What, historically, are the
essentials
of high comedy?
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
occur
several that are inspired by Italian themes, The three Systers
of Mantua (1578) and The Duke of Millayn and the Marques of
Mantua (1579) were acted by professional players, and Ariodante
and Genevora (1583), as already mentioned, was performed by
the Merchant Taylors' boys. Italian players, it is noticeable,
'
had, in 1574, followed the queen's progress, “and made pastyme
fyrst at Wynsor and afterwardes at Reading. ' From the list of
properties supplied for the performance at Reading, it is evident
that the foreigners acted a pastoral.
Probably, except for some school plays, the pieces performed
before the queen, even when they were on Italian, or, as
was more frequently the case, on classical and mythological,
subjects, were not cast in the mould of Ariosto or of Terence.
Written, for the most part, to be acted by professional companies
before popular audiences, they did not follow the classic or neo-
classic conventions the influence of which has been traced in the
preceding pages. They adhered instinctively to the freer lines
of native English drama, inherited from miracle and morality
plays”. A few of them, in fact, as may be inferred from their titles,
1 See Documents relating to the Office of the Revels in the time of Queen Elizabeth,
ed. Feuillerat, A. (vol. xxi of Bang's Materialien).
2 One play of this type, not mentioned, however, in the revels' accounts, has
recently been brought to light. It is The Plaie of Pacient Grissel, written by John
Phillip and printed by T. Colwell, to whom, in all probability, it was licensed for
publication in 1565/6 and 1568/9. A unique copy found in lord Mostyn's library was
sold in 1907, and from this the play has been reprinted by the Malone Society (1909).
The plot is taken from the closing tale of the Decameron, probably through an inter.
mediate source, though some of the episodes and the form of the proper names make it
9
5
2
3
1
## p. 117 (#141) ############################################
Realistic Influences. Tom Tyler 117
were belated moralities; a large number treated fabulous and
romantic themes? ; at least two, The Creweltie of a Stepmother and
Murderous mychaell, seem to be early specimens of the drama of
domestic life?
With few exceptions, these plays have perished; but, doubtless,
they were typical of the theatrical productions of the first twenty
years of Elizabeth's reign. Together with other popular pieces no
longer known even by name, they came under the lash of purist
critics, such as Whetstone in his preface to Promos and Cassandra
(1578) and Sidney in his Apologie for Poetrie (printed in 1595),
who ridiculed their extravagances of plot and style, and their
defiance of the unities. Sidney deplored the mingling in the same
piece of grave and humorous elements, ‘hornpipes and funerals,
and proclaimed that the salvation of the English drama could
only be found in strict adherence to classical rules. But it was
in vain for him to strive against the stream. Even in the plays
adapted from Roman, neo-Latin, or Italian models, Roister Doister,
Misogonus and The Bugbears, the native dramatic instinct for
breadth of design, vigour of characterisation and a realism that
often becomes coarseness, had largely transmuted, as has been
shown, the borrowed alien materials.
On the other hand, the popular drama, increasingly produced
by men with something of the culture of the universities or the
capital, tended towards a higher level of construction and of
diction. An example of early native farcical comedy is extant in
the anonymous Tom Tyler and his Wife, acted by 'pretty boys,'
which from its language and versification cannot have been written
later than the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, and probably goes
back further. Though allegorical figures, Destiny, Desire and
Patience, are introduced, the play is in effect a domestic drama
6
unlikely that this source was Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. The comedy covers the whole
lengthy history of Grissell's marriage, her sufferings, her abasement, and her restora-
tion to her husband and her dignities. The author shows some skill in grouping his
materials, but the characterisation is weak, and the fourteeners,' in which the serious
passages are mainly written, are monotonous, though the piece contains some pretty
lyrics. The most interesting feature of Pacient Grissell is that it mingles with the
personages of the Italian story a number of allegorical figures, of which the chief is
• Politicke perswasion,' the nimble-tongued Vice, who acts as the evil genius of the
marquis. Thus, more than thirty years before Chettle, Dekker and Haughton's
similarly named comedy (as to which cf. vol. vi, chap. II) was written, the story
of pacient Grissell,' always a favourite with playwrights (cf. Ward, A. W. , Eng. Dram.
Lit. vol. I, pp. 428—430 and ante, p. 15), had appeared in vernacular dramatic form.
i Similar plays, not performed before the queen, but still extant, are Common
Conditions (imperfect) and The Rare Triumphs oj Love and Fortune.
3 Cf. post, chap. XIII.
1
1
## p. 118 (#142) ############################################
I 18
Early English Comedy
of low life, showing how Tom suffers tribulation at the hands of
his shrewish wife, and how, even when a friend has tamed her by
drastic methods, he weakly surrenders the fruits of the victory
which has been won for him. The piece has a lusty swing and
vigour in its action and dialogue, and in its racy songs. It has
also a certain underlying unity in the idea that a man cannot
escape his fate, however unpleasant it may be. As Tom Tyler
ruefully exclaims :
If Fortune will it, I must fulfil it;
If Destiny say it, I cannot denay it.
But, if Tom Tyler be compared with The Taming of a Shrew
(to instance a play on a somewhat kindred theme, though it lies
slightly beyond the period dealt with in this chapter), it will be
evident how much native comedy had gained from contact with
foreign models in careful articulation of plot and in refinement
of diction and portraiture.
The fusion of classical with native elements appears very
clearly in Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias, a 'tragical
comedy,' as he calls it, which was almost certainly acted before
the queen in 1564! The plot is drawn from the annals of Syracuse,
and such figures as Carisophus, the parasite, Eubulus, the good
counsellor, Stephano, the slave-servant, and Dionysius, the tyrant,
are borrowed from the Roman stage. Many classical quotations
are introduced into the dialogue, which in the frequent use of
orixouvola and of rhetorical moral commonplaces shows the
influence of Seneca. Yet in spite of its debt to Latin drama
Damon and Pithias is not an academic product, but is, in form
and spirit, predominantly of native English type. It is not divided
into acts after the classical manner; and in its deliberate mixture
of pathos and farcical humour, and in its violation of the unity
of time, it runs counter not exactly to the precedents of the
classical stage, but to the current renascence perversion of them.
The Syracusan court at which the action is laid is modelled upon
the Elizabethan, and the rivalries of Aristippus and Carisophus
had their counterpart in the intrigues among the virgin queen's
1 The play was not licensed till 1567, and the earliest known edition dates from
1571. But 'Edwardes' Tragedy' is mentioned in the Revels' accounts as having been
performed by the children of the chapel at Christmas, 1564. Damon and Pithias in
the loose terminology of the day might well be called a tragedy in contrast with his
earlier • toying plays,' to which Edwards refers in his prologue. The play was
already familiar to the courtiers who saw his Palamon and Arcite at Oxford in
September 1566 (cf. post, vol. vi, chap. XII). Damon and Pithias was revived at
Oxford in January 1568 (cf. loc. cit. ).
## p. 119 (#143) ############################################
Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra 119
train, though the author protests against any topical interpreta-
tion of his 'courtly toyes':
We doo protest this flat,
Wee talke of Dionisius Courte, wee meane no Court but that.
Even more unmistakably English is the character of Grim the
collier, who hails from Croydon, though he never mentions his
birthplace, and shows remarkable familiarity with Syracusan affairs.
There is genuine, if coarse, vernacular humour in the episode of
the shaving of him by the saucy lackeys, Will and Jack, who pick
his pockets on the sly, while they chant the refrain ‘Too nidden
and toodle toodle too nidden. ' And the episode, though in itself
grotesquely irrelevant, is due to the playwright's true instinct that
comic relief is needed to temper the tragic suspense while the life of
Pitbias, who has become hostage for Damon during his two months'
respite from the block, trembles in the balance. The high-souled
mutual loyalty of the two friends and the chivalrous eagerness
with which each courts death for the other's sake are painted with
genuine emotional intensity. Though lacking in metrical charm or
verbal felicity, Damon and Pithias has merits which go some way
towards accounting for the acclaim with which, as contemporary
allusions show, it was received; and the play possesses an impor-
tance of its own in the development of romantic drama from a
combination of forces and materials new and old. As Roister
Doister and Misogonus, based on Latin or neo-Latin plays, had by
the incorporation of English elements gravitated towards a type
of comedy hitherto unknown, so Damon and Pithias, an original
work by a native playwright, showed the strong influence of classical
types and methods. Starting from opposite quarters, the forces
that produced romantic comedy are thus seen to converge.
George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, printed in 1578,
is another tragicomedy in direct line of succession to Damon and
Pithias. It is based on one of the tales in Giraldi Cinthio's
Hecatommithi, though the names of the leading figures are changed,
as they were to be changed yet again by Shakespeare when in his
Measure for Measure, founded on Whetstone's play, he gave to
the story its final and immortal form. Whetstone's sense of the
importance of design and structure is seen in his prefatory state-
ment, that he had divided the whole history into two commedies,
for that, Decorum used, it would not be convayed in one. ' Thus
the story of the self-righteous deputy, Promos, who seduces
Cassandra by a promise of pardon to her condemned brother,
6
毒
## p. 120 (#144) ############################################
I 20 Early English Comedy
Andrugio, is dramatised in two parts, each, after the orthodox
classical pattern, divided into five acts. Yet the necessity for
so complex and formal a scheme arises largely from the fact, not
mentioned by the playwright, that with the overmastering English
instinct for elaboration and realism, he adds a comic underplot, in
which the courtesan Lamia is the chief figure. This underplot is
much more closely linked to the main theme than is the humorous
interlude in Damon and Pithias, for it heightens the impression
of general social demoralisation and of hypocrisy in officials of
every grade. With its far from ineffective portrayal of several
characters new to English drama, and with its sustained level of
workmanlike though uninspired alexandrines and decasyllabic
lines, including some passages of blank verse, Promos and Cas-
sandra is the most typical example of an original romantic play
before the period of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors.
Edwards and Whetstone both prefaced their dramas with a
statement of their theory of the function of comedy.
In commedies the greatest skyll is this lightly to touch
All thynges to the quicke; and eke to frame eche person so,
That by his common talke, you may his nature rightly know.
The olde man is sober, the yonge man rashe, the lover triumphyng in joyes,
The matron grave, th harlat wilde, and full of wanton toyes.
Whiche all in one course they no wise doo agree;
So correspondent to their kinde their speeches ought to bee.
Thus wrote Edwards, and Whetstone, though without referring
to him, paraphrases his words :
To write a Comedie kindly, grave olde men should instruct, yonge men
should showe the imperfections of youth, Strumpets should be lascivious,
Boyes unhappy, and Clownes should speake disorderlye; entermingling all
these actions in such sorte as the grave matter may instruct and the pleasant
delight.
The playwrights who wrote thus realised the principle, which
underlies romantic art, of fidelity to Nature in all her various forms.
