1

of alloy, produced a sparkling currency, the very counters of court compliment. It was truly said, and it was meant for praise, that he hath stepped one step further than any either before or since he first began the witty discourse of his Euphues.' .'"* He is now some forty years old. According to Nash," he is but a little fellow, but he hath one of the best wits in England."+ The little man smiles briskly upon all around him; but there is a furrow on his brow, for he knows

"What hell it is in suing long to bide."

He has been a dreary time waiting and petitioning for the place of Master of the Revels. In his own peculiar phraseology he tells the Queen, in one of his petitions," For these ten years I have attended with an unwearied patience, and now I know not what crab took me for an oyster, that in the middest of your sunshine, of your most gracious aspect, hath thrust a stone between the shells to rate me alive that only live on dead hopes." Drayton described him truly, at a later period, when poetry had asserted her proper rights, as

"Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,

Playing with words, and idle similies."

Lyly was undoubtedly the predecessor of Shakspere. His Alexander and Campaspe,' acted not only at Court but at the Blackfriars, was printed as early as 1584. It is not easy to understand how a popular audience could ever have sat it out; but the incomprehensible and the excellent are sometimes confounded. What should we think of a prologue, addressed to a gaping pit, and hushing the cracking of nuts into silence, which commences thus?" They that fear the stinging of wasps make fans of peacock's tails, whose spots are like eyes and Lepidus, which could not sleep for the chattering of birds, set up a beast whose head was like a dragon: and we, which stand in awe of report, are compelled to set before our owl Pallas's shield, thinking by her virtue to cover the other's deformity." Shakspere was a naturalist, and a true one; but Lyly was the more inventive, for he made his own natural history. The epilogue to the same play informs the confiding audience that "Where the rainbow toucheth the tree no caterpillars will hang on the leaves: where the glow-worm creepeth in the night no adder will go in the day." Alexander and Campaspe' is in prose. The action is little, the talk is everthing. Hephæstion exhorts Alexander against the danger of love, in a speech that with very slight elaboration would be long enough for a sermon. Apelles soliloquizes upon his own love for Campaspe in a style so insufferably tedious, that we could wish to thrust the picture that he sighs over down his rhetorical throat (even as Pistol was made to swallow the leek), if he did not close his oration with one of the prettiest songs of our old poetry:

Webbe's Discourse of English Poetry,' 1586.

† Apology of Pierce Pennilesse.

Petition to the Queen in the Harleian MSS.: Dodsley's Old Plays, 1825, vol. ii.

66

Cupid and my Campaspe play'd

At cards for kisses, Cupid paid;

He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows,
His mother's doves and team of sparrows;
Loses them, too; then down he throws
The coral of his lip, the rose

Growing on 's cheek (but none knows how),
With these the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin;
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last he set her both his eyes,
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love! has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?"

The dramatic system of Lyly is a thing unique in its kind. He never attempts to deal with realities. He revels in pastoral and mythological subjects. He makes his gods and goddesses, his nymphs and shepherds, all speak a language which common mortals would disdain to use. In prose or in verse, they are all the cleverest of the clever. They are, one and all, passionless beings, with no voice but that of their showman. But it is easy to see how a man of considerable talent would hold such things to be 'the proper refinements to banish for ever the vulgarities of the old comedy. He had not the genius to discover that the highest drama was essentially for the people; and that its foundations must rest upon the elemental properties of mankind, whether to produce tears or laughter that should command a lasting and universal sympathy. Lyly came too early, or too late, to gather any enduring fame; and he lived to see a new race of writers, and one towering above the rest, who cleared the stage of his tinselled puppets, and filled the scene with noble copies of humanity. His fate was a hard one. Without the vices of men of higher talent, he had to endure poverty and disappointment, doomed to spin his "pithy sentences and gallant tropes" for a thankless Court and a neglectful multitude; and, with a tearful merriment, writing to his Queen, "In all humility I entreat that I may dedicate to your Sacred Majesty Lyly de Tristibus, wherein shall be seen patience, labours, and misfortunes."

