Shakespeare's Fellows

WHEN one stands upon the highest summit of some many-folded range of hills, the mere loftiness of his station often makes the lower crowns, distinct and bold beneath him, seem little inferior ; but when, descending, he makes one of them his perch, how the lonely monarch rises aloft! Thus it is when from Shakespeare’s height men survey his fellows, the swelling names of that Elizabethan cluster. “ Marlowe,” they say with mouthing rhetoric, “ on whose dawn-flushed brow the morning clouds too soon crept with envious vapors that the most golden of Apollo’s shafts should never pierce more ; Beaumont and Fletcher, twins of the summer noontide, and Chapman bearing his weight of forests with the ease and might of old Titans; Ford and Webster, who made their home with the tempest, and seemed to leash the thunder ; ” and so with all the others of the tremendous upheaval of the age. But when one leaves Shakespeare’s ground and descends to any of these, how wind-blown is all such tumid description, while undiminished the king of the peaks still soars in the sky! It is not by the critic’s will that Shakespeare’s altitude is made the measure of other men who were so unfortunate as to be born his rivals; one can help it no more than the eye can help seeing. It has been said of Dante that the thirteenth century existed to become his commentary. So grand a mot cannot be made for the great dramatist, though it is true that his genius reduced all his contemporaries to perpetual subjection to itself; no superlatives can be offered in their praise except by his leave, and, when their own worth is made known, the last service they do us in showing how invaluable is Shakespeare’s treasure is perhaps the most useful.

Even Marlowe, in whose youth, if anywhere in history, was the promise of a mate for Shakespeare, needs the placet of the latter’s withdrawal before he can tread the stage. There are some, no doubt, who would say that possibly Shakespeare might not have obtained entrance there with Lear and Othello if Marlowe had not first fitted the tragic buskin to the high step of Tamburlaine ; and in a sense the retort would be a just one. The highest genius avails itself of those who go before to prepare the way, the road-makers building the paths of speech and opening the provinces of thought; but to be forced to stipulate at the outset that a great name in literature, such as Marlowe’s, shall be considered only with reference to his turn in historical development is to make a confession of weakness in the cause ; it is to forego his claim to be judged as a writer of universal literature. It is not a question now of settling that or any other particular of Marlowe’s rank, nor of analyzing his genius, nor of discussing the tradition of his life. The exact reach and swing and force of his “mightly line" we leave our readers to experience when they expose their brains to it. But in suffering the reperusal of these dramas¹ ourselves, being tempted thereto by delightful printing and unobtrusive editing, certain observations occurred to us regarding that enormous difference of altitude between Shakespeare and his fellows to which we have just adverted.

What this difference is in Marlowe’s case is tersely indicated by the fact that competent students discern his genius in Titus Andronicus, which in Shakespeare’s crown is rather a foil than a gem. This play, with Marlowe’s touch still on it, would illustrate, if compared with Shakespeare’s undoubted work, how cumbrous and stiffening were the shackles of the stage tradition from which he freed his art. But in Marlowe’s accredited dramas, say in Doctor Faustus (to lay aside the rant of Tamburlaine as merely initiatory, tentative, and facile), the necessities of contemporaneous taste and usage are so tyrannical as almost to ruin the work for any other age. Doctor Faustus is not in any sense a drama. It is a series of slightly connected scenes from the life of a conjuror, in which thaumaturgy and the hatred of the Papacy are made to furnish comic horseplay of the most clownish kind; or else fear of the devil — a real live devil— is used to still the blood of the spectators with the horns, hooves, and fire of coarse horror. Of the dramatic capabilities of the Faust legend as a whole Marlowe indicates no perception. He caught the force, at most, of two situations in it, — the invocation of Helen’s shadow and the soliloquy ; but though in treating these he exhibited, genius as bold, direct, and original as Shakespeare’s self, they are merely fragmentary. Except in these scenes, in which Marlowe’s voice really quells his time and sounds alone in the theatre, the uproar of the pit frightens away the muse, and leaves comedy and tragedy alike to the disfigurement of the ruthless pre-Elizabethan stage. Similarly in The Jew of Malta, even if the first two acts are in fact fashioned by dramatic genius as no other but Shakespeare could have moulded them, the last three taper off into the tail of the old monster that had flopped and shuffled on the mediæval boards on every saint’s day, time out of mind. In Edward II. alone is there any approach to a drama, properly speaking : it is complete, connected, sustained, and it has tenderness, passion, and pathos ; but though Mr. Swinburne gives it the palm in certain particulars over Shakespeare’s Richard II., which was modeled after it, it will not bear comparison with that play in dramatic grasp. To notice but one difference : in Marlowe’s work the king’s favoritism is so much an infatuation and a weakness that he loses our sympathy, and his dethronement, independently of its brutal miseries, is felt to be just; while in Shakespeare Richard’s favoritism is retired far in the background, and his faith in his divine right to the crown (never insisted on by Edward) is so eloquent and so pervades and qualifies the whole play that, when the king is murdered, one is driven to believe that the bishop’s denunciation of God’s vengeance on the usurping Lancaster must prove true prophecy. In the matter of dramatic handling there can be no doubt of Shakespeare’s more expert sense; and for our part, comparing the two scene by scene, Shakespeare is always more perfect, though his ideality may make the characterization appear, as it does to Mr. Swinburne, less sharp; we miss in Richard only the charm of the presence of Marlowe’s young Prince, in whose person, perhaps it is worth remarking, the “child” first entered into the dramatic literature of England.