But they and their fellows, except Gascoigne in his derivative
productions, had not the intuition to see that the principle could
never be fully applied till comedy adopted as her chief instrument
the infinitely flexible medium of daily intercourse between man
and man-prose. It was Lyly who grasped the secret, and taught
comedy to speak in new tones. It remained for a greater than
Lyly to initiate her into the final mystery of the imaginative
transfiguration of Nature, and thus inspire her to create
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
## p. 121 (#145) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
THE PLAYS OF THE UNIVERSITY WITS
Come foorth you witts, that vaunt the pompe of speach,
And strive to thunder from a Stage-man's throate:
View Menaphon a note beyond your reach;
Whose sight will make your drumming descant doate;
Players avant, you know not to delight;
Welcome sweete Shepheard; worth a Scholler's sight.
THESE lines of Thomas Brabine, prefixed to Greene's Menaphon
(1589), follow hard upon Nashe's involved and, today, obscure
preface, ‘To the Gentlemen Students. This preface is one long gibe
at the poets and the writers who, either without university education
had risen from the ranks, or, though thus educated, had chosen
ways of expression not in accordance with the standards of the
university wits. John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Robert
Greene and Thomas Nashe, however they may have differed among
themselves, stood shoulder to shoulder whenever they were facing
the ‘alcumists of eloquence' whose standards were not their own.
Though, in the period from 1570 to 1580, the curriculum at Oxford
and at Cambridge was still medieval, yet, as an addition to it, or in
place of it, groups of students, from year to year, received with
enthusiasm whatever returning scholars and travellers from Italy
and France had to offer them of the new renascence spirit and
its widening reflection in continental literary endeavour. A pride
in university training which amounted to arrogance, and a curious
belief, not unknown even today, that only the university-bred man
can possibly have the equipment and the sources of information
fitting him to be a proper exponent of new, and, at the same time, of
really valuable, ideas and literary methods—these were sentiments
shared by all the members of the group of 'university wits. '
John Lyly, born in 1553 or 1554, was an Oxford man. He gradu-
ated B. A. in 1573, and M. A. in 1575, and, in 1579, was incorporated
M. A. at Cambridge. By precedence in work and, probably, in actual
historical importance, he is the leader of the group. Indeed,
Lyly is typical of the university-bred man whose native common-
## p. 122 (#146) ############################################
I 22 Plays of the University Wits
sense and humour just save him from the pedantry which conceives
that the summum bonum for man lies in books, and in books only.
His remarkably receptive and retentive mind had been open at
the university to all influences for culture, both permanent and
ephemeral. Like a true son of the time, also, he could rarely
distinguish between the two kinds.
Blount, the compiler of the first collected edition of Lyly's
plays (1632), declared :
Our nation are in his debt, for a new English which hee taught them.
Euphues and His England began first that language: All our Ladies were
then his Schollers; And that Beantie in Court which could not Parley
Euphueisme, was as little regarded as shee which now there speakes not
French. These his playes Crown'd him with applause, and the Spectators
with pleasure. Thou canst not repent the Reading of them over; when Old
John Lilly is merry with thee in thy Chamber, Thou shalt say, Few (or
None) of our Poets now are such witty companions.
>
But Blount wrote after the fashion of a publisher turned biographer,
not as a man thoroughly informed. In regard to both Euphues
and the plays, Gabriel Harvey's malicious statement that 'young
Euphues hatched the egges, that his elder freends laide' comes
much nearer the truth. In the plays which Lyly wrote between
his first appearance as an author, in 1579, with his novel Euphues
and his Anatomie of Wit, and his death in 1606, he was rather
one who mingled literary and social fashions, a populariser and a
perfecter, than a creator. The composite product bears the im-
print of his personality, but he borrows more than he creates.
A brief review of material, methods and style in his comedy will
prove this true.
What, in the first place, is the material ? Usually, the slight
theme is suggested by some legend of the gods and goddesses ;
sometimes, as in Love's Metamorphosis, the source is treated simply
for its dramatic value--as Lyly understood drama, of course; some-
times for a fugitive allegory bearing on incidents in the career
of the virgin queen, or in national affairs; sometimes, as in
Endimion, Sapho and Phao and Midas, for what has been
interpreted as complicated allegory; and, rarely, as in Mother
Bombie, for mere adaptive fooling. Such material for tenuous
plots is not new. Turning the pages of the Accounts of the Revels
at Court, one finds titles of plays given by the children's com-
panies—the choirboys of St Paul's, of the Chapel Royal, or the
schoolboys of Westminster or of Merchant Taylors' under
>
1 See, as to Euphues and its influence, vol. III, chap. XVI, pp. 392 ff.
## p. 123 (#147) ############################################
Lyly's Material and Style
123
Mulcaster-very similar to the names of Lyly's plays. There
are, for instance, Iphigenia, Narcissus, Alcmaeon, Quintus Fabius
and Scipio Africanus. We do not know precisely what was the
treatment applied to such subjects—in themselves suggesting
histories, possibly allegories, or even pastorals—but. we do know
that, from the hand of Richard Edwards, master of the children
of the chapel in 1561, we find plays which, in structure, general
method and even some details, provided models for Lyly? . For
instance, the Damon and Pithias of Edwards, probably produced
at court in 1564, deals with a subject of which Lyly was fond-
contrasted ideas of friendship, here exemplified in two para-
sites and the famous friends. The piece is loosely constructed,
especially as to the cohering of the main plot and the comic sub-
plot. It derives its fun, also, from pages and their foolery. We
possess too little dramatic work, especially work produced at court,
of the period of 1560–80, to speak with assurance; yet it seems
highly probable that Edwards was no isolated figure, but, rather,
typifies methods current in plays of that date.
Moreover, as has now been clearly demonstrated, the style
of Lyly, even with all his additions and modifications, is but a
stage of the evolution, in Spain, Italy, France and England, of
a pompous, complicated, highly artificial style, derived from the
Latin periods of Cicero, to which each decade of the renascence
and each experimental copyist had added some new details of
self-conscious complexity. Lyly had two models: one, partly for
style but mainly for material, and the other almost wholly for
style. The first was The Dial of Princes of Don Antonio de
Guevara (1529, with English translations by Berners in 1534 and
by North in 15579); the second was George Pettie's The Petite
Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576). What Lyly specially develops
for himself is the elaborate and irritatingly frequent punning and
the constant citation of the 'unnatural natural history' of Pliny.
Nevertheless, Lyly was one of those-perhaps the chief among
the prose writers of his day-who had a genuine feeling for style.
He felt, as Bond has said,
the need of and consistently aimed at what has been well denominated the
quality of mind in style—the treatment of the sentence not as a haphazard
agglomeration of clauses, phrases and words, but as a piece of literary
architecture whose end is foreseen in the beginning and whose parts are
calculated to minister to the total effect.
i See, as to the plays performed by the children of the chapel, post, vol. vi, chap. II.
2 Cf. vol. 11, p. 340, and vol. II, p. 345.
## p. 124 (#148) ############################################
I 24
Plays of the University Wits
Yet his style is his own, rather because of the surpassing
skill with which he handles its details and imprints the
stamp of his personality on it, than because the details are
original.
Moreover, in his attitude toward love-his gallant trifling ; his
idealisation of women, which, with him, goes even to the point of
making them mere wraiths; above all, in the curious effect
produced by his figures as rather in love with being in love
than moved by real human passion-he is Italianate and of the
renascence.
Moreover, his interest in 'manners maketh man
shows the influence of Il Cortegiano and numberless other re-
nascence discussions of courtly conduct.
Again, in his suspected allegorical treatment of incidents in
the politics of the time, he, probably, does little more than develop
the methods of political allegory current in the days of Henry VIII.
Though the presumably large group of moralities which, in that
reign, scourged conditions of the time, has, with the exception of
Respublica and part of Albion Knight, disappeared, it is not
difficult to believe that the allegory which we suspect in Endimion,
Sapho and Phao and Midas glances at Lyly's own time, even as
political moralities had represented people and conditions in the
reign of Elizabeth's father. Here, again, Lyly is not a creator,
but one who, in a new time and for a new audience, applies an
old method to modified literary conditions. Trace Lyly back as
you will, then, to his sources, he is, in material and style, in his
attitude toward men, women, manners and love, thoroughly of the
renascence ; for, looking back to the classics, and stimulated by
modern Italian thought, he expresses himself in a way that
reproduces an intellectual mood of his day.
Nor, of course, is Lyly at all an innovator in his free use of the
lyric. From the miracle-plays downward, the value of music both
as an accompaniment for strongly emotionalised speech, and as a
pleasure in itself, had been well understood : the direction in the
Chester series 'then shall God speak, the minstrels playing 'proves
the first statement, and the gossips' song in the Chester Noah
play proves the second. The presence, later, of choirboys in the
miracle-plays and their períormances at court, tended to main-
tain the lyric in the drama; for their clear boyish voices were
particularly suited to the music of the time. Often, too, young
actors were probably even better as singers, for singing was their
vocation, acting only an avocation. Lyly, as the chief of those who,
at one time or another, wrote for choirboys, merely maintains
## p. 125 (#149) ############################################
I 25
6
.
The Songs of Lyly
the custom of his predecessors as to lyrics. Perhaps, however, he
uses them rather more freely.
That these charming songs in Lyly's plays are really his has
lately been doubted more than once. Certainly, we do not find
them in the quartos : they appear first in Blount's collected
edition of 1632, nearly thirty years after Lyly's death. Yet
Elizabethan dramatists in general seem never to have evaded any
metrical task set them; and, usually, they came out of their efforts
successfully. It proves nothing, too, that we find the song 'What
bird so sings yet so dos wayl ? ' of Campaspe in Ford and Dekker's
The Sun's Darling (1632—4), or another, “O for a bowl of fat
canary,' in the 1640 quarto of Middleton's A Mad World, My
Masters. With the Elizabethan and Jacobean latitude of view
toward originality of material, with the wise principle cherished in
this age that 'we call a thing his in the long run who utters it
clearest and best,' there was no reason why a dramatist should not
omit quotation marks when using the work of a previous songster.
On the other hand, when we recall the collaboration in the masques
of Ben Jonson, not long afterwards, of Giles as master of song,
Inigo Jones as architect, and Ferrabosco as dancing-master, there
is no reason why Lyly should not have called in the aid of any
of the more skilled composers about the court or the city. Words
and music may have been composed by the music-master of the
boys of Paul's. Though we have no verse certainly Lyly's which
would lead us to expect such delicacy as he shows in 'Cupid
and my Campaspe played at cards for kisses,' or juvenile bac-
chanalia like 'O for a bowl of fat canary,' yet, in the material
from Diogenes Laertius which is the source of the scene in
Alexander and Campaspe where the song of the bird notes
occurs, there is certainly a hint for it. Therefore, as Bond has
pointed out, though this song may have been written at Lyly's
order, it may equally well have been a part of his usual skilful
creative use of material thoroughly grasped by him. When all is
said, however, it is not wise, in the light of present evidence, to
rest any large part of Lyly's claim to the attention of posterity on
his authorship of the songs in his plays. In all these respects,
then-of material, method and attitude-Lyly, while genuinely of
the renascence, is far more the populariser and perfecter than
the creator.
