did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth at his best and

his worst. It is the difference between Dryden and the bellman’s verses--between poetry and rank fustian, or commonplace. His short life, and the conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable that the bulk of Marlowe’s work should be but little. _Tamburlaine_, _Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._, and _The Massacre of Paris_ sum up the list of the plays which we can be sure were wholly his. _The Tragedy of Dido_ was written in collaboration with Nash. Beyond this there is a supposition, supported by greater or less probability, that he had a share in _Lust’s Dominion_ and in _Titus Andronicus_ and _Henry VI._ To the plays are to be added the fragment of _Hero and Leander_, _The Passionate Shepherd_, and the translations from Ovid written in his earlier days.[76]

[SN: _Character of these writers._]

If the question is asked what this body of poets had done to advance the development of the English drama, the answer must be that they had done something to improve its language. More can hardly be claimed for them. They certainly give no example of how to construct a dramatic story, nor did they create a consistent interesting character, unless Greene’s Fair Margaret be allowed as an exception. That you did very well as long as you took care that something happened, whether it was what the personage would have done, or what would follow from what went before, or not, was apparently an accepted rule with all of them. It was somewhat strange that it should have been so, for all were educated men, and were deeply conscious of their learning. Even if they did not take the classic model, which, as they were all far better qualified to write a chorus than to construct a plot, it would have been to their advantage to do, they might have learnt, without going beyond Horace, to avoid their grosser faults. It must not be forgotten that none of their surviving plays were published in favourable circumstances. All may have been, and some certainly were, subject to manipulation while in the hands of the actors. But even when allowance is made for this, it is undeniable that the writers of the school of Marlowe, to use a not very accurate but convenient expression, were totally wanting in any sense of proportion. To judge by much that they were content to write, they cannot have known the difference between good and bad. The incoherent movement of their plays was perhaps partly due to the want of scenery. When the audience would take a curtain for Syracuse, they would also take it for Ephesus or for twenty different places, indoors and out, in one act. There was, therefore, no check on the playwright, who could move with all the licence of the story-teller. But then they did not give their plays even the coherence of a story. As they were all dependent on companies of actors, they may often have put in what their employers told them was needed to please a part of the audience. It is to this necessity that we may attribute the comic scenes of _Dr Faustus_ if we wish to find an excuse for Marlowe--and if, indeed, they were his, and not written in by others at the orders of Henslowe the manager. But this does not account for all. When it is allowed for, enough remains to show that all these predecessors of Shakespeare were unable to see the difference between horseplay and humour, and were almost equally blind to the immense distinction between the “grand manner” and mere fustian. This last, indeed, had an irresistible attraction for them, and not less for Marlowe than for the others. If it had not he would never have put the rant of _Tamburlaine_ into the mouth which spoke the superb lines beginning “If all the pens that ever poets held,” nor would he have allowed Barabas to sink from the gloomy magnificence of his beginning into a mere grotesque puppet Jew with a big nose.

[SN: _Shakespeare._]

“All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is,--that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon--married and had children there--went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays--returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.” This summary, which Steevens put in a note to the ninety-third sonnet, is as true as when it was written in the last century. It is not quite exhaustive, for we know that Shakespeare had the respect and affection of his contemporaries from Chettle to Ben Jonson, and also that he was a very prosperous man. Yet Steevens included nearly all that the most extreme industry has been able to discover of Shakespeare’s life. The date of his birth was on or just before the 23rd April 1564, and he died on that day in 1616. From the age of about twenty till he was nearly forty he lived in London as actor or manager. In his youth he wrote two poems in the prevailing fashion, _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_. The sonnets published in 1609 belong to a later period, but it is impossible to fix their date. His chief work was always done for the company to which he belonged. For that he recast old plays or wrote new ones. The poems alone were published by himself. His sonnets appeared in a pirated edition during his life, and his plays after his death, when his fellow-actors had no longer an overpowering motive to keep them for themselves. On this very slight framework there has been built a vast superstructure of guesswork of which very little need be said here.