Around Lyly are collected the satellites of the early stage, looking perhaps with little complacency upon the new author, whose bolder and simpler style, though scarcely yet developed-whose incidents, though encumbered as yet with superfluous horrors-have seized upon the popular mind as something to be felt and understood. The critics can scarcely comprehend that there is genius in this young man; for he labours not at words, and appears to have no particular anxiety to be fine and effective. Robert Wilson, of whom we have spoken, compares notes with the great Euphuist; and they think the age is growing degenerate. Thomas Kyd is there in the full flush of his popularity. He is the author of Jeronimo,' which men held a dozen years after "was the only best and judiciously penned play in Europe." ""* It is of the same period as

* Jonson's Induction to Cynthia's Revels.'

Andronicus.

Wherever performed originally, the principal character was adapted to an actor of very small stature. It is not impossible that a precocious boy, one of the children of Paul's, might have filled the character. Jeronimo the Spanish marshal, and Balthazar the Prince of Portugal, thus exchange compliments:

There can be no doubt that Jeronimo,' whatever remodelling it may have received, belongs essentially to the early stage. There is killing beyond all reasonable measure. Lorenzo kills Pedro, and Alexandro kills Rogero: Andrea is also killed, but he does not so readily quit the scene. After a decent interval, occupied by talk and fighting, the man comes again in the shape of his own ghost, according to the following stage-direction :-"Enter two, dragging of ensigns; then the funeral of Andrea: next Horatio and Lorenzo leading Prince Balthazar captive: then the Lord General, with others, mourning: a great cry within, Charon, a boat, a boat: then enter Charon and the Ghost of Andrea.” Charon, Revenge, and the Ghost have a little pleasant dialogue; and the Ghost then vanishes with the following triumphant words :

"I am a happy ghost;

Revenge, my passage now cannot be cross'd:
Come, Charon; come, hell's sculler, waft me o'er
Your sable streams which look like molten pitch;
My funeral rites are made, my hearse hung rich."

The Ghost of Shakspere's first Hamlet was, we have little doubt, an improvement upon this personage.

Henry Chettle, a friend of Greene, but who seems to have been a man of higher morals, if of inferior genius; and Anthony Munday, who was called by Meres "the best plotter" (by which he probably means a manufacturer of dumb shows), are the only remaining dramatists whose names have escaped oblivion that can be called contemporaries of Shakspere in his early days at the Blackfriars.

Chettle is one of the very few persons who have left us any distinct memorial of Shakspere. He appears to have had some connexion with the writers of his time, in preparing their manuscripts for the press. Greene's posthumous tract, The Groat's-worth of Wit,' author's faint and blotted sheets, written on his sick-bed.