What, then, justifies the increasing attention given to Lyly's
1 As to the opportunities afforded to lyric poetry by the drama, cf. ante, vol. iv,
chap. vi, p. 115.
## p. 126 (#150) ############################################
126
Plays of the University Wits
a
work by historians of English drama ? Wherein consists his real
contribution? It is a time-honoured statement that he definitively
established prose as the expression for comedy, that his success
with it swept from the boards the vogue of the ‘jigging vein' of
men who, like Edwards, had written such halting lines as these :
Yet have I played with his beard in knitting this knot;
I promised friendship, but-you love few words-I spake it but I meant
it not.
Who markes this friendship between us two
Shall judge of the worldly friendship without more ado.
It may be a right pattern thereof; but true friendship indeed
Of nought but of virtue doth truly proceed.
For such cumbrous expression, Lyly substituted a prose which,
though it could be ornate to pompousness at his will, could, also,
be gracefully accurate and have a certain rhythm of its own. But
his real significance is that he was the first to bring together on
the English stage the elements of high comedy, thereby preparing
the way for Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and As You
Like It. Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can
hardly miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read
Lyly's plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny's Natural
History. It is not merely that certain words of the song of
the birds' notes in Campaspe gave Shakespeare, subconsciously,
probably, his hint for ‘Hark, hark, the lark'; or that, in the talk
of Viola and the duke he was thinking of Phillida and Galathea”;
but that we could hardly imagine Love's Labour's Lost as existent
in the period from 1590 to 1600, had not Lyly's work just preceded
it. Setting aside the element of interesting story skilfully developed,
which Shakespeare, after years of careful observation of his audi-
ences, knew was his surest appeal, do we not find Much Ado About
Nothing and As You Like It, in their essentials, only develop-
ments, through the intermediate experiments in Love's Labour's
Lost and Two Gentlemen of Verona, from Lyly's comedies?
What, historically, are the essentials of high comedy? It deals
with cultivated people in whom education, and refining environ-
ment, have bred subtler feelings. These gods and goddesses of
Lyly, who have little, if anything, of a classic past, but every-
thing, in thought, attitude towards life and even speech itself, of
the courtiers of Lyly's day, are surely subjects for high comedy.
So close, indeed, are these figures of mythology to the evanescent
life of Lyly's moment, that we are constantly tempted to see, in
Twelfth Night, act II, sc. 4.
? Galathea, act ini, sc. 3.
## p. 127 (#151) ############################################
Lyly and High Comedy 127
this or that figure, some well known person of the court, to hear
in this or that speech, some sentiments according with well known
opinions of this or that notability. And what is love in these
comedies? Not the intense passion that burns itself out in
slaughter—the love of the Italian novelle and the plays of Kyd,
Greene and others influenced by them. Nor is it at all mere
physical appetite, as it often becomes, in the lesser Elizabethans
and, generally, among the Jacobeans. Instead, as in As You
Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, it is the motive force be-
hind events and scenes, but not the one absorbing interest for
author or reader: it is refined, sublimated, etherealised. Contrasts,
delicately brought out, between the real underlying feelings of the
characters and what they wish to feel or wish to be thought to
feel, all of this phrased as perfectly as possible according to
standards of the moment, are what interests Lyly and what he
teaches his audience to care for particularly. Certainly, then,
we are in the realm of high comedy; for, surely, there can be no
laughter from such sources which is not thoughtful laughter, the
essential, as George Meredith has pointed out, of this worm of
drama. From start to finish, Lyly's comedy is based on thought,
and cannot properly be appreciated without thought. At every
point, it is planned, constructed, modelled, to suit the critical
standards of its author and of an exacting group of courtier
critics, both eagerly interested in all that Italy and the continent
had to offer them as literary models of the past and present. Lyly
especially rested, for his prospective success, on his skill in phrase.
It is not merely that he is an artist in the complications of the
euphuistic style to which his own Euphues had given vogue, but
that he is a student of skilled phrase for dramatic and charac-
terising purposes. And this is of great significance for two reasons:
first, because high comedy demands, as a further essential, a nice
sense of phrase-witness Congreve and Sheridan among our later
masters of it; and, secondly, because this careful phrasing of Lyly
emphasises, for the first time in our English drama, the third
essential of a perfect play. Story, the first essential, had been,
crudely, understood so early as the trope in liturgical mysteries.
By accretion of episode, constructive story, which is plot, developed.
The need of characterisation soon came to be understood in miracle-
plays, in moralities and in the interlude of the better kind. Yet
phrase, not as a mere means of characterisation, but so treated,
from start to finish, that it shall do more than expound plot and
characterise, that it shall give pleasure for its own sake by its form
2
## p. 128 (#152) ############################################
128
Plays of the University Wit.
or its content, is Lyly's great contribution to the drama. As he
himself said, 'It is wit that allureth, when every word shal have
his weight, when nothing shal proceed, but it shal either savour of
a sharpe conceipt, or a secret conclusion. ' More than anyone else
before 1587, he raises our English drama to the level of literature;
more than anyone else, he creates a popular drama-for the great
public liked it—which was also enthusiastically received by
audiences at the court as the embodiment of prevailing literary
tastes. He bridges from the uncritical to the critical public
more successfully than any one of the dramatists, till Shake-
speare's depicting of character, as exhibited universally, revealed
to all classes of men their community of experience and emotion.
This raising of the intellectual level of the drama Lyly accomplishes,
too, by the addition of the feminine qualities of literature-delicacy,
grace, charm, subtlety. The English drama was masculine already
to the point of swaggering. It was Lyly's pleasant duty to refine
it, to make it more intellectual, and thus to win the plaudits of a
court presided over by a queen who, if virile in her grasp on
affairs of state, was certainly feminine in her attitude towards the
arts.
If, then, Lyly looks back to an English, a continental and,
even, a classical, past, for inspiration and models, he yet rises
above his sources in an accomplishment which is individual and
of not merely ephemeral significance, but of great importance
to those who immediately follow him in the drama. He intel-
lectualises the drama; he brings, not adaptation, but original
work, into closest touch with the most cultivated men and women
of the time; he unites the feminine to the already existent
masculine elements in our drama; he attains, even if somewhat
hazily, that great dramatic form, high comedy, and, attaining it,
breaks the way for a large part of Shakespeare's work.
George Peele (born 1558) graduated B. A. at Christ Church,
Oxford, in 1577, and M. A. in 1579. Either he must have
made rapid advance as a dramatist during his first years in
London, 1580—2, or, during his long career at the university,
some nine years, he must have developed genuine dramatic ability.
This is evident, because, in July 1583, he was summoned from
London to Oxford to assist William Gager, author of Rivales,
in an entertainment which the latter was arranging for the recep-
tion at Christ Church of Albertus Alasco, Polish prince palatine.
Certainly, The Araygnement of Paris, Peele’s ‘first encrease,' as
## p. 129 (#153) ############################################
Varied Work of Peele
129
Thomas Nashe called it, shows a writer who would seem to have
passed the tiro stage. This play, entered for publication in April
1584, is evidently influenced by the dramatic methods of John Lyly,
owing to the fact that, like Lyly's plays, it was acted before the
queen by children. When we consider that Peele's activity covered
sixteen or eighteen years (he was dead by 1598), at a time when
dramatic composition was rapid, his dramatic work remaining to
us seems not large in quantity. Nor was he himself a slow
workman. Syr Clyomon and Clamydes, tentatively assigned to
him by Dyce, is no longer believed to be his. It is clearly of an
earlier date, and, very possibly, was written by Thomas Preston.
Of Wily Beguiled, sometimes attributed to Peele, Schelling rightly
says: "There is nothing in this comedy to raise a question of
Peele's authorship except the simple obviousness with which the
plot is developed. ' Nor does it seem possible at present to go
beyond Miss Jane Lee's conclusions as to Peele's probable share
in The First and Second Parts of Henry VI. The best proof
as yet advanced for Peele's authorship of Locrine is, even cumu-
latively), inconclusive. Besides The Araygnement of Paris, we
have, as extant plays assigned to Peele, The Old Wives Tale,
Edward I, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe and
The Battell of Alcazar. The last of these plays is attributed to
Peele only because a quotation from it in England's Parnassus
(1600) is assigned to him and because of certain similarities of
phrase; but the play is usually accepted as his. The Hunting of
Cupid, a masque extant only in a slight fragment, and The Turkish
Mahomet, which we know only by its title and some references,
complete the list of Peele’s plays.
Even this brief list, however, shows the variety in his work:
the masque, in The Hunting of Cupid, and something very closely
related to it, in The Araygnement of Paris; the chronicle history,
in Edward I, and, very probably, in The Turkish Mahomet, an even
more marked mingling of romance and so-called history; something
like an attempt to revive the miracle-play, in King David and
Fair Bethsabe ; and genuine literary satire on romantic plays of
the day, in The Old Wives Tale. Whether this variety means
that he merely turned his attention hither and thither as chance
called him, or that he was restlessly trying to find his own easiest
and best expression amid the many inchoate forms of the drama
of the moment, it is perfectly clear that his inborn dramatic gift
was slight. Neither dramatic situation nor characterisation
1 Cf. as to Locrine, ante, chap. iv and post, chap. x.
9
>
>
E. L. V,
CH. VI.
## p. 130 (#154) ############################################
130
Plays of the University Wits
interests him strongly. After years of practice, he is not good
in plotting. Even where he is at his best in characterisation, in
such little touches as the following, he cannot sustain himself at
the pitch reached:
(Queen Elinor presents her babe to its uncle, Lancaster. )
Q. ELINOR. Brother Edmund, here's a kinsman of yours:
You must needs be acquainted.
LANCASTER. A goodly boy; God bless him! -
Give me your hand, sir:
Yon are welcome into Wales.
Q. ELINOR. Brother, there's a fist, I warrant you, will hold a mace as
fast as ever did father or grandfather before him.
Uneven in characterisation, loose in construction to the point of
recklessness, so extravagant in diction that, at moments, one
even suspects burlesque, Peele leaves a critical reader wondering
whether he was merely over-hurried and impatient of the work
he was doing, or genuinely held it in contempt. Certainly, the
chief merit of the fantastic Old Wives Tale is its clever satire on
such romantic plays as Common Conditions. Peele, in his play,
makes fun of just those qualities in the current drama which
Sidney criticised in his Defence of Poesie—the myriad happenings
left untraced to any sufficient cause, the confusion caused by this
multiplicity of incident, and the lavish use of surprise. The Old
Wives Tale confuses the reader as much as any one of the plays
which it ridicules ; but, when seen, it becomes amusing and, in
respect of its satire, a fit predecessor of The Knight of the
Burning Pestle. As the first English play of dramatic criticism,
it deserves high praise.
