Contemporaries of Shakespeare Greene, Peele, and Lodge
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
The list which comprises the names of the very greatest among great poets or among men otherwise great can naturally never be a long one: briefer yet is the list of theirs who are only less great than these, and who first began the work or gave the example which none but they could follow, could complete, or could excel. Above all others enrolled in this latter list the name of Marlowe stands high, and will stand for ever. The father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse was therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare.
There is no such test of critical faculty and genuine instinct for true appreciation of poetry as the estimate given or accepted of Marlowe's place among poets. For his countrymen, at all events, there is none as yet, and probably there never will be. Most writers and most readers above the level of such as would do well to abstain and should in pity be prohibited from reading or from writing are much of one mind about Chaucer and Spenser, about Shakespeare and Milton, about Coleridge and Shelley. Those only who know and understand, as Pindar and as Dante would have expressed it, can hope or can be expected to appreciate the greatness of the man who began his career by a double and incomparable achievement: the invention of English blank verse and the creation of English tragedy.
It has not always been duly remarked, it is not now always duly remembered, by students of the age of Shakespeare that Marlowe is the one and only precursor of that veritable king of kings and lord of lords among all writers and all thinkers of all time. The names usually associated with his by painstaking and well-meaning historians of dramatic poetry are hardly memorable or mentionable at all, except from a chronological point of view, among the names of dramatic poets. Lily, Greene, Peele, Nash, and Lodge were true though not great poets, who blundered into playwriting-invitissima Minerva-in search of popularity or of bread. Lily, Nash, and Greene were writers of prose which it would be difficult to over-praise if we had here to consider the finest work of Greene in romantic fiction, of Nash and Lily in controversial satire. Thackeray has given to the sweetest and loftiest verses of Peele the immortality which they could hardly have expected or attained, beautiful and noble and pathetic as they are, but for the more than royal dignity conferred on them by association with the deathless name and memory of Colonel Newcome. But their plays, though something in advance of the unreadable Gorboduc and the unspeakable Locrine, have no particular claim to record among the trophies of our incomparable drama: they belong rather to the historic province of antiquarian curiosity than to the esthetic or spiritual kingdom of English poetry. No man can be more grateful than I for the research of the learned and laborious historians whose industry has been devoted to the noble task of lighting up the dark ways of study for all future students of the highest, the wealthiest, the most precious and golden branch of a matchless literature. For all these illustrious scholars it was a matter of obvious and obtrusive necessity to register all surviving literary documents which belong to the subject of their study. For a writer whose aim is confined to the indication and illustration of poetic and dramatic quality of imaginative or spiritual excellence the attempt would be worse than a superfluous impertinence: it would be an injurious aberration or excursion from the straight line of his intended labour.
Nash is always readable, even when religious: and something of the 'lightness and brightness' of his sunny and fiery spirit gives life to his fantastic little interlude of Summer's Last Will and Testament. The graceful author of Rosalynde is unrecognisable in Lodge's lamentable Roman tragedy The Wounds of Civil War. The Selimus and Alphonsus of Greene are feeble and futile essays in hopeless and heartless imitation of Tamburlaine the Great; very bloody, very wordy, very vehement, but essentially spiritless and passionless. Had Shakespeare never retouched his Titus Andronicus, and earned by his surely slight and transient additions in Greene's own semi-lyrical style the shamefully famous expression of the dying man's undying rancour, that strangely fated play could hardly have been remembered except as the third in this trinity or triunity of rhetorical and rhapsodical horrors. The composition of Orlando Furioso is as pitifully scandalous as the story of its author's roguery in the disposal or venditation of his rubbish. James the Fourth is a comparatively creditable piece of work; but its few, poor, meagre merits are noticeable mainly because of its date. There is something more of liveliness and coherence in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: enough to exasperate the reader who can see what a far better and what a really charming work of realistic and fantastic invention might have been made of it-by the nameless author, for instance, of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, George a Greene is an honest and homely expansion of a good old ballad into a passable if rather formless little play. It might savour of paradox to avow a preference for so tardy and so singular a survival of the old moralities as A Looking-Glass for London and England; but, if that preference is not perverse and capricious, no more final proof of the fact that Dr. Lodge and Master Greene (M.A.) ought never to have strayed or staggered on to the boards could possibly be exacted. For there is not only much to amuse the reader of this quaint and belated sermon in scenes, there is something for him to admire and enjoy. And it is a pity, if not a shame, that even the smallest and least precious jewel of poetry should have been misframed in so barbaric a setting.
