resemblance to Lyly's comedies, for its main motive is to turn a classical story into a neat compliment to the sovereign. Paris has to award the apple, the prize of beauty, to the fairest of the three goddesses, Juno, Pallas, and Venus. His choice falls on Venus, but her jealous rivals arraign him for injustice before Zeus and the Olympians. He makes an eloquent defence, which is received with favour, but on the motion of Apollo, who holds that women should be judged by women, the final award is referred to Diana. She solves the difficulty by assigning the prize, not to any one of the competitors, but to the 'gracious nymph Eliza,' In state Queen Juno's peer, for power in arms The dénouement is felicitous, and Diana's eulogy on England, breathes exactly the spirit of John of Gaunt's eloquent apostrophe in Shakspere's Richard II. The play is graceful throughout, and, despite a few somewhat irrelevant episodes, is well constructed. It is written chiefly in rhyming metres, but the speeches of Paris and of Diana before the Council of the Gods are in flowing and agreeable, though slightly monotonous, blank verse 1. Peele's patriotism found less worthy expression in a later play, The Chronicle of Edward 1, wherein his hatred of all things Spanish prompted him to blacken the fame of good Queen Eleanor of Castile. Though not published till 1593, it was acted several years previously, and almost certainly preceded Marlowe's Edward II, to which it is immeasurably inferior. 1 A curious play, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, was attributed to Peele by Dyce, on insufficient evidence. Its date is probably about 1584, and it deals with the fortunes of two mediaeval heroes, who are supposed to meet at the court of Alexander the Great. It is written almost entirely in rhyming septenars, and the verse besides lacking Peele's usual grace, contains peculiarities of diction (e.g. the habit of adding a pronoun after a noun, The King of Norway, he,') not found in his known works. An analysis of the play is given in Morley's English Writers, vol. ix. 238. But it was later in date than Tamburlaine, and was affected by the revolution in dramatic style produced by the success of that play. The rhyming couplets of The Arraignment of Paris are discarded, and in their place we have blank verse written in evident imitation of Marlowe's manner, and often with incongruous effect. The most successful lines occur in some of the earlier speeches, which ring with a genuinely national tone. passage may be quoted as an apt embodiment of the spirit of Elizabethan England, here transferred to the age of 'Longshanks': 'The people of this land are men of war, That govern with familiar majesty; But if their sovereigns once 'gin swell with pride The Battle of Alcazar, printed anonymously in 1594, has the same characteristics of style as Edward I, and is almost undoubtedly by Peele. Its hero is Thomas Stukeley, a Devonshire man, whose life was a series of extraordinary adventures, ending on an African battle-field. The story is told with vigour, but construction and character-drawing are both immature. The Old Wives' Tale, printed in 1595, is chiefly noticeable for having probably furnished Milton with hints for the framework of Comus. In the Tale, amidst a variety of other disconnected episodes, we have the adventures of two brothers seeking their sister Delia, who has been beguiled by the enchanter Sacrapant, and is only set free at the last through the intervention of a ghost or spirit. Among the secondary threads of interest is a caricature of the classical school of versifiers, especially Gabriel Harvey, whose hexameters are quoted and ridiculed by a comic character, Huanebango. Finally, we have from Peele's hand a play founded on Scripture history, David and Bethsabe. It has been called 'a curious specimen of the Miracle Play in its most modern form,' and is noticeable as one of the few dramas of the Renaissance period drawn from Scriptural sources. This is Peele's most ambitious and finished work. It is written throughout in blank verse, and, as its full title tells us, deals with two incidents, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, With the Tragedie of Absalom. The earlier plot is handled with tact and delicacy, and the story of Absalom's revolt is powerfully told. But little skill is shown in connecting the two episodes, and the play is rather a dramatized chronicle than a drama in the stricter sense. The blank verse is facile and fluent, and is often not without a real, though somewhat grandiose, beauty, but it seldom varies its cadence and soon palls on the ear. Peele's theatrical activity extended over a period of fifteen years; he was not cut off in mid-career like Marlowe and Greene. Yet he made less contribution than either to dramatic advance, and he was not an originator in the same sense as Lyly. He can scarcely be said to show the instinct of a true master, whether in plot, portraiture, or versification. But his versatility, his urbane and graceful treatment of his themes, his command of imagery and language, his freedom from the sensuous taint—all these combine to give him an honourable place among the lieutenants, not the leaders, of Elizabethan drama. CHAPTER V. ROBERT GREENE. AMONG Shakspere's predecessors the place second to Marlowe must be assigned to ROBERT GREENE, of whose personal career, as typical of the Bohemianism of the times, some details have already been given. Like Lyly, he was novelist and playwright in one, and attained high excellence in both arts. He himself tells us that as soon as he had taken his degree he 'left the University and away to London, where I became an author of plays, and a penner of Love-Pamphlets, so that I soon grew famous in that quality.' Of his early dramatic works, published previously to Marlowe's Tamburlaine, not one has survived. Whether from professional jealousy, or the more respectable motive of literary conservatism, Greene, as has been said, had opposed with envenomed ridicule the introduction of blank verse upon the stage. But the victory of the new metre was so decisive that he found himself compelled to follow in the fashion that his rival had set. Alphonsus, King of Arragon, which is almost certainly the earliest of his extant plays, is written in obvious imitation of Tamburlaine. Not only are Marlowe's style and diction faithfully copied, even to the almost literal reproduction of individual lines, but the whole plot of the drama is modelled upon that of its predecessor. The interest is supposed to centre round Alphonsus, who, like the Scythian, rises from a lowly fortune to high estate, conquering kingdom after kingdom, and finally overcoming the Great Turk,' whose daughter he wins as his wife. But the play shows few traces of power or spontaneity. It was not difficult to improve upon Marlowe's extravagances, and to represent the victorious Alphonsus making his entry with a canopy carried over him by three lords, having over each corner a king's head crowned.' But it was quite a different matter for Greene to catch the real spirit of his predecessor's great creation, with its superb poetry and passion, and in this he completely failed. His hero is a purely lay figure, whose exploits arouse scant sympathy, and the subordinate characters are equally wooden. There is little attempt at dramatic development of plot; we have merely, as in Tamburlaine, a succession of scenes without any adequate binding motive. Perhaps the most effective touch, and one which owes nothing to Marlowe's example, is the skilfully managed reappearance of the hero's father in the last act, to resolve complications and bring about a happy finale. The play exhibits a magnificent contempt for historical perspective, which is remarkable even in that age of jumbled chronologies. The story is mediaeval, but it is introduced by Venus, who acts throughout as Chorus; Medea, Mahomet, and the Homeric seer Calchas are all pressed into the service of the plot, and Calchas is represented as rising 'in a white surplice and a cardinal's mitre,' while the Great Turk orders prisoners to be led to the Marshalsea.' A similar naïveté characterizes many of the stage directions, as for instance, 'Exit Venus; or if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage, and draw her up.' Orlando Furioso is similar in its general style to Alphonsus, and is written for the most part in equally inflated diction, but it shows a distinct advance both in constructive power and characterization. The plot is taken from Ariosto's epic, though numerous additions and changes are made by the dramatist. Angelica, the daughter of Marsillius, Emperor of Africa, is sought in marriage by princely suitors from all parts of the earth. In the opening scene of the play the wooers one by one make their appeal, and Angelica, passing over mighty potentates like the Soldan of Egypt and the King of the Isles, fixes her choice on Orlando, the County Palatine. The foreshadowing of a leading situation in The Merchant of Venice will be noticed, and there can be little doubt that this episode was introduced |