This play shows, too, as Gummere has pointed out, the
peculiar subjective humour of Peele, which rests on ‘something
more than a literal understanding of what is said and done, a
new appeal to a deeper sense of humour. ' He does not get his
fun solely from time-honoured comic business, or clownery, but
from dramatic irony in the contrast of romantic plot and realistic
diction-indeed, by contrasts in material, in method, in characteri-
sation and, even, in phrase. This is Peele's contribution to that
subtler sense of humour which we have noted in Lyly. In Lyly,
it leads to high comedy: in Peele it finds expression in dramatic
criticism.
Though Peele's life may have had its unseemly sides, he had
a real vision of literature as an art: primus verborum artifex,
Thomas Nashe called him ; nor, for the phrasing of the time, were
## p. 131 (#155) ############################################
Peele as Poet
131
the words exaggerated. Reading his songs, such as that of Paris
and Oenone in The Araygnement of Paris, or the lines at the open-
ing of King David and Fair Bethsabe, one must recognise that
he had an exquisite feeling for the musical value of words; that
he had the power to attain a perfect accord between words and
musical accompaniment. One can hear the tinkling lute in
certain lines in which the single word counts for little; but the
total collocation produces something exquisitely delicate. Yet
Peele is far more than a mere manipulator of words for musical
effect. He shows a real love of nature, which, breaking free from
much purely conventional reference to the nature gods of
mythology, is phrased as the real poet phrases. The seven lines
of the little song in The Old Wives Tale beginning, 'Whenas the
rye reach to the chin,' are gracefully pictorial; but the following
lines from The Araygnement of Paris show Peele at his best, as he
breaks through the fetters of conventionalism into finely poetic
expression of his own sensitive observation :
Not Iris, in her pride and bravery,
Adorns her arch with such variety;
Nor doth the milk-white way, in frosty night,
Appear so fair and beautiful in sight,
As done these fields, and groves, and sweetest bowers,
Bestrew'd and deck'd with parti-colourd flowers.
Along the bubbling brooks and silver glide,
That at the bottom do in silence slide;
The water-flowers and lilies on the banks,
Like blazing comets, burgeen all in ranks;
Under the hawthorn and the poplar-tree,
Where sacred Phoebe may delight to be,
The primrose, and the purple hyacinth,
The dainty violet, and the wholesome minth,
The double daisy, and the cowslip, queen
Of summer flowers, do overpeer the green;
And round about the valley as ye pass,
Ye may ne see for peeping flowers the grass:. . .
Is there not in the italicised lines something of that peculiar
ability which reached its full development in the
the mature
Shakespeare—the power of flashing before us in a line or two
something definitive both as a picture and in beauty of phrase ?
One suspects that Peele, in the later years of his life, gave
his time more to pageants than to writing plays, and not un-
willingly. He certainly wrote lord mayors' pageants--in 1585,
for Woolstone Dixie, and, in 1591, his Discursus Astraeae for
William Webbe. Moreover, all his plays except The Old Wives
Tale were in print by 1594, and even that in 1595. One of the
9_2
1
## p. 132 (#156) ############################################
132
Plays of the University Wits
Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, those rather dubious bits
of biography, tells us 'George was of a poetical disposition never
to write so long as his money lasted. ' Whether the Jests be
authentic or not, those words probably state the whole case for
Peele'. He was primarily a poet, with no real inborn gift for the
drama, and he never developed any great skill as a playwright.
This may have been because he could not; the reason may,
probably, be sought in the mood which finds expression in The Old
Wives Tale—a mood partly amused by the popular crude forms of
art, partly contemptuous towards them. Consequently, as he went
on with his work without artistic conscience, without deep interest
in the form, he could not lift it; he could merely try to give an
imperfectly educated public what he deemed it wanted. But even
this compromise with circumstance could not keep the poet from
breaking through occasionally. And in his feeling for pure beauty
—both as seen in nature and as felt in words—he is genuinely of
the renascence.
Robert Greene, born at Norwich in July 1558, took his B. A. at
St John's, Cambridge, in 1578, and his M. A. at Clare hall in 1583.
He was incorporated M. A. at Oxford in 1588. Apparently,
between the times of taking his B. A. and his M. A. degrees, he
travelled, at least in Spain and Italy. Certainly, then or later,
he came to know other parts of the continent, for he says in his
Notable Discovery of Coosnage, 'I have smiled with the Italian. . .
eaten Spanish mirabolanes. . . France, Germany, Poland, Denmark,
I know them all. ' That is, by the time he was twenty-five, he had
had his chance to know at first hand the writings of Castiglione,
Ariosto and Machiavelli—the Italian authors to whom his work is
most indebted. He had had, too, his chance of contrasting the
newer learning of Italy with the traditional English teaching of his
time. A man of letters curiously mingling artistic and Bohemian
sympathies and impulses with puritanic ideals and tendencies, who
had been trained in the formal learning of an English university,
he was greatly stimulated by the varied renascence influences,
and, by them, in many cases, was led, not to greater liberty, but to
greater licence of expression. As novelist, pamphleteer and play-
wright, he is always mercurial, but always, no matter how large his
borrowings, individual and contributive'.
1 As to the Merrie Conceited Jests, cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, p. 360.
2 See, as to Greene's literary activity other than dramatic, vol. III, chap. XVI,
pp. 353 ff. and vol. iv, chap. xvi, pp. 318 ff.
## p. 133 (#157) ############################################
Greene's Novels and Pamphlets
133
Greene seems to have begun his varied literary career while
still at Cambridge, for, in October 1580, the first part of his novel,
Mamillia, was licensed, though it did not appear before 1583. In
the latter year, the second part was licensed, though the first
edition we have bears date 1593. We are not clear as to what
exactly Greene was doing between the time of taking the two
degrees; but, in some way, it meant a preparation which made
it possible for him to pour out, between 1583 and 1590, a rapid
succession of some dozen love stories and ephemeral pamphlets—
Morando, Planetomachia, Menaphon, Perimedes, Pandosto, The
Spanish Masquerado, etc. , etc. That, during this time or later,
Greene was either a clergyman or an actor has not been proved.
About 1590, some unusually strong impulsion, resulting either
from a long sickness or, less probably, from some such contrition
as his Repentance says the eloquence of John More at one time
produced in him, gave him a distaste for his former courses, in
literary work as well as in general conduct. Certainly, as Churton
Collins has pointed out, Greene's Mourning Garment, his Farewell
to Folly, 1590 and 1591, and his Vision-which, though published
after his death (1592) as written when he was moribund, was
evidently, for the most part, composed about 1590—show this
changed mood. Indeed, the mood was sufficiently lasting for him
to write, in 1592, when he published his Philomela,
I promised, Gentlemen, both in my Mourning Garment and Farewell to
Folly, never to busy myself about any wanton pamphlets again . . . but yet
am I come, contrary to vow and promise, once again to the press with a
labour of love, which I hatched long ago, though now brought forth to
light.
In any case, it cannot be denied that his non-dramatic production
in the two years of life remaining before 1592 was, for the main part,
very different from that which had preceded. Whether his series
of coney-catching exposures formed part of a genuine repentance,
it is quite impossible to tell'. The three or four pamphlets of this
sort by Greene were not wholly the result of an observation which
moved him irresistibly, either through indignation or repentance,
to frank speaking.
Even more puzzling, however, than his change of attitude,
about 1590, or than his real feeling in his so-called exposures, is
the question raised with much ingenious argument by Churton
Collins, whether Greene began his dramatic work earlier than
1590. Greene himself says in his Repentance: 'but after I had by
1 As to this, see ante, vol. IV, pp. 319 ff.
1
## p. 134 (#158) ############################################
134
Plays of the University Wits
degrees proceeded Master of Arts (1583) I left the University and
away to London, where. . . after a short time. . . I became an author
of plays and love-pamphlets. ' That, certainly, does not sound as if
Greene did not write any plays for some seven years after he left
Cambridge. Moreover, another passage in Perimedes (1588)
“Two mad men of Rome (that is London] had it in derision for
that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical
buskins'—is open to two interpretations : namely, that he was
derided for not attempting to write blank verse plays, or for
failure in the attempt? Churton Collins skilfully emphasises
what is true, that neither Nashe, in the preface to Menaphon,
nor any of the writers of commendatory verse accompanying
Greene's publications before 1590, mention his drama. But it
is to be noted that two of the four passages cited by Churton
Collins are dated as early as 1588. Now, most recent opinion
does not favour the conclusion that, before this date, Greene had
produced any surviving work besides Alphonsus and, in collabora-
tion with Lodge, A Looking Glasse for London and England.
Even in 1589, Nashe, in his preface to Menaphon, was looking for
evidence to elevate Greene above the writers of blank verse plays,
and, therefore, would hardly have counted the two plays mentioned,
or even Orlando, against such overwhelming successes as The
Spanish Tragedie, Tamburlaine and Faustus. For A Looking
Glasse was written in collaboration; one or both of the others may
have been merely burlesque of the new high-flown style; and there
is more than a suspicion that Alphonsus was a failure. As will
be seen when the probable dates of the plays remaining to us are
considered, the safer statement, probably, is that, although Greene
had been writing plays before 1589, he had not accomplished
anything which could be compared on approximately equal terms
with the original achievements of Marlowe or of Kyd, and that his
best dramatic work was produced in 1590 or after this date.
The dramatic work remaining to us which is certainly his is
small. A lost play of Job is entered in the Stationers' register in
1594 as his. The attribution to him of Selimus on the authority of
the title-page of the first edition, 1594, and of two quotations as-
signed to him by Allot in England's Parnassus, 1600, which are
found in this particular play, is not accepted by either A. W. Ward
or C. M. Gayley; and Churton Collins says that his authorship is
1 Churton Collins, unfortunately for his argument, seems to favour both opinions.
See p. 75, vol. 1, of his Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, where he holds the former
opinion; and p. 40 of his introduction, where, apparently, he holds the second.
## p. 135 (#159) ############################################
Plays attributed to Greene
135
>
'too doubtful to justify any editor including [it] in Greene's works. '
It is now generally admitted that he was not the author of
Mucedorus, or of The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, which have sometimes been assigned to him. It seems
all but impossible to determine Greene's share in the First Part
of the Contention betwixt the Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and
The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke. Critical opinion,
following the lead of Miss Lee, is, on the whole, disposed to favour
the view that Greene had some share in the work, but where, and
to what extent, are mere matters of conjecture! On the other
hand, the attribution to him of George a Greene, the Pinner of
Wakefield is not to be waived. This attribution arises from
two manuscript statements in sixteenth century handwriting on
the title-page of the 1590 edition in the duke of Devonshire's
library, 'Written by . . .
several that are inspired by Italian themes, The three Systers
of Mantua (1578) and The Duke of Millayn and the Marques of
Mantua (1579) were acted by professional players, and Ariodante
and Genevora (1583), as already mentioned, was performed by
the Merchant Taylors' boys. Italian players, it is noticeable,
'
had, in 1574, followed the queen's progress, “and made pastyme
fyrst at Wynsor and afterwardes at Reading. ' From the list of
properties supplied for the performance at Reading, it is evident
that the foreigners acted a pastoral.