In writing above to the effect that Marlowe’s plays in general are deeply infected by the rawness of the time, — imperfectly dissociated from the miracle plays in conception, incident, and realistic passion (however far removed from them in style and metrical structure), and dependent on vulgar buffoonery in many scenes, — we have not been unmindful that many scholars, and among them the studious editor of this edition, have denied Marlowe’s responsibility for large portions of the works that go under his name as sole author. Questions of this sort are difficult to settle ; but the method of ascribing to a writer only such passages as are worthy of the editor’s idea of him has the fault of being too easy. Marlowe’s reform of the drama was, like other reforms, a matter of time, of prejudice, of fierce opposition, of timid managers, of vociferous and rebellious audiences ; and however perfectly he may have theorized, he had to practice with such clay as he had. Possibly the burlesque and rout and horror, Tamburlaine’s chariot drawn by captive kings, and the nose of Barabas, which passed into a proverb for its enormousness, and all the strut and feathers and saltpetre devils, — possibly all this was the work of some theatrical ancestor of that “ wicked partner,” who has figured in modern politics and trade. Perhaps, when Marlowe rewrote an old play, he seized the opportunity to put in as much good and strike out as much evil as luck and the managers would consent to, and when he wrote an original drama he may have let others fill up the interstices of its loose construction with stuff which he disdained to father; and on the other hand, it may be as well to take a less drastic view. It is not more likely that he was always at his best than that he was always sober. However that may be, in this paper his name is used to signify what it must to the world at large, to wit, the dramas and poems which have come down to us under it and are admirably edited and presented in this edition. And this Marlowe — the Marlowe of history, not of critical dissection — is by no means a Prospero of art.

It is necessary to add another word. If anything could lead us to adopt in all its fullness that pleasing theory of “ the wicked partner,” with all its saving consequences, it would be Marlowe’s rhymed verse, in which his genius had a solitary and unimpeded course. His dramatic faculty, distinct and powerful as it was, exhibited its perfect might only in a few volcanic flashes. But in his verses he surpassed his rival wherever the two approached near enough to invite just comparison. Venus and Adonis is left out of sight by the first two sestiads of Hero and Leander. The latter stands alone in its many perfections : its music (which Keats but lamely limped after) has never been heard since in England ; its imagery almost convicts us of the heresy of believing that its author was endowed with a richer fancy, were that possible, than the master’s own. It bears the test, which is called the supreme trial of the highest genius, — that of being wholly modern, if by such a current phrase of egotism we may express its freedom from those decaying elements of time and place in which the potency of oblivion lies. And we would fain believe that the poet who sang this love-story and the passionate shepherd’s lay always worked as perfectly; but remembering how often the highest genius has been touched by the frailties of its time, even the memory of the “ dead shepherd ’’cannot persuade us that the dramas are more than a mighty and chaotic experiment in creation which must in great part lapse back into the gulf.

On leaving Marlowe and turning to Middleton,² the second name in Mr. Bullen’s series, one is perhaps more delightfully impressed by the powerful compulsion with which Shakespeare “worked out the beast and evolved the man ” in English drama. If any one thinks that the putting out of Gloster’s eyes with hot irons upon the stage is too horrible, let him turn to the old tragedy ; and if he thinks Shakespeare is unclean, we commend him to the early plays of Middleton. Vice is the butt of comedy, and burlesque must live with low characters ; and perhaps, as men are constituted, it is at least equally effective to make evil ridiculous as to make it terrible. Against certain indecencies the former is the only method open to literature. But not to put too puritanical a point to it, the comedies in these first four volumes, now issued, bring us into very unsavory company. They present a picture of London life, no doubt, as it was lived in certain quarters, and are copious illustrations of the society of the time; but into such quarters and society what need to go ? Wit and cleverness there is of a local and temporary kind ; or at least it is so closely attached to the town of the time that one cannot get its effect without a sort of expatriation from his own place and putting into abeyance his sense of decency. Moreover, a considerable amount of special information is required to understand the plays ; in fact, the contemporary drench is so deep that oblivion can be wrung out of them. It is easy to say that this is of necessity the case with comedy ; that the subject is manners, and manners are transitory; and that the aim is to make fun, and fun is for the pit. The point which is aimed at here — and it is one to thank Heaven for — is that Shakespeare rose out of all this, and gave us laughter without fastening upon us the swarm of “ wag-tails ” and other classes of ill-sounding names, in endless succession, which his fellows transported so plentifully from the London streets; and that he should have done this seems, when we read the comedy of his time, the most marvelous thing about him. In this, too, he was preëminently a free soul.

From what has been written it will be justly inferred that this series is one for scholarly libraries, as is also shown by the fact that only eighty of the whole three hundred and fifty copies, to which the edition is limited, are offered for sale in this country. Scholars will not need to be told what is the value of such a reissue of works which have been published hitherto only in inconvenient editions, now difficult to obtain, and which have never had so careful, well informed, and judicious an editor, wdiose work is to be highly commended, though occasionally a student may differ from his interpretations, as has sometimes occurred with ourselves. Nor in attempting to illustrate plainly the eternal difference between Shakespeare and his fellows (from which it follows, in our view, that, broadly speaking, the public does not neglect the latter without justice and wisdom) have we meant to obscure a spark of Marlowe’s fiery genius, or to slur a syllable of Middleton’s mastery of speech, which, when he puts forth his power, is of the noblest; just as with the remaining members of the series, which is to include Shirley and Beaumont and Fletcher, if not others, we would not even seem to depreciate their charm and force and rightful claim to honorable remembrance, though here and there some sere foliage mingles with and almost hides the leaves that are bright with the living green. To know them well is to know Shakespeare better. The editor has done a service of worth to the great historic body of our literature, and the student who enriches his library with these volumes will have no unimportant fraction of the indispensable wealth which in its fullness makes up a perfect English culture.