Tragedy Part 3

Still further, a stimulus for tragedy was exercised by the daily events of that active era. These stirred men's imagination and ambition, and must almost inevitably have directed artistic impulse toward the heroic, the pa.s.sionate, and the terrible. The abundance of bloodshed in Elizabethan tragedy may find some interpretation in the fact that Ben Jonson killed his man in a duel and that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. The time was one of bloodshed, violence, quick and brutal pa.s.sion; a time in which the torture of a Gloster or the revenge of a Shylock was far closer to life, to the life at least of poets and dramatists, than such stories are to-day.

Drake in his cabin drinking and praying with the unmoved lieutenant whom he was to hang the next day is a bit of fact that rivals in horror the devilries of a Barabas. Even if Seneca's example had not already approved themes of adultery, murder, blood-vengeance, the atrocities of tyranny, and the deadly strife of father and son, such themes must have stirred men's minds in the days of the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholemew and the career of Mary Stuart. If tradition had not already selected the falls of princes as the especial field for tragedy, the history of monarchical Europe in the sixteenth century must have given such stories a power of appeal hardly to be appreciated now. In that strenuous generation the dramatist must have found artistic impulses from b.l.o.o.d.y and gruesome deeds, and no less from daring ambition, heroic struggle, and indomitable greatness of mind.

The summons, however, which the tragic muse heeded came directly from the public theatres and the professional actors. The university men who at this time were writing for the theatre under the lash and loans of a slave-driving theatrical manager may have been tempted to forget that their sordid and Bohemian existence offered a means for triumphant artistic expression. The London theatres were now well established, patronized by the courtiers, and secured in prosperity by the motley audiences that crowded their performances. They had become important centres in the social life of the time, comparable to the newspaper offices of a twentieth-century city in their close touch with the daily life about them; and in their task of affording amus.e.m.e.nt and information fulfilling in part the functions of periodicals and novels as well as of the drama at present. The stage, without scenery, was still in a transition state between the medieval and modern, and, to our view, almost unrealizably crude. Places were sometimes indicated by signs; properties, beds, tables, or trees were brought on or off as occasion required; or, a heavier property, like a cave, might remain whether the scene was in cave-land or a counting-room. There was no drop curtain; actors went off, others came on, and the place changed from a seacoast to the palace; or, the actors merely moved across the platform, and it transpired that they had pa.s.sed from "a fair and pleasant green" to a room in the house of Faustus. At the close of a tragedy all the survivors might be needed to bear off the bodies of the dead. A balcony in the rear of the stage stood in stead of a castle wall or the deck of a s.h.i.+p, while a curtained s.p.a.ce below might represent an inner room or a dungeon vault. A curtain extending across the stage seems at times to have been used in managing a change of scene. Spectacular elements were not lacking: fireworks, ascents and descents of G.o.ds, armies, coronations, and battles delighted the eye. On costume, anachronistic but elaborate, the manager lavished his money and ingenuity. Cleopatra tightly laced, Tamburlaine in scarlet copper breeches are recorded facts, but Venuses, Apollos, mermaids, devils, satyrs, and nymphs leave something for fancy to conceive, as does the "gown to go invisible in" which perhaps s.h.i.+elded Ariel or Puck. Of the acting we have little information. Female parts were played by boys; clowns with their jigs were great favorites, but a considerable skill in acting must be supposed,--less subtle, less occupied with stage business than to-day, more declamatory possibly, and more attentive to the spoken word. Any superiority in the appreciation possessed by the audiences over those of to-day must be attributed not to their superior intelligence, but to their long training in listening to plays. They probably differed from uneducated audiences in the cheaper theatres of to-day chiefly, if at all, in spontaneity of emotions, a desire for emotional incongruity, and a cultivated delight in verbal fireworks or felicities. It is certain that in the time of Marlowe they were gaping for sensation and joyed in a comedy of beatings, a tragedy of murders, and a mixture of jigging and villany. For such audiences, for such a stage, under stress of immediate demand requiring hasty and collaborative work, Marlowe and his contemporaries wrote. They were hack writers, and so viewed by the literati of their day. Every one of them, Shakespeare included, had in the first place to satisfy the demands of the public theatres. This needs to be remembered no less than the fact that the plays of nearly all, of the meanest hack as well as Shakespeare, seem to have felt the stir and thrill of the effort to express thought in enduring words.

In the course of the six or seven years ending with Marlowe's death in 1593, tragedy experienced a rapid and multiform development. The various influences already noticed in the last chapter as at work were developed by the ingenuity and innovation of a dozen writers, and translated into the expression of individual genius by Marlowe and Shakespeare. No theory of tragedy ruled the theatres; no school of dramatists adopted any code of principles; the plays which we cla.s.s as tragedies were mostly known as histories and were written in violence to the accepted literary conception.