Probably, except for some school plays, the pieces performed
before the queen, even when they were on Italian, or, as
was more frequently the case, on classical and mythological,
subjects, were not cast in the mould of Ariosto or of Terence.
Written, for the most part, to be acted by professional companies
before popular audiences, they did not follow the classic or neo-
classic conventions the influence of which has been traced in the
preceding pages. They adhered instinctively to the freer lines
of native English drama, inherited from miracle and morality
plays”. A few of them, in fact, as may be inferred from their titles,
1 See Documents relating to the Office of the Revels in the time of Queen Elizabeth,
ed. Feuillerat, A. (vol. xxi of Bang's Materialien).
2 One play of this type, not mentioned, however, in the revels' accounts, has
recently been brought to light. It is The Plaie of Pacient Grissel, written by John
Phillip and printed by T. Colwell, to whom, in all probability, it was licensed for
publication in 1565/6 and 1568/9. A unique copy found in lord Mostyn's library was
sold in 1907, and from this the play has been reprinted by the Malone Society (1909).
The plot is taken from the closing tale of the Decameron, probably through an inter.
mediate source, though some of the episodes and the form of the proper names make it
9
5
2
3
1
## p. 117 (#141) ############################################
Realistic Influences. Tom Tyler 117
were belated moralities; a large number treated fabulous and
romantic themes? ; at least two, The Creweltie of a Stepmother and
Murderous mychaell, seem to be early specimens of the drama of
domestic life?
With few exceptions, these plays have perished; but, doubtless,
they were typical of the theatrical productions of the first twenty
years of Elizabeth's reign. Together with other popular pieces no
longer known even by name, they came under the lash of purist
critics, such as Whetstone in his preface to Promos and Cassandra
(1578) and Sidney in his Apologie for Poetrie (printed in 1595),
who ridiculed their extravagances of plot and style, and their
defiance of the unities. Sidney deplored the mingling in the same
piece of grave and humorous elements, ‘hornpipes and funerals,
and proclaimed that the salvation of the English drama could
only be found in strict adherence to classical rules. But it was
in vain for him to strive against the stream. Even in the plays
adapted from Roman, neo-Latin, or Italian models, Roister Doister,
Misogonus and The Bugbears, the native dramatic instinct for
breadth of design, vigour of characterisation and a realism that
often becomes coarseness, had largely transmuted, as has been
shown, the borrowed alien materials.
On the other hand, the popular drama, increasingly produced
by men with something of the culture of the universities or the
capital, tended towards a higher level of construction and of
diction. An example of early native farcical comedy is extant in
the anonymous Tom Tyler and his Wife, acted by 'pretty boys,'
which from its language and versification cannot have been written
later than the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, and probably goes
back further. Though allegorical figures, Destiny, Desire and
Patience, are introduced, the play is in effect a domestic drama
6
unlikely that this source was Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. The comedy covers the whole
lengthy history of Grissell's marriage, her sufferings, her abasement, and her restora-
tion to her husband and her dignities. The author shows some skill in grouping his
materials, but the characterisation is weak, and the fourteeners,' in which the serious
passages are mainly written, are monotonous, though the piece contains some pretty
lyrics. The most interesting feature of Pacient Grissell is that it mingles with the
personages of the Italian story a number of allegorical figures, of which the chief is
• Politicke perswasion,' the nimble-tongued Vice, who acts as the evil genius of the
marquis. Thus, more than thirty years before Chettle, Dekker and Haughton's
similarly named comedy (as to which cf. vol. vi, chap. II) was written, the story
of pacient Grissell,' always a favourite with playwrights (cf. Ward, A. W. , Eng. Dram.
Lit. vol. I, pp. 428—430 and ante, p. 15), had appeared in vernacular dramatic form.
i Similar plays, not performed before the queen, but still extant, are Common
Conditions (imperfect) and The Rare Triumphs oj Love and Fortune.
3 Cf. post, chap. XIII.
1
1
## p. 118 (#142) ############################################
I 18
Early English Comedy
of low life, showing how Tom suffers tribulation at the hands of
his shrewish wife, and how, even when a friend has tamed her by
drastic methods, he weakly surrenders the fruits of the victory
which has been won for him. The piece has a lusty swing and
vigour in its action and dialogue, and in its racy songs. It has
also a certain underlying unity in the idea that a man cannot
escape his fate, however unpleasant it may be. As Tom Tyler
ruefully exclaims :
If Fortune will it, I must fulfil it;
If Destiny say it, I cannot denay it.
But, if Tom Tyler be compared with The Taming of a Shrew
(to instance a play on a somewhat kindred theme, though it lies
slightly beyond the period dealt with in this chapter), it will be
evident how much native comedy had gained from contact with
foreign models in careful articulation of plot and in refinement
of diction and portraiture.
The fusion of classical with native elements appears very
clearly in Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias, a 'tragical
comedy,' as he calls it, which was almost certainly acted before
the queen in 1564! The plot is drawn from the annals of Syracuse,
and such figures as Carisophus, the parasite, Eubulus, the good
counsellor, Stephano, the slave-servant, and Dionysius, the tyrant,
are borrowed from the Roman stage. Many classical quotations
are introduced into the dialogue, which in the frequent use of
orixouvola and of rhetorical moral commonplaces shows the
influence of Seneca. Yet in spite of its debt to Latin drama
Damon and Pithias is not an academic product, but is, in form
and spirit, predominantly of native English type. It is not divided
into acts after the classical manner; and in its deliberate mixture
of pathos and farcical humour, and in its violation of the unity
of time, it runs counter not exactly to the precedents of the
classical stage, but to the current renascence perversion of them.
The Syracusan court at which the action is laid is modelled upon
the Elizabethan, and the rivalries of Aristippus and Carisophus
had their counterpart in the intrigues among the virgin queen's
1 The play was not licensed till 1567, and the earliest known edition dates from
1571. But 'Edwardes' Tragedy' is mentioned in the Revels' accounts as having been
performed by the children of the chapel at Christmas, 1564. Damon and Pithias in
the loose terminology of the day might well be called a tragedy in contrast with his
earlier • toying plays,' to which Edwards refers in his prologue. The play was
already familiar to the courtiers who saw his Palamon and Arcite at Oxford in
September 1566 (cf. post, vol. vi, chap. XII). Damon and Pithias was revived at
Oxford in January 1568 (cf. loc. cit. ).
## p. 119 (#143) ############################################
Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra 119
train, though the author protests against any topical interpreta-
tion of his 'courtly toyes':
We doo protest this flat,
Wee talke of Dionisius Courte, wee meane no Court but that.
Even more unmistakably English is the character of Grim the
collier, who hails from Croydon, though he never mentions his
birthplace, and shows remarkable familiarity with Syracusan affairs.
There is genuine, if coarse, vernacular humour in the episode of
the shaving of him by the saucy lackeys, Will and Jack, who pick
his pockets on the sly, while they chant the refrain ‘Too nidden
and toodle toodle too nidden. ' And the episode, though in itself
grotesquely irrelevant, is due to the playwright's true instinct that
comic relief is needed to temper the tragic suspense while the life of
Pitbias, who has become hostage for Damon during his two months'
respite from the block, trembles in the balance. The high-souled
mutual loyalty of the two friends and the chivalrous eagerness
with which each courts death for the other's sake are painted with
genuine emotional intensity. Though lacking in metrical charm or
verbal felicity, Damon and Pithias has merits which go some way
towards accounting for the acclaim with which, as contemporary
allusions show, it was received; and the play possesses an impor-
tance of its own in the development of romantic drama from a
combination of forces and materials new and old. As Roister
Doister and Misogonus, based on Latin or neo-Latin plays, had by
the incorporation of English elements gravitated towards a type
of comedy hitherto unknown, so Damon and Pithias, an original
work by a native playwright, showed the strong influence of classical
types and methods. Starting from opposite quarters, the forces
that produced romantic comedy are thus seen to converge.
George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, printed in 1578,
is another tragicomedy in direct line of succession to Damon and
Pithias. It is based on one of the tales in Giraldi Cinthio's
Hecatommithi, though the names of the leading figures are changed,
as they were to be changed yet again by Shakespeare when in his
Measure for Measure, founded on Whetstone's play, he gave to
the story its final and immortal form. Whetstone's sense of the
importance of design and structure is seen in his prefatory state-
ment, that he had divided the whole history into two commedies,
for that, Decorum used, it would not be convayed in one. ' Thus
the story of the self-righteous deputy, Promos, who seduces
Cassandra by a promise of pardon to her condemned brother,
6
毒
## p. 120 (#144) ############################################
I 20 Early English Comedy
Andrugio, is dramatised in two parts, each, after the orthodox
classical pattern, divided into five acts. Yet the necessity for
so complex and formal a scheme arises largely from the fact, not
mentioned by the playwright, that with the overmastering English
instinct for elaboration and realism, he adds a comic underplot, in
which the courtesan Lamia is the chief figure. This underplot is
much more closely linked to the main theme than is the humorous
interlude in Damon and Pithias, for it heightens the impression
of general social demoralisation and of hypocrisy in officials of
every grade. With its far from ineffective portrayal of several
characters new to English drama, and with its sustained level of
workmanlike though uninspired alexandrines and decasyllabic
lines, including some passages of blank verse, Promos and Cas-
sandra is the most typical example of an original romantic play
before the period of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors.
Edwards and Whetstone both prefaced their dramas with a
statement of their theory of the function of comedy.
In commedies the greatest skyll is this lightly to touch
All thynges to the quicke; and eke to frame eche person so,
That by his common talke, you may his nature rightly know.
The olde man is sober, the yonge man rashe, the lover triumphyng in joyes,
The matron grave, th harlat wilde, and full of wanton toyes.
Whiche all in one course they no wise doo agree;
So correspondent to their kinde their speeches ought to bee.
Thus wrote Edwards, and Whetstone, though without referring
to him, paraphrases his words :
To write a Comedie kindly, grave olde men should instruct, yonge men
should showe the imperfections of youth, Strumpets should be lascivious,
Boyes unhappy, and Clownes should speake disorderlye; entermingling all
these actions in such sorte as the grave matter may instruct and the pleasant
delight.
The playwrights who wrote thus realised the principle, which
underlies romantic art, of fidelity to Nature in all her various forms.
