Elizabethan Age

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1550-1620)

 

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

Political Summary

In the Age of Elizabeth all doubt seems to vanish from English history. After the reigns of Edward and Mary, the accession of a popular sovereign was like the sunrise after a long night, in Milton’s words, we suddenly see England,

 “a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself, like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.”

Elizabeth, with all her vanity and inconsistency, steadily loved England and England’s greatness; and that she inspired all her people with the unbounded patriotism which exults in Shakespeare, and with the personal devotion which finds a voice in the Faerie Queene.

Under her administration the English national life progressed by gigantic leaps rather than by slow historical process, and English literature reached the very highest point of its development.

Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age:

1).Religious Toleration

The most characteristic feature of the age was the comparative religious tolerance.

The frightful excesses of the religious war known as the Thirty Years’ War on the Continent found no parallel in England.

Upon her accession Elizabeth found the whole kingdom divided against itself; the North was largely Catholic, while the southern counties were as strongly Protestant.

Scotland had followed the Reformation while Ireland remained true to its old religious traditions, both countries were openly rebellious.

Elizabeth favored both religious parties, and Catholics and Protestants acted together as trusted counselors of a great sovereign.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada established the Reformation as a fact in England, Reformation began, to settled the mind of man, freed from religious fears.

2).Social contentment.

It was an age of comparative social contentment, in strong contrast with the days of England.

The rapid increase of manufacturing towns gave employment to thousand Increasing trade brought enormous wealth to England, The increase of wealth, the improvement in living, the opportunities for labor, the new social content–these also are factors which help to account for the new literary activity.

3)Enthusiasm.

It is an age of dreams, of adventure, of unbounded enthusiasm springing from the new lands of fabulous riches revealed by English explorers. 

Drake sails around the world, shaping the mighty course which English colonisers shall follow through the centuries; young philosopher Bacon is saying confidently, 

“I have taken all the knowledge for my province.”

Explorers found many new places and lands which were wealthier than ever. 

Marston writes in Eastward Ho! 

"Why, man, all their dripping pans are pure gold. The prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and as for rubies and diamonds, they goe forth on holydayes and gather 'hem by the seashore to hang on their children's coates." 

New Earth was revealed by new explores - Cabot, Drake, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh, Willoughby, Hawkins.The mind must search farther than the eye; with new, rich lands opened to the sight, the imagination must create new forms to people the new worlds.

Hakluyt’s famous Collection of Voyages, and Purchase, His Pilgrimage, were even more stimulating to the English imagination. Her poets are creating literary works that are young forever. 

Cabot, Drake, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh, Willoughby, Hawkins,–a score of explorers reveal a new earth to men’s eyes, and instantly literature creates a new heaven to match it.

Renaissance Literature:

The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the early 16th century to the early 17th century believed to have originated in northern Italy in the fourteenth century and referred to as “the age of Shakespeare” or “the Elizabethan era.”

Poets such as Edmund Spenser and John Milton produced works that demonstrated an increased interest in understanding English Christian beliefs, such as the allegorical representation of the Tudor Dynasty in The Faerie Queen and the retelling of mankind’s fall from paradise in Paradise Lost; playwrights, such as Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, composed theatrical representations of the English take on life, death, and history. Nearing the end of the Tudor Dynasty, philosophers like Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon published their own ideas about humanity and the aspects of a perfect society, pushing the limits of metacognition at that time. England came closer to reaching modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the Scientific Method.

The Drama

The Age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and comfort among all classes, of unbounded patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad.

The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama.

The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and the new drama was begin to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages.

THE NON-DRAMATIC POETS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

EDMUND SPENSER (1552-1599)

Life 

He was born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, and was poor.

His education began at the Merchant Taylors' School in London and was continued in Cambridge.

He read the classics, made acquaintance with the great Italian poets, and wrote numberless little poems of his own.

Though Chaucer was his beloved master, his ambition was not to rival the Canterbury Tales, but rather to express the dream of English chivalry, much as Ariosto had done for Italy in Orlando Furioso.

In (1576) Spenser went to the north of England, and fall in love and to record his melancholy over the lost Rosalind in the Shepherd’s Calendar.

