6

detached in detail from the miracle plays," such as the story of King Darius or the Conversion of St. Paul; while comedy had its forerunner in the morality' in which allegorical personages, such as Youth, Sin, Good works, and, above all, Death or the Devil figured on the stage. One of these old moralities, Everyman, when played recently, showed by its hold on modern audiences how strong a dramatic power lay under the rude form. But the age of Elizabeth was an age of speculation rather than of growth, of interest in this world and this life far more than in the next : and men and women soon banished abstractions

from the stage. But the theatre retained the simple character of the religious performances. Sidney in his Defence of Poesie denounces, from Harvey's academic standpoint, the popular dramas which observed neither unity of place nor time, nor unity of tone, but were ready to bring Asia on one side of the stage and Africa on the other, and to let comedy jostle tragedy. These plays, faithful to their origin, troubled little about verisimilitude or classic example; their object was to tell a story, bringing it home by means of dialogue, gesture, and action. And presently, in defiance of the academicians, men of scholarly training threw their talent into this form. Shakespeare's forerunners, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nash, and, above all, Marlowe, were university men, who, seeking to live by their wits, fell to producing the form of literature for which there was a demand, not among the coteries, but among the people.

Christopher Marlowe was born in February, 1564, two months before Shakespeare. He was educated at Cambridge, and in or about 1588 the first part of Tamburlaine was acted, George Alleyn, the famous actor of that day, playing the tyrant. The

D

tragedy of Dr. Faustus was written not later than 1590, the year when Spenser published the Faerie Queene. The Jew of Malta, and the chronicle play Edward II., as well as much inferior dramatic work done in collaboration with Nash, and the exquisite though unfinished narrative poem Hero and Leander, were all completed before June, 1593, when Marlowe came by a miserable end - stabbed in a tavern brawl by a serving-man.

Thus it appears that in the very years when Spenser was composing the fantastic dialect and unreal sentiment of the Faerie Queene, Marlowe was writing such verse as we find in Tamburlaine's passionate outcry over the beauty of his chosen queen, whose magic he can neither express nor comprehend:

If all the pens that ever poets 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.

He was writing the exclamation of Faustus when, by the magic power for which he has bartered his soul, Helen is raised up before him in her living semblance:

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

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss

Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!

Oh! thou ar fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
For wanton Arethusa's azured arms:

And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

He was writing the lines which tell of

women or unwedded maids

Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.

At a time when Spenser was spending his profuse talent in describing the material horrors and delights of an enchanted kingdom, Marlowe was writing the answer of Mephistopheles to Faustus' question:

Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer?
Meph. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer.

Conspired against our God with Lucifer

And are for ever damned with Lucifer.

Faust. Where are you damned?

Meph. In hell.

Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

In the language, in the thought of these passages, we find a poetry that shows the genius of the English race in all its adult perfection.

It cannot be said that the plays, viewed as complete works of art, approach this standard. Tamburlaine contains more bombast than any piece of English literature. But nothing could

be more wonderful than the fire and force which sustain this drama of rhetoric without humour, without action, and without love interest. It is the presentment of a world-conqueror's lust for

power, and in scene after scene king opposes king in debate, with rival boastings and threatenings; in scene after scene the conquered and captive monarch heaps curses on his conqueror, who replies with taunts. Marlowe has fed his imagination with the thoughts of what world-conquest might mean, and the names of strange towns and countries clash and rattle in his verse, along with "numbers more than infinite of men."

And I have marched along the river Nile
To Machda where the mighty Christian priest,
Called John the Great, sits in a milk-white robe,
Whose triple mitre I did take by force,
And made him swear obedience to my crown,
From thence unto Cazates did I march,
Where Amazonians met me in the field,

With whom, being women, I vouchsafed a league,
And with my power did march to Zanzibar,
The eastern part of Afric, where I viewed
The Ethiopian sea, rivers and lakes,

But neither man nor child in all the land;
Therefore I took my course to Manico,
Where unresisted, I removed my camp,
And by the coast of Byather, at last

I came to Cubar, where the negroes dwell,
And conquering that, made haste to Nubia.
There having sacked Borno, the kingly seat,
I took the king, and led him bound in chains
Unto Damasco, where I stayed before.

But in his second play Marlowe rose from depicting Tamburlaine, "the Scourge of God and terror of the world," to a yet greater range of power; to the study of one tempted with a magic that should give him mastery of all knowledge with power over spirits omnipotent. Yet, more than the advance in sublimity, one notes the advance in dramatic art. He does not seek to make us feel the power of Faustus so much as the continuous struggle between remorse and temptation, ending

with the tremendous final scene where the magician waits his doom.

Ah Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live

And then thou must be damned perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament.
One drop would save my soul-half a drop-ah, my
Christ!

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? 'tis gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows!
Mountain and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

It will be noted also how the verse varies here from the "drumming decasyllabon" of Tamburlaine. In the Jew of Malta (Shylock's forerunner) there are yet finer passages; and in Edward II. Marlowe achieved a severer pathos and finer movement of the verse than had at that date been compassed by his younger rival and imitator. And though Tamburlaine in his car dragged by captive kings, with his admonitions,

Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

might be parodied by Ancient Pistol, yet Shakespeare and all men knew what Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama owed to Marlowe.

It is very probable that Shakespeare collaborated with Marlowe in rehandling that sequence of his