But they and their fellows, except Gascoigne in his derivative
productions, had not the intuition to see that the principle could
never be fully applied till comedy adopted as her chief instrument
the infinitely flexible medium of daily intercourse between man
and man-prose. It was Lyly who grasped the secret, and taught
comedy to speak in new tones. It remained for a greater than
Lyly to initiate her into the final mystery of the imaginative
transfiguration of Nature, and thus inspire her to create
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
## p. 121 (#145) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
THE PLAYS OF THE UNIVERSITY WITS
Come foorth you witts, that vaunt the pompe of speach,
And strive to thunder from a Stage-man's throate:
View Menaphon a note beyond your reach;
Whose sight will make your drumming descant doate;
Players avant, you know not to delight;
Welcome sweete Shepheard; worth a Scholler's sight.
THESE lines of Thomas Brabine, prefixed to Greene's Menaphon
(1589), follow hard upon Nashe's involved and, today, obscure
preface, ‘To the Gentlemen Students. This preface is one long gibe
at the poets and the writers who, either without university education
had risen from the ranks, or, though thus educated, had chosen
ways of expression not in accordance with the standards of the
university wits. John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Robert
Greene and Thomas Nashe, however they may have differed among
themselves, stood shoulder to shoulder whenever they were facing
the ‘alcumists of eloquence' whose standards were not their own.
Though, in the period from 1570 to 1580, the curriculum at Oxford
and at Cambridge was still medieval, yet, as an addition to it, or in
place of it, groups of students, from year to year, received with
enthusiasm whatever returning scholars and travellers from Italy
and France had to offer them of the new renascence spirit and
its widening reflection in continental literary endeavour. A pride
in university training which amounted to arrogance, and a curious
belief, not unknown even today, that only the university-bred man
can possibly have the equipment and the sources of information
fitting him to be a proper exponent of new, and, at the same time, of
really valuable, ideas and literary methods—these were sentiments
shared by all the members of the group of 'university wits. '
John Lyly, born in 1553 or 1554, was an Oxford man. He gradu-
ated B. A. in 1573, and M. A. in 1575, and, in 1579, was incorporated
M. A. at Cambridge. By precedence in work and, probably, in actual
historical importance, he is the leader of the group. Indeed,
Lyly is typical of the university-bred man whose native common-
## p. 122 (#146) ############################################
I 22 Plays of the University Wits
sense and humour just save him from the pedantry which conceives
that the summum bonum for man lies in books, and in books only.
His remarkably receptive and retentive mind had been open at
the university to all influences for culture, both permanent and
ephemeral. Like a true son of the time, also, he could rarely
distinguish between the two kinds.
Blount, the compiler of the first collected edition of Lyly's
plays (1632), declared :
Our nation are in his debt, for a new English which hee taught them.
Euphues and His England began first that language: All our Ladies were
then his Schollers; And that Beantie in Court which could not Parley
Euphueisme, was as little regarded as shee which now there speakes not
French. These his playes Crown'd him with applause, and the Spectators
with pleasure. Thou canst not repent the Reading of them over; when Old
John Lilly is merry with thee in thy Chamber, Thou shalt say, Few (or
None) of our Poets now are such witty companions.
>
But Blount wrote after the fashion of a publisher turned biographer,
not as a man thoroughly informed. In regard to both Euphues
and the plays, Gabriel Harvey's malicious statement that 'young
Euphues hatched the egges, that his elder freends laide' comes
much nearer the truth. In the plays which Lyly wrote between
his first appearance as an author, in 1579, with his novel Euphues
and his Anatomie of Wit, and his death in 1606, he was rather
one who mingled literary and social fashions, a populariser and a
perfecter, than a creator. The composite product bears the im-
print of his personality, but he borrows more than he creates.
A brief review of material, methods and style in his comedy will
prove this true.
What, in the first place, is the material ? Usually, the slight
theme is suggested by some legend of the gods and goddesses ;
sometimes, as in Love's Metamorphosis, the source is treated simply
for its dramatic value--as Lyly understood drama, of course; some-
times for a fugitive allegory bearing on incidents in the career
of the virgin queen, or in national affairs; sometimes, as in
Endimion, Sapho and Phao and Midas, for what has been
interpreted as complicated allegory; and, rarely, as in Mother
Bombie, for mere adaptive fooling. Such material for tenuous
plots is not new. Turning the pages of the Accounts of the Revels
at Court, one finds titles of plays given by the children's com-
panies—the choirboys of St Paul's, of the Chapel Royal, or the
schoolboys of Westminster or of Merchant Taylors' under
>
1 See, as to Euphues and its influence, vol. III, chap. XVI, pp. 392 ff.
## p. 123 (#147) ############################################
Lyly's Material and Style
123
Mulcaster-very similar to the names of Lyly's plays. There
are, for instance, Iphigenia, Narcissus, Alcmaeon, Quintus Fabius
and Scipio Africanus. We do not know precisely what was the
treatment applied to such subjects—in themselves suggesting
histories, possibly allegories, or even pastorals—but. we do know
that, from the hand of Richard Edwards, master of the children
of the chapel in 1561, we find plays which, in structure, general
method and even some details, provided models for Lyly? . For
instance, the Damon and Pithias of Edwards, probably produced
at court in 1564, deals with a subject of which Lyly was fond-
contrasted ideas of friendship, here exemplified in two para-
sites and the famous friends. The piece is loosely constructed,
especially as to the cohering of the main plot and the comic sub-
plot. It derives its fun, also, from pages and their foolery. We
possess too little dramatic work, especially work produced at court,
of the period of 1560–80, to speak with assurance; yet it seems
highly probable that Edwards was no isolated figure, but, rather,
typifies methods current in plays of that date.
Moreover, as has now been clearly demonstrated, the style
of Lyly, even with all his additions and modifications, is but a
stage of the evolution, in Spain, Italy, France and England, of
a pompous, complicated, highly artificial style, derived from the
Latin periods of Cicero, to which each decade of the renascence
and each experimental copyist had added some new details of
self-conscious complexity. Lyly had two models: one, partly for
style but mainly for material, and the other almost wholly for
style. The first was The Dial of Princes of Don Antonio de
Guevara (1529, with English translations by Berners in 1534 and
by North in 15579); the second was George Pettie's The Petite
Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576). What Lyly specially develops
for himself is the elaborate and irritatingly frequent punning and
the constant citation of the 'unnatural natural history' of Pliny.
Nevertheless, Lyly was one of those-perhaps the chief among
the prose writers of his day-who had a genuine feeling for style.
He felt, as Bond has said,
the need of and consistently aimed at what has been well denominated the
quality of mind in style—the treatment of the sentence not as a haphazard
agglomeration of clauses, phrases and words, but as a piece of literary
architecture whose end is foreseen in the beginning and whose parts are
calculated to minister to the total effect.
i See, as to the plays performed by the children of the chapel, post, vol. vi, chap. II.
2 Cf. vol. 11, p. 340, and vol. II, p. 345.
## p. 124 (#148) ############################################
I 24
Plays of the University Wits
Yet his style is his own, rather because of the surpassing
skill with which he handles its details and imprints the
stamp of his personality on it, than because the details are
original.
Moreover, in his attitude toward love-his gallant trifling ; his
idealisation of women, which, with him, goes even to the point of
making them mere wraiths; above all, in the curious effect
produced by his figures as rather in love with being in love
than moved by real human passion-he is Italianate and of the
renascence.
Moreover, his interest in 'manners maketh man
shows the influence of Il Cortegiano and numberless other re-
nascence discussions of courtly conduct.
Again, in his suspected allegorical treatment of incidents in
the politics of the time, he, probably, does little more than develop
the methods of political allegory current in the days of Henry VIII.
Though the presumably large group of moralities which, in that
reign, scourged conditions of the time, has, with the exception of
Respublica and part of Albion Knight, disappeared, it is not
difficult to believe that the allegory which we suspect in Endimion,
Sapho and Phao and Midas glances at Lyly's own time, even as
political moralities had represented people and conditions in the
reign of Elizabeth's father. Here, again, Lyly is not a creator,
but one who, in a new time and for a new audience, applies an
old method to modified literary conditions. Trace Lyly back as
you will, then, to his sources, he is, in material and style, in his
attitude toward men, women, manners and love, thoroughly of the
renascence ; for, looking back to the classics, and stimulated by
modern Italian thought, he expresses himself in a way that
reproduces an intellectual mood of his day.
Nor, of course, is Lyly at all an innovator in his free use of the
lyric. From the miracle-plays downward, the value of music both
as an accompaniment for strongly emotionalised speech, and as a
pleasure in itself, had been well understood : the direction in the
Chester series 'then shall God speak, the minstrels playing 'proves
the first statement, and the gossips' song in the Chester Noah
play proves the second. The presence, later, of choirboys in the
miracle-plays and their períormances at court, tended to main-
tain the lyric in the drama; for their clear boyish voices were
particularly suited to the music of the time. Often, too, young
actors were probably even better as singers, for singing was their
vocation, acting only an avocation. Lyly, as the chief of those who,
at one time or another, wrote for choirboys, merely maintains
## p. 125 (#149) ############################################
I 25
6
.
The Songs of Lyly
the custom of his predecessors as to lyrics. Perhaps, however, he
uses them rather more freely.
That these charming songs in Lyly's plays are really his has
lately been doubted more than once. Certainly, we do not find
them in the quartos : they appear first in Blount's collected
edition of 1632, nearly thirty years after Lyly's death. Yet
Elizabethan dramatists in general seem never to have evaded any
metrical task set them; and, usually, they came out of their efforts
successfully. It proves nothing, too, that we find the song 'What
bird so sings yet so dos wayl ? ' of Campaspe in Ford and Dekker's
The Sun's Darling (1632—4), or another, “O for a bowl of fat
canary,' in the 1640 quarto of Middleton's A Mad World, My
Masters. With the Elizabethan and Jacobean latitude of view
toward originality of material, with the wise principle cherished in
this age that 'we call a thing his in the long run who utters it
clearest and best,' there was no reason why a dramatist should not
omit quotation marks when using the work of a previous songster.
On the other hand, when we recall the collaboration in the masques
of Ben Jonson, not long afterwards, of Giles as master of song,
Inigo Jones as architect, and Ferrabosco as dancing-master, there
is no reason why Lyly should not have called in the aid of any
of the more skilled composers about the court or the city. Words
and music may have been composed by the music-master of the
boys of Paul's. Though we have no verse certainly Lyly's which
would lead us to expect such delicacy as he shows in 'Cupid
and my Campaspe played at cards for kisses,' or juvenile bac-
chanalia like 'O for a bowl of fat canary,' yet, in the material
from Diogenes Laertius which is the source of the scene in
Alexander and Campaspe where the song of the bird notes
occurs, there is certainly a hint for it. Therefore, as Bond has
pointed out, though this song may have been written at Lyly's
order, it may equally well have been a part of his usual skilful
creative use of material thoroughly grasped by him. When all is
said, however, it is not wise, in the light of present evidence, to
rest any large part of Lyly's claim to the attention of posterity on
his authorship of the songs in his plays. In all these respects,
then-of material, method and attitude-Lyly, while genuinely of
the renascence, is far more the populariser and perfecter than
the creator.
