rouse the enthusiasm of the pit. Marlowe's rants are usually the product of his own lyrical fervour; but Peele, in carrying on his master's style with added sound and fury, indulged the taste of his audience. The following speech of Muly Mahamet, who, in The Battle of Alcazar, is represented (for no particular reason) starving with his wife in the desert, affords a good specimen of this poet's musical nonsense :

Hold thee, Calipolis, feed and faint no more.
This flesh I forced from a lioness,

Meat of a princess, for a princess meet:
Learn by her noble stomach to esteem

Penury plenty in extremest dearth;

Who, when she saw her foragement bereft,

Pined not in melancholy or childish fear,

But as brave minds are strongest in extremes,

So she, redoubling her former force,

Ranged through the woods, and rent the breeding vaults

Of proudest savages, to save herself;

Feed then and faint not, fair Calipolis.

For rather than fierce famine shall prevail
To gnaw thy entrails with her thorny teeth,
The conquering lioness shall attend on thee,
And lay huge heaps of slaughtered carcases,
As bulwarks in her way, to keep her back.
I will provide thee of a princely osprey,
That, as she flieth over fish in pools,
The fish shall turn their glistening bellies up,
And thou shalt take thy liberal choice of all.
Jove's stately bird, with wide commanding wings,
Shall hover still about thy princely head,
And beat down fowl by shoals into thy lap :
Feed then, and faint not, fair Calipolis.1

Imaginative rants of this kind brought into fashion, among the bullies, braggarts, and humourists, who frequented the theatre, a canting heroic style of ordinary conversation, as may be seen from Dekker's imitation of it in the Simon Eyre of the Shoemaker's Holiday; the language of the "Captain" in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster; as well as from the ridicule of Shakespeare in the characters of Nym and Pistol, and the satire of Ben Jonson in the person of Tucca. The mastery which Peele 1 Greene and Peele's Works (Dyce), p. 428.

obtained over the audience, by what Greene calls the "bombasting out of blank verse," shows him to have been, in a sense, a master of dramatic style; and his knowledge of the sensuous effects, half musical, half pictorial, that can be produced by a harmonious combination of words and images bordering on nonsense, is illustrated in the lyrical opening of his David and Bethsabe:

Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,

Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair;
Shine, sun, burn, fire; breathe air, and ease me ;
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me.
Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning;
Make not my glad cause cause of my mourning.
Let not my beauty's fire
Inflame unstaid desire,

Nor pierce any bright eye

That wandereth lightly.

BETHSABE. Come, gentle Zephyr, tricked with those perfumes
That erst in Eden sweetened Adam's love,

And stroke my bosom with thy silken fan:
This shade, sun-proof, is yet no proof for thee:
Thy body, smoother than the waveless spring,
And purer than the substance of the same,

Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce :
Thou and thy sister, soft and sacred air,
Goddess of life and governess of health,
Keep every fountain fresh and arbour sweet :
No brazen gate her passage can repulse,

Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath;
Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes,
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes,

To play the wanton with us through the leaves.1

But admirably as Peele's lyric style was adapted for the purposes of stage rhetoric, he lacked the spiritual imagination and the knowledge of character required for the production of a great drama. He was inferior in certain points, as I have said, both to Marlowe and Greene; and he was no more able than either of his companions to convert romantic materials into an organic form. He fails precisely for the same reasons that caused them to fail; as may be seen from his tragedy entitled 1 Greene and Peele's Works (Dyce), p. 463.

The Battle of Alcazar. The scheme of this play was evidently suggested by Tamburlaine. It represents the death of three kings, and of a valiant Englishman, Stukeley, allies of Muly Mahamet, usurping Sultan of Morocco,incidents that actually occurred in the early part of Elizabeth's reign. The obvious motive of the dramatist is to present to the spectators various scenes of war and adventure, interesting their imagination in the fortunes of one of their own countrymen, transporting it to distant scenes, and exalting it by speeches of stirring rhetoric. But there is no person in the play conceived in the same lyrical spirit as Marlowe's Tamburlaine; hence to work out the action the poet has to fall back on the machinery of the ancient stage. At the opening of each act he introduces a "Presenter," who describes the progress of affairs. The first act is preceded by a Dumb Show, representing the series of events out of which the initial situation in the play has arisen. This pageant is interpreted to the spectators by the Presenter. Before the second act the same indispensable personage speaks as follows:

Now war begins his rage and ruthless reign,
And Nemesis, with bloody whip in hand,
Thunders for vengeance on the Negro Moor;
Nor may the silence of this speechless night,
Dire architect of murders and misdeeds,

Of tragedies and tragic tyrannies,

Hide or contain the barbarous cruelty

Of this usurper to his progeny.

Ghosts, presenters and ranting rhetoric-of a much coarser kind than Peele's-are found in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. But Kyd, vulgar as he was, had a truer idea of the structure necessary for a drama than any of his immediate associates. His masterpiece has an intelligible and stirring plot. The Induction, in which Revenge proposes to exhibit the action of the play to the ghost of Andrea, seems to be a dramatic rendering (perhaps 1 Greene and Peele's Works (Dyce), p. 425.

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suggested by the ghost of Atreus in the Thyestes of Seneca) of the epic scheme employed, in The Mirror of Magistrates, by Higgins, who makes the ghosts of different historic personages, assembled in the halls of Morpheus, relate their tragic fortunes. As far as the mere form of the play goes, the labyrinth of revenge, through which the action proceeds, is constructed with a greater knowledge of stage effect than Marlowe's Jew of Malta; but in the representation of character Kyd is greatly inferior to his master.

The work of all the early Romantic dramatists deserves the appreciative study of every lover of art and literature. The links which connect them with the ancient drama; the genius and daring with which they naturalised on the stage the imitation of purely secular action; the difficulties they encountered in the construction of appropriate dramatic forms; the lyric freshness and naïveté of their invention, all this secures for the poetry of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Kyd an interest and sympathy hardly aroused by the more elaborate efforts of some of their late successors. Still more interesting is it as marking the starting-point of Shakespeare's dramatic invention. Shakespeare was first the disciple of these dramatists, afterwards their rival, finally their conqueror in the public esteem. There is no evidence to show that he ever made one of the society which Greene addresses in his Repentance, or that he sympathised with its riots; but it is evident from his early dramas that he was of the school of Marlowe; and the vein of Italian thinking which he derived from that poet formed an element of his conception so long as he continued to write for the stage. Within the rude limits marked out by his predecessor's experiments he went on to develop his own perfection; and The Jew of Malta, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Edward I., and The Spanish Tragedy shine with a reflected glory, when we consider them as preparing the way for The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Henry IV., and Hamlet.

CHAPTER II

THE LYRICAL ELEMENT IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS

"SHAKESPEARE's characters (says Pope, in an admirable criticism) are so much Nature herself, that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image; each picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakespeare is as much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will upon comparison be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character we must add the wonderful preservation of it, which is such throughout his plays, that, had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker." 1

Universality of idea, individuality of character-these, combined, are doubtless the qualities which distinguish the style of Shakespeare from that of every other poet. But when we seek for the cause of this effect, when we strive to penetrate the thought of the dramatist, to discover the motive of his conceptions, to fathom the meaning of his profound expressions, we at once feel ourselves to be face to face with a mystery. Two opposite schools of interpretation, in particular, have developed themselves, the German and the English, each equally confident and equally contemptuous of the method of the other; the former explaining the character of Shakespeare's plays by a supposed system of inward philosophy; the latter by 1 Preface to Shakespeare, Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), x. 535.