English Renaissance Drama 3 страница

Curiously enough, as Mr Churton Collins has pointed out, Greene, except in the two pamphlets written just before his death, never refers to his having written plays; and before 1592 his contemporaries are equally silent as to his labours as a playwright. Only four plays remain to us of which he was indisputably the sole author. The earliest of these seems to have been the Comicall History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon, of which Henslowe's Diary contains no trace. But it can hardly have been first acted long after the production of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which had, in all probability, been brought on the stage in 1587. For this play, "comical" only in the negative sense of having a happy ending, was manifestly written in emulation as well as in direct imitation of Marlowe's tragedy. While Greene cannot have thought himself capable of surpassing Marlowe as a tragic poet, he very probably wished to outdo him in "business," and to equal him in the rant which was sure to bring down at least part of the house. Alphonsus is a history proper - a dramatized chronicle or narrative of warlike events. Its fame could never equal that of Marlowe's tragedy; but its composition showed that Greene could seek to rival the most popular drama of the day, without falling very far short of his model.

In the Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (not known to have been acted before February, 1592, but probably written in 1589) Greene once more attempted to emulate Marlowe; and he succeeded in producing a masterpiece of his own. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, which doubtless suggested the composition of Greene's comedy, reveals the mighty tragic genius of its author; but Greene resolved on an altogether distinct treatment of a cognate theme. Interweaving with the popular tale of Friar Bacon and his wondrous doings a charming idyl (so far as we know, of his own invention), the story of Prince Edward's love for the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, he produced a comedy brimful of amusing action and genial fun. Friar Bacon remains a dramatic picture of English Elizabethan life with which The Merry Wives alone can vie; and not even the ultraclassicism in the similes of its diction can destroy the naturalness which constitutes its perennial charm. The History of Orlando Furioso, one of the Twelve Peeres of France has on unsatisfactory evidence been dated as before 1586, and is known to have been acted on the 21st of February 1592. It is a free dramatic adaptation of Ariosto, Harington's translation of whom appeared in 1591, and who in one passage is textually quoted; and it contains a large variety of characters and a superabundance of action. Fairly lucid in arrangement and fluent in style, the treatment of the madness of Orlando lacks tragic power. Very few dramatists from Sophocles to Shakespeare have succeeded in subordinating the grotesque effect of madness to the tragic; and Greene is not to be included in the list.

In The Scottish Historie of James IV. (acted 1592, licensed for publication 1594) Greene seems to have reached the climax of his dramatic powers. The "historical" character of this play is pure pretence. The story is taken from one of Giraldi Cinthio's tales. Its theme is the illicit passion of King James for the chaste lady Ida, to obtain whose hand he endeavours, at the suggestion of a villain called Ateukin, to make away with his own wife. She escapes in doublet and hose, attended by her faithful dwarf; but, on her father's making war upon her husband to avenge her wrongs, she brings about a reconciliation between them. Not only is this well-constructed story effectively worked out, but the characters are vigorously drawn, and in Ateukin there is a touch of Iago. The fooling by Slipper, the clown of the piece, is unexceptionable; and, lest even so the play should hang heavy on the audience, its action is carried off by a "pleasant comedic" — i.e. a prelude and some dances between the acts — "presented by Oboram, King of Fayeries," who is, however, a very different person from the Oberon of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

George-a-Greene the Pinner of Wakefield (acted 1593,1593, printed 1 599), a delightful picture of English life fully worthy of the author of Friar Bungay, has been attributed to him; but the external evidence is very slight, and the internal unconvincing. Of the comedy of Fair Em, which resembles Friar Bacon in more than one point, Greene cannot have been the author; the question as to the priority between the two plays is not so easily solved. The conjecture as to his supposed share in the plays on which the second and third parts of Henry VI. are founded has been already referred to. He was certainly joint author with Thomas Lodge of the curious drama called A Looking Glasse for London and England (acted in 1592 and printed in 1594) - a dramatic apologue conveying to the living generation of Englishmen the warning of Nineveh's corruption and prophesied doom. The lesson was frequently repeated in the streets of London by the "Ninevitical motions" of the puppets; but there are both fire and wealth of language in Greene and Lodge's oratory. The comic element is not absent, being supplied in abundance by Adam, the clown of the piece, who belongs to the family of Slipper, and of Friar Bacon's servant, Miles.