What, then, justifies the increasing attention given to Lyly's
1 As to the opportunities afforded to lyric poetry by the drama, cf. ante, vol. iv,
chap. vi, p. 115.
## p. 126 (#150) ############################################
126
Plays of the University Wits
a
work by historians of English drama ? Wherein consists his real
contribution? It is a time-honoured statement that he definitively
established prose as the expression for comedy, that his success
with it swept from the boards the vogue of the ‘jigging vein' of
men who, like Edwards, had written such halting lines as these :
Yet have I played with his beard in knitting this knot;
I promised friendship, but-you love few words-I spake it but I meant
it not.
Who markes this friendship between us two
Shall judge of the worldly friendship without more ado.
It may be a right pattern thereof; but true friendship indeed
Of nought but of virtue doth truly proceed.
For such cumbrous expression, Lyly substituted a prose which,
though it could be ornate to pompousness at his will, could, also,
be gracefully accurate and have a certain rhythm of its own. But
his real significance is that he was the first to bring together on
the English stage the elements of high comedy, thereby preparing
the way for Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and As You
Like It. Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can
hardly miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read
Lyly's plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny's Natural
History. It is not merely that certain words of the song of
the birds' notes in Campaspe gave Shakespeare, subconsciously,
probably, his hint for ‘Hark, hark, the lark'; or that, in the talk
of Viola and the duke he was thinking of Phillida and Galathea”;
but that we could hardly imagine Love's Labour's Lost as existent
in the period from 1590 to 1600, had not Lyly's work just preceded
it. Setting aside the element of interesting story skilfully developed,
which Shakespeare, after years of careful observation of his audi-
ences, knew was his surest appeal, do we not find Much Ado About
Nothing and As You Like It, in their essentials, only develop-
ments, through the intermediate experiments in Love's Labour's
Lost and Two Gentlemen of Verona, from Lyly's comedies?
What, historically, are the essentials of high comedy? It deals
with cultivated people in whom education, and refining environ-
ment, have bred subtler feelings. These gods and goddesses of
Lyly, who have little, if anything, of a classic past, but every-
thing, in thought, attitude towards life and even speech itself, of
the courtiers of Lyly's day, are surely subjects for high comedy.
So close, indeed, are these figures of mythology to the evanescent
life of Lyly's moment, that we are constantly tempted to see, in
Twelfth Night, act II, sc. 4.
? Galathea, act ini, sc. 3.
## p. 127 (#151) ############################################
Lyly and High Comedy 127
this or that figure, some well known person of the court, to hear
in this or that speech, some sentiments according with well known
opinions of this or that notability. And what is love in these
comedies? Not the intense passion that burns itself out in
slaughter—the love of the Italian novelle and the plays of Kyd,
Greene and others influenced by them. Nor is it at all mere
physical appetite, as it often becomes, in the lesser Elizabethans
and, generally, among the Jacobeans. Instead, as in As You
Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, it is the motive force be-
hind events and scenes, but not the one absorbing interest for
author or reader: it is refined, sublimated, etherealised. Contrasts,
delicately brought out, between the real underlying feelings of the
characters and what they wish to feel or wish to be thought to
feel, all of this phrased as perfectly as possible according to
standards of the moment, are what interests Lyly and what he
teaches his audience to care for particularly. Certainly, then,
we are in the realm of high comedy; for, surely, there can be no
laughter from such sources which is not thoughtful laughter, the
essential, as George Meredith has pointed out, of this worm of
drama. From start to finish, Lyly's comedy is based on thought,
and cannot properly be appreciated without thought. At every
point, it is planned, constructed, modelled, to suit the critical
standards of its author and of an exacting group of courtier
critics, both eagerly interested in all that Italy and the continent
had to offer them as literary models of the past and present. Lyly
especially rested, for his prospective success, on his skill in phrase.
It is not merely that he is an artist in the complications of the
euphuistic style to which his own Euphues had given vogue, but
that he is a student of skilled phrase for dramatic and charac-
terising purposes. And this is of great significance for two reasons:
first, because high comedy demands, as a further essential, a nice
sense of phrase-witness Congreve and Sheridan among our later
masters of it; and, secondly, because this careful phrasing of Lyly
emphasises, for the first time in our English drama, the third
essential of a perfect play. Story, the first essential, had been,
crudely, understood so early as the trope in liturgical mysteries.
By accretion of episode, constructive story, which is plot, developed.
The need of characterisation soon came to be understood in miracle-
plays, in moralities and in the interlude of the better kind. Yet
phrase, not as a mere means of characterisation, but so treated,
from start to finish, that it shall do more than expound plot and
characterise, that it shall give pleasure for its own sake by its form
2
## p. 128 (#152) ############################################
128
Plays of the University Wit.
or its content, is Lyly's great contribution to the drama. As he
himself said, 'It is wit that allureth, when every word shal have
his weight, when nothing shal proceed, but it shal either savour of
a sharpe conceipt, or a secret conclusion. ' More than anyone else
before 1587, he raises our English drama to the level of literature;
more than anyone else, he creates a popular drama-for the great
public liked it—which was also enthusiastically received by
audiences at the court as the embodiment of prevailing literary
tastes. He bridges from the uncritical to the critical public
more successfully than any one of the dramatists, till Shake-
speare's depicting of character, as exhibited universally, revealed
to all classes of men their community of experience and emotion.
This raising of the intellectual level of the drama Lyly accomplishes,
too, by the addition of the feminine qualities of literature-delicacy,
grace, charm, subtlety. The English drama was masculine already
to the point of swaggering. It was Lyly's pleasant duty to refine
it, to make it more intellectual, and thus to win the plaudits of a
court presided over by a queen who, if virile in her grasp on
affairs of state, was certainly feminine in her attitude towards the
arts.
If, then, Lyly looks back to an English, a continental and,
even, a classical, past, for inspiration and models, he yet rises
above his sources in an accomplishment which is individual and
of not merely ephemeral significance, but of great importance
to those who immediately follow him in the drama. He intel-
lectualises the drama; he brings, not adaptation, but original
work, into closest touch with the most cultivated men and women
of the time; he unites the feminine to the already existent
masculine elements in our drama; he attains, even if somewhat
hazily, that great dramatic form, high comedy, and, attaining it,
breaks the way for a large part of Shakespeare's work.
George Peele (born 1558) graduated B. A. at Christ Church,
Oxford, in 1577, and M. A. in 1579. Either he must have
made rapid advance as a dramatist during his first years in
London, 1580—2, or, during his long career at the university,
some nine years, he must have developed genuine dramatic ability.
This is evident, because, in July 1583, he was summoned from
London to Oxford to assist William Gager, author of Rivales,
in an entertainment which the latter was arranging for the recep-
tion at Christ Church of Albertus Alasco, Polish prince palatine.
Certainly, The Araygnement of Paris, Peele’s ‘first encrease,' as
## p. 129 (#153) ############################################
Varied Work of Peele
129
Thomas Nashe called it, shows a writer who would seem to have
passed the tiro stage. This play, entered for publication in April
1584, is evidently influenced by the dramatic methods of John Lyly,
owing to the fact that, like Lyly's plays, it was acted before the
queen by children. When we consider that Peele's activity covered
sixteen or eighteen years (he was dead by 1598), at a time when
dramatic composition was rapid, his dramatic work remaining to
us seems not large in quantity. Nor was he himself a slow
workman. Syr Clyomon and Clamydes, tentatively assigned to
him by Dyce, is no longer believed to be his. It is clearly of an
earlier date, and, very possibly, was written by Thomas Preston.
Of Wily Beguiled, sometimes attributed to Peele, Schelling rightly
says: "There is nothing in this comedy to raise a question of
Peele's authorship except the simple obviousness with which the
plot is developed. ' Nor does it seem possible at present to go
beyond Miss Jane Lee's conclusions as to Peele's probable share
in The First and Second Parts of Henry VI. The best proof
as yet advanced for Peele's authorship of Locrine is, even cumu-
latively), inconclusive. Besides The Araygnement of Paris, we
have, as extant plays assigned to Peele, The Old Wives Tale,
Edward I, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe and
The Battell of Alcazar. The last of these plays is attributed to
Peele only because a quotation from it in England's Parnassus
(1600) is assigned to him and because of certain similarities of
phrase; but the play is usually accepted as his. The Hunting of
Cupid, a masque extant only in a slight fragment, and The Turkish
Mahomet, which we know only by its title and some references,
complete the list of Peele’s plays.
Even this brief list, however, shows the variety in his work:
the masque, in The Hunting of Cupid, and something very closely
related to it, in The Araygnement of Paris; the chronicle history,
in Edward I, and, very probably, in The Turkish Mahomet, an even
more marked mingling of romance and so-called history; something
like an attempt to revive the miracle-play, in King David and
Fair Bethsabe ; and genuine literary satire on romantic plays of
the day, in The Old Wives Tale. Whether this variety means
that he merely turned his attention hither and thither as chance
called him, or that he was restlessly trying to find his own easiest
and best expression amid the many inchoate forms of the drama
of the moment, it is perfectly clear that his inborn dramatic gift
was slight. Neither dramatic situation nor characterisation
1 Cf. as to Locrine, ante, chap. iv and post, chap. x.
9
>
>
E. L. V,
CH. VI.
## p. 130 (#154) ############################################
130
Plays of the University Wits
interests him strongly. After years of practice, he is not good
in plotting. Even where he is at his best in characterisation, in
such little touches as the following, he cannot sustain himself at
the pitch reached:
(Queen Elinor presents her babe to its uncle, Lancaster. )
Q. ELINOR. Brother Edmund, here's a kinsman of yours:
You must needs be acquainted.
LANCASTER. A goodly boy; God bless him! -
Give me your hand, sir:
Yon are welcome into Wales.
Q. ELINOR. Brother, there's a fist, I warrant you, will hold a mace as
fast as ever did father or grandfather before him.
Uneven in characterisation, loose in construction to the point of
recklessness, so extravagant in diction that, at moments, one
even suspects burlesque, Peele leaves a critical reader wondering
whether he was merely over-hurried and impatient of the work
he was doing, or genuinely held it in contempt. Certainly, the
chief merit of the fantastic Old Wives Tale is its clever satire on
such romantic plays as Common Conditions. Peele, in his play,
makes fun of just those qualities in the current drama which
Sidney criticised in his Defence of Poesie—the myriad happenings
left untraced to any sufficient cause, the confusion caused by this
multiplicity of incident, and the lavish use of surprise. The Old
Wives Tale confuses the reader as much as any one of the plays
which it ridicules ; but, when seen, it becomes amusing and, in
respect of its satire, a fit predecessor of The Knight of the
Burning Pestle. As the first English play of dramatic criticism,
it deserves high praise.