He so prepared copying out the He says, in the

preface to Kind-Harte's Dream,' in which he is very anxious to explain the share which he had in the publication of Greene's pamphlet, "I had only in the copy this share: it was ill-written, as sometimes Greene's hand was none of the best; licensed it must be, ere it could be printed, which could never be if it might not be read. To be brief, I writ it over, and, as near as I could, followed the copy, only in that letter I put something out, but in the whole book not a word in; for I protest it was all Greene's, not mine, nor Master Nash's, as some unjustly have affirmed." In this pamphlet of Greene's an insult was offered to Shakspere; and it would appear from the allusions of Chettle that he was justly offended. Marlowe, also, resented, as well he might, the charge of impiety which was levelled against him. Chettle "With says, neither of them that take offence was I acquainted." By acquaintance he means companionship, if not friendship. He goes on, "And with one of them I care not if I never be." He is supposed here to point at Marlowe. But to the other he tenders an apology, in all sincerity: "The other, whom at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that as I have moderated the heat of living writers, and might have used my own discretion (especially in such a case), the author being dead, that I did not I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault; because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." In the Induction to Cynthia's Revels' Ben Jonson makes one of the personified spectators on the stage say, "I would speak with your author; where is he?" It may be presumed, therefore, that it was not uncommon for the author to mix with that part of the audience; and thus Henry Chettle may be good evidence of the civil demeanour of William Shakspere. We may imagine the young "maker" composedly moving amidst the throng of wits and critics that fill the stage. He moves amongst them modestly, but without any false humility. In worldly station, if such a consideration could influence his demeanour, he is fully their equal. They are for the most part, as he himself is, actors, as well as makers of plays. Phillips says Marlowe was an actor. Greene is reasonably conjectured to have been an actor. Peele and Wilson were actors of Shakspere's own company; and so was Anthony Wadeson. There can be little doubt that upon the early stage the occupations for the most part went together. The dialogue was less regarded than the action. A plot was hastily got up, with rude shows and startling incidents. The characters were little discriminated; one actor took the tyrant line, and another the lover; and ready words were at hand for the one to rant with and the other to whine. The actors were not very solicitous about the words, and often discharged their mimic passions in extemporaneous eloquence. In a few years the necessity of pleasing more refined audiences changed the economy of the stage. Men of high talent sought the theatre as a ready mode of maintenance by their writings; but their connexion with the stage would naturally begin in acting rather than in authorship. The managers, themselves actors, would think, and perhaps

rightly, that an actor would be the best judge of dramatic effect; and a Master of Arts, unless he were thoroughly conversant with the business of the stage, might better carry his taffeta phrases to the publishers of sonnets. The rewards of authorship through the medium of the press were in those days small indeed; and paltry as was the dramatist's fee, the players were far better paymasters than the stationers. To become a sharer in a theatrical speculation offered a reasonable chance of competence, if not of wealth. If a sharer existed who was "excellent" enough in "the quality" he professed to fill the stage creditably, and added to that quality "a facetious grace in writing," there is no doubt that with "uprightness of dealing" he would, in such a company as that of the Blackfriars, advance rapidly to distinction, and have the countenance and friendship of "divers of worship." One of the early puritanical attacks upon the stage has this coarse invective against players: "Are they not notoriously known to be those men in their life abroad, as they are on the stage, roysters, brawlers, ill-dealers, boasters, lovers, loiterers, ruffians? So that they are always exercised in playing their parts and practising wickedness; making that an art, to the end that they might the better gesture it in their parts?" By the side of this silly abuse may be placed the modest answer of Thomas Heywood, the most prolific of writers, himself an actor: "I also could wish that such as are condemned for their licentiousness might by a general consent be quite excluded our society; for, as we are men that stand in the broad eye of the world, so should our manners, gestures, and behaviours, savour of such government and modesty, to deserve the good thoughts and reports of all men, and to abide the sharpest censure even of those that are the greatest opposites to the quality. Many amongst us I know to be of substance, of government, of sober lives, and temperate carriages, housekeepers, and contributory to all duties enjoined them, equally with them that are ranked with the most bountiful; and if, amongst so many of sort, there be any few degenerate from the rest in that good demeanour which is both requisite and expected from their hands, let me entreat you not to censure hardly of all for the misdeeds of some, but rather to excuse us, as Ovid doth the generality of women :—

*

'Parcite paucarum diffundere crimen in omnes;
Spectetur meritis quæque puella suis.'"+

Those of Shakspere's early competitors who approached the nearest to him in genius possessed not that practical wisdom which carried him safely and honourably through a life beset with some temptations. They knew not the value of "government and modesty." He lived amongst them, but we may readily believe that he was not of them.

The curtain is drawn back, slowly, and with little of mechanical contrivance. The rush-strewn stage is presented to the spectators. The play to be performed is Henry VI. The funeral procession of Henry V. enters to a dead march; a

Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Players.

Apology for Actors.