Greene's dramatic genius has nothing in it of the intensity of Marlowe's tragic muse; nor perhaps does he ever equal Peele at his best. On the other hand, his dramatic poetry is occasionally animated with the breezy freshness which no artifice can simulate. He had considerable constructive skill, but he has created no character of commanding power - unless Ateukin be excepted; but his personages are living men and women, and marked out from one another with a vigorous but far from rude hand. His comic humour is undeniable, and he had the gift of light and graceful dialogue. His diction is overloaded with classical ornament, but his versification is easy and fluent, and its cadence is at times singularly sweet. He creates his best effects by the simplest means; and he is indisputably one of the most attractive of early English dramatic authors.

Greene's dramatic works and poems were edited by Alexander Dyce in 1831 with a life of the author. This edition was reissued in one volume in 1858. His complete works were edited for the Huth Library by A. B. Grosart. This issue (1881-1886) contains a translation of Nicholas Storojhenko's monograph on Greene (Moscow, 1878). Greene's plays and poems were edited with introductions and notes by J. Churton Collins in 2 vols. (Oxford, 1905); the general introduction to this edition has superseded previous accounts of Greene and his dramatic and lyrical writings. An account of his pamphlets is to be found in J. J. Jusserand's English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (Eng. trans., 1890). See also W. Bernhardi, Robert Greenes Leben and Schriften (1874); F. M. Bodenstedt, in Shakespeare's Zeitgenossen and ihre Werke (1858); and an introduction by A. W. Ward to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Oxford, 1886, 4th ed., 1901).

George Gascoigne (1539-1578)

There is some confusion about the biography of George Gascoigne, particularly since recent (as yet unpublished) research by Dr. Evelyn Lord of Cambridge University has revealed that there was more than one person of this name living at the same time, and that at least one of the others was a poet. Biographers seem to agree that our man was a Cardington (Bedfordshire) Gascoigne, born within one or two years of 1539, the son of Sir John Gascoigne, a landowner and farmer. George is said to have attended Trinity College, Cambridge, although the records do not include his name, and by 1555 he seems to have been in London at Gray's Inn. He even sat as a very young MP in Queen Mary I's last Parliament (1558), according to his biographer Prouty.
Gascoigne first went to court as a replacement for his father as almoner at Elizabeth I's coronation, and after that he spent his life trying to establish himself as a courtier, something he consistently failed to do and which failure he shared with a later courtly aspirant-cum-poet, John Donne. He did make some connections, however, and married Elizabeth Breton, a wealthy widow, but even here things began to go wrong. It seems that Elizabeth had already been contracted in marriage to one Edward Boyes (before she met Gascoigne), but that she did not consider the marriage valid. Boyes, unfortunately, disagreed, and took them to court. They were separated, and Elizabeth's goods impounded, but after much legal wrangling they finally won their case.
In 1566 Gascoigne wrote his play Supposes, a translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi (1509), for a carnival at Gray's Inn. Gascoigne, like his father, tried his hand at farming, but he was not very successful and he was not helped by his father's vow to disinherit him nor by his mother's stealing his sheep. His own brothers, also, took actions against him in court for various reasons, and by 1570 Gascoigne had already been in prison for debt. Getting re-elected to Parliament was one way out, because it provided one with immunity, but when Gascoigne tried that tactic in 1571 he was disallowed by the Privy Council as being "a notorious ruffian....an atheist and godless person." There was nothing for it but to join the army, and late in 1571 we find Gascoigne volunteering to serve in the Netherlands under William the Silent.
In 1572 Gascoigne returned to England and wrote a wedding masque for Lord Montague, and prepared for press his collected works under the name of A Hundreth Sundry Flowres. His biographers mention further catastrophes which made him return to Holland almost immediately, but in any case he was accused of treason, acquitted, but lost most of his personal assets. In a new book, The Steele Glas, he attacked the futility of war, but in 1575, when Gascoigne was again in England, he had to revise parts of Flowres to satisfy the censors. Much of the rest of his literary output, which includes the famous Adventures of Master F.J., was revised to contain declarations of his good moral intentions, and hence the major works, including F.J., have two versions.
In 1576 Gascoigne's luck seemed to turn, for Lord Burghley appointed him to head a "fact-finding" mission (as we would call it today) to Paris and Antwerp, which produced Gascoigne's Spoyle of Antwerp, a vivid first-hand account. In October 1577, however, Gascoigne came down with an unspecified illness which killed him, just at the time when his life seemed to be turning around.

