[Page Heading: Third Period]
_Julius Caesar_, the first of the plays dealing with Roman history, may have been written before 1600, but, whether it preceded _Hamlet_ by one year or three, it forms a gradual introduction to the group of the great tragedies. Masterly as it is in its delineation of types, rich in political wisdom and the knowledge of human nature, splendid in rhetoric, it still fails to rise to the intensity of pa.s.sion that marks the succeeding dramas. In _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_, Shakespeare at length faced the great fundamental forces that operate in individual, family, and social life, realized especially those that make for moral and physical disaster, took account alike of the deepest tendencies in character and of the mystery of external fate or accident, exhibited these in action and reaction, in their simplicity and their complexity, and wrought out a series of spectacles of the pity and terror of human suffering and human sin without parallel in the modern world. In these stupendous tragedies he availed himself of all the powers with which he was endowed and all the skill which he had acquired. His verse has liberated itself from the formalism and monotony that had marked it in the earlier plays, and is now free, varied, responsive to every mood and every type of pa.s.sion; the language is laden almost to the breaking point with the weight of thought; the dialogue ranges from the lightest irony to heart-rending pathos and intolerable denunciation; the characters lose all semblance of artificial creations and challenge criticism and a.n.a.lysis like any personage in history; the action is pregnant with the profoundest significance. Hardly, if at all, less powerful are the later tragedies of the Roman group. _Antony and Cleopatra_ is unsurpa.s.sed for the intensity of its picture of pa.s.sion, for its superb mastery of language, for its relentless truth. The more somber scenes of _Coriola.n.u.s_ convey a tragedy which either on its personal or its political side scarcely yields to its predecessors in poignancy and gloom. Whatever else he may have written in these years, here is surely the period of tragedy.
Nor do the plays cla.s.sed as comedies and falling in the first three years of the new century seriously modify this impression of the prevailing tone of the period. _Troilus and Cressida_, _All"s Well that Ends Well_, and _Measure for Measure_ present a marked contrast to the romantic comedy of the preceding stage. The love-story of the first deals with a coquette and ends sordidly; while in the political plot, though it gives occasion for speeches full of weighty thinking, jealousy and intrigue overwhelm the heroic element. The second, alone of Shakespeare"s comedies, has a hero who is a rake; and, skilful as is the delineation of Helena, it needs all the dramatist"s power to hold our sympathy and to force us to an unwilling a.s.sent to the t.i.tle. _Measure for Measure_ has its scene laid in a city seething in moral corruption: out of this rises the central situation of the play; and the presence of the most idealistic of Shakespeare"s heroines does not avail to counterbalance the atmosphere of sin and death that mocks the conventional happy ending, and makes this play, even more than the two others, seem more in place among the tragedies than among the comedies.
[Page Heading: Fourth Period]
The plays of the last period are, in the Folio, cla.s.sed with comedies, and such no doubt they are if judged merely by the nature of their denouements. But if we consider their characteristic note, and the fact that through the greater part of each play the forces and pa.s.sions involved are rather those operative in tragedy than in comedy, we easily perceive why they have been cla.s.sed as tragi-comedies or dramatic romances. _Pericles_ in many respects stands apart from the other three in nature as well as in date, for it is a dramatization of an old Greek romance, and in it the hand of another than Shakespeare is only too evident. Yet it shares with the others certain common features: like _The Tempest_ it has scenes at sea; all four deal with the separation and reuniting of families; all show us sympathetic figures deeply wronged and finally overcoming their injurers by forgiveness. The abounding high spirits of the earlier comedies are here replaced by a mood of calm a.s.surance of the ultimate triumph of good and a placid faith that survives a rude acquaintance with the evil that is in men"s hearts. No period has a more distinctive quality than this of the dramatic romances, in which the dramatist, on the eve of his retirement from London, gave his imagination free play, and in both character and action stamped his last creations with the mark of a lofty idealism.
[Page Heading: Interpretation of Periods]
The obvious fitness of this fourfold division into periods inevitably raises the question of its causes, and attempts at an answer have run along two main lines. One of these has been followed out with much eloquence and persuasiveness by Professor Dowden, whose phrases "In the Workshop," "In the World," "In the Depths," "On the Heights," to describe the four periods, point clearly enough to the kind of significance which he finds in the changes in mood and type of play.