This play shows, too, as Gummere has pointed out, the
peculiar subjective humour of Peele, which rests on ‘something
more than a literal understanding of what is said and done, a
new appeal to a deeper sense of humour. ' He does not get his
fun solely from time-honoured comic business, or clownery, but
from dramatic irony in the contrast of romantic plot and realistic
diction-indeed, by contrasts in material, in method, in characteri-
sation and, even, in phrase. This is Peele's contribution to that
subtler sense of humour which we have noted in Lyly. In Lyly,
it leads to high comedy: in Peele it finds expression in dramatic
criticism.
Though Peele's life may have had its unseemly sides, he had
a real vision of literature as an art: primus verborum artifex,
Thomas Nashe called him ; nor, for the phrasing of the time, were
## p. 131 (#155) ############################################
Peele as Poet
131
the words exaggerated. Reading his songs, such as that of Paris
and Oenone in The Araygnement of Paris, or the lines at the open-
ing of King David and Fair Bethsabe, one must recognise that
he had an exquisite feeling for the musical value of words; that
he had the power to attain a perfect accord between words and
musical accompaniment. One can hear the tinkling lute in
certain lines in which the single word counts for little; but the
total collocation produces something exquisitely delicate. Yet
Peele is far more than a mere manipulator of words for musical
effect. He shows a real love of nature, which, breaking free from
much purely conventional reference to the nature gods of
mythology, is phrased as the real poet phrases. The seven lines
of the little song in The Old Wives Tale beginning, 'Whenas the
rye reach to the chin,' are gracefully pictorial; but the following
lines from The Araygnement of Paris show Peele at his best, as he
breaks through the fetters of conventionalism into finely poetic
expression of his own sensitive observation :
Not Iris, in her pride and bravery,
Adorns her arch with such variety;
Nor doth the milk-white way, in frosty night,
Appear so fair and beautiful in sight,
As done these fields, and groves, and sweetest bowers,
Bestrew'd and deck'd with parti-colourd flowers.
Along the bubbling brooks and silver glide,
That at the bottom do in silence slide;
The water-flowers and lilies on the banks,
Like blazing comets, burgeen all in ranks;
Under the hawthorn and the poplar-tree,
Where sacred Phoebe may delight to be,
The primrose, and the purple hyacinth,
The dainty violet, and the wholesome minth,
The double daisy, and the cowslip, queen
Of summer flowers, do overpeer the green;
And round about the valley as ye pass,
Ye may ne see for peeping flowers the grass:. . .
Is there not in the italicised lines something of that peculiar
ability which reached its full development in the
the mature
Shakespeare—the power of flashing before us in a line or two
something definitive both as a picture and in beauty of phrase ?
One suspects that Peele, in the later years of his life, gave
his time more to pageants than to writing plays, and not un-
willingly. He certainly wrote lord mayors' pageants--in 1585,
for Woolstone Dixie, and, in 1591, his Discursus Astraeae for
William Webbe. Moreover, all his plays except The Old Wives
Tale were in print by 1594, and even that in 1595. One of the
9_2
1
## p. 132 (#156) ############################################
132
Plays of the University Wits
Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, those rather dubious bits
of biography, tells us 'George was of a poetical disposition never
to write so long as his money lasted. ' Whether the Jests be
authentic or not, those words probably state the whole case for
Peele'. He was primarily a poet, with no real inborn gift for the
drama, and he never developed any great skill as a playwright.
This may have been because he could not; the reason may,
probably, be sought in the mood which finds expression in The Old
Wives Tale—a mood partly amused by the popular crude forms of
art, partly contemptuous towards them. Consequently, as he went
on with his work without artistic conscience, without deep interest
in the form, he could not lift it; he could merely try to give an
imperfectly educated public what he deemed it wanted. But even
this compromise with circumstance could not keep the poet from
breaking through occasionally. And in his feeling for pure beauty
—both as seen in nature and as felt in words—he is genuinely of
the renascence.
Robert Greene, born at Norwich in July 1558, took his B. A. at
St John's, Cambridge, in 1578, and his M. A. at Clare hall in 1583.
He was incorporated M. A. at Oxford in 1588. Apparently,
between the times of taking his B. A. and his M. A. degrees, he
travelled, at least in Spain and Italy. Certainly, then or later,
he came to know other parts of the continent, for he says in his
Notable Discovery of Coosnage, 'I have smiled with the Italian. . .
eaten Spanish mirabolanes. . . France, Germany, Poland, Denmark,
I know them all. ' That is, by the time he was twenty-five, he had
had his chance to know at first hand the writings of Castiglione,
Ariosto and Machiavelli—the Italian authors to whom his work is
most indebted. He had had, too, his chance of contrasting the
newer learning of Italy with the traditional English teaching of his
time. A man of letters curiously mingling artistic and Bohemian
sympathies and impulses with puritanic ideals and tendencies, who
had been trained in the formal learning of an English university,
he was greatly stimulated by the varied renascence influences,
and, by them, in many cases, was led, not to greater liberty, but to
greater licence of expression. As novelist, pamphleteer and play-
wright, he is always mercurial, but always, no matter how large his
borrowings, individual and contributive'.
1 As to the Merrie Conceited Jests, cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, p. 360.
2 See, as to Greene's literary activity other than dramatic, vol. III, chap. XVI,
pp. 353 ff. and vol. iv, chap. xvi, pp. 318 ff.
## p. 133 (#157) ############################################
Greene's Novels and Pamphlets
133
Greene seems to have begun his varied literary career while
still at Cambridge, for, in October 1580, the first part of his novel,
Mamillia, was licensed, though it did not appear before 1583. In
the latter year, the second part was licensed, though the first
edition we have bears date 1593. We are not clear as to what
exactly Greene was doing between the time of taking the two
degrees; but, in some way, it meant a preparation which made
it possible for him to pour out, between 1583 and 1590, a rapid
succession of some dozen love stories and ephemeral pamphlets—
Morando, Planetomachia, Menaphon, Perimedes, Pandosto, The
Spanish Masquerado, etc. , etc. That, during this time or later,
Greene was either a clergyman or an actor has not been proved.
About 1590, some unusually strong impulsion, resulting either
from a long sickness or, less probably, from some such contrition
as his Repentance says the eloquence of John More at one time
produced in him, gave him a distaste for his former courses, in
literary work as well as in general conduct. Certainly, as Churton
Collins has pointed out, Greene's Mourning Garment, his Farewell
to Folly, 1590 and 1591, and his Vision-which, though published
after his death (1592) as written when he was moribund, was
evidently, for the most part, composed about 1590—show this
changed mood. Indeed, the mood was sufficiently lasting for him
to write, in 1592, when he published his Philomela,
I promised, Gentlemen, both in my Mourning Garment and Farewell to
Folly, never to busy myself about any wanton pamphlets again . . . but yet
am I come, contrary to vow and promise, once again to the press with a
labour of love, which I hatched long ago, though now brought forth to
light.
In any case, it cannot be denied that his non-dramatic production
in the two years of life remaining before 1592 was, for the main part,
very different from that which had preceded. Whether his series
of coney-catching exposures formed part of a genuine repentance,
it is quite impossible to tell'. The three or four pamphlets of this
sort by Greene were not wholly the result of an observation which
moved him irresistibly, either through indignation or repentance,
to frank speaking.
Even more puzzling, however, than his change of attitude,
about 1590, or than his real feeling in his so-called exposures, is
the question raised with much ingenious argument by Churton
Collins, whether Greene began his dramatic work earlier than
1590. Greene himself says in his Repentance: 'but after I had by
1 As to this, see ante, vol. IV, pp. 319 ff.
1
## p. 134 (#158) ############################################
134
Plays of the University Wits
degrees proceeded Master of Arts (1583) I left the University and
away to London, where. . . after a short time. . . I became an author
of plays and love-pamphlets. ' That, certainly, does not sound as if
Greene did not write any plays for some seven years after he left
Cambridge. Moreover, another passage in Perimedes (1588)
“Two mad men of Rome (that is London] had it in derision for
that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical
buskins'—is open to two interpretations : namely, that he was
derided for not attempting to write blank verse plays, or for
failure in the attempt? Churton Collins skilfully emphasises
what is true, that neither Nashe, in the preface to Menaphon,
nor any of the writers of commendatory verse accompanying
Greene's publications before 1590, mention his drama. But it
is to be noted that two of the four passages cited by Churton
Collins are dated as early as 1588. Now, most recent opinion
does not favour the conclusion that, before this date, Greene had
produced any surviving work besides Alphonsus and, in collabora-
tion with Lodge, A Looking Glasse for London and England.
Even in 1589, Nashe, in his preface to Menaphon, was looking for
evidence to elevate Greene above the writers of blank verse plays,
and, therefore, would hardly have counted the two plays mentioned,
or even Orlando, against such overwhelming successes as The
Spanish Tragedie, Tamburlaine and Faustus. For A Looking
Glasse was written in collaboration; one or both of the others may
have been merely burlesque of the new high-flown style; and there
is more than a suspicion that Alphonsus was a failure. As will
be seen when the probable dates of the plays remaining to us are
considered, the safer statement, probably, is that, although Greene
had been writing plays before 1589, he had not accomplished
anything which could be compared on approximately equal terms
with the original achievements of Marlowe or of Kyd, and that his
best dramatic work was produced in 1590 or after this date.
The dramatic work remaining to us which is certainly his is
small. A lost play of Job is entered in the Stationers' register in
1594 as his. The attribution to him of Selimus on the authority of
the title-page of the first edition, 1594, and of two quotations as-
signed to him by Allot in England's Parnassus, 1600, which are
found in this particular play, is not accepted by either A. W. Ward
or C. M. Gayley; and Churton Collins says that his authorship is
1 Churton Collins, unfortunately for his argument, seems to favour both opinions.
See p. 75, vol. 1, of his Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, where he holds the former
opinion; and p. 40 of his introduction, where, apparently, he holds the second.
## p. 135 (#159) ############################################
Plays attributed to Greene
135
>
'too doubtful to justify any editor including [it] in Greene's works. '
It is now generally admitted that he was not the author of
Mucedorus, or of The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, which have sometimes been assigned to him. It seems
all but impossible to determine Greene's share in the First Part
of the Contention betwixt the Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and
The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke. Critical opinion,
following the lead of Miss Lee, is, on the whole, disposed to favour
the view that Greene had some share in the work, but where, and
to what extent, are mere matters of conjecture! On the other
hand, the attribution to him of George a Greene, the Pinner of
Wakefield is not to be waived. This attribution arises from
two manuscript statements in sixteenth century handwriting on
the title-page of the 1590 edition in the duke of Devonshire's
library, 'Written by . . .