2.Works

Gascoigne's first significant work was the play Supposes, which was a substantial contribution to the introduction of Italian erudite comedy into England, and which Shakespeare used as a source for the sub-plot of The Taming of the Shrew. Gascoigne was a fine translator, trying to remain faithful to the spirit of Ariosto's Italian text while at the same time endowing it with uniquely English characteristics of bawdy wit and double entrendre, which would have appealed to his student audience.
Critics have concentrated on Gascoigne as a poet because they have felt, since the time of C.S. Lewis at any rate, that the early period of the Renaissance in England produced few poets of note. Apart from Surrey and Wyatt, and perhaps Sackville (co-author of Gorboduc), late Henrician and Marian literature has been dismissed as, in Lewis's word, "drab." More recently, however, Alicia Ostriker, writing in Christopher Ricks's anthology, called Gascoigne one of the best poets writing in what she still calls "that fallow time." Ivor Winters thought him a better poet than Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton, and his poems are appearing in greater quantity in anthologies, not to mention being reprinted on the Web, where the complete text of A Hundreth Sundry Flowres may be read. His account of military expeditions in Holland deserve a reading, too, and The Adventures of Master F.J. is a signifcant work of early Renaissance prose fiction which deserves at least as much attention as Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller.

John Lyly (1554-1606)

John Lyly was born in Kent in 1554. He was brought up in Canterbury where he likely attended the King's School at the same time as Marlowe. Lyly received the A.M. degree at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, in 1575. After failed petitions for support from Lord Burghley for a fellowship, Lyly removed to London.
He became instantly famous with the publication of the prose romance Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and His England (1580). Euphues is Greek for "graceful." Euphuism, as the elaborate prose style modelled on Lyly came to be called, was at the height of popularity in the 1580s. Euphuistic style has two features:

an especially elaborate sentence structure based on parallel figures from the ancient rhetorics and a wealth of ornament including proverbs, incidents from history and poetry, proverbs, and similes drawn from pseudoscience, from Pliny, from textbooks, or from the author's imagination.¹

Lyly's style had a marked impact on contemporary writers, not the least on Shakespeare. Polonius in Hamlet, Moth in Love's Labour's Lost, and the repartees of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing show signs of Lyly's influence.
In 1583, Lyly married Beatrice Browne, a Yorkshire heiress. The same year he became in control of the first Blackfriars Theatre. He wrote several prose comedies for children's companies, all geared towards the courtly audience. These plays included Campaspe (1584), Sapho and Phao (early 1580s), Endymion: The Man in the Moon (1586-7), Love's Metamorphosis (1589), Midas (1589), and Mother Bombie (1589).² Lyly's only play in verse was the comedy The Woman in the Moone (1594?).

Lyly's contribution to the Martin Marprelate controversy, on the bishops' side, was 1589's Pap with an Hatchet. Lyly served as an MP three times, the first of which was for Hindon in Wiltshire, in 1589. Lyly spent most of the remainder of his life at his wife's home in Mexborough, Yorkshire.

Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)

THOMAS KYD, one of the most important of the English Elizabethan dramatists who preceded Shakespeare. Kyd remained until the last decade of the eighteenth century in what appeared likely to be impenetrable obscurity. Even his name was forgotten until Thomas Hawkins about 1773 discovered it in connection with The Spanish Tragedy in Thomas Heywood's Apologie for Actors. But by the industry of English and German scholars a great deal of light has since been thrown on his life and writings. He was the son of Francis Kyd, citizen and scrivener of London, and was baptized in the church of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, on the 6th of November 1558. His mother, who survived her son, was named Agnes, or Anna. In October 1565 Kyd entered the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School, where Edmund Spenser and perhaps Thomas Lodge were at different times his school-fellows. It is thought that Kyd did not proceed to either of the universities; he apparently followed, soon after leaving school, his father's business as a scrivener. But Nashe describes him as a " shifting companion that ran through every art and throve by none." He showed a fairly wide range of reading in Latin. The author on whom he draws most freely is Seneca, but there are many reminiscences, and occasionally mistranslations of other authors. Nashe contemptuously said that "English Seneca read by candlelight yeeldes many good sentences," no doubt exaggerating his indebtedness to Thomas Newton's translation. John Lyly had a more marked influence on his manner than any of his contemporaries.

It is believed that he produced his famous play, The Spanish Tragedy, between 1584 and 1589; the quarto in the British Museum (which is probably earlier than the Gottingen and Ellesmere quartos, dated 1594 and 1599) is undated, and the play was licensed for the press in 1592. The full title runs, The Spanish Tragedie containing the Lamentable End of Don Horatio and Bel-imperia; with the Pitiful Death of Old Hieronimo, and the play is commonly referred to by Henslowe and other contemporaries as Hieronimo. This drama enjoyed all through the age of Elizabeth and even of James I and Charles I so unflagging a success that it has been styled the most popular of all old English plays.

Certain expressions in Nashe's preface to the 1589 edition of Robert Greene's Menaphon may be said to have started a whole world of speculation with regard to Kyd's activity. Much of this is still very puzzling; nor is it really understood why Ben Jonson called him "sporting Kyd." In 1592 there was added a sort of prologue to The Spanish Tragedy, called The First Part of Jeronimo, or The Warres of Portugal, not printed till 1605. Professor Boas concludes that Kyd had nothing to do with this melodramatic production, which gives a different version of the story and presents Jeronimo as little more than a buffoon. On the other hand, it becomes more and more certain that what German criticism calls the Ur-Hamlet, the original draft of the tragedy of the prince of Denmark, was a lost work by Kyd, probably composed by him in 1587. This theory has been very elaborately worked out by Professor Sarrazin, and confirmed by Professor Boas; these scholars are doubtless right in holding that traces of Kyd's play survive in the first two acts of the 1603 first quarto of Hamlet, but they probably go too far in attributing much of the actual language of the last three acts to Kyd. Kyd's next work was in all probability the tragedy of Soliman and Perseda, written perhaps in 1588 and licensed for the press in 1592, which, although anonymous, is assigned to him on strong internal evidence by Mr. Boas. No copy of the first edition has come down to us; but it was reprinted, after Kyd's death, in 1599.

In the summer or autumn of 1590 Kyd seems to have given up writing for the stage, and to have entered the service of an unnamed lord, who employed a troop of players. Kyd was probably the private secretary of this nobleman, in whom Professor Boas sees Robert Radcliffe, afterwards fifth Earl of Sussex. To the wife of the Earl (Bridget Morison of Cassiobury) Kyd dedicated in the last year of his life his translation of Gamier's Comedia (1594), to the dedication of which he attached his initials. Two prose works of the dramatist have survived, a treatise on domestic economy, The House-holders Philosophy, translated from the Italian of Tasso (1588); and a sensational account of The Most Wicked and Secret Murdering of John Brewer, Goldsmith (1592). His name is written on the title-page of the unique copy of the last-named pamphlet at Lambeth, but probably not by his hand. That many of Kyd's plays and poems have been lost is proved by the fact that fragments exist, attributed to him, which are found in no surviving context.