With the first of these phrases few will be disposed to quarrel. In his period of experiment Shakespeare"s style was as yet comparatively unformed, and his attention was so much occupied with problems of technic that even the most psychological of critics finds here little revelation of personality, and must be content to describe the stage as one of professional apprenticeship. In the terms used of the three later periods, however, there is an implication that the tone and mood of the plays in each are the direct reflection of the emotional experiences through which the poet himself was pa.s.sing at the period of their composition. But this is to take for granted a theory of the relation between artist and production which has against it the general testimony of creator and critic alike. It is not at the pitch of an emotional experience that an artist successfully trans.m.u.tes his life into art, but in retrospect, when his recollective imagination reproduces his mood in a form capable of being expressed without being dissipated. Of course, Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account of personal experience in the writing of drama. His boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, about the time that he was writing _The Merchant of Venice_ and the rollicking farce of _The Taming of the Shrew_, and just before he conceived Falstaff; it was fourteen years later that he gave us the pathetic figure of the young Mamillius in _The Winter"s Tale_. From all we know of his personal life, the years of _King Lear_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_ were years of abounding prosperity. The _lacrimae rerum_ that touch the mind in these stupendous tragedies are the outcome of profound meditation and vivid imagination, not the accompaniment of a cry of instant pain. However we are to reconstruct the spiritual biography of Shakespeare, it is clear that it is by no such simple reading of his life in terms of his treatment of comic or tragic themes.
The other line of explanation will suggest itself to any thoughtful student who contemplates the facts summed up in Chapter V on the Elizabethan drama. Whatever Shakespeare"s preeminence in the quality of his work, he was not singular for innovations in kind. Not only are the plays of his experimental stage preceded by models easily discerned, but throughout his career one can see him eagerly taking up and developing varieties of drama on which less capable men had stumbled and for which the public had shown relish. Chronicle history, romantic comedy, tragedies of blood and revenge, dramatic romance, had all been invented by others, and Shakespeare never hesitated to follow their trail when it promised to lead to popular success. This does not mean that he did not put conscience into his work, but only that the change in type of play perceptible from period to period is more safely to be explained by changes of theatrical fashion and public taste than by conjectures as to the inner life of the dramatist. Nor are we prevented from finding here too that great good fortune as to occasion and opportunity that is needed, along with whatever natural endowment, to explain the achievement of Shakespeare. The return of the vogue of tragedy after he had attained maturity and seen life was indeed happy for him and for us; as was the rise of the imaginative type of dramatic romance when the storm and stress of his youth had gone by. Had the theatrical demand called for tragedy when Shakespeare was in the early thirties and light comedy when he was in the forties, it seems likely that he would have responded to the demand, though we can hardly suppose that the result would have been as fortunate as in the existing state of things it proved to be.
[Page Heading: Dates of the Poems]
The foregoing discussion has been confined to Shakespeare"s plays; the poems present problems of their own. _Venus and Adonis_ (1593) and _Lucrece_ (1594), indeed, resemble the plays of the first period, with which they are contemporary, both in conforming to a familiar type then much in vogue, the re-telling in ornate style of cla.s.sical legends drawn chiefly from Ovid, and in exhibiting marks of the conscious exercise of technical dexterity. They show the Shakespeare of the dramas mainly in their revelation of a remarkable power of detailed observation and their richness of phrase and fluency of versification. Vivid and eloquent though they are, they can hardly be regarded as affording a sure prophecy of the pa.s.sion and power of characterization that mark his mature dramatic production.