Nevertheless, tragedy was establis.h.i.+ng itself as a popular species of drama, was separating its themes and their treatment clearly from those of comedy, and was defining the course which it was to follow until the Puritan revolution.

The impossibility of determining a precise chronology of the stage history of the period renders the exact appraisal of indebtedness, or the tracing of any certain evolution, very insecure. The changes in the companies in 1594 and the consequent publication of a large number of plays in the same year enable us to fix on a number of tragedies acted before Marlowe's death, and we may safely add a few others as not later than 1595. Among these extant tragedies and in the names of those that have not survived there are representatives of various types,--biblical plays, tragedies dealing with romantic love, domestic tragedies telling stories of contemporary crimes. In any one of these plays, indeed, various types may be combined; the writers were concerned with telling stories, not with _l'evolution des genres_. But the most salient and pervasive forces working in tragedy may be roughly denominated as (1) the chronicle history play, (2) the revenge type of tragedy, (3) the type of tragedy created by Marlowe. To these should perhaps be added romantic comedy with its idealized love story and its element of averted tragedy. But the first three types, though overlapping and not distinct, were of marked importance in the history of tragedy and need especial consideration in connection with the most important dramatists of this period, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

The chronicle history play may claim attention first, not because it was demonstrably earlier in appearance than the others, but because it engaged the efforts of nearly every dramatic writer of the period, and because in its disregard of foreign influence or parallel in its methods and structure, and in its devotion to the demands of the London theatres, it is most typical of the drama of the period. The prime essential of a play was that it should tell a story. A playwright took his material from _novella_, poem, or chronicle, and strove to translate it into an interesting and varied series of scenes. In the chronicles he found material peculiarly suited to such translation. Everything was there,--battles, coronations, counsels, conspiracies, amours, speeches, characterization, and sentiments.

No enlargement was necessary as in the case of a _novella_, no considerations of consistency of characterization, few incidents in addition to those in the highway or the byways of the narrative, and only a minimum of invention. The interest of a distinct plot was superseded by that of historical persons, events, and spectacles, and these compelled only such unity as might be secured by taking the reign of one monarch as the basis of a play, or sometimes of several plays. The presentation of history involved a large number of persons on the stage, many changes of place, a long stretch of time, and an incongruity of matter, all this loosely organized into scenes themselves often long and varied and admitting some change of place and lapse of time within their bounds.

Though the scene, rather than the act, was the unit in popular drama, it had almost no structural value. A play was really a continuous performance, the actors coming and going, a battle intervening, and now and then a withdrawal of all the actors and the appearance of a new group presaging a marked change of place or the beginning of an entirely different action. In the arrangement of scenes, however, some attention to parallel, contrast, and climax soon became manifest; and some integration of the confused material from the chronicles, particularly in the separation from scenes abounding in action of those purely narrative or expository and those purely lyrical, chiefly lamentations. In spite of such beginnings of system, the early chronicle plays, "The Famous Victories of Henry V," "Jack Straw," "Leir," "Edward I," and "The Troublesome Reign" are less coherent in structure, more incongruous in material, and less regardful of any clear fable, tragic or comic, than are other contemporary plays.

To determine criteria to define these plays and their successors as a cla.s.s is by no means easy. They were usually based on the chronicles, but the method of composition just described was applied to legend or poem with similar results, and there were also plays based on chronicles of contemporary events. They had for their main purpose the presentation of history, but this was shared by plays on French and Roman as well as English history, and there were historical plays that had no marks of the chronicle method of structure. The English chronicle plays usually show a p.r.o.nounced patriotic temper, but this is often subsidiary and neglected in the desire for farce or sensation. The spectacular features are a characteristic element, a battle-scene being perhaps the most indispensable element or ingredient of a chronicle play, but this again fails to supply even more than a superficial criterion. In the popularity of the presentations of historical facts, all kinds of stories were worked over into a likeness to "true chronicle history," and the genuine historical, legendary, and biographical plays are hardly distinguishable from the pretenders. An illuminating ill.u.s.tration of the characteristics of the national drama about 1590 can be found in a comparison of two dramatic versions of a romance in Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," one by Cinthio himself, the other by Robert Greene. The Italian play is a tragicomedy in strict Senecan form, in which Arrenopia (Greene's Dorothea) appears as a declamatory queen confiding her troubles to the attendant nurse. Greene took the romantic comedy, added some pseudo-historical events, patriotic sentiments, and a pitched field for the finale, and called the whole "The Scottish Historie of James IV, slaine at Flodden." For our purpose the chronicle plays are to be regarded less as a distinct type than as representing a set of practices in vogue at this period and widely influential on the drama's development. They possessed the following characteristics and imposed some or all of them on very different forms of drama: subjects drawn from English history, the presentation of historical and political events, an incongruous mixture of material, a narrative structure almost as unorganized as the chronicles themselves, patriotic sentiments, and the stage pageantry of court and camp.

