CHAPTER 5. EARLY ELIZABETHAN DRAMA · The Origins: The Morality, Chronicle play, and Interlude-John Heywood. Early The Origins. When Henry VIII. mounted the throne the Morality play still held the field of drama. Indeed, it lingered on until the days of Shakespeare, receiving for a time a new lease of life at the hands of rival theologians, who found it a convenient weapon for thrashing out the problems which the Reformation had raised. Even Foxe, the martyrologist, left a Latin religious drama, while the virulent Protestant bishop John Bale (1495-1563) wrote twenty-two plays, of which only five have survived, the most important being King John, an anti-papal Chronicle play and the earliest extant historical drama in the language. The Interlude. But the Renaissance spirit at the Tudor court demanded plays which would amuse rather than instruct. The result was the rise of the Interlude, a new type of comedy, lasting from one to two hours, farcical in character and generally dealing with a single incident or anecdote. It flourished during the first half of the 16th century, and bridges the gap between medieval and Elizabethan drama, being itself derived partly from the comic elements of the morality and partly from the French sottie or farce. The most famous writer of interludes was John Heywood (1497-c. 1578), who, beginning life as one of Henry VIII.'s "singing-men," rose high in favour at court and married into the family of Sir Thomas More. Six of his plays are extant, the best known being the Four PP, an entertaining dialogue between a Pothecary, a Pardoner, a Palmer, and a Pedlar, in which the last named is appointed to decide which of the other three can tell the biggest lie. The Professional Actor and the Theatre. The interlude is interesting, not so much for its literary fruits, which were nothing remarkable, as for the indications which it gives of the tendencies of the English drama at this period. For its genesis was intimately associated with the rise of the professional actor in England. The printing-press had deprived the minstrel of his occupation. The case of Heywood, himself "a player of the virginals," shows us what happened to the whole class which he represented. They turned to the theatre as the only form of entertainment left to them, and in doing so they entirely altered the status and character of the art which they adopted. Actors' companies, under the patronage of noblemen, had become a recognized feature of London life as early as Henry VIII.'s time, and the exchequer accounts show us that quite a number existed at this period. With the rise of the professional actor we approach the beginning of the theatre as we know it to-day. It remained to establish permanent playhouses (c. 1576), and to determine the form of the drama, with its division into acts and scenes and its distinction between comedy and tragedy. The latter was the work of the Renaissance and the revival of interest in classical literature, though the lesson in either respect was never fully learnt by Shakespeare. Scholastic Drama.-Terence had been read throughout the Middle Ages; Petrarch had drawn attention to Seneca and Plautus. But only in the middle of the 15th century did men find out that these writers had intended their plays to be actually performed. The discovery led to an outburst of dramatic activity in the schools and universities of Europe during the 16th century. Teachers not only made their pupils perform the classical dramas, but set themselves to write Latin plays in imitation of them. Thus there was a large body of Latin drama produced at English seats of learning during the Tudor period which scholars are only now beginning to appraise at its proper value. Quite apart from this, the boy-players, more especially of the choirschools-St. Paul's, the Chapel Royal, etc.-exerted a powerful influence upon the development of the vernacular drama. Heywood wrote his interludes f for such "children," and they were the favourite | performers at court, where they generally acted plays in the native tongue, right up to the time of Shakespeare. Title-page of "Gammer Gurton's Needle." (S. Kensington Museum.) Early Comedy and Tragedy.-The vast bulk of these English plays of scholastic origin have been lost, but a few remain to give us a taste of their quality. About 1550, for example, two English comedies were produced, one at Christ's College, Cambridge, and the other at Eton or Winchester. The first, entitled Gammer Gurton's Nedle, by one W. S., was little more than a farcical interlude divided into acts and scenes. The other, Ralph Roister Doister, by Nicholas Udall, was a closer imitation of the comedies of Plautus. Neither is a great work of art, but both are of first-class historical importance, as the earliest extant regular comedies in the language. The earliest extant regular English tragedy was likewise the work of scholars, this time the lawyers of the Inner Temple; for on January 18, 1562, these gentlemen performed before Queen Elizabeth a Senecan play called Gorboduc, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. Following their classical model, the authors, one of whom was a great poet, strictly observed the "unities" of time and place, and saw to it that no action of any kind should appear upon the stage. The drama therefore wearies the modern reader like some interminable conversation. But it secured Sir Philip Sidney's enthusiastic admiration, and is remarkable, moreover, as the first play, as far as we know, written in blank verse, the native tongue of the Elizabethan theatre. It would, however, be a mistake to regard these dramas as necessarily representative of the output of the period. As The Supposes (1566), a translation from Ariosto by George Gascoigne, and the Promos and Cassandra (1578) of George Whetstone show us, Italian influence, which contributed so largely to the work of Shakespeare, was making itself felt long before his time, while the records of the Revels Office contain the names of hundreds of lost plays which prepared the way for the great florescence at the end of the 16th century. Meanwhile the popular theatre was making its way in the teeth of a puritan Lord Mayor and Corporation, and finally, about 1576, sealed its triumph by the erection of the first permanent English playhouse just beyond the limits of the hostile city's authority. In 1580 everything was ready for the advent of a great dramatist. The University Wits.