Of these poets, and poet-players, (for many of them were actors as well as authors,) only two, Munday and Chettle, can be decisively stated to have been predecessors of Shakespeare; but the plays of such as had written for Henslowe, before what may be called the era of our great dramatist, are registered by him without the names of their authors. I shall now proceed to give an account of the extant works of those who, it can be distinctly ascertained, were the precursors of Shakespeare. Two of the most distinguished dramatists, Marlow and Greene, were dead anterior to the date when Shakespeare had acquired any reputation as an original poet.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOW,

AND THE EMPLOYMENT OF BLANK-VERSE UPON THE

PUBLIC STAGE.

IN the examination of dramatic productions which preceded any of Shakespeare's original works, I have somewhat anticipated an important event in the history of dramatic poetry-the first employment of blankverse in performances represented on the public stage. We have seen that in Love and Fortune, Arden of Feversham, A Knack to know a Knave, The Troublesome Reign of King John, The History of King Leir, The Taming of a Shrew, and some other plays, all written prior to 1592, and all acted at theatres frequented by popular audiences, blank-verse was employed. It will now be necessary to revert back a few years, in order to ascertain the date at which this change took place, (to the speedy and almost entire exclusion of rhyme and prose, which had been previously used,) and by whom it was effected.

Verses of ten syllables without rhyme were first composed in English by Lord Surrey, in his translation of parts of the Æneid, on the title-page of which it is termed a strange metre.' The earliest instance of its application to the purposes of the drama, was in the tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, by Sackville and Norton, acted before the Queen in 1561-2. The

example was followed in 1566 in Gascoyne's Jocasta, played at Gray's Inn; and at a still greater interval by Thomas Hughes, in his Misfortunes of Arthur, represented before the Queen at Greenwich, in 1587. These, it will be remarked, were plays either performed at Court or before private societies. The question is, when blank-verse was first used in dramatic compositions performed at the public theatres of the metropolis ?

Gosson, in his School of Abuse, 1579, mentions two prose books played at the Bell Savage;' and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, already examined, is an instance of an early history' in prose, although printed to look like metre. These seem to have been exceptions to the ordinary rule, for Gosscn, in his Plays Confuted in five Actions, tells us that poets send their verses to the stage upon such feet, as continually are rolled up in rhyme.' He says nothing of blank-verse, and there is no doubt that when he wrote, prose and rhyme only were used in popular dramatic exhibitions.

Blank-verse was first employed in plays performed at the public theatres of London, about the year 1586, four or five years after Gosson had published his Plays Confuted in five Actions. The evidence of this fact is contained in the epistle by Thomas Nash to the Gentlemen Students of both Universities,' prefixed to Robert Greene's Menaphon, printed in 1587. We there meet with the following passage:—

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I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age

'is grown of late, so that every mechanical mate ' abhorreth the English he was born to, and plucks, with a solemn periphrasis, his ut vales from the ink'horn: which I impute not so much to the perfection of arts, as to the servile imitation of vain-glorious ' tragedians, who contend not so seriously to excel in action, as to embowel the clouds in a speech of 'comparison; thinking themselves more than initiated ' in poets' immortality, if they but once get Boreas by 'the beard, and the heavenly Bull by the dewlap. But ' herein I cannot so fully bequeath them to folly, as 'their idiot art-masters, that intrude themselves to our

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ears as the alchymists of eloquence, who (mounted

on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better 'pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blankverse. Indeed, it may be the engrafted overflow of 'some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagina'tion with a more than drunken resolution, being not extemporal in the invention of any other means to 'vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their • choleric incumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon. Amongst this kind of men, 'that repose eternity in the mouth of a player, I can

but engross some deep-read school-men or gram'marians, who having no more learning in their skull 'than will serve to take up a commodity, nor art in their brain than was nourished in a serving-man's

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idleness, will take upon them to be the ironical cen'sors of all, when God and poetry doth know they are the simplest of all.'

Hence it is quite evident that blank-verse had been employed upon the common stage prior to 1587, when the work from which the above quotation is made bears date. Nash talks of the swelling bombast of bragging blank-verse,' which he also calls a drumming decasyllabon,' and ridicules those who reposed eternity in the mouth of a player.' The turn of expression in the whole passage also seems to show clearly, that independently of any general censure of the dramatic poets of the time, Nash had also some particular individual allusion. Having been entered of St. John's College in 1585, he was obliged to leave the University in 1587, without taking his degree*, and coming to London he joined his friend Greene, who was supporting himself by his prolific pen :-'Give 'me the man' (says Nash of Greene, in another part of the address above quoted) whose extemporal vein ' in any humour will excell our greatest art-masters' 'deliberate thoughts; whose inventions, quicker than 'his eye, will challenge the proudest rhetorician to the 'contention of the like perfection with the like expe'dition.' It will be observed that Nash twice employs

*He was engaged with some friend in writing a satirical piece called Terminus et non Terminus: his friend was expelled, and it is doubtful if Nash did not share his disgrace and punishment: at all events he could not take his degree; and this circumstance is alluded to in the epistle of England to her three Daughters,' in Poli manteia, 1595, where, speaking of Nash and Harvey, the writer says, 'Cambridge, make thy two children friends: thou hast been unkind to 'the one [Nash] to wean him before his time, and too fond upon the other to keep him so long without preferment.'-Sign. Q 4.