From their earliest appearance, however, the chronicle plays offered opportunities for developments later consummated by Shakespeare. Comic scenes were freely interspersed to enliven the tedium of royal declamations, and in these lay the possibility of the combination of history and comedy in the Falstaff plays. On the other hand, the history of a doleful fall of a prince or the retribution visited on some tyrant gave the plays a tragic tone and opened the way for "Macbeth" and "Lear." "The Troublesome Reign of King John,"[9] the basis of Shakespeare's play, is the best example of an early chronicle play presenting undeveloped possibilities for tragedy. It is written partly in blank verse, partly in rhyme, and partly in prose. It does not follow the chronicles with any fidelity, but twists history, adds fiction, and proclaims throughout a vigorous protestant patriotism. Battles, emba.s.sies, farce, orations, death, and much else mingle together, each scene being treated like another and no discernible method being followed in their arrangement or proportion, except that of a loose adherence to the scheme of "a life and death." The first part closes with John crowned and a.s.sured of the miscarriage of his intended murder of Arthur; in the second part, as the address to the reader declares,

"First scenes shows Arthur's death in infancie, And last concludes John's fatall tragedie."

"The Troublesome Reign" indicates what little advance had been made toward tragedy when Marlowe's first play appeared. The prologue to that play was a declaration of reform and innovation.

"From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."

The doggerel rhyme favored in the popular drama was to give place to blank verse, and the jigging clowns to heroic themes and "high astounding terms."

Marlowe came to the theatre,[10] fresh from the university, his fancy aflame with the beauty of Latin verse and story, his mind storming with the problems and ambitions of adolescent genius. He threw aside Senecan traditions and devoted himself to meeting the demands of the professional stage. When a few years later he died, English tragedy had been created anew largely through his achievement.

His independence and initiative are shown in his choice of subjects.

Although in "Dido" he took a standard theme of humanistic tragedy, and in the Henry VI plays and "Edward II" followed the prevailing taste for English history, and in "The Ma.s.sacre of Paris" another fas.h.i.+on for the dramatization of current atrocities; yet in "Tamburlaine" he chose the story of a world conqueror, in "Faustus" a legend that had just entered print in the German "Volksbuch" of 1587, and in "The Jew of Malta" he worked over unknown sources into a tragedy of revenge with evident freedom of invention. All three stories present notable contributions to tragic themes, and the last two disregard both the fas.h.i.+on for historical subjects and the requirement that tragedy deal only with princes. These new and varied themes gave a chance for a considerable revolution in the content of tragedy. Revenge, murders, battles, intrigue, physical horrors are still prominent; but the Senecan round of incest and adultery disappears, and the "Mirror for Magistrates" no longer represents the epitome of tragic action.

Marlowe's choice and treatment of plots seem, indeed, dictated by a new conception of tragedy, as dealing not merely with a life and death, or a b.l.o.o.d.y crime, or a reversal of fortune, but with the heroic struggle of a great personality, doomed to inevitable defeat. "Tamburlaine" is scarcely a tragedy at all, but rather a chronicle of the hero's greatness; but in "Faustus" and "The Jew" heroes with ambitions boundless and pa.s.sionate like Tamburlaine's are overwhelmed in the end by the inexorable destiny of human weakness. In "Edward II," where the hero is less dominant over the action, the study of historical facts results in a more restrained, more human presentation of the same theme, a ruling pa.s.sion drawing the protagonist to pitiful defeat.

In the structure of his plots Marlowe forsook the Senecan models and began with the methods of the chronicle play. "Tamburlaine" is a chronicle history, presenting the story of the events of a life and ending with death. Originally the play contained comic scenes, omitted in the published form and evidently of no value in structure or conception. Without these there is enough of a medley, though the amazing succession of conquests, defiances, murders, harangues, battles, funerals, wooings, and horrors is arranged with considerable skill. There is manifest regard for contrast in the alternating exhibitions of Tamburlaine's power and his enemies'

weakness; his love for Zenocrate, an addition to the source, is integrated with the main story of conquest; and in Part I the climactical arrangement is emphasized by the division into acts. Each act comprises an important stage in Tamburlaine's career, act v presenting the culmination in the suicide of the Turkish emperor and empress, the conquest of Arabia, Zenocrate's former betrothed, and the submission of her conquered father to her marriage with Tamburlaine. Part II, the prologue implies, was an afterthought due to the popularity of Part I. The climax is carried on somewhat loosely up to the harnessing of the jades of Asia; but the reversal of fortune, though developed in the death of Zenocrate, the unworthiness of the eldest son, and the approach of death to Tamburlaine, is not given effective emphasis. Tamburlaine's death is merely the end of the play, not a tragic catastrophe. Epical and crude though their structure is, the two plays possess a firmer organization and a greater unity than any preceding popular tragedy. Everything centres in the protagonist; he keeps the middle of the stage; his towering pa.s.sion and incessant declamation fix one's attention; episodes like the deaths of the Turks or of Olympia hardly divert the mind from his t.i.tanic personality.

A similar unity governs the structure of "Faustus" and "The Jew." In each there are many actions, some comic, instead of one serious action, and the history of a lifetime instead of a great emotional crisis; but in each the dominant figure and the course of his controlling pa.s.sion impose a certain unity of structure. Both begin with soliloquies, revealing the protagonists at the height of fortune and about to face crises in their careers; and it is significant of the increased importance given to inner conflict that reflective soliloquies, neglected in "Tamburlaine," play a considerable part, especially in "Faustus." In both plays there is also advance in the clear conception of catastrophe, which now controls the structure. In "The Jew" his thwarted l.u.s.t for gold drives him through a series of villanous triumphs over difficulties until he is melodramatically hoist with his own petard. In "Faustus" the choice of the devilish magic leads through apparent success, past opportunities for repentance, to final remorse and d.a.m.nation. In both plays, the domination of the protagonist by a pa.s.sion, its conflicting joys and sorrows, and its final failure become points for emphasis. The history of a life thus becomes organized into a tragedy.

In "Edward II," Marlowe's masterpiece in structure as in other respects, there is an absence of comedy, for which he seems to have had no apt.i.tude, and adherence to the chronicles is governed by his maturing sense of the structural principles which should proportion the tragic story. Twenty years of confusion are condensed into five acts which attain dramatic organization not only under the direction of the central personality and the inevitable catastrophe, but also from the skillful handling of the counter-force. The play begins with a salient manifestation in the recall of Gaveston of the pa.s.sion which is to be the king's downfall. The hazardous combination of the two similar careers of Gaveston and Spenser is adroitly managed; it develops the central theme of Edward's weakness and brings into active conflict the counter-force of the barons under the leaders.h.i.+p of Mortimer. The alternating triumph and discomfiture of the king in his struggle with the barons leads to the climax of their humiliation at the end of act iii; and thus the turning-point of the action is given an emphasis not found in earlier plays. Henceforth the counter-force is in the ascendant, and the catastrophe is realized with a tremendous power that justifies Lamb's extravagance: "the death scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or modern with which I am acquainted." The play, to be sure, has many faults of structure. It is the product of an immature period of the drama and of crude theatrical conditions; but it indicates clearly how Marlowe was developing tragic movement out of the confused narratives of the chronicles, and was giving to a presentation of diverse and crowded actions principles not altogether unlike those that Aristotle had found in the Attic drama.

It should be added that the manifest excellences of the dramatic treatment lie less in the structure of any one play as a whole than in the handling of the separate scenes. These have, of course, the peculiarities of the popular stage and the chronicle plays. Events are sometimes reported by an intercalary narrative like scene ii, act i, of "Edward II," which consists of four lines by Gaveston, announcing that the n.o.bles have gone to Lambeth, and four words of reply by Kent. Soliloquies are often used to explain action or character. In the task of translating incident into dramatic situation, however, Marlowe had the advantages of centuries of dramatic practice and the traditions of tragic acting, and his genius often worked with facility and power. These qualities are most manifest in the death scenes. Olympia, Bajazeth, Zabina, Zenocrate, all die with at least stage effectiveness; and in the deaths of Faustus and Edward, Marlowe's dramatic power reached its highest mark. Death, synonymous with tragic catastrophe, was revealed to future dramatists as something more than physical horror or the end of existence. Death became the loss of active and glorious living, the negation of individual power, the expiring struggle of the drama of life, its last defiance and its most irresistible appeal to pity and terror.

Characterization, like conception and structure, in Marlowe's tragedy is largely an affair of the protagonist. Minor figures are for the most part mere sketches without any sustained and consistent delineation. Only in "Edward II" does the antagonist receive much attention, and only in that play is the character of the tragic hero free from lapses into caricature and absurdity. The protagonists, as in many tragedies before and since, are evil men intent on evil deeds. They appeal to our sympathy only in misfortune and disaster; in more fortunate circ.u.mstances they run counter to moral laws and excite a mixture of admiration, horror, and even contempt. Tamburlaine the atheist and Faust the dealer in magic invited a greater condemnation in every Christian then than now. Barabas is conceived, under the inspiration of Machiavelli and perhaps also of stage practice, as an intriguing villain with all the accompaniments ever since familiar in drama and fiction. He is the source of all evil and utterly without conscience; he avows his villany to the audience and he works by crafty intrigue with the aid of an equally conscienceless accomplice.

Edward II, on the other hand, is of the type of tyrants, weak, vacillating, and self-indulgent, and he offers the difficult dramatic problem of a protagonist who is sometimes contemptible and must sometimes be heroic and pitiful. Marlowe's conception of a tragic hero, however, transcended any outlines furnished by his sources or any stage types such as villain and tyrant. He conceived his heroes first of all as men capable of great pa.s.sions, consumed by their desires, abandoned to the pursuit of their l.u.s.ts, whether they led to glory, butchery, loss of kingdom, or eternal d.a.m.nation. This intensity of emotion gives them an elevation and a heroic interest that outlasts contemptibility or pathos. Nor are they without representational value. They linger in the mind as men, absurd, exaggerated, monstrous at times, but appealingly human in moments when their pa.s.sion rings true, and impressively typical of the eternal struggle of pa.s.sion and desire against the fixed limits of human attainment. It is in the realization of their emotions that the plays secure their great impressiveness. Tragedy has become not the presentation of history, myth, or events of any sort, but the presentation of the pa.s.sionate struggle and pitiful defeat of an extraordinary human being.

Genuine human pa.s.sion and a vital conception of life's tragedy found expression in verse, sometimes inspired, sometimes absurd, but always spontaneous and unfaltering. Blank verse, borrowed from Italy and adopted in English Senecan plays, now became a new instrument, and its preeminent adaptability for tragic poetry henceforth long remained unquestioned. If it has had many greater masters since, it had none comparable before, and, in spite of stiffness, monotony, and great unevenness, it rises now and again to remarkable technical excellence. It is _sui generis_, without known models, though it gathers to itself many of the prevailing characteristics of Renaissance poetry. It has plenty of Senecan hyperbole, but curiously little of Senecan ant.i.thesis or aphorism; it abounds in rant and bombast; it is over-adorned with cla.s.sical allusion; it delights in ornament and sonority; and in the main it is declamatory and lyrical rather than dramatically suited to character and situation. Again, it is mannered and often monotonous, especially in "Tamburlaine," where the repet.i.tion of names and the recurrence of polysyllabic words at the ends of lines give the familiar swing:--

"To ride in triumph through Persepolis"....

"Soft ye, my lords, and sweet Zenocrate"....

"Then shall my native city, Samarcanda."

Yet the lover of romantic poetry will find delight in the very impetuosity of the rant, the thunder of the declamation, the roll of the proper names, the color and pageantry of the descriptions, the occasional loveliness of the luxurious cla.s.sicism, and yet more in the splendid surges of the verse to reveal the turmoil and anguish of pa.s.sionate death. From the first moment Marlowe was an undoubted poet; and to his tremendous facility of words and rhythm he was adding, as "Edward II" reveals, a moderation of ornament, an evenness of power, and a dramatic consistency, while still retaining the potentiality of dazzling dramatic flash. He brought not only blank verse but poetry to the English drama, and the greatness of its style dates from his achievement.

We must not, however, in the poet forget the playwright, or lose sight of Marlowe's contributions to the purely theatrical side of the drama.

"Tamburlaine" set a standard in stage effects as well as in poetry. Kings and sultans appear in droves, crowns are handed about like toys, treaties are torn, cities stormed, battles fought. Frequently eight or ten chieftains crowd the stage with their trains. The tents of the conqueror are pitched and changed from white to red and then to black as the beleaguered city continues to withstand his power. An emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cages. Tamburlaine drives the bridled monarchs harnessed to his chariot. Two bodies are burnt; there are murders by the dozen; and there is a solemn funeral scene where the hea.r.s.e advances in the light of a burning town. The popular stage had probably never seen such a spectacle before. In "Faustus" new and even more surprising stage effects are supplied to ill.u.s.trate the wonders of magic.

In "The Jew of Malta" there is a display of plots and atrocities which the plays of the next thirty years strove in vain to surpa.s.s. Apart from these spectacular elements, it is obvious that the characterization and declamation, in fact the very structure of the plays, were designed to supply full opportunity for the acting of Edward Alleyn. He was nearly seven feet tall, we are told, the greatest actor of his day, and especially skilled in majestic parts. So to him, perhaps, as well as to Marlowe's conception of tragedy, was due the one-part play, the sonorous lines, and the pa.s.sionate protagonists.

Such considerations recall the double purpose, hardly separable from the drama and particularly manifest in the Elizabethan dramatists, the two desires, to please their audiences and to create literature. The spectacle, bombast, and horrors, the new and startling stories of Marlowe's plays were certainly intended to win his public, and they probably caused no twinges to his artistic conscience. On the other hand, while hardly an element of the dramas is without the influence of theatrical conditions, and while of deliberate artistic theories there is little evidence, yet the study of character, the underlying conceptions, the maturing power of structure, as well as the beauty and wisdom of separate pa.s.sages, reveal a mind of intellectual and emotional profundity seeking to give n.o.ble expression to the things in life that impressed him most vividly. In the traffic of the stage the young poet found a chance to study men and their motives, to seek "the immortal flowers of poetry," and to utter something of his own experience and view of life. Into the rapid translation of stories for the stage he threw his own conception of the rewards and defeats of an overmastering pa.s.sion, of the glory of struggle, and the pity and terror of failure. In the further development of the drama, his influence continued not only in his series of tragedies forming a fairly definite type, but also as that of an inspiring personality.

"Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had; his raptures were All air and fire, which made his verses clere; For that fine madnes still he did retaine, Which rightly should possess a poet's braine."

DRAYTON: _Epistle to Henry Reynolds._

The influence upon the drama of Marlowe's whilom friend, Thomas Kyd, was not due to his personality, concerning which recently discovered doc.u.ments create no very favorable impression, or to any remarkable poetic genius, but to a single play and the type of tragedy which it fathered. "The Spanish Tragedy,"[11] entered in the Stationers' Register, 1592, and probably acted at about the same time as "Tamburlaine," and earlier than Marlowe's other plays, was the first representative of this type of revenge tragedies, and it gained an immediate and lasting popularity, though after a time encountering the ridicule of Jonson and later dramatists. The story of revenge had already appeared in "h.o.r.estes" and in Latin plays at the universities; and theme, ghost, treatment, and structure were derived from Seneca by Kyd and adapted with great originality to the popular drama. At least, no other dramatist has as good a claim to be considered the creator of a species of tragedy that had a long series of representatives even after its culmination in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."

The main theme of the play is revenge of a father for a son, superintended by a ghost; and this theme attaches to itself other motives important both here and in their later developments. The revenge is delayed by hesitation on the part of Hieronimo, who finds his task a difficult one and requires much proof and superabundant deliberation to spur his irresolution into activity. Madness is another accompaniment of the main theme; the second t.i.tle of the 1602 quarto, "Old Hieronimo mad againe," indicating how important it was in the stage presentation. Hieronimo pretends madness, and his pretended madness often pa.s.ses into real melancholy and distraction.

Isabella, his wife, is driven by insanity to suicide. Intrigue used both against and by the avenger is another important element; the villain is a machinator and Hieronimo finally accomplishes his revenge by means of dissimulation and trickery. According to both Senecan and national precedents, vengeance moves in a pathway of blood; ten of the _dramatis personae_, innocent and guilty alike, pa.s.s to "the loathsome pool of Acheron," and the final slaughter leaves five bodies to be borne from the stage. Intrigue and slaughter characterize most of the tragedies of this period, notably "The Jew of Malta," but the ghost-directed revenge, hesitation, insanity, and the meditative soliloquies distinguished more specifically the Kydian species. In spite of the medley of intrigue and carnage, there is introduced, after Senecan fas.h.i.+on, much philosophizing and introspection. Meditations on fate, revenge, suicide, and similar subjects play a large part in the development of the story and are most frequently given the form of soliloquies. Hieronimo's inner struggle is revealed in lonely communings, now in defense, now in bitter condemnation of his delay.

The structure is an interesting adaptation of Senecan and popular characteristics. The play does not confine itself to the last phase of an action, and it introduces various actions introductory or subsidiary to that of the revenge, and a mixture of comedy. Moreover, everything is represented on the stage with the freedom established in the popular drama.

On the other hand, there is much exposition by means of narrative, and Revenge and the ghost of Andrea appear, after Senecan fas.h.i.+on, as a prologue, and after each act as a sort of vestigial chorus. While there is a surplus of violent and external action, the epic, lyric, and reflective scenes picture an inner conflict and supply both aphorisms and a searching psychology. When late in the play Hieronimo's revenge for his son is finally started, it has to contend with both his own hesitation and the intrigues of the villain. Its development, in comparison with "Hamlet," is absurdly faulty because of Kyd's failure to make clear from the start the character of the avenger; but, if it is studied as a first attempt to give structure to a complex theme, the vicissitudes of Hieronimo's irresolution and frenzy will seem carefully designed and strikingly prophetic of the course of Hamlet's struggle.

Kyd's skill in devising stage situations is shown by the dramatic value and lasting effect on the public of the scene in which Hieronimo is called from his naked bed to discover the body of his son hanging in the arbor, or of the scene in which, offering a handkerchief to the weeping Senex, he draws forth the b.l.o.o.d.y napkin which he has kept as a reminder of his son's death.

The play within the play, used here as a means of revenge; the scenes in which Isabella "runs lunatick"; the laments and final exultation of the ghost; the exhibition of the body of Horatio after the mock play, found later imitators and became usual accessories of revenge tragedies. Indeed, minor bits of stage business, as the wearing of black, the swearing by the cross of the sword, the capture of the accomplice by the watch, the reading of a book before a soliloquy, the falling on the ground as an expression of grief, though not the inventions of Kyd, were given their later vogue partly through the popularity of this play.

Some of the types of character represented also appear again and again in later plays. Lorenzo is the villain par excellence; his accomplice is grotesque as well as evil; and Bel Imperia, both prettily sentimental and desperately revengeful, is of a type not uncommon in later tragedy. The character of Hieronimo, rudely as it is drawn, is not without subtlety of conception. This type of tragic hero, very different from Marlowe's, naturally good and n.o.ble, meditative by temperament, driven to melancholy and madness by the responsibility forced on him by crime, and at length accomplis.h.i.+ng direful revenge through trickery and irony, is manifestly a precursor of Hamlet. Kyd's style justifies Nash's description, "whole handfulls of tragical speeches" and "a blank verse bodged up with ifs and ands." It displays the rhetorician rather than the poet and, like his conception and structure, gives evidence of an ingenious innovator adapting Seneca. It abounds in artificial balance, parallelism, ant.i.theses, word-play, strained figures, and it harrows h.e.l.l for its tragic vocabulary; but its love scenes have a verbal prettiness and its tirades and soliloquies helped to confer on subsequent tragic style sententiousness and elevation as well as rant. Far inferior to "Tamburlaine" as an artistic achievement, "The Spanish Tragedy" can no more than that play be pushed aside as a mere blood and thunder tirade. Beneath its absurdities there lies the conception of an inner struggle against overwhelming responsibility, and of the conflict of the individual against evil and fate.

From the success of such a play Kyd may very naturally have turned to the similar story of revenge embodied in Belleforest's "Historie of Hamblet."

From contemporary references we infer that the old "Hamlet" was a tragedy of blood, written under Senecan influence, and containing a ghost that cried "revenge." If, as seems undoubted, it was used by Shakespeare, traces of it must be found in the German version of Hamlet, in the corrupt first quarto, and even in Shakespeare's final version; but there is as yet no agreement among scholars as to what can be attributed to Shakespeare's borrowing rather than to his invention and transformation. It seems entirely probable, however, that the early play was a companion-piece to "The Spanish Tragedy," containing the motives of revenge, hesitation, insanity, intrigue, and slaughter, with the addition of the murderer's pa.s.sion for the wife of the murdered. On the now established theory that the play was by Kyd, we may infer a protagonist like Hieronimo, much meditating and soliloquizing, a dramatic structure like that of "The Spanish Tragedy," a play within a play, a mad Ophelia, and an intrigue culminating in slaughter. There are evidences in Marston and later contributors to the revenge type that the original "Hamlet," fully as much as "The Spanish Tragedy," served as their model; while doubtless like "The Spanish Tragedy," Kyd's "Hamlet" must have borne a much closer resemblance than even that play to Shakespeare's masterpiece.

"Soliman and Perseda," if not by Kyd, at least shows many evidences of his influence and is itself an interesting combination of the tragedy of revenge and romantic comedy. Love, Fortune, and Death make up a Kydian chorus and debate for supremacy until the close, when Death, like the Ghost, exults in an enumeration of the dead. The love story furnishes a clearly defined plot. The course of true love, despite the heroine's jealousy, an unintended murder by the hero, his banishment, the sack of Rhodes by the Turks, and the Sultan's pa.s.sion for the heroine, ascends through the first four acts to the reunion and prospective happiness of the lovers. The fifth act proceeds to their separation and death through the Sultan's wickedness. Some of the incidents are those of romantic comedy, such as the use of the chain as a symbol of loyal love, its loss, the resulting jealousy, and the donning of boy's clothes by the heroine in order to receive death from the sword of the hated suitor. The fun of the piece is furnished by a _miles gloriosus_, Basilisco, and the extraordinary merit of his characterization furnishes the chief reason for doubting Kyd's authors.h.i.+p. Over lyric love, fortune, and fun, however, Death reigns supreme. This is his favorite tragedy, for eighteen persons are actually killed on the stage, and at the close not one of the _dramatis personae_ is left to bear off the bodies of the slain.

The successes of Marlowe and Kyd gave tragic stories a new popularity with actors and audiences, and the stage was occupied with fiercely declaiming Asiatic conquerors, deep-dyed villains, and shrieking ghosts. Marlowe's themes, characters, and blank verse found many imitators, while Kyd's plays encouraged the presentation of stories of ghosts and revenge similar to those in Seneca and his English imitators. Direct imitations of Seneca in technic and language are also common. The abundance of bloodshed is invariable. A wide range of material was drawn upon, including Asiatic story, Italian _novelle_, Plutarch, Xenophon, and the Bible, although the English chronicles remained the favorite source, and the majority have at least the semblance of a historical setting. Many have a mixture of comic material, but they show in general a preponderance of tragic events and emotions far greater than in the early popular tragedies. There seems to have been a general effort in conformity with an address to the audience placed in the second act of "The Wars of Cyrus," acted by the Children of the Revels, which announces that they have "exiled from our tragicke stage"

"needlesse antickes," and promises "mournfull plaints writ sad, and tragicke tearmes." The gentle reader will not linger long over any of these plays or discover in them signs of nascent genius, but they have a considerable interest in ill.u.s.trating further the development of chronicle history toward tragedy, the influence of the Senecan tradition, and the dominating power of Marlowe's example. They also inform us of the conditions governing tragedy when Shakespeare began his career. In their many resemblances one to another we have evidence not so much of direct borrowings as of the close relations then existing among the few theatrical playwrights and companies. Any successful innovation was bound to have its immediate imitations, and on the other hand the keen rivalry for success was likely to result in innovation and novelty.

Of these plays perhaps "Locrine"[12] has the most diverse indebtedness. It presents a story of a b.l.o.o.d.y family feud, but it is also of the chronicle history order, with a mixture of battles, patriotism, and farce. It exhibits borrowings from Spenser, imitations of "Tamburlaine," Ate as a chorus, dumb shows requiring a menagerie, two ghosts, one of whom takes part in the action, and a story of double revenge. The hero is occupied with revenge number one until the fourth act, when his infidelity makes him the object of a return revenge that culminates in his death. Among the plays mainly indebted to Marlowe are: Greene's "Alphonsus of Aragon," a comedy that is almost a travesty on the first part of "Tamburlaine"; "Selimus," ascribed to Greene, which also shows Senecan structure and philosophy; "The Wounds of Civil War, or the Tragedies of Marius and Sylla," the first extant play based on Plutarch; "The Wars of Cyrus," in part romantic comedy; and Peele's "Battle of Alcazar," which has a presenter, dumb shows, three ghosts, and a Moorish villain of the same cla.s.s as Marlowe's Barabas and Aaron in "t.i.tus Andronicus."

The English chronicle plays also felt Marlowe's influence, most notably in Shakespeare's early historical plays, to be considered in a moment, but also in several plays almost contemporary with "Edward II" and the first versions of "Henry VI." "The True Tragedy of Richard III" (1594), by an unknown author or authors, seems to have preceded Shakespeare's play and to have followed the third part of "Henry VI." It presents a combination of chronicle play with Marlowesque protagonist and a Kydian apparatus of revenge. The ghost of Clarence appears at the beginning crying, "Vindicta,"

and Truth and Poetry supply the necessary exposition. The revenge element becomes prominent toward the end of the play, when the ghosts of Richard's victims appear to him in a dream, not visible as in Shakespeare, and the remorseful villain declares that not merely his victims but all the forces of nature, sun, moon, and planets, cry revenge:--

"The birds sing not, but sorrow for revenge.

The silly lambs sit bleating for revenge."

Richard is a man of powerful will carried away by ambition and evidently modeled on Tamburlaine; but unlike the Scythian and like Faustus, he is conscience-smitten, and his punishment comes in remorse as well as death.

This conception, based on the chronicle, is treated with power, but in the main the play is a hodge-podge. More worthy examples of chronicle history are "Edward III," often ascribed to Marlowe and not unworthy of him, and the anonymous "Tragedy of Woodstock."[13] The latter shows frequent resemblances to "Edward II" and apparently preceded Shakespeare's "Richard II," leaving off at the point where that play begins. The events of half a reign are focused about the central personalities of Richard and Woodstock, a weak king beset by flatterers and an honorable and patriotic leader of the n.o.bles. The construction is skillful in its integration of comedy with the main action and its alternation of tragic and comic, action and counsel, force and counter-force; and the characterization is remarkably well individualized. Woodstock, especially, has human appeal and is notable as a tragic hero, or at least the central figure of a history, who meets misfortune and death through no fault of his own but solely through the wickedness of others.

Holinshed's chronicle is also the source of "Arden of Feversham" (1592), sometimes ascribed on very insufficient grounds to Shakespeare, the earliest extant domestic tragedy. The play deals with a notorious murder of some forty years before, and follows the crude dramaturgy of the earliest chronicle plays. The stage presentation of notably brutal murders is common to-day and was to be expected on the Elizabethan stage, but the play seems also to represent reaction from the royalties, marvels, and unrealities of the contemporary tragedy. The epilogue, indeed, offers a defiance of romanticism and the since well-worn creed of the realist.

"Gentlemen, we hope youle pardon this naked tragedy, Wherein no filed points are foisted in To make it gratious to the eare or eye; For simple truth is gratious enough, And needes no other points of glosing stuffe."

Notwithstanding this protestation, occasional monologues reveal the common stylistic decorations. The play is tediously detailed and artlessly realistic, though it has some vigorous blank verse and several powerful scenes; the most powerful, when Michael in the middle of the night is awaiting the murderers of his master, recalling a well-known pa.s.sage in "The Spanish Tragedy." But the greatest merit of the play lies in the portrait of Alice Arden, absorbed in a despicable pa.s.sion, but cunning and unabashed, incomparably the most lifelike evil woman up to this time depicted in the drama.