 

Upon his friend Harvey’s advice he came to London, at Leicester House. Here he finished the Shepherd’s Calendar,

 

Here he met Sidney and all the queen’s favorites. The court was full of intrigues, lying and flattery, and Spenser’s opinion of his own uncomfortable position is best expressed in a few lines from “Mother Hubbard’s Tale”:

In 1580, Spenser, was made secretary to Lord Grey, the queen’s deputy in Ireland, and the third period of his life began.

He was given an immense estate with the castle of Kilcolman, in Munster, which had been confiscated from Earl Desmond, one of the Irish leaders. After nearly sixteen years’ residence he wrote his View of an unhappy island in the ‘State of Ireland ‘(1596),his only prose work, in which he submits a plan for “pacifying the oppressed and rebellious people.

In Kilcolman, surrounded by great natural beauty, Spenser finished the first three books of the Faery Queen.

In 1589 Raleigh visited him, heard the poem with enthusiasm, hurried the poet off to London, and presented him to Elizabeth.

The first three books met with instant success when published and were acclaimed as the greatest work in the English language.

Soon after his return to Ireland again Spenser fell in love with his beautiful Elizabeth, an Irish girl; wrote his Amoretti, or sonnets, in her honour; He represented her, in the Faerie Queene, also as the beautiful woman dancing among the Graces.

In 1594 he married Elizabeth, celebrating his wedding with his “Epithalamion,” one of the most beautiful wedding hymns in any language.

Spenser’s next visit to London was in 1595, when he published “Astrophel,” an elegy on the death of his friend Sidney, and three more books of the Faerie Queene.

Kilcolman, the ancient house of Desmond, was one of the first places attacked by the rebels, Spenser barely escaped with his wife and two children. It is supposed that some unfinished parts of the Faery Queen were burned in the castle.

Year (1599) he died in an inn at Westminster. And buried beside his master Chaucer in Westminster Abbey,

According to Ben Jonson he died “for want of bread”; but whether that is a poetic way of saying that he had lost his property or that he actually died of destitution,

Major Works of Edmund Spenser:

Faerie Queene

1)The Shepheardes Calender, published under the pseudonym

 2)Immerito

3)Amoretti and Epithalamion, containing: 1)Amoretti 2)Epithalamion

4)Complaints, Containing sundrie small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie includes:

“The Ruines of Time”

“The Teares of the Muses”

“Virgil’s Gnat”

“Prosopopoia

 Mother Hubberds Tale”

5)“Ruines of Rome: by Bellay”

6)“Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie”

7)“Visions of the worlds vanitie”

8)“The Visions of Bellay”

9)“The Visions of Petrarch”

10)Astrophel. A Pastoral Elegy upon the death of the most Noble and valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney.

11)Prothalamion

The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene is the great work upon which the poet’s fame chiefly rests. The original plan of the poem included twenty-four books, each of which was to recount the adventure and triumph of a knight who represented a moral virtue. Spenser’s purpose, as indicated in a letter to Raleigh which introduces the poem, is as follows:

To portrait in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave Knight, perfected in the twelve private Moral Virtues, as Aristotle hath devised; which is the purpose of these first twelve books: 

Each of the Virtues appears as a knight, fighting his opposing Vice, and the poem tells the story of the conflicts.

It is therefore purely allegorical, not only in its personified virtues but also in its representation of life as a struggle between good and evil.

In its strong moral element the poem differs radically from Orlando Furioso, upon which it was modelled.

Spenser completed only six books, celebrating Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy

We have also a fragment of the seventh, treating of Constancy; but the rest of this book was not written, or else was lost in the fire at Kilcolman.

Argument of the Faery Queen.

From the introductory letter we learn that the hero visits the queen’s court in Fairy Land, while she is holding a twelve-days festival. On each day some distressed person appears unexpectedly, tells a woful story of dragons, of enchantresses, or of distressed beauty or virtue, and asks for a champion to right the wrong and to let the oppressed go free. Sometimes a knight volunteers or begs for the dangerous mission; again the duty is assigned by the queen; and the journeys and adventures of these knights are the subjects of the several books.

The first recounts the adventures of the Redcross Knight, representing Holiness, and the lady Una, representing Religion. Their contests are symbolical of the world-wide struggle between virtue and faith on the one hand, and sin and heresy on the other.

The second book tells the story of Sir Guyon, or Temperance;

The third, of Britomartis, representing Chastity;

The fourth, fifth, and sixth, of Cambel and Triamond (Friendship), Artegall (Justice), and Sir Calidore (Courtesy).

