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nius. Belinus promises Alphonsus that he shall possess whatever his sword conquers, and in the first battle he kills the usurper, and claims the kingdom of Arragon, which Belinus, as by contract bound, bestows upon him. Thus seated on the throne of Arragon, Alphonsus demands the submission of Belinus, his benefactor, as a vassal; and the latter, not submitting, is warred upon and subdued, together with his ally, the Duke of Milan. Alphonsus gives away the kingdom of Naples, the dukedom of Milan, and even his own crown of Arragon to three of his chief followers, determining himself to attack Amurack, the Sultan of Turkey, (to whom Belinus had fled,) and to seat himself on the throne of the Mahometan empire. He succeeds, and finally marries Iphigina, the daughter of Amurack, who is content, after a long struggle, to yield the sovereignty to his Christian son-in-law.

These are the main incidents, and from the first act to the last, (for it is regularly divided into acts, though the scenes are not marked,) it is full of bustle and battles-Christians of various kingdoms, Turks, and Amazons (for an army of female warriors is brought into the field on behalf of Amurack) fill the stage; and independent of any interest for the principal characters, which is inconsiderable, it must have been a striking spectacle. Medea is also introduced to work enchantments, and, at the instigation of Fausta, the wife of Amurack, she raises Homer's Calchas, and makes him prophesy of the result of the contest between Alphonsus and Amurack.

The blank-verse has little force or variety, though

sufficiently easy and flowing, and Greene has here rarely assisted himself by the insertion of rhyming couplets. The following is the prologue of Venus, who, lamenting the deficiency of poets, undertakes to write the piece herself; and for this purpose, after she has delivered her prologue, departs with Calliope and the rest of the Muses (who had entered playing upon instruments) to Parnassus

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'Poets are scarce, when Goddesses themselves 'Are forced to leave their high and stately seats, 'Placed on the top of high Olympus mount, 'To seeke them out to pen their champions praise. 'The time hath been when Homer's sugar'd muse · Did make each echo to repeate his verse, That every coward that durst crack a spear 'And tilt and turney for his lady's sake, 'Was painted out in colours of such price As might become the proudest potentate: 'But now-a-days, so irksome idless' slights, And cursed charms have witch'd each student's mind, That death it is to any of them all,

If that their hands to penning you do call. 'Oh Virgil, Virgil, wert thou now alive, 'Whose painful pen in stout Augustus' days 'Did 'dain to let the base and silly fly 'To scape away without thy praise of her, 'I do not doubt but long or ere this time,

Alphonsus' fame unto the heavens should climb;

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Alphonsus' fame, that man of Jove his seed,

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Whose sire, although he habit on the earth,

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'As well as any one, whate'er he be.

But setting by Alphonsus' power divine,

What man alive, or now amongst the ghosts, 'Could countervail his courage and his strength? 'But thou art dead, yea, Virgil, thou art gone, And all his acts drown'd in oblivion.

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No, Venus, no, though poets prove unkind,

'And loth to stand in penning of his deeds,

Yet rather than they shall be clean forgot,

I, which was wont to follow Cupid's games,
Will put in ure Minerva's sacred art;

And this my hand, which used for to pen
The praise of Love and Cupid's peerless power,
'Will now begin to treat of bloody Mars,
'Of doughty deeds and valiant victories.'

The choruses Venus delivers between the acts are sometimes necessary to the due understanding of the plot, which proceeds with great rapidity, the action changing suddenly from Italy to Turkey, and from Turkey again to Italy.

The scene of enchantment, in which Medea raises Calchas, presents nothing so remarkable as the curious fact that the Greek seer was dressed in a white surplice and a cardinal's mitre.' The enchantress thus invokes him

Thou which wert wont in Agamemnon's days 'To utter forth Apollo's oracles

'At sacred Delphos, Calchas I do mean,
'I charge thee come, all lingering set aside,
Unless the penance you thereof abide.
'I conjure thee by Pluto's loathsome lake,
By all the hags which harbour in the same,

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By stinking Styx and filthy Phlegethon,

To come with speed, and truly to fulfil

'That which Medea to thee straight shall will.'

Throughout there is the usual abundance of classical allusion without propriety, as in the following instance, where Amuracke is made, in the true Turkish spirit of the time, to threaten Mahomet himself, for having disappointed him.

'Oh, Dædalus, and wert thou now alive,

To fasten wings upon high Amuracke, Mahound should know, and that for certainty, "That Turkish kings can brook no injury.'

It is evident, from the last lines put into the mouth of Venus in the Epilogue, that Greene meant to write a second part to this performance; but whether he were deterred by its want of popularity, or prevented by the suddenness of his death, must be matter of mere speculation. She thus addresses the Muses, from whom she was about to depart for Olympus.

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'Mean time, dear Muses, wander you not far 'Forth of the path of high Parnassus' hill; That when I come to finish up his life,

'You may be ready for to succour me.

Adieu, dear dames; farewell, Calliope.'

Possibly the continuation has perished.

In The Looking-Glass for London and England, 1594, Greene had a coadjutor in the celebrated Thomas Lodge, and I shall speak of that production when I remark upon the separate performances of the latter.

172

ON

JOHN LYLY AND HIS WORKS.

JOHN LYLY was an ingenious scholar, with some fancy; but if poetry be the heightened expression of natural sentiments and impressions, he has little title to the rank of a poet. His thoughts and his language are usually equally artificial, the results of labour and study; and in scarcely a single instance does he seem to have yielded to the impulses of genuine feeling.

He is therefore to be placed in a rank inferior to most of his contemporaries; but it is not to be forgotten that, strictly speaking, some writers with whom he may have been compared, were not his contemporaries: he began to write a little before them, and he was the inventor of a style which, however factitious, had the recommendations of refinement and novelty *. Lyly became so fashionable, that better pens, as in the case of Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, followed his example, and became his imitators. The chief characteristic of his style, besides its smoothness, is

* It was called Euphuism, from his work Euphues the Anatomy of Wit, which was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company in 1578, and was no doubt published early in 1579. Malone (see Shakespeare by Boswell, ii. 188) had a copy dated 1579, which he supposed to be the second edition, the first being without the insertion of the year on the title-page.

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