Towards the close of his life Kyd was brought into relations with Christopher Marlowe. It would seem that in 1590, soon after he entered the service of this nobleman, Kyd formed his acquaintance. If he is to be believed, he shrank at once from Marlowe as a man intemperate and of a cruel heart and irreligious. This, however, was said by Kyd with the rope 'round his neck, and is scarcely consistent with a good deal of apparent intimacy between him and Marlowe. When, in May 1593, the lewd libels and blasphemies of Marlowe came before the notice of the Star Chamber, Kyd was immediately arrested, papers of his having been found shuffled with some of Marlowe's, who was imprisoned a week later. A visitation on Kyd's papers was made in consequence of his having attached a seditious libel to the wall of the Dutch churchyard in Austin Friars. Of this he was innocent, but there was found in his chamber a paper of vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ.

Kyd was arrested and put to the torture in Bridewell. He asserted that he knew nothing of this document and tried to shift the responsibility of it upon Marlowe, but he was kept in prison until after the death of that poet (June 1, 1593). When he was at length dismissed, his patron refused to take him back into his service. He fell into utter destitution, and sank under the weight of bitter times and privy broken passions. He must have died late in 1594, and on the 30th of December of that year his parents renounced their administration of the goods of their deceased son, in a document of great importance discovered by Professor Schick.

The importance of Kyd, as the pioneer in the wonderful movement of secular drama in England, gives great interest to his works, and we are now able at last to assert what many critics have long conjectured, that he takes in that movement the position of a leader and almost of an inventor. Regarded from this point of view, The Spanish Tragedy is a work of extraordinary value, since it is the earliest specimen of effective stage poetry existing in English literature. It had been preceded only by the pageant-poems of Peele and Lyly, in which all that constitutes in the modern sense theatrical technique and effective construction was entirely absent. These gifts, in which the whole power of the theatre as a place of general entertainment was to consist, were supplied earliest among English playwrights to Kyd, and were first exercised by him, so far as we can see, in 1586. This, then, is a more or less definite starting date for Elizabethan drama, and of peculiar value to its historians.

Curiously enough, The Spanish Tragedy, which was the earliest stage-play of the great period, was also the most popular, and held its own right through the careers of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher. It was not any shortcoming in its harrowing and exciting plot, hut the tameness of its archaic versification, which probably led in 1602 to its receiving additions, which have been a great stumblingblock to the critics. It is known that Ben Jonson was paid for these additional scenes, but they are extremely unlike all other known writings of his, and several scholars have independently conjectured that John Webster wrote them.

Of Kyd himself it seems needful to point out that neither the Germans nor even Professor Boas seems to realize how little definite merit his poetry has; he is important, not in himself, but as a pioneer. The influence of Kyd is marked on all the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, and the bold way in which scenes of violent crime were treated on the Elizabethan stage appears to be directly owing to the example of Kyd's innovating genius. His relation to Hamlet has already been noted, and Titus Andronicus presents and exaggerates so many of his characteristics that Mr. Sidney Lee and others have supposed that tragedy to be a work of Kyd's, touched up by Shakespeare. Professor Boas, however, brings cogent objections against this theory, founding them on what he considers the imitative inferiority of Titus Andronicus to The Spanish Tragedy. The German critics have pushed too far their attempt to find indications of Kyd's influence on later plays of Shakespeare. The extraordinary interest felt for Kyd in Germany is explained by the fact that The Spanish Tragedy was long the best known of all Elizabethan plays abroad. It was acted at Frankfurt in 1601, and published soon afterwards at Nuremberg. It continued to be a stock piece in Germany until the beginning of the 18th century; it was equally popular in Holland, and potent in its effect upon Dutch dramatic literature.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, English dramatist, the father of English tragedy, and instaurator of dramatic blank verse, the eldest son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, was born in that city on the 6th of February 1564. He was christened at St George's Church, Canterbury, on the 26th of February, 1563/4, some two months before Shakespeare's baptism at Stratford-on-Avon. His father, John Marlowe, is said to have been the grandson of John Morley or Marlowe, a substantial tanner of Canterbury. The father, who survived by a dozen years or so his illustrious son, married on the 22nd of May 1561 Catherine, daughter of Christopher Arthur, at one time rector of St Peter's, Canterbury, who had been ejected by Queen Mary as a married minister. The dramatist received the rudiments of his education at the King's School, Canterbury, which he entered at Michaelmas 1578, and where he had as his fellow-pupils Richard Boyle, afterwards known as the great earl of Cork, and Will Lyly, the brother of the dramatist. Stephen Gosson entered the same school a little before, and William Harvey, the famous physician, a little after Marlowe. He went to Cambridge as one of Archbishop Parker's scholars from the King's School, and matriculated at Benet (Corpus Christi) College, on the 17th of March 1571, taking his B.A. degree in 1584, and that of M.A. three or four years later.

Francis Kett, the mystic, burnt in 1589 for heresy, was a fellow and tutor of his college, and may have had some share in developing Marlowe's opinions in religious matters. Marlowe's classical acquirements were of a kind which was then extremely common, being based for the most part upon a minute acquaintance with Roman mythology, as revealed in Ovid's Metamorphoses. His spirited translation of Ovid's Amores (printed 1596), which was at any rate commenced at Cambridge, does not seem to point to any very intimate acquaintance with the grammar and syntax of the Latin tongue. Before 1587 he seems to have quitted Cambridge for London, where he attached himself to the Lord Admiral's Company of Players, under the leadership of the famed actor Edward Alleyn, and almost at once began writing for the stage.

Of Marlowe's career in London, apart from his four great theatrical successes, we know hardly anything; but he evidently knew Thomas Kyd, who shared his unorthodox opinions. Nash criticized his verse, Greene affected to shudder at his atheism; Gabriel Harvey maligned his memory. On the other hand Marlowe was intimate with the Walsinghams of Scadbury, Chiselhurst, kinsmen of Sir Francis Walsingham: he was also the personal friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and perhaps of the poetical earl of Oxford, with both of whom, and with such men as Walter Warner and Robert Hughes the mathematicians, Thomas Harriott the notable astronomer, and Matthew Royden, the dramatist is said to have met in free converse. Either this free converse or the licentious character of some of the young dramatist's tirades seems to have sown a suspicion among the strait-laced that his morals left everything to be desired. It is probable enough that this attitude of reprobation drove a man of so exalted a disposition as Marlowe into a more insurgent attitude than he would have otherwise adopted. He seems at any rate to have been associated with what was denounced as Sir Walter Raleigh's school of atheism, and to have dallied with opinions which were then regarded as putting a man outside the pale of civilized humanity.

As the result of some depositions made by Thomas Kyd under the influence of torture, the Privy Council were upon the eve of investigating some serious charges against Marlowe when his career was abruptly and somewhat scandalously terminated. The order had already been issued for his arrest, when he was slain in a quarrel by a man variously named (Archer and Ingram) at Deptford, at the end of May 1593, and he was buried on the 1st of June in the churchyard of St Nicholas at Deptford. The following September Gabriel Harvey referred to him as "dead of the plague." The disgraceful particulars attached to the tragedy of Marlowe in the popular mind would not seem to have appeared until four years later (1597) when Thomas Beard, the Puritan author of The Theatre of God's Judgements, used the death of this playmaker and atheist as one of his warning examples of the vengeance of God. Upon the embellishments of this story, such as that of Francis Meres the critic, in 1598, that Marlowe came to be "stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his lewde love," or that of William Vaughan in the Golden Grove of 1600, in which the unfortunate poet's dagger is thrust into his own eye in prevention of his felonious assault upon an innocent man, his guest, it is impossible now to pronounce.

We really do not know the circumstances of Marlowe's death. The probability is he was killed in a brawl, and his atheism must be interpreted not according to the ex parte accusation of one Richard Baines, a professional informer (among the Privy Council records), but as a species of rationalistic antinomianism, dialectic in character, and closely related to the deflection from conventional orthodoxy for which Kett was burnt at Norwich in 1589. A few months before the end of his life there is reason to believe that he transferred his services from the Lord Admiral's to Lord Strange's Company, and may have thus been brought into communication with Shakespeare, who in such plays as Richard II and Richard III owed not a little to the influence of his romantic predecessor.

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