Spenser’s plan was a very elastic one and he filled up the measure of his narrative with everything that caught his fancy,–historical events and personages under allegorical masks, beautiful ladies, chivalrous knights, giants, monsters, dragons, sirens, enchanters, and adventures enough to stock a library of fiction.

Spenser’s great poem–with the exception of a single line in the prologue, “Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralise my song”–gives hardly a hint of what is coming. 

As to the meaning of the allegorical figures, one is generally in doubt. In the first three books the shadowy Faerie Queene sometimes represents the glory of God and sometimes Elizabeth, who was naturally flattered by the parallel. Britomartis is also Elizabeth.

The Redcross Knight is Sidney, the model Englishman.

Arthur, who always appears to rescue the oppressed, Una is sometimes a religion and sometimes the Protestant Church; while Duessa represents Mary Queen of Scots, or general Catholicism.

In the last three books Elizabeth appears again as Mercilla; Henry IV of France as Bourbon; the war in the Netherlands as the story of Lady Belge; Raleigh as Timias; the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland (lovers of Mary or Duessa) as Blandamour and Paridell; and so on through the wide range of contemporary characters and events, till the allegory becomes as difficult to follow as the second part of Goethe’s Faust.

Poetical Form for the Faerie Queene 

Spenser invented a new verse form, which has been called since his day the Spenserian stanza.

The new stanza was an improved form of Ariosto’s eight-line stanza and bears a close resemblance to one of Chaucer’s most musical verse forms in the “Monk’s Tale.”

Spenser’s stanza is in nine lines, eight of five feet each and the last of six feet,rimming ababbcbcc.

Minor Poems of Spenser.

Next to his masterpiece, the Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) is the best known of Spenser’s poems; though, as his first work, it is below many others in melody. It consists of twelve pastoral poems, or eclogues, one for each month of the year. The themes are generally rural life, nature, love in the fields; and the speakers are shepherds and shepherdesses. To increase the rustic effect Spenser uses strange forms of speech and obsolete words.

Jonson complained his works are not English or any other language. Some are melancholy poems on his lost Rosalind; some are satires on the clergy; one, “The Briar and the Oak,” is an allegory; one flatters Elizabeth, and others are pure fables touched with the Puritan spirit.

 Other noteworthy poems are “Mother Hubbard’s Tale,” a satire on society; “Astrophel,” an elegy on the death of Sidney Amoretti, or sonnets, to his Elizabeth; the marriage hymn, “Epithalamion,” and four “Hymns,” on Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty.

Importance of the Shepherd’s Calendar.

The publication of this work, in 1579, by an unknown writer who signed himself modestly “Immerito,” marks an important epoch in our literature.

This first published work of Spenser is noteworthy in at least four respects:

-First, it marks the appearance of the first national poet in two centuries;

-second, it shows again the variety and melody of English verse, which had been largely a tradition since Chaucer;

-Third, it was our first pastoral, the beginning of a long series of English pastoral compositions modeled on Spenser

-Fourth, it marks the real beginning of the outburst of great Elizabethan poetry.

Characteristics of Spenser’s Poetry:

The five main qualities of Spenser’s poetry are ,

• -a perfect melody
• -a rare sense of beauty
• -a splendid imagination, which could gather into one poem heroes, knights, ladies, dwarfs, demons and dragons, classic mythology, stories of chivalry, and the thronging ideals of the Renaissance.

It is Spenser’s idealism, his love of beauty, and his exquisite melody which have caused him to be known as “the poets’ poet.”

Comparison between Chaucer and Spenser.

Spenser regarded Chaucer as his master, two centuries intervene between them, and that their writings have almost nothing in common. We shall appreciate this better by a brief comparison between our first two modern poets.

Chaucer was dealing largely with ancient or mediæval material, with modern way of looking at life. He threw aside the outgrown metrical romance, which was practically the only form of narrative in his day, invented the art of story-telling in verse, he lived wholly in the present, studied the men and women of his own time, painted them as they were, but added always a touch of kindly humor or romance to make them more interesting. So his mission appears to be simply to amuse himself and his readers.