The case of the _Sonnets_ is very different. From Meres"s mention of them in 1598 we know that some had been written and were being circulated in ma.n.u.script by that date, and certain critics have sought to a.s.sign the main body of them to the first half of the last decade of the sixteenth century. But they were not published till 1609, and many of the greatest strike a note of emotion more profound than can be heard before the date of _Hamlet_. In writing them, Shakespeare was, to be sure, following a vogue, but as Professor Alden has pointed out in his introduction to them in the Tudor Shakespeare, they stand apart in important respects from the ordinary sonnet sequences of the time. All our researches have failed to tell us to whom they were addressed, if, indeed, they were addressed to any actual person at all; it is hardly necessary to urge that Shakespeare was capable of profound and pa.s.sionate utterance under the impulse of imagination alone. The probability is that they were produced at intervals over a period of perhaps a dozen years, and that they represent a great variety of moods, impulses, and suggestions. While some of them betray signs of youth and remind us of the apprentice workman of _Loves Labour"s Lost_, others display in their depth of thought, intensity of feeling, and superb power of incisive and concentrated expression, the full maturity of the man and the artist. Hardly in the great tragedies themselves is there clearer proof of Shakespeare"s supremacy in thought and language.
CHAPTER V
THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
Shakespeare"s lifetime was coincident with a period of extraordinary activity and achievement in the drama. By the date of his birth Europe was witnessing the pa.s.sing of the religious drama that had held its course for some five centuries, and the creation of new and mixed forms under the incentive of cla.s.sical tragedy and comedy. These new forms were at first mainly written by scholars and performed by amateurs, but in England, as everywhere else in western Europe, the growth of a cla.s.s of professional actors was threatening to make the drama popular, whether it should be new or old, cla.s.sical or medieval, literary or farcical. Court, school, organizations of amateurs, and the strolling actors were all rivals in supplying a widespread desire for dramatic entertainment; and no boy who went to a grammar school could be ignorant that the drama was a form of literature which gave glory to Greece and Rome and might yet bestow its laurels on England.
When Shakespeare was twelve years old the first public playhouse was built in London. For a time literature held aloof from this public stage. Plays aiming at literary distinction were written for schools or court, or for the choir boys of St. Paul"s and the royal chapel, who, however, gave plays in public as well as at court. But the professional companies prospered in their permanent theaters, and university men with literary ambitions were quick to turn to these theaters as offering a means of livelihood. By the time that Shakespeare was twenty-five, Lyly, Peele, and Greene had made comedies that were at once popular and literary; Kyd had written a tragedy that crowded the pit; and Marlowe had brought poetry and genius to triumph on the common stage--where they had played no part since the death of Euripides. A native literary drama had been created, its alliance with the public playhouses established, and at least some of its great traditions had been begun.
The development of the Elizabethan drama for the next twenty-five years is of exceptional interest to students of literary history, for in this brief period, in connection with the half-dozen theaters of a growing city and the demands of its varied population, we may trace the beginning, growth, florescence, and decay of many kinds of plays, and of many great careers. Actors, audiences, and dramatists all contributed to changes in taste and practice and to a development of unexampled rapidity and variety. In every detail of dramatic art there was change and improvement, a constant addition of new subject-matter, a mastery of new methods of technic, and an invention of new kinds of plays. The popular successes of Marlowe and Kyd and the early plays of Shakespeare himself seemed old-fashioned and crude to the taste of twenty years after, yet the triumphs of Shakespeare"s maturity failed to exhaust the opportunities for innovation and advance. We are amazed to-day at the mere number of plays produced, as well as by the number of dramatists writing at the same time for this London of two hundred thousand inhabitants. To realize how great was the dramatic activity, we must remember further that hosts of plays have been lost, and that probably there is no author of note whose entire work has survived. By the time, however, that Shakespeare withdrew from London to Stratford the drama had reached its height. The dozen years from 1600 to 1612 included not only Shakespeare"s great tragedies, but the best plays of Jonson, Chapman, and Webster, and the entire collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher. The only other decades comparable with this in the history of the drama are that which heard plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes and that other which saw the masterpieces of Racine and Moliere.
[Page Heading: Elizabethan Drama]
The greatness of the drama, however, by no means ended with the retirement and death of Shakespeare. Some of those who had been his early a.s.sociates continued to write for the stage, and younger men, as Fletcher, Ma.s.singer, Ford, and Shirley, carried on the traditions of their predecessors. If, as in other forms of literature, there was decline and decadence during the next twenty-five years, the drama also retained initiative, poetry, and intellectual force until the end. It was not dead or dying when the outbreak of the Civil War cut short its course; in fact, its plays, its traditions, even some of its theaters, actors, and dramatists survived the suppression of twenty years and helped to start the drama of the Restoration. Had Shakespeare lived to the age of seventy-eight he would have seen the closing of the theaters, and his lifetime would have covered the crowded history of the drama"s development from such semi-moralities as _Cambises_ and _The Nice Wanton_ to the last plays of Ma.s.singer and Shirley.