[SN: _Guesses about his life._]

It is not only the large element of sheer folly in these guesses, the imbecile attempt to prove that the man of whom Ben Jonson spoke and wrote the well-known words was not the author of his own plays, which may be put aside. Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort to find political journalism, or other things didactic, social, and scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez, speaking of the very similar race of Cervantistas, has said that this is the resource of people, often respectable for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy literature as literature, but being also conscious that they ought to enjoy it, have been driven to look for something else in their author. These good people have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled on Molière in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some great names may be quoted to give a certain authority to the supposition that Shakespeare unlocked his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their sake we must not dismiss this guess as unceremoniously as we may well turn out the egregious Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not essentially wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is proved except this, that Shakespeare experienced some of the common fortunes of men of letters and other men, and then this, that he carried the indelicacy of his time to its possible extreme. We know that his “sugared sonnets” were handed about among his friends so freely that they got into print. So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart, and if the sonnet beginning “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” did refer to a particular person who must have been perfectly well known to many of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist must have been singularly destitute of the beginnings of a sense of shame, even according to the standard of the sixteenth century. It is impossible to prove that those who take this view are wrong--and if the word evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to prove that they are right. But be their belief right or wrong, the value of the sonnets is not affected. They are valuable, not because they reveal the passing fortunes of one man, however great, but because they express what is permanent in mankind in language of everlasting excellence.

[SN: _Order of his work._]

The work by which Shakespeare was first known in his time were the poems _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_, which appeared respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the dates of composition and order of succession of his plays are obscure, it is certain that he was working for the stage before the first of these years. But as yet he was rather redoing the work of others than producing for himself. The sonnets were widely known by 1598, and were in all probability inspired, as so many other collections of the same class, though of very different degrees of merit, were, by the example of _Astrophel and Stella_. The chronology of the plays is, it may be repeated, difficult to settle, but on the whole they may be asserted to have followed the order in which it would appear natural to assign them on internal evidence. First come those in which his hand, though never to be mistaken, is seen in least power--_Pericles_ and _Henry VI._ Then come others in which we get most of the mere fashion of the time, its euphuism and other affectations--_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _Love’s Labour Lost_, &c. Next follow the long series of romantic plays and chronicle plays, darkened by tragedy and irradiated by humour--_The Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Henry IV._, _As You Like It_. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps more accurate to call the greater drama, _The Tempest_ and _The Winter’s Tale_, belong to the later years.

[SN: _Estimates of Shakespeare._]

The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes to speak, after so many others, of Cervantes, stands in an even more formidable shape on the path of him who wishes to speak of Shakespeare. Most generations have produced those who have spoken badly. When they were honest, and were not also incapable of literature, which has sometimes been the case, they were enslaved to some fashion, some pedantry of their own time. With these have been the merely inept, and there has not been wanting the buffoon, straining after singularity. The gutter and the green-room have been audible. But by the side of these there has been an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the greatest masters of English literature. It began with Ben Jonson, and has lasted till it has become wellnigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement of the competent judges, this universal acceptance, are by themselves enough to dispense us from proving that in him there was something more than was merely national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, all the Elizabethans, belong to us and to others only as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso, Lope, Calderon, all the others of Spain’s great time, belong to the Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes, though the first is very English and the second very Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their countrymen may understand them best, but there is that in them which is common to all humanity. The one star differs from the other in glory; for if Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece under the “species of eternity,” he brought much less than Shakespeare, who included everything except religion, and leaves us persuaded of his power to deal with that. _Don Quixote_ is equivalent to one of the great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme quality of universality. So much can be said of only one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman Montaigne, in whom also there was something which speaks to all men at all times.

[SN: _Divisions of his work._]

The work of Shakespeare falls into two classes--the pure poetry and the drama. The second is, indeed, intensely poetic, both in form and spirit, so that the division becomes unintelligent if we push it too far. But when his poetry is dramatic--when it is employed to set forth an action by talk--it is used for another purpose, and is found in combination with other qualities than are to be found in the pure poems. These are the _Venus and Adonis_, _The Rape of Lucrece_, the sonnets, and the lyrics, which are mostly to be found in the plays, but can be detached from them. [SN: _The poems._] It is a sufficient proof of the vast sweep of Shakespeare’s genius that if we had nothing of him but these, the loss to the literature of the world would be irreparable, but he would still be a great poet. The _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_ are greater poems than Marlowe’s _Hero and Leander_, more intense in passion, more uniformly magnificent in expression. Marlowe may reach their level when he is speaking to the full extent of his power, but he is not always there. Shakespeare always leaves the impression that he is within the limit of what he could do. The lyrics are the most perfect achievements of an age of lyric poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones for the much that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and Greene. But if their best is put beside Shakespeare it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if hung by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the comparison. The age was rich in sonnets. It produced the passion and melody of Sidney, the beauty of Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the vigour of Drayton. Yet Shakespeare’s sonnets are no less distinctly the greatest than his lyrics. It is even here that his pre-eminence is the most marked, for he has triumphed over more. The lyric is free and is brief. The sonnet is bound by rigid laws, and a cycle of sonnets is peculiarly liable to become monotonous, to be redundant, to be mechanical and frigid. But Shakespeare’s sonnets, whether or no they be in the order in which he would have put them, or were written to fall into any particular order, gave a varied yet consistent play of thought and passion, overshadowed by the ever-present consciousness of “the barren rage of death’s eternal cold.” In them, too, we always feel the superiority of the faculty to the work done. There is no toil, no struggle to express. What would have made another poet immortal, if said with manifest effort, is all poured out in “a first fine careless rapture.”