Like Chaucer, Spenser was a busy man of affairs, but in him the poet and the scholar always predominates. He writes as the idealist, describing men not as they are but as he thinks they should be; he has no humor, and his mission is not to amuse but to reform. Like Chaucer he studies the classics and contemporary French and Italian writers; but instead of adapting his material to present-day conditions, he makes poetry, as in his Eclogues for instance, more artificial even than his foreign models. Spenser always looks backward for his inspiration;

His first quality is imagination, not observation, and he is the first of our poets to create a world of dreams, fancies, and illusions.

His second quality is a wonderful sensitiveness to beauty.

MINOR POETS

Thomas Sackville (1536-1608).

Sir Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord High Treasurer of England, is generally classed with Wyatt and Surrey among the predecessors of the Elizabethan Age.

In imitation of Dante’s Inferno, Sackville formed the design of a great poem called The Mirror for Magistrates.

The idea was to follow Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and let each character tell his own story; so that the poem would be a mirror in which present rulers might see themselves and read this warning: “Who reckless rules right soon may hope to rue.” 

Sackville finished only the “Induction” and the “Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham.” These are written in the rime royal, and are marked by strong poetic feeling and expression. Unfortunately Sackville turned from poetry to politics, and the poem was carried on by two inferior poets, William Baldwin and George Ferrers.

Sackville wrote also, in connection with Thomas Norton, the first English tragedy, Ferrex and Porrex, also called Gorboduc.

As a writer he is known by three principal works, all published after his death,

The Arcadia is a pastoral romance, interspersed with eclogues, in which shepherds and shepherdesses sing of the delights of rural life. The Apologie for Poetrie (1595), generally called the Defense of Poesie, appeared in answer to a pamphlet by Stephen Gosson called The School of Abuse (1579) The Apologie is one of the first critical essays in English. it is still one of the best expressions of the place and meaning of poetry in any language.

Astrophel and Stella is a collection of songs and sonnets addressed to Lady Penelope Devereux, to whom Sidney had once been betrothed.

George Chapman (1559?-1634).

Chapman wrote chiefly for the stage. His plays, most part merely poems in dialogue, fell far below the high dramatic standard of his time and are now almost unread.

His most famous work is the metrical translation of the Iliad (1611) and of the Odyssey (1614). Chapman’s Homer, though lacking the simplicity and dignity of the original, has a force and rapidity of movement which makes it superior in many respects to Pope’s more familiar translation. Chapman is remembered also as the finisher of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.

Michael Drayton (1563-1631).

Drayton is the most voluminous and, interesting of the minor poets. He is the Layamon of the Elizabethan Age.

His chief work is Polyolbion, an enormous poem of

many thousand couplets, describing the towns, mountains, and rivers of Britain, with the interesting legends connected with each.

Two other long works are the Barons’ Wars and the Heroic Epistle of England; and besides these were many minor poems. One of the best of these is the “Battle of Agincourt,” a ballad written in the lively meter which Tennyson used with some variations in the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and which shows the old English love of brave deeds and of the songs that stir a people’s heart in memory of noble ancestors. 

THE FIRST ENGLISH DRAMATISTS

PERIODS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DRAMA

The Religious Period.

In Europe, as in Greece, the drama had a distinctly religious origin.

The first characters were drawn from the New Testament, and the object of the first plays was to make the church service more impressive, or to emphasize moral lessons by showing the reward of the good and the punishment of the evil doer.

In the latter days of the Roman Empire plays of every kind were forbidden.

But soon the Church itself provided a substitute for the forbidden plays in the famous Mysteries and Miracles.

 

Miracle and Mystery Plays.

Miracle play:

Miracle plays specifically depicted miracles performed and experienced by saints, re-enacting them in the lives of everyday people rather than as they would have occurred in the Bible.

Morality play:

A morality play is a genre of theatrical work, originating in the Mediaeval period, that intended to impart moral lessons as much as to entertain an audience

In France the name miracle was given to any play representing the lives of the saints.

The mystère represented scenes from the life of Christ or stories from the Old Testament associated with the coming of the Messiah.

The earliest Miracle of which we have any record in England is the Ludus de Sancta Katharina, which was performed in Dunstable about the year 1110.first version was prepared by Geoffrey of St. Albans, a French school-teacher of Dunstable.

Cycles of Plays

The early Miracle plays of England were divided into two classes: 

The first, given at Christmas, included all plays connected with the birth of Christ;

The second, at Easter, included the plays relating to his death and triumph.

The complete cycle was presented every spring, beginning on Corpus Christi day; and as the presentation of so many plays meant a continuous outdoor festival of a week .