Something of the same regret may probably or must surely be felt by readers of The Arraignment of Paris. That George Peele might and should have left a more honoured name among English poets than he chose or than he could manage to leave is painfully or pleasantly obvious when we compare the lovely lyrical and pastoral opening of this little courtly interlude with the weary and wordy commonplace of the rhyming and rhymeless verses that follow and fill out its five acts-'tedious and brief.' Quaint and pretty casualties or felicities of expression may be found here and there to relieve the general platitude of style and matter. The 'oration' of Paris in the fourth act is noticeable, if not memorable, as a decent exercise in blank verse when few could achieve anything better in that line than 'untimely breathings, sick and short assays.' But it has no more claim to be classed among plays or even among attempts at playwriting than any of Lily's courtly allegories in dialogue; effusions or elaborations of devout and decorous ingenuity with which a critic, or even a chronicler, of dramatic poetry or fiction has naturally no concern.
It is lamentable that neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe should have taken in hand so magnificent and suggestive a subject for historic drama as the reign of the greatest Plantagenet: it is deplorable that Peele should have ventured on it. Difficult and exacting as even the greatest among poets might or rather must have found it, that a man of any literary capacity whatsoever should have dropped upon the nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in its spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play of Edward I. is a riddle beyond and also beneath solution. There is hardly a passable line or couplet in all the vile expanse of its twenty-five chaotic scenes; the treatment of character and the handling of incident would be disgraceful to a child. The community in platitude of metre, baseness of spirit, and brutality of dullness, between the detestable scenes which do their bestial and futile utmost to pollute such names as Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Castile, may not suffice as thoroughly as we may wish they might suffice to establish the infamous identity of the author of Edward I. with the author of the Fourth Scene of the Fifth Act of The First Part of King Henry VI.; but at least it goes very far to confirm all rational English readers in their confidence that this villainy is the branding badge of but one minor poet-not of two curs, but of one cur. The heavy tumidity of The Battle of Alcazar is relieved by the really fine scene which reminded Lamb of Marlowe, and is rather honoured than disgraced by the kindly raillery of Shakespeare. The miserable traitor and apostate Stukeley would have had no more reason to thank George Peele than to thank the anonymous author of a later play devoted to the commemoration of his misdeeds for the feeble attempt to present them as the achievements or attempts of a melodramatic megalomaniac. The soliloquy which closes the fourth act is matchless, I should hope, for drivel of desperation and platitude of bombast, in all the dramatic memorials of ambitious and hopeless impotence.
The scriptural tragedy of David and Bethsabe hardly deserves either the exuberant effusion of Campbell's praise or the all but unqualified scorn of other critics. It is a poor thing on the whole; yet there is the mark of a real though certainly not a great poet on the earlier scenes. But Voltaire's farce on the same subject, 'translated' with such adorable impudence 'from the English of Hume,' is much better worth reading and far more provocative of reperusal. Whether Peele is or is not responsible for the authorship of Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes is a matter which may be left for debate to the wise men of Gotham who question the authenticity of Shakespeare's part in The Two Noble Kinsmen. I should hardly suppose that even this meanest among the precursors of Shakespeare must be credited or discredited with the production of so lamentable if not so belated an attempt to reopen 'King Cambyses' vein.' The only redeeming point in all the narcotic or hypnotic rubbish is the sometimes rather amusing humour of the clown Subtle Shift-a not unwelcome survival of the Vice who gives occasional life to the mysteries and moralities which preceded the birth of tragedy or comedy in England as in France.