[SN: _The dramas._]

And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico lies the far-spreading palace of the plays. The dramatic work of Shakespeare is greater than the purely poetic, mainly because of its vastly greater scope. It contains all that is in the poems, and so much more that they are, as it were, lost in the abundance. In this stately pleasure-house there are no doubt parts which diligent examination will show to bear the traces of inexperience in the builder, fragments of the work of others, and ornaments in the passing taste of the time. Shakespeare laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock plays, and now and then he passed what he found in them, not because it was good but because it would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like others, he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere playing with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and the quibbles which made Dr Johnson shake his head. In common with every other dramatist from Sophocles downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his audience. The mere man of letters writing “closet” plays can forget the stage, and be punished by the discovery that his masterpiece won’t act. Shakespeare aimed at being acted. His stage had no change of scenery, and his audience loved action. Therefore he could put in more words than can be admitted when time must be found for the operations of the stage-carpenter and the scene-shifter. Therefore also he could allow himself a licence in the change of scene, which is impossible when it carries with it a change of scenery. But all this is either easily separable or can be amended by rearrangement. And therein lies the absolute difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. _The Jew of Malta_ could not be made an acting play by any process of manipulation. Take from the best of the others--even from Ben Jonson--what was purely Elizabethan, and how much remains? They are excellent to read, and were good to act before an audience which accepted their convention, but before that only. For purely stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The _Dama Melindrosa_ would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not _Every Man in his Humour_, or _Epicene_. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains--not in all cases, indeed, but in most--a play--that is, a consistent action--carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature.

[SN: _The reality of Shakespeare’s characters._]

It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare’s plays their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of Bardolph, “Would I were with him wheresome’er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell,” are the outward and visible signs of this inward and spiritual truth to nature. _Henry IV._ and _Henry V._ may seem to be but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree is less trim and balanced than the clipped yew. But it has a higher life and the finer unity. The Henry V. who meets Falstaff with--

“I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”

is the same man as he who said--

“I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness.... I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill; Redeeming time when men think least I will.”

Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father, he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs him nothing--a perfect portrait of the “unconscious hypocrite.” The circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously, and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity. Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-loving animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic, grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made on the model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused, unnatural, or inconsequent.

The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of some of Shakespeare’s characters is a tribute to their reality. We are never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille or Racine, or the _galanes_, _damas_, and jealous husbands of Lope and Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even Molière, who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and transparent, because he also is, in comparison, narrow and arbitrary. We may differ as to his purpose in writing _Don Juan_ or _Tartuffe_. Was he only drawing infidelity and hypocrisy to make them hateful? Was he speaking for the _libertins_ of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of the philosophy of the eighteenth, who were in revolt against the claim of religion to be a guide of life and to control conduct? But the personages explain themselves. Again, when we meet one of those sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently explained alterations of the whole nature of a man or woman, so common with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know it to be false to life, and put it down at once as a clumsy playwright’s device. But the characters of Shakespeare are like the great figures of history, real, and yet not always to be understood at once, because they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery of nature.

The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the last years of the sixteenth century, and who outlived him, do not belong to our subject. It is enough to point out how unlikely it was that they would continue him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shakespearian drama without Shakespeare, when he deliberately sacrificed character to the convenient simplicity of the “humour,” and looked for the structural coherence of his plays to the unities. Other men who were less wise preferred to keep the freedom which they had not the strength to bear.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.

[71] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.

[72] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_, 1825.

[73] _Dramatic Works of John Lyly._ Edited by F. W. Fairholt, 1858.

[74] _Dramatic Works of Robert Greene._ Dyce, 1883.

[75] _Dramatic Works of George Peele._ Dyce, 1883.

[76] _Works of Christopher Marlowe._ Dyce, 1865.