-The greatest did not arrive until some ten years later, but the intervening decade belongs to a group of seven young writers, generally called ! the "University Wits," who, bred in the traditions of the classical drama, went down to the popular stage and delivered it From jigging veins of riming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in play, filling the Elizabethan theatre with "high astounding terms," with charming romances, and with exquisite lyrics. Of these remarkable men, who by no means confined their attention to the drama, the earliest to enter the field was John Lyly. He stands somewhat apart from his fellows, inasmuch as he wrote almost wholly for the court and for the boys' companies rather than for the popular stage. He was, in fact, the last and perhaps the best of a long line of court dramatists whose task of entertaining the queen was presently to be committed to the " public players." Lyly's eight plays, to which Shakespeare owed a considerable debt, were court allegories. Their themes were derived generally from classical mythology, and nearly all were in prose, steeped in the euphuistic style that Lyly himself had popularized in his novel Euphues. Lyly was the wittiest of the "University Wits," and his best plays, such as Endymion and Campaspe, still glow with a certain faint fairy moonlight. George Peele, another of this group, is remembered chiefly for his Arraignment of Paris and David and Bethsabe, two unequal plays containing much sweet flowing verse. Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most popular dramas of the age, established a type aptly described as "the tragedy of blood," to which Titus Andronicus belongs, while Hamlet itself was based upon an earlier horror-play of the same genre, said to have been written by Kyd. Thomas Lodge has bequeathed us turgid classical dramas like The Wounds of Civil War, and was moreover a collaborator with Robert Greene, a man of much greater parts, who squandered his genius in drink and much second-rate writing. Greene was a prolific playwright, and his best dramas belong to the same species which Shakespeare brought to perfection in As You Like It and The Winter's Tale-namely, the dramatized pastoral romance. Another of Greene's collaborators was Thomas Nash, though his extant dramatic work is slight. Christopher Marlowe. Greatest of all was Christopher Marlowe (1564-93). Youngest but one of the seven, being born in the same year as Shakespeare, this marvellous boy," before his untimely death at the age of twenty-nine, had founded English romantic tragedy, had written one of the greatest poetical dramas in our language, and had converted the stiff mechanical blank verse of Gorboduc into a vital form which Shakespeare in his turn could make fit for the lips of his greatest creations. But he was far more than a pioneer. The fame of his contemporaries is the light which they derive from their proximity to Shakespeare; Marlowe shines for us across the centuries in the blaze of his own genius. No one but Milton could bend the bow of "grand style" as he bent it, or catch the spirit of Prometheus as he caught it, while his poem Hero and Leander proves him a son also of the gentler muse of sweet sensuousness to whom Spenser devoted the service of a lifetime. His dramas show only moderate constructive ability or power of characterization, but they carry the reader away by the sheer force and beauty of their language, and by the titanic visions which they call up in the mind. Tamburlaine, his earliest and crudest creation, comes upon the stage driving a team of kings before his chariot ; Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, rules the world by the power of gold; Faustus sells his soul for a magician's wand. Each is inspired by a lust of power, and the tragedy always pursues the same course-triumph followed by a mighty fall. From the technical point of view, Marlowe's best work is Edward II., but it cannot compare in psychological interest or poetic grandeur with Doctor Faustus, which became the admired model of the finest philosophical play of modern times, Goethe's Faust. For this great symbolic tragedy deals with a theme which was part not only of the author's inner experience but of the very stuff which nourished the Renaissance spirit. The pride of intellect by which both the Faustus of Marlowe and the Lucifer of Milton fell, was the subtlest and most dangerous temptation of the age. After wandering for centuries through the mists of ignorance, man found himself once more before the tree of knowledge. There, within his reach, burned like a thousand lamps the coveted fruit of his desire; but there, too, coiled about the roots, lay the old serpent, still unconquered, still thirsting for his soul's blood. Like his great hero, Marlowe also tasted the forbidden fruit and came to a miserable and sordid end, not indeed torn asunder by devils, but stabbed in a low tavern in a dispute over some light o' love, "the manner of his death being so terrible," writes a contemporary Puritan, "that it was not only a manifest sign of God's judgment, but also an horrible and fearful terror to all that beheld him." SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST Texts.-Representative English Comedies, ed. C. M. Gayley (3 vols., Macmillan, 1912-14).-Specimens of Pre-Shaksperean Drama, ed. J. M. Manly (2 vols., Ginn, 1900-3).-UDALL, N.: Dramatic Writings, ed. J. S. Farmer (Museum Dramatists, 1907).-LYLY, J.: Complete Works, ed. R. W. Bond (3 vols., Clarendon Press, 1902).—PEELE, GEORGE: Works, ed. A. Dyce (3 vols., 1883, ed. A. H. Bullen (2 vols., Nimmo, 1888)-GREENE, ROBERT: Dramatic Works, ed. A. Dyce (1883); Plays and Poems, ed. J. Churton Collins (2 vols., Clarendon Press, 1905).-KYD, THOMAS: Works, ed. F. S. Boas (Clarendon Press, 1901).—MARLOWE, C.: Works, ed. A. H. Bullen (3 vols., Bullen, 1884-5).—HADOW, G. E. and W. H.: Oxford Treasury of English Literature, Vol. II. Growth of the Drama (Clarendon Press). WILLIAMS, W. H.: Specimens of the Elizabethan Drama (Clarendon Press). Studies.-WYNNE, A.: The Growth of English Drama (Clarendon Press, 1914).—SAINTSBURY, G.: Elizabethan Literature (Macmillan, 1887).-SYMONDS, J. A.: Shakespeare's Predecessors (Smith, Elder, 1883). LOWELL, J. R.: The Old English Dramatists (Macmillan, 1893).-BOAS, F. S.: Shakespeare and his Predecessors (Murray).-WARD, Sir A. W.: English Dramatic Literature (3 vols., Macmillan, 1899). SCHELLING, F. E.: Elizabethan Drama (2 vols., New York, 1908).-CHAMBERS, E. K.: The Mediaval Stage (2 vols., Clarendon Press, 1903).-GAYLEY, C. M.: Beginnings of English Comedy (Macmillan, 1903). CreizeNACH, W.: The English Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (trans. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1916).-FEUILLERAT, A.: John Lyly (Cambridge, 1910). |