At the present day only four cycles exist (except in the most fragmentary condition)

The four cycles are the Chester and York plays, so called from the towns in which they were given;

the Towneley or Wakefield plays, named for the Towneley family, which for a long time owned the manuscript;

The Chester cycle has 25 plays,

The Wakefield 30,

The Coventry 42,

The York 48.

They were in great favour from the twelfth to the sixteenth century.

The York plays are generally considered to be the best; but those of Wakefield show more humour and variety, and better workmanship. The former cycle especially shows a certain unity resulting from its aim to represent the whole of man’s life from birth to death. The same thing is noticeable in Cursor Mundi, which, with the York and Wakefield cycles, belongs to the fourteenth century.

The Stage and the Actors

At first the actors as well as the authors of the Miracles were the priests and their chosen assistants.

The players in the movable theaters, perform in the town in the squares and open places. Each of these theaters consisted of a two-story platform, set on wheels. The lower story was a dressing room for the actors; the upper story was the stage proper, and was reached by a trapdoor from below. When the play was over the platform was dragged away, and the next play in the cycle took its place. So in a single square several plays would be presented in rapid sequence to the same audience.

The Moral Period of the Drama.

The second or moral period of the drama is shown by the increasing prevalence of the Morality plays. In these the characters were allegorical personages,–Life, Death, Repentance, Goodness, Love, Greed, and other virtues and vices.

In Spain and Portugal these plays, under the name auto, were wonderfully developed by the genius of Calderon and Gil Vicente; but in England the Morality was a dreary kind of performance, like the allegorical poetry which preceded it.

The best known of the Moralities is “Everyman,” The subject of the play is the summoning of every man by Death; and the moral is that nothing can take away but an honest life and the comforts of religion. Its the pure Greek drama; there is no change of time or scene, and the stage is never empty from the beginning to the end of the performance.

Other well-known Moralities are the “Pride of Life,” “Hyckescorner,” and “Castell of Perseverance.”

Of the known authors of Moralities, two of the best are John Skelton, who wrote “Magnificence,” and probably also “The Necromancer”; and Sir David Lindsay (1490-1555), “the poet of the Scotch Reformation,” whose religious business it was to make rulers uncomfortable by telling them unpleasant truths in the form of poetry. With these men a new element enters into the Moralities. They satirize or denounce abuses of Church and State.

The Interludes.

The dramatic scenes, at banquets where a little fun was wanted; and again slipped into a Miracle play to enliven the audience after a solemn scene.

The Interludes originated, in a sense of humour.

John Heywood (1497?-1580?), a favourite retainer and jester at the court of Mary, credit for raising the Interlude to the distinct dramatic form known as comedy.

Heywood’s Interludes were written between 1520 and 1540. His most famous is “The Four P’s,” a contest of wit between a “Pardoner, a Palmer, a Pedlar and aPothecary.” The characters here strongly suggest those of Chaucer.

Another interesting Interlude is called “The Play of the Weather.” In this Jupiter and the gods assemble to listen to complaints about the weather and to reform abuses. Naturally everybody wants his own kind of weather. The climax is reached by a boy who announces that a boy’s pleasure consists in two things, catching birds and throwing snowballs, and begs for the weather to be such that he can always do both. Jupiter decides that he will do just as he pleases about the weather, and everybody goes home satisfied.

The Artistic Period of the Drama.

The artistic is the final stage in the development of the English drama. It represent human life as it is.

The First Comedy

The first true play in English, with a regular plot, divided into acts and scenes, is probably the comedy, “Ralph Royster Doyster.” It was written by Nicholas Udall, master of Eton, and later of Westminster school,

The story is that of a conceited fop in love with a widow, who is already engaged to another man. The play is an adaptation of the Miles Gloriosus, a classic comedy by Plautus,

The next play, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” (cir. 1562), is a domestic comedy, a true bit of English realism, representing the life of the peasant class.

