unsuccessful, and he of course excels in giving utterance to Dido's ecstasy when she finds that her love is returned: 'What more than Delian music do I hear, That calls my soul from forth his living seat, And when we whisper, then the stars fall down So she declares that in her lover's looks she sees 'eternity,' and that he can make her 'immortal with a kiss.' When he sails away at the call of destiny, she cries that she will follow him: 'I'll frame me wings of wax, like Icarus, Despair drives her to seek her end upon the pyre, but her suicide has nothing of the theatrical magnificence that lights up with hectic brilliance Cleopatra's dying moments. Shakspere surrounds the Egyptian queen with an atmosphere of voluptuous splendour to the last, only to convince us more irresistibly of the essential worthlessness of the purely sensuous life. Such an aim was far from Marlowe, and his treatment of the story of Dido illustrates vividly the contrast in ethical temper between him and the author of Antony and Cleopatra. Aeneas is little more than a lay figure, and is chiefly noticeable for his account of the fall of Troy, which presents the main difficulty of the play. His speech contains lines which must have been written by Marlowe, but the passage describing the murder of Priam by Pyrrhus in the presence of Hecuba is extravagant beyond even the worst excesses of Tamburlaine, and reads like an intentional burlesque : 'At which the frantic queen leaped on his face, Among the minor characters Iarbas, the jealous rival of Aeneas, is drawn with some force, and the Nurse, garrulous of tongue, and still alive to the stirrings of the tender passion, is a type The Olympian deities are which Shakspere was to develop. 'I'll give thee tackling made of riveld gold, Through which the water shall delight to play: The sails of folded lawn.' With Dido our survey of Marlowe's dramatic works comes to a close, as the plays, usually ascribed to Shakspere, in which he had a share, will be more conveniently treated in a later chapter. But a few words must be said on his narrative poem Hero and Leander, which, though fragmentary, is one of the most remarkable of Elizabethan compositions, and gives ample proof that Marlowe might have achieved no less fame as a poet than as a dramatist. Indeed the two Sestiads of Hero and Leander, which he lived to complete, are, for sustained beauty and consummate workmanship, the most perfect product of his pen. The Renaissance spirit is there in its very quintessence: it leaps and glows in every line. Its frank Paganism, its intoxication of delight in the loveliness of earthly things, especially, the bodies of men and women, its ardour of desire, the desire that wakens at first sight' and that presses forward impetuously to possession-all these find here matchless utterance. The atmosphere of the poem is, of course, highly sensuous, but the tale moves forward with such lightness and freedom, and Marlowe's imaginative touch is so unerring, that there is never a feeling of closeness. In this respect Hero and Leander is incomparably superior to the Venus and Adonis, which is oppressive in its realistically detailed study of lustful passion. In freshness too and winding beauty of melody Marlowe's fragment far outvies Shakspere's completed poem, and it achieved an immediate and widespread popularity. We are told that rowers used to sing the poet's couplets as they plied their sculls on the Thames, and that 'Men would shun their sleep in still dark night To meditate upon his golden lines.' Among these men we may reckon Shakspere, through whose mind Hero and Leander was clearly running when he quoted one of its most notable verses in As You Like It, and apostrophized its author in a tone of tender recollection as Dead Shepherd.' Christopher Marlowe is one of the most fascinating figures in our own, or indeed in any, literature. In the temple of poetic fame the highest places are sacred to genius that has mounted securely to its meridian splendour, to Homer, Dante, Shakspere. But seats only lower than these, and hallowed with perhaps richer offerings of human sympathy and love, are granted to genius dead ere its time, cut down in the freshness of its morning radiance. It is here that Marlowe is to be sought, side by side with Collins and Shelley and Keats. What the world has lost by the untimely close of his career we cannot know; but we do know that, even had he lived, he could never have been another Shakspere.' For nature, so lavish to him in other ways, had entirely withheld from him the priceless gift of humour, and the faculty of interpreting commonplace human experience. He never learnt the secrets of a woman's heart, and he knew of no love lifted above the level of sense. Between him and his mighty successor there is, and there must always have been, an impassable gulf. Marlowe is the rapturous lyrist of limitless desire, Shakspere the majestic spokesman of inexorable moral law. · CHAPTER IV. KYD, LYLY, AND PEELE. THE fascination of Marlowe's genius and the enduring success of his reform have tended to overshadow the important services rendered to dramatic progress by some of his contemporaries, notably by Kyd in tragedy and by Lyly and Greene in comedy. Of no leading Elizabethan playwright do we know so little as of THOMAS KYD, yet persistent stage-tradition during the earlier seventeenth century testifies to his remarkable influence and popularity1. With the exception of Tamburlaine, no preShaksperean play excited so much enthusiasm and was at the same time so widely ridiculed and parodied as The Spanish Tragedy. This is the only drama which can be with certainty ascribed to Kyd, except his paraphrase of Cornelia by the French writer Garnier. It is possible that he wrote Soliman and Perseda, whose theme is briefly introduced as 'a play within the play' into The Spanish Tragedy. The First Part of Jeronimo may also have come from his hand. It deals with the events preceding the story of The Spanish Tragedy, and may have been composed by Kyd before the more elaborate work. But this is conjectural, and there is much to be said in favour of the view 1 It has been recently suggested with great plausibility, that the dramatist may be identified with the Thomas Kydd, son of Francis Scrivener,' entered at Merchant Taylors' School, October 26, 1565. In this case Nash's famous reference in the preface to Greene's Menaphon to 'the shifting companions that leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busię themselves with the endeavours of art,' probably alludes to Kyd, and not to Shakspere, as has been sometimes supposed. See further on this subject Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis, by Gregor Sarrazin, chaps. 2 and 5. that Jeronimo is an expansion in dramatic form of the opening narrative in The Spanish Tragedy by an anonymous playwright anxious to make capital out of the popularity of the subject1. To these dramas of doubtful origin we may add the old version of Hamlet, satirically mentioned by Nash in 1589 as the work of an author deeply read in English Seneca,' and further scoffed at by Lodge in his Wit's Miserie, 1596. Recent criticism has tended to fix on Kyd as the object of Nash's invective, and there is certainly no dramatist of the period to whom a play on the subject of the Danish prince, treated in the Senecan style, can be so plausibly ascribed 2. For The Spanish Tragedy, dating probably from 1587, with revenge and madness as its main themes, anticipates in certain aspects Shakspere's mighty work, and at the same time borrows much of its machinery from the Roman writer. Thus it opens in orthodox Senecan fashion with the apparition of Andrea's Ghost, accompanied by Revenge. These two figures are supposed to watch the development of the action throughout, and they serve as Chorus by commenting at intervals on the situation. The place of the classical Prologue is filled by the General who gives the Spanish king an account of the battle in which the Portuguese prince Balthasar slew Don Andrea, and was afterwards taken prisoner by Horatio, son of the Knight-marshal, Hieronimo. Balthasar, during his captivity at the Spanish court, falls in love with Belimperia, the betrothed of Don Andrea, but she spurns the addresses of her lover's murderer, and transfers her affections to Horatio, in alliance with whom she hopes to avenge Andrea's death. The scenes between them strike a more intense note of amorous passion than had hitherto been heard on the English stage, and their parting interview heralds the last leave-taking of Romeo and Juliet. For their joy is of the briefest. Belimperia's brother Lorenzo, whose coolly methodical villainy anticipates that of Iago, favours Balthasar's suit, and is resolved to further it at all hazards. He employs an agent, Pedringano, to spy 1 This view is ably worked out by Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tragödie, pp. 110-112. 2 The evidence for this is excellently worked out in Sarrazin's essay, chap. 5. |