is very lax in construction, as usual; but apart from this it is almost as great a masterpiece as Faustus, the story of which it recalls. It is a combination of morality and masque, rich in passages of real poetic power, containing a number of irrelevant episodes, such as that of the lover Orleans, which redeem themselves by their own

intrinsic beauty. The Honest Whore (1604) returned to the realistic method, and in it we are able to see Dekker at his highest. The fine female character of Bellafront is superior to any study of woman in Jonson, and the whole play has been highly praised by Hazlitt. But the naïve sincerity with which Dekker follows the metamorphosis of his heroine must close the play to the modern stage, though its psychological truth and its human sympathies will always keep it a favourite among students of the Elizabethan drama.

His Realistic and Satirical Prose Works. Dekker is not a great prose writer, but he is a very engaging one. Among his numerous prose books are The Bachelor's Banquet (1603), a pleasant satire on "the variable humours of women"; The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), a more ambitious satire, not so skilfully worked out; The Belman of London (1608), a grim little book on the seamy side of London life and full of quaint information; and The Guls Hornboke (1609), the best and brightest of all, invaluable for its pictures of the various types of gull, for whom the book is humorously written in the guise of a handbook or manual. Just as Satiromastix defeated The Poetaster by its good nature rather than by any literary superiority, so these little prose books gave no offence and pictured their comic types with pleasant friendliness.

Summary.—Dekker's works are a strange combination of ethical rectitude and crude animal spirits, of a crass realism with an almost lyrical charm of tender feeling, of a noisome squalor with the fragrance of genuine good nature. He was not a great poet, though he has left us a few beautiful lyrics. He will be remembered as the typical Londoner of the Elizabethan period-free and frank, noisy, and not squeamish, either in language or in life, but at the bottom serious, patriotic, and generous.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST

Texts.-BEN JONSON: Works, ed. W. Gifford and Cunningham (9 vols., 1875; 3 vols., Chatto, 1876); Best Plays, ed. Nicholson and Herford (Mermaid Series, 3 vols., Unwin, 1893-4); Catiline, ed. by L. H. Harris (Milford, 1921); Every Man in his Humour, ed. by H. H. Carter (Milford, 1922); English Masques, ed. H. A. Evans (Blackie, 1897).-MARSTON, J.: Works, ed. A. H. Bullen (3 vols., Nimmo, 1887). DEKKER, T.: Works, ed. A. H. Bullen (4 vols., Nimmo, 1887); Best Plays, ed. E. Rhys (Mermaid ed., Unwin, 1906).—GAYLEY, C. M.: Representative English Comedies (3 vols., Macmillan, N.Y., 1912-14). Studies. SMITH, G. Gregory: Ben Jonson (English Men of Letters, Macmillan, 1919).—SWINBURNE, A. C.: A Study of Ben Jonson (Chatto, 1889).

CHAPTER 5. POETRY: THE INFLUENCE OF SPENSER

George Gascoigne Sir Philip Sidney-Thomas Watson-Henry Constable-Thomas LodgeGiles Fletcher the elder-Barnabe Barnes-Samuel Daniel-Michael Drayton, etc.

GEORGE GASCOIGNE (?1525-77)

Life and Works. Gascoigne, though he died two years before the publication of The Shepheardes Calender, is not a poetic forerunner of Spenser, nor does he, like the writers of A Mirror for Magistrates, seek to perpetuate mediæval formulæ of style and sentiment. He strikes out new paths of his own, and so may be included in this section; but his originality is greater than his artistic power, and his work suffers from the waywardness that marred his life. Born in Bedfordshire about 1525, a son of Sir John Gascoigne, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and entered Gray's Inn in 1555. After a period of dissipation, which led to his being disinherited, he returned to his studies at the Inn, where in 1566 his Supposes, a prose version of Ariosto's I Suppositi, was presented, as also Jocasta, a translation by him and Francis Kinwelmersh of Dolce's Giocasta, adapted from the Phanissa of Euripides. But in 1573 he found it expedient to leave England for a time and to join the forces fighting in the Low Countries. During his absence an undated and anonymous edition of his works was published; a "corrected, perfected, and augmented" edition appeared in 1575 as The Posies of George Gascoigne, Esquire. In Flanders Gascoigne seems to have become familiar with the “Prodigal Son" plays, which were so popular there; in 1575 he wrote a "tragicall comedie " of this type, The Glass of Government. It was one of the "moral and godly" works with which he sought to redeem his former frailties. These works also included edifying prose tracts, of which the chief was The Drum of Doomsday, and his blankverse satire The Steel Glass. both written in 1576. On October 7 of the following year he died.

Prose Writings. Gascoigne's versatile talents showed to greater advantage in drama than in poetry. It was an enduring achievement to write the two earliest prose comedies in English. Though one was a translation and the other a disguised Puritan tract, they are distinguished by the ease and aptness of the dialogue. Another prose romance, The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi, in its sentimental colloquies and the alliterative balance of its style, is a forerunner of Euphues. The story is probably based on some incident in Gascoigne's own career, though he avers that it is translated from a tale by Bartello," an Italian who is not otherwise known. Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English, written for a friend, is the first attempt at a treatise

on prosody in the language.