For nearly a quarter of a century he was a sharer in this dramatic movement, working in London as actor, manager, and playwright. While no playwright was more desirous than he to find in the stage full opportunity for his genius, he was as keen as any in gauging the immediate theatrical demand and in meeting the varying conditions of a highly compet.i.tive profession. As we have already noted, he began by imitating those who had won success, and to the end he was adroit in taking advantage of a new dramatic fashion or discovery. Like his fellows, he often took his plots from novels, histories, or other narratives; but his very choice of stories might be determined by the theatrical taste of the moment, and in his treatment of those stories he shows in person, situation, or scene, a consideration of current practices, traditions, and conventions. In every field of literature, a writer is conditioned by the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and this dependence on current taste is especially important in the drama, where practice tends to fix itself in convention, and where innovation to be successful requires cooperation from the actors and approval from the audience as well as genius from the author. Though Shakespeare is for all time, he is part and parcel of the Elizabethan drama. If his plays are Elizabethan in their defects and limitations, such as their trivial puns and word-play, their overcrowded imagery, their loose and broken structure, their paucity of female roles, their mixture of comic and tragic, their reliance on disguise and mistaken ident.i.ty as motives, their use of improbable or absurd stories; they are Elizabethan also in the qualities of their greatness, their variety of subject, their intense interest in the portrayal of character, the flexibility and audacity of their language, their n.o.ble and opulent verse, the exquisite idealism of their romantic love, and their profound a.n.a.lysis of the sources of human tragedy.
[Page Heading: Beginnings of the Drama]
The Elizabethan drama was a continuation of the medieval drama transformed by the influence of cla.s.sical models, especially the comedies of Terence and Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca. In England, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Miracle and Mystery plays were declining and were soon to disappear. The most common type of drama for the next sixty years was the Morality, which symbolized life as a conflict of vices and virtues or of the body and the soul. The drama was rapidly changing from long out-door performances to brief plays that could be given almost anywhere by a few actors. The term Interludes became common for all such entertainments, and allegorical frameworks served to contain a wide variety of matter, farce, pedagogy, politics, religion, history, or pageant. Close imitations of the cla.s.sical forms were soon attempted by scholars and men of letters; but as the professional actors grew in importance the development of a national comedy and tragedy went on without much direction from critics or theorists, but rather in response to the demands of actors and audiences and to the initiative of authors.
The developments of comedy were numerous. Allegory gradually disappeared, and the Morality ceased to exist as a definite type, though its symbolization of life and its concern with conduct were handed along to the later drama. The plays of Robert Wilson, about 1580, show an interesting use of allegory for the purposes of social satire, and realism and satire long continued to characterize Elizabethan comedy, though for a time confined mostly to incidental scenes. Common and incidental also was farce, which is found in most plays of the century whether tragic, comic, or moral in their main purpose. Further, it was soon discovered that the Plautian scheme of comedy was well suited to farcical incident, as in _Gammer Gurton"s Needle_ (1552).[6] The cla.s.sical models or their Italian imitations also produced other and less domestic imitations, as in Gascoigne"s translation of Ariosto"s _I Suppositi_ (pr. 1566) and Udall"s _Ralph Roister Doister_ (1540); a little later, Lyly"s _Mother Bombie_, Munday"s _Two Italian Gentlemen_, and Shakespeare"s _Comedy of Errors_. Indeed such adaptations continued much later and resulted in some of the best farces, or realistic comedies of intrigue, as Shakespeare"s _Merry Wives of Windsor_ (1598), Heywood"s _Wise Woman of Hogsdon_ (1604), Jonson"s _Epicene_ (1609) and _Alchemist_ (1610).
[6] In this chapter the dates appended to the plays indicate the conjectured year of presentation. Dates of publication are prefixed by _pr_.
[Page Heading: Influence of Plautus]
The Plautian model, however, was far more influential than can be indicated by these close adaptations or by any list of direct imitations or borrowings. For the Elizabethan it offered a standard of comedy, and its plots, persons, and devices were freely used in all kinds of plays, romantic as well as realistic, sentimental as well as satirical or farcical. The plots of Plautus and Terence offer a series of tricks in which the complications are often increased by having the trickster tricked. Certain fixed types of character play the parts of gulls or gullers, as the old parents, the young lovers, the parasite, the braggart soldier, and the clever slave. The intrigue is forwarded by the use of disguise, mistaken ident.i.ty, and most surprising coincidences; and it is accomplished by dialogue, often gross and abusive, but usually lively. This model served every nation of western Europe, reappearing with prolonged vitality in the inventions of Lope de Vega, the "commedia del arte" of Italy, and in the masterpieces of Moliere. Much in its scheme that seems artificial and theatrical to-day was, we must remember, accepted without question by Europe of the sixteenth century as essential and desirable in comedy, especially in realistic comedy of intrigue or manners.
The plots of Terence, notably that of the _Andria_, also gave some encouragement to the modern fondness for adventure and sentimental love, and some cla.s.sical sanction to the abundant romantic material that was knocking at the doors of comedy. If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. It included the medieval stories of knights and their gests, and also the fresher tales of cla.s.sical mythology; the Americas and Indies of contemporary adventure and the artificial Arcadias of humanist imitators of Virgil and Theocritus. Ovid and Malory, Homer and Boccaccio, Drake and Sanazzaro, were all contributors.
The union of this romance with comedy on the stage began in two ways, and princ.i.p.ally under the innovation of two writers, Lyly and Greene.
The taste for pageants, processions, and tableaux grew and flourished under the patronage of the court; and music, dancing, and spectacle were combined with dialogue in various court exhibitions and plays given by the child actors. John Lyly, writing for these choir boys, developed this type of entertainment into a distinct species of comedy. Of his eight plays, written at intervals from 1580 to 1593, all but one were in prose, and all except the Plautian _Mother Bombie_ adhere loosely to a common formula. Cla.s.sical myth or story, with pastoral elements, and occasionally an allegory of contemporary politics, furnish the basis of plots with similar love complications. G.o.ds, G.o.ddesses, nymphs, fairies, and many others add to the spectacle and mingle in the love intrigue, and all rise to a graceful dialogue, which quickens to brisk repartee when the pages or servants appear. The witty page supersedes the rude buffoon of earlier plays, and everything is graceful and ingenious, slight in serious interest, but relieved by movement and song.
[Page Heading: Lyly and Greene]
This is the form of comedy which Shakespeare adopted for _Love"s Labour"s Lost_ and perfected in _A Midsummer-Night"s Dream_. But Lyly"s contribution should not be defined merely by this type of drama, original as it is in its departure from medieval or cla.s.sical precedents. He showed how comedy might be a courtly and literary entertainment and also the playground of fancy and wit.
The second development of romantic comedy came through the dramatization of stories of love, adventure, and marvels. To such stories Robert Greene gave a heightened charm through the idealization of his heroines.
His _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_ (1590) is a magic play with an historical setting; but the interest gathers and centers on the love story of Margaret, the Keeper"s daughter. In _James IV_ (_c._ 1591) the pseudo-historical setting frames the stories of the n.o.ble Ida and the wronged but faithful Dorothea. In the incidents of the plot, with its woman disguised as a page, the faithless lover, and the final reconciliation, and also in the sweetness, modesty, and loyalty of the heroine, the play reminds us of Shakespeare"s comedies and is indeed very close to _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, in which he was clearly adopting Greene"s formula.
