From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 4

Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent sent to help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." Sidney was England's darling, and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain "the meed of some melodious tear." Spenser's _Ruins of Time_ were among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known.

Another typical Englishman of Elizabeth's reign was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical enterprise that marked, the times. He fought against the queen's enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot army against the League in France. Raleigh was from Devons.h.i.+re, the great nursery of English seamen. He was half-brother to the famous navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard Grenville. He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1591 he published a report of the fight, near the Azores, between Grenville's s.h.i.+p, the _Revenge_, and fifteen great s.h.i.+ps of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon, "memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable." Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588. He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Ess.e.x "singed the Spanish king's beard," in the harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San Jose, in the West Indies; and on his return he published his _Discovery of the Empire of Guiana_. In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in the Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia, and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe.

America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, "the Devons.h.i.+re Skipper," had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, after his voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, _The Princ.i.p.al Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation_, worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets. We see the influence of this literature of travel in the _Tempest_, written undoubtedly after Shakspere had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers's s.h.i.+pwreck on the Bermudas or "Isles of Devils."

Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth's successor, James I. He was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason. The sentence hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and he was beheaded. Meanwhile, during his twelve years' imprisonment in the Tower, he had written his _magnum opus_, the _History of the World_. This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of learned dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. A chapter with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in a universal history nowadays: "Of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle regions of the air." The preface and conclusion are n.o.ble examples of Elizabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to Death. "O eloquent, just and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _hic jacet_."

Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet. Spenser calls him "the summer's nightingale," and George Puttenham, in his _Art of English Poesy_ (1589), finds his "vein most lofty, insolent, and pa.s.sionate." Puttenham used _insolent_ in its old sense, _uncommon_; but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, _The Lie_, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life--the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, _The Pilgrimage_. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are a.s.serted in the ma.n.u.scripts or by tradition to have been "made by Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he was beheaded." Of one such poem the a.s.sertion is probably true--namely, the lines "found in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster."

Even such is Time, that takes in trust, Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days; But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My G.o.d shall raise me up, I trust!

The strictly _literary_ prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented--outside of the _Arcadia_ and _Euphues_ already mentioned--chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian _novelle_. George Turberville's _Tragical Tales_ (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_ (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio's _Decameron_ and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge's _Rosalind_ and Robert Greene's _Pandosto_, the sources respectively of Shakspere's _As You Like It_ and _Winter's Tale_, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against "Martin Marprelate,"

an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so c.u.mbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were Nash's _Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_, Lyly's _Pap with a Hatchet_, and Greene's _Groat's Worth of Wit_. Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the _Chronicle of England_, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot.

Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most important was Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the first four books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of law, and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous, stately, and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would doubtless have been written in Latin.

The life of Francis Bacon, "the father of inductive philosophy," as he has been called--better, the founder of inductive logic--belongs to English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to the history of English philosophy. But his volume of _Essays_ was a contribution to general literature. In their completed form they belong to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims--the text for an essay--than that developed treatment of a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were, said their author, "as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appet.i.te than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays, so called, in the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the thing is ancient." The word he took from the French _essais_ of Montaigne, the first two books of which had been published in 1592. Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they "came home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate t.i.tle explains their character: _Counsels Civil and Moral_, that is, pieces of advice touching the conduct of life, "of a nature whereof men shall find much in experience, little in books." The essays contain the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice."

"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination, and his n.o.ble English rises now and then, as in his essay _On Death_, into eloquence--the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that _lumen sicc.u.m_ which he loved to commend, "not drenched or bloodied by the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was a dry wine.

A popular cla.s.s of books in the 17th century were "characters" or "witty descriptions of the properties of sundry persons," such as the Good Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some modern _Heads of the People_, where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more modern instance of the kind is George Eliot's _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, which derives its t.i.tle from the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the original models of this kind of literature.

The most popular character-book in Europe in the 17th century was La Bruyere's _Caracteres_. But this was not published till 1688. In England the fas.h.i.+on had been set in 1614, by the _Characters_ of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed. One of Overbury's sketches--the _Fair and Happy Milkmaid_--is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness. "Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made hay-c.o.c.k. She makes her hand hard with labor, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel, she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She bestows her year's wages at next fair, and, in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and surgery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones. Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."

England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said Bishop Joseph Hall, which were "sung to the wheel and sung unto the pail." Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered s.n.a.t.c.hes of them through his plays, and wrote others like them himself:

Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song.

That old and antique song we heard last night.

Methinks it did relieve my pa.s.sion much, More than light airs and recollected terms Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.

The knitters and the spinners in the sun And the free maids that weave their threads with bones Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth[20]

And dallies with the innocence of love Like the old age.

[Footnote 20: Simple truth.]

Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the _Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon_, and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_ and _Shepherd's Pipe_ (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, _The Pa.s.sionate Shepherd to his Love_, which Shakspere quoted in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and Juliet_ (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero and Leander_, and Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of Lucrece_, the first of these on an Italian and the other three on cla.s.sical subjects, though handled in any thing but a cla.s.sical manner. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand. It is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the _Rape of Lucrece_ especially, the poet lingers over the a.n.a.lysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have done.

In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who wrote the last four "sestiads"),[21] the path is utterly lost, "with woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown." One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one compares any pa.s.sage in Marlowe and Chapman's _Hero and Leander_ with Byron's ringing lines:

The wind is high on h.e.l.le's wave, As on that night of stormy water, When love, who sent, forgot to save The young, the beautiful, the brave, The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter.

[Footnote 21: From Sestos on the h.e.l.lespont, where Hero dwelt.]

Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from 1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a great Elizabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman's time. Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_, is well known. In his translation of the _Odyssey_, Chapman employed the ten-syllabled heroic line chosen by most of the standard translators; but for the _Iliad_ he used the long "fourteener."

Certainly all later versions--Pope's and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and Bryant's--seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman's English, which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist. In Chapman it is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many pa.s.sages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer's hexameters.

From his bright helm and s.h.i.+eld did burn a most unwearied fire, Like rich Antumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase.

The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea, found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow's _Survey of London_, and Harrison's _Description of England_ (prefixed to Holinshed's _Chronicle_), but in long historical and descriptive poems, like William Warner's _Albion's England_, 1586; Samuel Daniel's _History of the Civil Wars_, 1595-1602; Michael Drayton's _Barons' Wars,_ 1596, _England's Heroical Epistles_, 1598, and _Polyolbion,_ 1613. The very plan of these works was fatal to their success. It is not easy to digest history and geography into poetry. Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three, but his _Polyolbion_ was nothing more than a "gazeteer in rime," a topographical survey of England and Wales, with tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of Marlowe, that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets had;" and there are brave things in Drayton, but they are only occasional pa.s.sages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His _Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the popular fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a good honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative piece, his _Epistle to the Countess of c.u.mberland,_ a sermon apparently on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous pa.s.sage in praise of philosophy,

Suave, mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis, E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.

But the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of immortal thought and pa.s.sion. Such was in England the fortune of the stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible, and acted at first by the priests as ill.u.s.trations of Scripture history and additions to the church service on feasts and saints' days.

Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them, and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air. In some English cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed almost to the close of the 16th century. And in the celebrated Pa.s.sion Play at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle play that has survived to our own day. These were followed by the moral plays, in which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, l.u.s.ty Juventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce were the persons of the drama. The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract vice, who became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The "formal Vice, Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for his business to belabor the roaring Devil with his wooden sword:

...with his dagger of lath In his rage and his wrath Cries 'Aha!' to the Devil, 'Pare your nails, Goodman Evil!'

He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch, of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to h.e.l.l for his crimes.

Masques and interludes--the latter a species of short farce--were popular at the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was often entertained at the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto. Original comedies and tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence and Seneca, and chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings. There was a master of the revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays to be performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children of the Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral. These early plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakspere's; but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary value.

There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy n.o.blemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players, who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until stationary theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of literature. In 1576 the first London play-houses, known as the Theater and the Curtain, were erected in the suburb of Sh.o.r.editch, outside the city walls. Later the Rose, the Hope, the Globe, and the Swan were built on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers resorting to them were accustomed to "take boat." These locations were chosen in order to get outside the jurisdiction of the mayor and corporation, who were Puritans, and determined in their opposition to the stage. For the same reason the Blackfriars, belonging to the company that owned the Globe--the company in which Shakspere was a stockholder--was built, about 1596, within the "liberties" of the dissolved monastery of the Blackfriars.

These early theaters were of the rudest construction. The six-penny spectators, or "groundlings," stood in the yard or pit, which had neither floor nor roof. The s.h.i.+lling spectators sat on the stage, where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence they chaffed the actors or the "opposed rascality" in the yard. There was no scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys. Plays were acted in the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or "Rome," or whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude appliances must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their public, and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of that day, that it responded to the appeal. It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals of s.p.a.ce and time, and "with aid of some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster's long jars." Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle, or cla.s.sical unities of time and place, to make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy. But the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the audience, and they decided for feedom and action, rather than restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of Shakspere and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in London in full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants.

Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the Englishmen of that time than it has ever been before or since. It was his club, his novel, his newspaper, all in one. No great drama has ever flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the Elizabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors, and familiar with stage effect. Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and Fletcher, who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not dependent on their pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived in a theatrical atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be put on.

It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence, some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome property in his native Stratford. Accordingly, shortly after 1580, a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a career. These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in wretchedness. Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme dest.i.tution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring, and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl.

The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays between 1584 and 1601. They were written for court entertainments, mostly in prose and on mythological subjects. They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk and vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them. All the characters talk Ephuism. The best of these was _Alexander and Campaspe_, the plot of which is briefly as follows. Alexander has fallen in love with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the artist Apelles to paint her portrait. During the sittings Apelles becomes enamored of his subject and declares his pa.s.sion, which is returned. Alexander discovers their secret, but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the lovers' hands. The situation is a good one, and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of pa.s.sionate scenes, gives us clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings.

For example:

"_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world?"

"_Camp_. He that made me last in the world."

"_Apel_. That was G.o.d."

"_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc.

Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's indebtedness to the fas.h.i.+on thus set is seen in such pa.s.sages as the wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_, greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.

The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere's forerunners, or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. _Tamburlaine_ was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with pa.s.sages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his _Discoveries_, the "scenical strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere put a quotation from _Tamburlaine_ into the mouth of his ranting Pistol. Marlowe's _Edward II_. was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays. It was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has provoked with the latter's _Richard II._ But the most interesting of Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the _Tragical History of Doctor Faustus_. The subject is the same as in Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty l.u.s.t for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdermain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in witchcraft. The greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn.

O, _lente, lente currite, noctis equi_!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike....

O soul, be changed into little water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!

Marlowe's genius was pa.s.sionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery.

George Peele's masterpiece, _David and Bethsabe_, was also, in many respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than dramatic, consisting not in the characterization--which is feeble--but in the Eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one n.o.ble chorus--

O proud revolt of a presumptuous man,

which reminds one of pa.s.sages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and occasionally Peele rises to such high aeschylean audacities as this: