Read Ebook: The old English dramatists by Lowell James Russell Norton Charles Eliot Author Of Introduction Etc

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It is for their poetical qualities, for their gleams of imagination, for their quaint and subtle fancies, for their tender sentiment, and for their charm of diction that these old playwrights are worth reading. They are the best comment also to convince us of the immeasurable superiority of Shakespeare. Several of them, moreover, have been very inadequately edited, or not at all, which is perhaps better; and it is no useless discipline of the wits, no unworthy exercise of the mind, to do our own editing as we go along, winning back to its cradle the right word for the changeling the printers have left in his stead, making the lame verses find their feet again, and rescuing those that have been tumbled higgledy-piggledy into a mire of prose. A strenuous study of this kind will enable us better to understand many a faulty passage in our Shakespeare, and to judge of the proposed emendations of them, or to make one to our own liking. There is no better school for learning English, and for learning it when, in many important respects, it was at its best.

I am not sure that I shall not seem to talk to you of many things that seem trivialities if weighed in the huge business scales of life, but I am always glad to say a word in behalf of what most men consider useless, and to say it the rather because it has so few friends. I have observed, and am sorry to have observed, that English poetry, at least in its older examples, is less read now than when I was young. I do not believe this to be a healthy symptom, for poetry frequents and keeps habitable those upper chambers of the mind that open toward the sun's rising.

MARLOWE

Other men had done their share towards what may be called the modernization of our English, and among these Sir Philip Sidney was conspicuous. He probably gave it greater ease of movement, and seems to have done for it very much what Dryden did a century later in establishing terms of easier intercourse between the language of literature and the language of cultivated society.

There had been good versifiers long before. Chaucer, for example, and even Gower, wearisome as he mainly is, made verses sometimes not only easy in movement, but in which the language seems strangely modern. That most dolefully dreary of books, "The Mirror for Magistrates," and Sackville, more than any of its authors, did something towards restoring the dignity of verse, and helping it to recover its self-respect, while Spenser was still a youth. Tame as it is, the sunshine of that age here and there touches some verse that ripples in the sluggish current with a flicker of momentary illumination. But before Spenser, no English verse had ever soared and sung, or been filled with what Sidney calls "divine delightfulness." Sidney, it may be conjectured, did more by private criticism and argument than by example. Drayton says of him:--

"The noble Sidney with this last arose, That hero? for numbers and for prose, That throughly paced our language as to show The plenteous English hand in hand might go With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce Our tongue from Lilly's writing then in use."

But even the affectations of Lilly were not without their use as helps to refinement. If, like Chaucer's frere,--

"Somewhat he lisped, for his wantonness,"

it was through the desire

"To make his English sweet upon his tongue."

It was the general clownishness against which he revolted, and we owe him our thanks for it. To show of what brutalities even recent writers could be capable, it will suffice to mention that Golding, in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, makes a witch mutter the devil's pater-noster, and Ulysses express his fears of going "to pot." I should like to read you a familiar sonnet of Sidney's for its sweetness:--

"Come, Sleep: O Sleep! the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, The indifferent judge between the high and low; With shield of proof, shield me from out the press Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw; O make in me those civil wars to cease: I will good tribute pay if thou do so. Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed, A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light, A rosy garland, and a weary head: And if these things, as being thine of right, Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see."

Do not consider such discussions as these otiose or nugatory. The language we are fortunate enough to share, and which, I think, Jacob Grimm was right in pronouncing, in its admirable mixture of Saxon and Latin, its strength and sonorousness, a better literary medium than any other modern tongue--this language has not been fashioned to what it is without much experiment, much failure, and infinite expenditure of pains and thought. Genius and pedantry have each done its part towards the result which seems so easy to us, and yet was so hard to win--the one by way of example, the other by way of warning. The purity, the elegance, the decorum, the chastity of our mother-tongue are a sacred trust in our hands. I am tired of hearing the foolish talk of an American variety of it, about our privilege to make it what we will because we are in a majority. A language belongs to those who know best how to use it, how to bring out all its resources, how to make it search its coffers round for the pithy or canorous phrase that suits the need, and they who can do this have been always in a pitiful minority. Let us be thankful that we too have a right to it, and have proved our right, but let us set up no claim to vulgarize it. The English of Abraham Lincoln was so good not because he learned it in Illinois, but because he learned it of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible, the constant companions of his leisure. And how perfect it was in its homely dignity, its quiet strength, the unerring aim with which it struck once nor needed to strike more! The language is alive here, and will grow. Let us do all we can with it but debase it. Good taste may not be necessary to salvation or to success in life, but it is one of the most powerful factors of civilization. As a people we have a larger share of it and more widely distributed than I, at least, have found elsewhere, but as a nation we seem to lack it altogether. Our coinage is ruder than that of any country of equal pretensions, our paper money is filthily infectious, and the engraving on it, mechanically perfect as it is, makes of every bank-note a missionary of barbarism. This should make us cautious of trying our hand in the same fashion on the circulating medium of thought. But it is high time that I should remember Ma?tre Guillaume of Patelin, and come back to my sheep.

In coming to speak of Marlowe, I cannot help fearing that I may fail a little in that equanimity which is the first condition of all helpful criticism. Generosity there should be, and enthusiasm there should be, but they should stop short of extravagance. Praise should not weaken into eulogy, nor blame fritter itself away into fault-finding. Goethe tells us that the first thing needful to the critic, as indeed it is to the wise man generally, is to see the thing as it really is; this is the most precious result of all culture, the surest warrant of happiness, or at least of composure. But he also bids us, in judging any work, seek first to discover its beauties, and then its blemishes or defects. Now there are two poets whom I feel that I can never judge without a favorable bias. One is Spenser, who was the first poet I ever read as a boy, not drawn to him by any enchantment of his matter or style, but simply because the first verse of his great poem was,--

"A gentle knight was pricking on the plain,"

and I followed gladly, wishful of adventure. Of course I understood nothing of the allegory, never suspected it, fortunately for me, and am surprised to think how much of the language I understood. At any rate, I grew fond of him, and whenever I see the little brown folio in which I read, my heart warms to it as to a friend of my childhood. With Marlowe it was otherwise. With him I grew acquainted during the most impressible and receptive period of my youth. He was the first man of genius I had ever really known, and he naturally bewitched me. What cared I that they said he was a deboshed fellow? nay, an atheist? To me he was the voice of one singing in the desert, of one who had found the water of life for which I was panting, and was at rest under the palms. How can he ever become to me as other poets are? But I shall try to be lenient in my admiration.

Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, was born at Canterbury, in February, 1563, was matriculated at Benet College, Cambridge, in 1580, received his degree of bachelor there in 1583 and of master in 1587. He came early to London, and was already known as a dramatist before the end of his twenty-fourth year. There is some reason for thinking that he was at one time an actor. He was killed in a tavern brawl, by a man named Archer, in 1593, at the age of thirty. He was taxed with atheism, but on inadequate grounds, as it appears to me. That he was said to have written a tract against the Trinity, for which a license to print was refused on the ground of blasphemy, might easily have led to the greater charge. That he had some opinions of a kind unusual then may be inferred, perhaps, from a passage in his "Faust." Faust asks Mephistopheles how, being damned, he is out of hell. And Mephistopheles answers, "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it." And a little farther on he explains himself thus:--

"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be; And, to conclude, when all the earth dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that are not heaven."

Milton remembered the first passage I have quoted, and puts nearly the same words into the mouth of his Lucifer. If Marlowe was a liberal thinker, it is not strange that in that intolerant age he should have incurred the stigma of general unbelief. Men are apt to blacken opinions which are distasteful to them, and along with them the character of him who holds them.

There is a passage in "Tamburlaine" which I remember reading in the first course of lectures I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a poet's feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea:--

"If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit;-- If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest."

Marlowe made snatches at this forbidden fruit with vigorous leaps, and not without bringing away a prize now and then such as only the fewest have been able to reach. Of fine single verses I give a few as instances of this:--

Here is a couplet notable for dignity of poise describing Tamburlaine:--

"Of stature tall and straightly fashioned, Like his desire, lift upward and divine."

"For every street like to a firmament Glistered with breathing stars."

"Unwedded maids Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the queen of Love."

This from "Tamburlaine" is particularly characteristic:--

"Nature Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Will us to wear ourselves and never rest Until we reach the ripest fruit of all."

One of these verses reminds us of that exquisite one of Shakespeare where he says that Love is

"Still climbing trees in the Hesperides."

But Shakespeare puts a complexity of meaning into his chance sayings, and lures the fancy to excursions of which Marlowe never dreamt.

But, alas, a voice will not illustrate like a stereopticon, and this tearing away of fragments that seem to bleed with the avulsion is like breaking off a finger from a statue as a specimen.

The impression he made upon the men of his time was uniform; it was that of something new and strange; it was that of genius, in short. Drayton says of him, kindling to an unwonted warmth, as if he loosened himself for a moment from the choking coils of his Polyolbion for a larger breath:--

"Next Marlowe bath?d 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 clear; For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

And Chapman, taking up and continuing Marlowe's half-told story of Hero and Leander, breaks forth suddenly into this enthusiasm of invocation:--

"Then, ho! most strangely intellectual fire That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire Her burning faculties, and with the wings Of thy unsphered flame visit'st the springs Of spirits immortal, now find the eternal clime Of his free soul whose living subject stood Up to the chin in the Pierian flood."

Surely Chapman would have sent his soul on no such errand had he believed that the soul of Marlowe was in torment, as his accusers did not scruple to say that it was, sent thither by the manifestly Divine judgment of his violent death.

"AEneas, I'll repair thy Trojan ships Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me, And let Achates sail to Italy; I'll give thee tackling made of rivelled gold, Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees; Oars of massy ivory, full of holes Through which the water shall delight to play; Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves; The masts whereon thy swelling sails shall hang Hollow pyramides of silver plate; The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought The wars of Troy, but not Troy's overthrow; For ballast, empty Dido's treasury; Take what ye will, but leave AEneas here. Achates, thou shalt be so seemly clad As sea-born nymphs shall swarm about thy ships And wanton mermaids court thee with sweet songs, Flinging in favors of more sovereign worth Than Thetis hangs about Apollo's neck, So that AEneas may but stay with me."

But far finer than this, in the same costly way, is the speech of Barabas in "The Jew of Malta," ending with a line that has incorporated itself in the language with the familiarity of a proverb:--

"Give me the merchants of the Indian mines That trade in metal of the purest mould; The wealthy Moor that in the Eastern rocks Without control can pick his riches up, And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones, Receive them free, and sell them by the weight; Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacynths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, And seld-seen costly stones of so great price As one of them, indifferently rated,

May serve in peril of calamity To ransom great kings from captivity. This is the ware wherein consists my wealth:

Infinite riches in a little room."

This is the very poetry of avarice.

"Here, take my crown; the life of Edward too: Two kings of England cannot reign at once. But stay awhile: let me be king till night, That I may gaze upon this glittering crown; So shall my eyes receive their last content, My head the latest honor due to it, And jointly both yield up their wish?d right. Continue ever, thou celestial sun; Let never silent night possess this clime; Stand still, you watches of the element; All times and seasons, rest you at a stay-- That Edward may be still fair England's king! But day's bright beam doth vanish fast away, And needs I must resign my wish?d crown. Inhuman creatures, nursed with tiger's milk, Why gape you for your sovereign's overthrow?-- My diadem, I mean, and guiltless life. See, monsters, see, I'll wear my crown again. What, fear you not the fury of your king?

I'll not resign, but, whilst I live, be king!"

Then, after a short further parley:--

"Here, receive my crown. Receive it? No; these innocent hands of mine Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime: He of you all that most desires my blood, And will be called the murderer of a king, Take it. What, are you moved? Pity you me? Then send for unrelenting Mortimer, And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel, Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear. Yet stay, for rather than I'll look on them, Here, here!--Now, sweet God of Heaven, Make me despise this transitory pomp, And sit for aye enthroniz?d in Heaven! Come, Death, and with thy fingers close my eyes, Or, if I live, let me forget myself."

Surely one might fancy that to be from the prentice hand of Shakespeare. It is no small distinction that this can be said of Marlowe, for it can be said of no other. What follows is still finer. The ruffian who is to murder Edward, in order to evade his distrust, pretends to weep. The king exclaims:--

"Weep'st thou already? List awhile to me, And then thy heart, were it as Gurney's is, Or as Matrevis', hewn from the Caucasus, Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale. This dungeon where they keep me is the sink Wherein the filth of all the castle falls, And there in mire and puddle have I stood This ten days' space; and, lest that I should sleep, One plays continually upon a drum; They give me bread and water, being a king; So that, for want of sleep and sustenance, My mind's distempered and my body numbed, And whether I have limbs or no I know not. O, would my blood dropt out from every vein, As doth this water from my tattered robes! Tell Isabel the queen I looked not thus, When, for her sake, I ran at tilt in France, And there unhorsed the Duke of Cler?mont."

This is even more in Shakespeare's early manner than the other, and it is not ungrateful to our feeling of his immeasurable supremacy to think that even he had been helped in his schooling. There is a truly royal pathos in "They give me bread and water"; and "Tell Isabel the queen," instead of "Isabel my queen," is the most vividly dramatic touch that I remember anywhere in Marlowe. And that vision of the brilliant tournament, not more natural than it is artistic, how does it not deepen by contrast the gloom of all that went before! But you will observe that the verse is rather epic than dramatic. I mean by this that its every pause and every movement are regularly cadenced. There is a kingly composure in it, perhaps, but were the passage not so finely pathetic as it is, or the diction less naturally simple, it would seem stiff. Nothing is more peculiarly characteristic of the mature Shakespeare than the way in which his verses curve and wind themselves with the fluctuating emotion or passion of the speaker and echo his mood. Let me illustrate this by a speech of Imogen when Pisanio gives her a letter from her husband bidding her meet him at Milford-Haven. The words seem to waver to and fro, or huddle together before the hurrying thought, like sheep when the collie chases them.

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