5 In order to earn money, it was necessary, like Shakespeare, to become a manager, to try to have a share in the property of a theatre; but such success is rare, and the life which they lead, a life of actors and artists, improvident, full of excess, lost amid debauchery and acts of violence, amidst women of evil fame, in contact with young profligates, among the temptations of misery, imagination and license, generally leads them to exhaustion, poverty, and death. Men received enjoyment from them, but neglected and despised them. One actor, for a political allusion, was sent to prison, and only just escaped losing his ears; great men, men in office, abused them like servants. Heywood, who played almost every day, bound himself, in addition, to write a sheet daily, for several years composes at haphazard in taverns, labors and sweats like a true literary hack, and dies leaving two hundred and twenty pieces, of which most are lost. Kyd, one of the earliest in date, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last, at the end of his career, was obliged to become once more a schoolmaster. Massinger dies unknown; and in the parish register we find only this sad mention of him: "Philip Massinger, a stranger." A few months after the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask alms of the City, because he had left nothing. Imagination, as Drummond said of Ben Jonson, oppressed their reason; it is the common failing of poets. They wish to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoyment; their mood, their heart governs them; in their life, as in their works, impulses are irresistible; desire comes suddenly, like a wave, drowning reason, resistance—often even giving neither reason nor resistance time to show themselves.1 Many are roisterers, sad roisterers of the same sort, such as Musset and Murger, who give themselves up to every passion, and "drown their sorrows in the bowl;" capable of the purest and most poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tenderness, and who yet can only undermine their health and mar their fame. Such are Nash, Decker, and Greene; Nash, a fantastic satirist, who abused his talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune; Decker, who passed three 1 See, amongst others, The Woman Killed with Kindness, by Heywood. Mrs. Frankfort, so upright of heart, accepts Wendoll at his first offer. Sir Francis Acton, at the sight of her whom he wishes to dishonor, and whom he hates, falls "into an ecstasy," and dreams of nothing save marriage. Compare the sudden transport of Juliet, Romeo, Macbeth, Miranda, etc.; the counsel of Prospero to Fernando, when he leaves him alone for a moment with Miranda. years in the King's Bench prison; Greene, above all, a pleasing wit, copious, graceful, who took a delight in destroying himself, publicly with tears confessing his vices,' and the next moment plunging into them again. These are mere androgynes, true courtesans, in manners, body, and heart. Quitting Cambridge, "with good fellows as free-living as himself," Greene had traveled over Spain, Italy, "in which places he sawe and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare." You see the poor man is candid, not sparing himself; he is natural; passionate in everything, repentance or otherwise; above all of ever-varying mood; made for self-contradiction; not self-correction. On his return he became, in London, a supporter of taverns, a haunter of evil places. In his Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance he says: "I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight. . . After I had wholly betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise) I was so far from calling upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of living; and for those my vaine discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long. If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied; let me shift after death as I may. 'Hell!' quoth I; 'what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than myselfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse. . . . If I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last.' ... ... 999 A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious verse the regularity and calm of an upright life; then returns to London, spends his property and his wife's fortune with "a sorry ragged queane," in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans; drinking, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and orgies; writing for bread, sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of his wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy of Rolla;2 very often 1 Compare La Vie de Bohême and Les Nuits d'Hiver, by Murger; Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, by A. de Musset. 2 The hero of one Alfred de Musset's poems.-TR. disgusted with himself, seized with a fit of weeping between two merry bouts, and writing little pieces to accuse himself, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn young people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. He was soon worn out by this kind of life; six years were enough to exhaust him. An indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings finished him. If it had not been for his landlady, who succored him, he "would have perished in the streets." He lasted a little longer, and then his light went out; now and then he begged her "pittifully for a penny pott of malmesie;" he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and when his own was "a washing," he was obliged to borrow her husband's. "His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges," and the poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding sheet, and six and fourpence for the burial. 3 In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced its way, and amongst others, that of the first, of the most powerful, of the true, founder of the dramatic school, Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces which brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas which hallow them, break forth impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like Kett,1 is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity, declares Moses "a juggler," Christ more worthy of death than Barabbas, says that "yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent and more admirable methode," and "almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme."2 Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of thought gave rise to in these new minds, who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared to walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded with children, from the straps and awls, he found himself studying at Cambridge, probably through the patronage of a great man, and on his return to London, in want, amid the license of the green-room, the low houses and taverns, 1 Burnt in 1589. 2 I have used Marlowe's Works, ed. Dyce, 3 vols., 1850. Append. i. vol. 3.—TR. his head was in a ferment, and his passions became excited. He turned actor; but having broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was begun, which, if time had not failed, would probably have brought him to the stake. He made love to a drab, and in trying to stab his rival, his hand was turned, so that his own blade entered his eye and his brain, and he died, cursing and blaspheming. He was only thirty years old. Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and occupied in such a manner! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder, atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy bespattered with blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations of the English stage, Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo, even the Pericles of Shakespeare, reach the same height of extravagance, magniloquence, and horror.1 It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall Schiller's Robbers, and how modern democracy has recognized for the first time its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor.2 So here the characters struggle and roar, stamp on the earth, gnash their teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the drums beat, coats of mail file past, armies clash, men stab each other, or themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats and lyrical figures; 3 kings die, straining a bass voice; "now doth ghastly death with greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my life." The hero in Tamburlaine the Great1 is seated on a chariot drawn by chained kings; he burns 1 See especially Titus Andronicus, attributed to Shakespeare: there are parricides, mothers whom they cause to eat their children, a young girl who appears on the stage violated, with her tongue and hands cut off. 2 The chief character in Schiller's Robbers, a virtuous brigand and redresser of wrongs.-TR. 3 For in a field, whose superficies And sprinkled with the brains of slaughter'd men, And he that means to place himself therein, Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses, Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks, Ere I would lose the title of a king.-Tamburlaine, part ii. i. 3. 4 The editor of Marlowe's Works, Pickering, 1826, says in his Introduction: "Both the matter and style of Tamburlaine, however, differ materially from Marlowe's other compositions, and doubts have more than once been suggested as to whether the play was properly towns, drowns women and children, puts men to the sword, and finally, seized with an inscrutable sickness, raves in monstrous outcries against the gods, whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless pride, of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many devastations, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of savage and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this prodigality of carnage, this display of splendors and exaggerated colors, this railing of demoniacal passions, this audacity of grand impiety. If in the dramas which succeed it, The Massacre at Paris, The Few of Malta, the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas the Jew maddened with hate, is thenceforth no longer human; he has been treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a beast. He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words: "Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words, All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like a demon who rejoices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the very extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors; and by forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she takes the veil, and to avenge him assigned to him. We think that Marlowe did not write it." Dyce is of a contrary opin ion.-TR. 1 Marlowe's The Few of Malta, ii. p. 275 et passim. |