'These three gifted men,' Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, have been thus bracketed by such critics as in three hundred years' time may possibly chain together the contemporary names of those three gifted men, Charles Mackay, Haynes Bayley, and Alfred Tennyson. It is shameful that it should not be (if it be not) superfluous to say that Marlowe differs from such little people as Peele and Greene, not in degree, but in kind; not as an eagle differs from wrens or titmice, but as an eagle differs from frogs or tadpoles. He first, and he alone, gave wings to English poetry; he first brought into its serene and radiant atmosphere the new strange element of sublimity. And, innovator as he was, revolutionist and creator, he was no less loyal and no less competent an artist, no less perfect and instinctive a workman in words, than Chaucer or than Spenser was before him. He had neither the boyish humour nor the childlike pathos of Chaucer: he had nothing of Spenser's incomparable melody and all but inexhaustible fancy; but among all English poets he was the first full-grown man; young indeed, and immature if set beside such disciples and successors as Shakespeare and Milton, but the first-born among us of their kind. Flutes and lutes and harps and harpsichords we had heard before the organ-music of his verse astonished and entranced all ears not naturally sealed against the higher strains of harmony, all hearts not religiously closed against the nobler tones of thought. And Shakespeare heard at once, and cast off shard by shard the crust of habit which fostered and sometimes fevered the jigging vein of his rhyming mother-wit, sweet and exquisite as it was; and Milton long afterwards prolonged and magnified by reverberation the music of 'Marlowe's mighty line.' His place among poets is exactly as questionable as Dante's. M. de Lamartine thought little or nothing of Dante, and M. de Lamartine was once a very great poet indeed.
When such another champion assails the fame of Marlowe, it will be time for those who know better to undertake his defence.
The reviler of Shakespeare can be no other than a scurrilous buffoon, 'a decent priest where monkeys are the gods,' and where Ibsen is the idol. The anatomist of Shakespeare-the superior person who knows all about the weaknesses of that inferior nature, who can expound the qualities and define the influences which made him the man he was, and precluded him from the dubious chance of showing himself a greater and a stronger man than the soft, flaccid weaklings in whom his pitiful and unmanly ideal of heroic or philosophic manhood is so degradingly revealed-the thinker whose masculine intelligence can fathom Shakespeare's at a glance and dismiss it with a smile-is worthy to be classed and remembered as a representative man after the order of Archquack Emerson. Collier the cleric and Rymer the railer are dead and damned to something less, let us hope, than everlasting fame; pity may surely be allowed to believe in a briefer term of expiatory survival, a milder infliction of purgatorial remembrance, for their successors in the inheritance of contempt. 'Zoïle aussi éternel qu'Homère' -what hardest of all hearts would not pity the case of Zoilus, eternally alive (or, in Browning's characteristically audacious phrase, 'immortally immerded') in 'the eternal cesspools' to which, when a living soul, he contributed all the irrepressible exuberance of effusive or explosive malignity which tortured what served him for a brain, and corroded what sufficed him for a heart? No other creature, alive or dead, can be quite so utterly and so hopelessly pitiable.
A much less incongruous and fissiparous trinity or triunity of pre-Shakespearean playwrights would be revealed in the reunion of three associated names much less inharmonious than the copulation of Greene's and Peele's with Marlowe's. Greene, Peele, and Lodge hang very well together; three really good poets at their best, who can only have been whipped and spurred into scribbling for the stage by insanity of ambition or stimulation of hunger. The dullness of The Wounds of Civil War is so dense and malarious that it is difficult for a suffering reader to remember the existence of Rosalynde. Nothing more perfectly and absolutely worthless, or more difficult for patient application to dig through, has ever been reissued in the various reissues of Dodsley's Old Plays: stupendous as is the stupidity or perversity which has always ignored James Howard's really excellent comedy of The English Monsieur, and selected for infliction on modern readers a piece of noisome nonsense which must make his name a stench in the nostrils of the nauseated reader.
But enough or too much has before been written on this pigmy trinity of dwarfish dramatists. It is not with their names, it is with no such names as theirs, that poets or judges of poetry will ever associate the deathless name of Marlowe. To one man only did Shakespeare ever pay the tribute of a passing word-a word of honour, of regret, of admiration, and it might almost seem of affection. And to Marlowe alone it is that we can feel as though such a tribute had been due. But to him we may feel that it would be strange if not a word of homage had been offered, not a token of regard had been vouchsafed, by Shakespeare.
NOTE.The foregoing essay was the last prose composition completed by Swinburne before his death.