Tragedy naturally lagged somewhat behind comedy as a form of popular entertainment. So far as we can judge from the extant plays, there was until the appearance of Kyd and Marlowe no real union between Senecan imitations like _Gorboduc_ (1562), _Jocasta_ (1566), and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ (1588), on the one hand, and popular medleys of morality, tragedy, and farce like _Cambises_ (1565), _h.o.r.estes_ (_pr._ 1567), and _Appius and Virginia_ (1563), on the other. Marlowe"s _Tamburlaine_ (1587) was an epoch-making play because it brought to the popular drama true poetry and genuine pa.s.sion; but it and its successors also established a new type of tragedy. Marlowe made no effort to retain the structure or themes of cla.s.sical tragedy; on the contrary, he made his plays loosely connected series of scenes dealing with the life and death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action. In this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that pleased the theaters. But each play centers its dramatic interest on a mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their inevitable disappointment. With the spectacle and sensation, the rant and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and their direful catastrophes. These plays set the key for all Elizabethan tragedy, including Shakespeare"s _Lear_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, and _Macbeth_. They were immediately followed by dozens of imitators. All blank verse echoed Marlowe"s mighty line, and tragedy was filled with ranting conquerors like Tamburlaine, monstrous villains like Barabbas, and murders like that of Edward II. Shakespeare was his pupil in the _2_ and _3 Henry VI_, mastered his methods in _Richard III_, and still wrote in emulation, though no longer in imitation, in _Richard II_ and _The Merchant of Venice_.
[Page Heading: Marlowe and Kyd]
Within a few months of _Tamburlaine_, appeared a play of almost equal influence on subsequent drama, Kyd"s _Spanish Tragedy_. Kyd was a student of Seneca, a translator of Garnier"s _Cornelia_, a Senecan imitation; and he adapted some elements of cla.s.sical tragedy to the English stage. The ten plays ascribed to Seneca were the accepted models of tragedy in the Renaissance. Their presentation of the more horrible stories of Greek tragedy, their rhetorical and aphoristic style, their moralizing and their psychology, were all greatly admired. They were believed by the Elizabethans to have been acted, and their murders and violence seemed to warrant such action on the modern stage; though the Elizabethans found less adaptable their use of the chorus, the restriction of the number of persons speaking, their long monologues, and the limitation of the action to the last phase of a story. Kyd modeled his rhetoric on Seneca and retained a vestige of the chorus, long soliloquies, and some other traits of Senecan structure; but his main borrowing was the essential story of a crime and its punishment. He thus brought to the Elizabethan stage the cla.s.sical theme of retribution. In his _Spanish Tragedy_, a murder is avenged under the direction of a ghost, by a hesitating and soliloquizing protagonist, who is driven through doubt and speculation almost to madness, and then to craft, with which he outwits the wily villain and brings all the leading _dramatis personae_ to a final slaughter.
Blood revenge was established as the favorite motive of tragedy; the conflict of craft between protagonist and villain made up the action, and the speculations of the avenger gave a chance for wisdom and eloquence. One other play, probably by Kyd, the lost _Hamlet_, also presented these features and later formed the basis for Shakespeare"s tragedy. Other plays, as _Soliman and Perseda_, _The True Tragedy of Richard III_, and _Locrine_ immediately adopted Kyd"s theme and technic; indeed the stage for half a dozen years abounded in avenging heroes, diabolical villains, shrieking ghosts, and long soliloquies on fate, death, retribution, and kindred themes. _t.i.tus Andronicus_ is quite in the Kydian vein. Many plays combined the salient traits of Marlowe and Kyd, and henceforth no one wrote tragedy without paying homage to their inventions.
[Page Heading: English History Plays]
We have now noticed the most important developments in comedy and tragedy made by the time that Shakespeare began writing for the theaters; and he made quick use of the progress accomplished by Plautian and Lylyan comedy, by Greene"s romances, and by the tragedies of Kyd and Marlowe. There were other plays not easily cla.s.sified under these names and of less service to Shakespeare. But to the critical playgoer of 1590 few plays would have seemed either "right comedies" or "right tragedies." The majority were mere dramatizations of story without close construction or selection of material, seeking merely varied and abundant action. They drew their material from all kinds of narrative sources, Italian _novelle_, current pamphlets, Latin historians, or English chronicles; and, whether historical or fict.i.tious, were usually known as Histories, _i.e._, stories.
The patriotic interest in English history fostered the presentation of its scenes upon the stage. The chronicles of Halle and Holinshed furnished abundant material; and emba.s.sies, processions, and pitched battles filled the stage with movement. Historical plays might, indeed, draw from cla.s.sical history or from current foreign history, but from 1590 to 1603 a very large number of plays give scenic representation to the reigns of English kings.