Gammer Gurton is patching the leather breeches of her man Hodge, when Gib, the cat, gets into the milk pan. While Gammer chases the cat the family needle is lost, a veritable calamity in those days. The whole household is turned upside down, and the neighbors are dragged into the affair. Various comical situations are brought about by Diccon, a thieving vagabond, who tells Gammer that her neighbor, Dame Chatte, has taken her needle, and who then hurries to tell Dame Chatte that she is accused by Gammer of stealing a favorite rooster. Naturally there is a terrible row when the two irate old women meet and misunderstand each other. Diccon also drags Doctor Rat, the curate, into the quarrel by telling him that, if he will but creep into Dame Chatte’s cottage by a hidden way, he will find her using the stolen needle. Then Diccon secretly warns Dame Chatte that Gammer Gurton’s man Hodge is coming to steal her chickens; and the old woman hides in the dark passage and cudgels the curate soundly with the door bar. All the parties are finally brought before the justice, when Hodge suddenly and painfully finds the lost needle–which is all the while stuck in his leather breeches–and the scene ends uproariously for both audience and actors.

The First Tragedy

Our first tragedy, “Gorboduc,” was written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, and was acted in 1562, only two years before the birth of Shakespeare. It is the first play to be written in blank verse.

The story of “Gorboduc” is taken from the early annals of Britain and recalls the story used by Shakespeare in King Lear. Gorboduc, king of Britain, divides his kingdom between his sons Ferrex and Porrex. The sons quarrel, and Porrex, the younger, slays his brother, who is the queen’s favorite. Videna, the queen, slays Porrex in revenge; the people rebel and slay Videna and Gorboduc; then the nobles kill the rebels, and in turn fall to fighting each other. The line of Brutus being extinct with the death of Gorboduc, the country falls into anarchy, with rebels, nobles, and a Scottish invader all fighting for the right of succession. The curtain falls upon a scene of bloodshed and utter confusion.

The artistic finish of this first tragedy is marred by the authors’ evident purpose to persuade Elizabeth to marry. It aims to show the danger to which England is exposed by the uncertainty of succession. Otherwise the plan of the play follows the classical rule of Seneca. There is very little action on the stage; bloodshed and battle are announced by a messenger; and the chorus, of four old men of Britain, sums up the situation with a few moral observations at the end of each of the first four acts.

Classical Influence upon the Drama.

The revival of Latin literature had a decided influence upon the English drama .Seneca was the favourite Latin author, and all his tragedies were translated into English between 1559 and 1581. This was the exact period in which the first English playwrights were shaping their own ideas.

Dramatic Unities

In the classic play the so-called dramatic unities of time, place, and action were strictly observed. Time and place must remain the same; the play could represent a period of only a few hours,

The characters, therefore, must remain unchanged throughout; there was no possibility of the child becoming a man, or of the man’s growth with changing circumstances. battles and important events were simply announced by a messenger. The classic drama also drew a sharp line between tragedy and comedy.

The English drama, on the other hand, strove to represent the whole sweep of life in a single play. The scene changed rapidly; the same actors appeared now at home, now at court, now on the battlefield; and vigorous action filled the stage before the eyes of the spectators.

Two Schools of Drama

The University Two Schools Wits, as men of learning were called, classical ideal, Sackville and Norton were of this class, and “Gorboduc” was classic in its construction. In the “Defense of Poesy” Sidney upholds the classics and ridicules .

Against these were the popular playwrights, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and many others, who recognized the English love of action and disregarded the dramatic unities in their endeavour to present life as it is.

The Theater

In the year 1574 a royal permit to Lord Leicester’s actors allowed them “to give plays anywhere throughout our realm of England,” and this must be regarded as the beginning of the regular drama.

Two years later the first playhouse, known as “The Theater,” was built for these actors by James Burbage in Finsbury Fields, just north of London.

It was in this theatre that Shakespeare probably found employment when he first came to the city.

A Dutch traveler, Johannes de Witt, has given us the only contemporary drawing we possess of the interior of one of these theaters. They were built of stone and wood, round or octagonal in shape, and without a roof, being simply an inclosed courtyard. At one side was the stage, and before it on the bare ground, or pit, stood that large part of the audience who could afford to pay only an admission fee. The players and these groundlings were exposed to the weather; those that paid for seats were in galleries sheltered by a narrow porch-roof projecting inwards from the encircling walls; while the young nobles and gallants, who came to be seen and who could afford the extra fee, took seats on the stage itself.

The Stage

In all these theatres, probably, the stage consisted of a bare platform, with a curtain or “traverse” .

By Shakespeare’s day, however, painted scenery had appeared, first at university plays, and then in the regular theaters.[135] In all our first plays female parts were taken by boy actors.

Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the Drama - University Wits:

The regular playwrights, Kyd, Nash, Lyly, Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, brought the English drama to the point where Shakespeare began to experiment upon it. Each of these playwrights added or emphasised some essential element in the drama, which appeared later in the work of Shakespeare.

John Lyly (1554?-1606), developed the pernicious literary style called euphuism, is one of the most influential of the early dramatists.

His court comedies are remarkable for their witty dialogue and for being our first plays to aim definitely at unity and artistic finish.

 Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1585) first gives us the drama, or rather the melodrama, of passion, copied by Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Ben Jonson is said to have written one version and to have acted the chief part of Hieronimo.

Robert Greene (1558?-1592) plays the chief part in the early development of romantic comedy, and gives us some excellent scenes of English country life in plays like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593)

Marlowe is one of the most suggestive figures of the English Renaissance, and the greatest of Shakespeare’s predecessors. The glory of the Elizabethan drama dates from his Tamburlaine (1587).

Life. 

Marlowe was born in Canterbury, was the son of a poor shoemaker, educated at the town grammar school and then at Cambridge. He became an actor and lived in a low-tavern atmosphere In 1587, when but twenty-three years old, he produced Tamburlaine, which brought him instant recognition.

Marlowe produced all his great work. Then he was stabbed in a drunken brawl and died. The Epilogue of Faustus might be written across his tombstone:

Marlowe’s Works.

Marlowe is famous for four dramas, now known as the Marlowesque or one-man type of tragedy, each revolving about one central personality who is consumed by the lust of power.

The first of these is Tamburlaine, the story of Timur the Tartar. Timur begins as a shepherd chief, who first rebels and then triumphs over the Persian king. Intoxicated by his success, Timur rushes like a tempest over the whole East. Seated on his chariot drawn by captive kings, with a caged emperor before him, he boasts of his power which overrides all things. Then, afflicted with disease, he raves against the gods and would overthrow them as he has overthrown earthly rulers. Tamburlaine is an epic rather than a drama; but one can understand its instant success with a people only half civilized, fond of military glory, and the instant adoption of its “mighty line” as the instrument of all dramatic expression.

Faustus, the second play, is one of the best of Marlowe’s works. The story is that of a scholar who longs for infinite knowledge, and who turns from Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law, the four sciences of the time, to the study of magic, much as a child might turn from jewels to tinsel and coloured paper. In order to learn magic he sells himself to the devil, on condition that he shall have twenty-four years of absolute power and knowledge. The play is the story of those twenty-four years. Like Tamburlaine, it is lacking in dramatic construction, but has an unusual number of passages of rare poetic beauty. Milton’s Satan suggests strongly that the author of Paradise Lost had access to Faustus and used it, as he may also have used Tamburlaine, for the magnificent panorama displayed by Satan in Paradise Regained. For instance, more than fifty years before Milton’s hero says, “Which way I turn is hell, myself am hell,” Marlowe had written: Marlowe’s third play is The Jew of Malta, a study of the lust for wealth, which centres about Barabas, a terrible old money lender, strongly suggestive of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The first part of the play is well constructed, showing a decided advance, but the last part is an accumulation of melodramatic horrors. Barabas is checked in his murderous career by falling into a boiling caldron which he had prepared for another, and dies blaspheming, his only regret being that he has not done more evil in his life. 

Marlowe’s last play is Edward II, a tragic study of a king’s weakness and misery. In terms of style and dramatic construction, it is by far the best of Marlowe’s plays.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Life (1564-1616).

Two outward influences were powerful in developing the genius of Shakespeare,–the little village of Stratford, centre of the most beautiful and romantic district in rural England, and the great city of London, the center of the world’s political activity.

 

William Shakespeare was baptised there on the twenty-sixth of April, 1564 (old style). As it was customary to baptise children on the third day after birth, the twenty-third of April - May 3, according to our present calendar is generally accepted as the poet’s birthday.

 

His father, John Shakespeare, was a trader in corn, meat, leather, and other agricultural products. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer, from an old Warwickshire family of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Norman blood.

 

Of Shakespeare’s education we know little, except that for a few years he probably attended the endowed grammar school at Stratford, where he picked up the “small Latin and less Greek” to which his learned friend Ben Jonson refers. His real teachers, meanwhile, were the men and women and the natural influences which surrounded him. Not only the gossip but also the dreams, the unconscious poetry that sleeps in the heart of the common people, appeal to Shakespeare’s imagination.

ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE:

In 1582 Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a peasant family of Shottery, who was eight years older than her boy husband.

About the year 1587 Shakespeare left his family and went to London and joined himself to Burbage’s company of players.

Of his life in London from 1587 to 1611, the period of his greatest literary activity, The first authentic reference to him is in 1592, when Greene’s[149] bitter attack appeared, showing that Shakespeare had in five years assumed an important position among playwrights. Then appeared the apology of the publishers of Greene’s pamphlet, with their tribute to the poet’s sterling character.

Ben Jonson says of him: “I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature.”

 

To judge from only three of his earliest plays it would seem reasonably evident that in the first five years of his London life he had gained entrance to the society of gentlemen and scholars

 

Shakespeare soon became an actor, and counted among the “stars.” He worked with other men, and he revised old plays before writing his own, and so gained a practical knowledge of his art. 

Shakespeare’s poems, rather than his dramatic work, mark the beginning of his success. “Venus and Adonis” became immensely popular in London, and its dedication to the Earl of Southampton brought, according to tradition, a substantial money gift, which may have laid the foundation for Shakespeare’s business success. and soon became part owner of the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, in which his plays were presented by his own companies. in 1611, he left London and retired permanently to Stratford.

 

In 1609, however, Five different accounts of this fascinating shipwreck were published, and the Bermudas became known as the “Isle of Devils.” Shakespeare took this story–which caused as much popular interest as that later shipwreck which gave us Robinson Crusoe–and wove it into The Tempest. In the same year (1611) he probably sold his interest in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, and his dramatic work was ended.

 

He was given a tomb in the chancel of the parish church, not because of his preëminence in literature, but because of his interest in the affairs of a country village. 

Works of Shakespeare:

At the time of Shakespeare’s death twenty-one plays existed in manuscripts in the various theatres.

The first printed collection of his plays, now called the First Folio (1623), was made by two actors, Heming and Condell.

This contains thirty-six of the thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakespeare, Pericles being omitted.

Four Periods

The plays and poems leave us with an impression of four different periods of work,and by the frequent use of rimed couplets with his blank verse.

These are:

First Period, Early Experiment. Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece, 1594; Titus Andronicus, Henry VI (three parts), 1590-1591; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1590; Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1591-1592; Richard-III, 1593; Richard II, King John, 1594-1595.

Second Period, Development. Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595; Merchant of Venice, Henry IV (first part), 1596; Henry IV (second part), Merry Wives of Windsor, 1597; Much Ado About Nothing, 1598; As You Like It, Henry V, 1599.

Third Period, Maturity and Gloom. Sonnets (1600-?), Twelfth Night, 1600; Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cæsar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, 1601-1602; All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, 1603; Othello, 1604; King Lear, 1605; Macbeth, 1606; Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, 1607.

Fourth Period, Late Experiment. Coriolanus, Pericles, 1608; Cymbeline, 1609; Winter’s Tale, 1610-1611; The Tempest, 1611; Henry VIII (unfinished).

For his legendary and historical material he depended, largely on Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and on North’s translation of Plutarch’s famous Lives.

Classification according to Dramatic Type.

Shakespeare’s dramas are usually divided into three classes, called tragedies, comedies, and historical plays.

Comedies.

Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Twelfth Night.

Tragedies.

Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello.

Historical Plays:

Julius Cæsar, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra.

Doubtful Plays.

Shakespeare is partly the work of other dramatists.

The first of these doubtful plays, often called the Pre-Shakespearean Group, are Titus Andronicus and the first part of Henry VI.

Shakespeare probably worked with Marlowe in the two last parts of Henry VI and in Richard III.

Taming of the Shrew, Timon, and Pericles are only partly Shakespeare’s work. Henry VIII is the work of Fletcher and Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen is a his doubtful works. The greater part of the play is undoubtedly by Fletcher. Edward III is doubtful of his authorship.

Shakespeare’s Poems.

Shakespeare poems gave him a commanding place in the Elizabethan Age. His two long poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” contain much poetic fancy; but it must be said of both that the subjects are unpleasant, in comparison with his great dramatic works these poems are now of minor importance.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, one hundred and fifty-four in number, are the only direct expression of the poet’s own feelings published together in 1609.

Goethe expresses the common literary judgement when he says, “I do not remember that any book or person or event in my life ever made so great an impression upon me as the plays of Shakespeare.”