Some of these form a distinct cla.s.s, since, however mixed with comic matter, they imitate Kyd or Marlowe and recast the chronicle of a reign to fit the accepted subjects of tragedy, the downfall of a prince, the revenge for a crime, the overthrow of a tyrant, or the retribution brought upon a conspirator or usurper. Conceived under Marlowe"s influence, and perhaps owing something to his hand, is the tetralogy that includes the three parts of _Henry VI_ and _Richard III_.
Those history plays, however, that do not follow the formulas for tragedy, are a heterogeneous group not easily cla.s.sified. They usually keep to the loose chronicle method that presented a series of scenes without much regard to unity or coherence. Farce, comedy, magic, spectacle, heroics, and everything that might have happened was permissible in these plays, and perhaps the only thing indispensable was a pitched field with opposing armies. Biographical, comic, popular, patriotic, or what not, these plays brought a variety of scenes to the theaters, but offered only a loose and flexible form rather than any dramatic direction or model to the creator of Falstaff.
The early deaths of Greene and Marlowe and the retirement of Lyly left Shakespeare the heir of their inventions. Though his plays were at first imitative, he soon surpa.s.sed his predecessors in gift of expression, in depiction of character, and in deftness of dramatic technic. The years from 1593 to near the turn of the century are particularly lacking in records of plays or theaters; but it seems clear that the main developments of the drama were in romantic comedy and chronicle history; and it is also clear that Shakespeare was the unquestioned leader in both of these forms.
[Page Heading: Shakespeare"s Leadership]
In comparison with his a.s.sociates, he was now the master, relying on his own experience rather than on their innovations. Neither the crude but popular _Mucedorus_ (1595) nor Dekker"s poetical extravagance, _Old Fortunatus_ (1596), could contribute to his development of romantic comedy; and domestic comedy could not instruct the inventor of Launce and Launcelot. Incidental relationships may indeed be noted. _As You Like It_, for example, dramatizes a pastoral novel with the addition of scenes that recall Robin Hood"s forest life, and may owe something to the suggestion of two Robin Hood plays by Chettle and Munday, _The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon_ (1598). But, on the whole, the indebtedness was on the other side, and imitations indicate that men of Shakespeare"s day realized that romantic comedy and history could not be carried farther.
In fact, a certain reaction set in against these forms of drama. Near the close of the century new tendencies became manifest. Comedy tended to become more realistic and satiric. Chapman, Marston, Middleton, and Jonson, all began writing romantic comedy, but changed shortly to realistic. Jonson, in his _Every Man in His Humour_ (1598), announced his opposition to the lawless drama which had preceded--whether romantic comedy or chronicle history--and proposed the creation of a new satirical comedy of manners. He was moved partly by a desire to break from past methods in order to bring comedy closer to cla.s.sical example, and partly by a desire for realism, a faithful presentation, a.n.a.lysis, and criticism of current manners. The growth of London and the increase in luxury and immorality seem to have encouraged such a movement, and for the decade after 1598 there were many comedies of London life, mostly satiric, and nearly all realistic. Many varieties are to be found, from gross representation of the seamy side of city life to serious discussion of social questions, and from sympathetic picturing of certain trades to satiric exposure of the evils of society.
Jonson"s emulation of Aristophanes led him into arrogant personal satire in the _Poetaster_ (1601), and there ensued the so-called war of the theaters, in which Marston, Dekker, and, according to report, Shakespeare were Jonson"s opponents. If Shakespeare, indeed, had a share in this war, he showed only slight interest in the prevailing comedy.
_Measure for Measure_ uses the device of a spying duke employed in Marston"s _Malcontent_, and discusses s.e.xual relationships somewhat in the tone of the time, while the scenes dealing with houses of ill fame are not unlike similar scenes in the contemporary plays of Middleton, Webster, and others. _Troilus and Cressida_, also, show more of a satiric temper than is usual in Shakespeare. But neither of these plays partakes to any extent of the prevailing satire on contemporary London.
Wide as was the range of Shakespeare"s genius, it seems to have avoided the field of satire.
[Page Heading: Realistic Comedy]