drama; but this was not apparent to contemporaries. Scholars despised the shows of mingled bloodshed and buffoonery in which the populace delighted. The people had no taste for dry and formal disquisitions in the style of 'Gorboduc.' The blank verse of Sackville and Hughes rang hollow; the prose of Lyly was affected; the rhyming couplets of the popular theatre interfered with dialogue and free development of character. The public itself was divided in its tastes and instincts; the mob inclining to mere drolleries and merriments upon the stage, the better vulgar to formalities and studied imitations. A powerful body of sober citizens, by no means wholly composed of Puritans and ascetics, regarded all forms of dramatic art with undisguised hostility. Meanwhile, no really great poet had arisen to stamp the tendencies of either Court or town with the authentic seal of genius. There seemed a danger lest the fortunes of the stage in England should be lost between the prejudices of a literary class, the puerile and lifeless pastimes of the multitude, and the disfavour of conservative moralists. From this peril Marlowe saved the English drama. Amid the chaos of conflicting elements he discerned the true and living germ of art, and set its growth beyond all risks of accident by his achievement. When, therefore, we style Marlowe the father and founder of English dramatic poetry, we mean that he perceived the capacities for noble art inherent in the Romantic Drama, and proved its adaptation to high purpose by his practice. Out of confusion he brought CLASSIC METRE AND ROMANTIC MATTER. 587 order, following the clue of his own genius through a labyrinth of dim unmastered possibilities. Like all great craftsmen, he worked by selection and exclusion on the whole mass of material ready to his hand; and his instinct in this double process is the proof of his originality. He adopted the romantic drama in lieu of the classic, the popular instead of the literary type. But he saw that the right formal vehicle, blank verse, had been suggested by the school which he rejected. Rhyme, the earlier metre of the romantic drama, had to be abandoned. Blank verse, the metre of the pedants, had to be accepted. To employ blank verse in the romantic drama was the first step in his revolution. But this was only the first step. Both form and matter had alike to be transfigured. And it was precisely in this transfiguration of the right dramatic metre, in this transfiguration of the right dramatic stuff, that Marlowe showed himself a creative poet. What we call the English, or the Elizabethan, or better perhaps the Shaksperian Drama, came into existence by this double process. Marlowe found the public stage abandoned to aimless trivialities, but abounding in the rich life of the nation, and with the sympathies of the people firmly enlisted on the side of its romantic presentation. He introduced a new class of heroic subjects, eminently fitted for dramatic handling. He moulded characters, and formed a vigorous conception of the parts they had to play. Under his touch the dialogue moved with spirit; men and women spoke and acted with the energy and spontaneity of He found the blank verse of the literary nature. school monotonous, tame, nerveless, without life or movement. But he had the tact to understand its vast capacities, so vastly wider than its makers had divined, so immeasurably more elastic than the rhymes for which he substituted its sonorous cadence. Marlowe, first of Englishmen, perceived how noble was the instrument he handled, how well adapted to the closest reasoning, the sharpest epigram, the loftiest flight of poetry, the subtlest music, and the most luxuriant debauch of fancy. Touched by his hands the thing became an organ capable of rolling thunders and of whispering sighs, of moving with pompous volubility or gliding like a silvery stream, of blowing trumpet-blasts to battle or sounding the soft secrets of a lover's heart. I do not assert that Marlowe made it discourse music of so many moods. But what he did with it, unlocked the secrets of the verse, and taught successors how to play upon its hundred stops. He found it what Greene calls a 'drumming decasyllabon.' Each line stood alone, formed after the same model, ending with a strongly accented monosyllable. Marlowe varied the pauses in its rhythm; combined the structure of succeeding verses into periods; altered the incidence of accent in many divers forms and left the metre fit to be the vehicle of Shakspere's or of Milton's thought. Compared with either of those greatest poets, Marlowe, as a versifier, lacks indeed variety of cadence, and palls our sense of melody by emphatic magniloquence. The pomp of his 'mighty line' tends to monotony; nor was he quite sure in his employment of the instrument which he discovered and divined. The finest bursts of metrical music in his dramas seem MARLOWE'S ORIGINALITY. 589 often the result of momentary inspiration rather than the studied style of a deliberate artist.1 This adaptation of blank verse to the romantic drama, this blending of classic form with popular material, and the specific heightening of both form and matter by the application of poetic genius to the task, constitutes Marlowe's claims to be styled the father and the founder of our stage. We are so accustomed to Shakspere that it is not easy to estimate the full importance of his predecessor's revolution. Once again, therefore, let us try to bear in mind the three cardinal points of Marlowe's originality. In the first place, he saw that the romantic drama, the drama of the public theatres, had a great future before it. In the second place, he saw that the playwrights of the classic school had discovered the right dramatic metre. In the third place, he raised both matter and metre, the subjects of the romantic and the verse of the classic school, to heights as yet unapprehended in his days. Into both he breathed the breath of life; heroic, poetic, artistic, vivid with the spirit of his age. From the chaotic and conflicting elements around him he drew forth the unity of English Drama, and produced the thing which was to be so great, is still so perfect. Marlowe was fully aware of his object. The few and seemingly negligent lines which serve as prologue to Tamburlaine,' written probably when he was a 1 These remarks on Marlowe's use of Blank Verse remain much as I first wrote them in September 1864. Their substance I have already published in Cornhill essays on 'The Drama of Elizabeth and James' and 'Blank Verse' (1865-6) and a Pall Mall Gazette article on 'Marlowe' (1867). After nearly twenty years I do not see reason to modify in any essential points the panegyric I then penned, and which has been far more eloquently uttered since by Mr. Swinburne. youth of twenty-two, set forth his purpose in plain terms: From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, In other words, Marlowe undertakes to wean the public from its drolleries and merriments. He advertises a metre hitherto unused upon the popular stage. He promises an entertainment in which heroic actions shall be displayed with the pomp of a new style. The puerilities of clownage are to retire into the second place. Yet the essential feature of the romantic drama, its power to fascinate and please a public audience, is not to be abandoned. III. The importance of Blank Verse in the history of English poetry, especially dramatic poetry, is so great that Marlowe's innovations in the use of it demand a somewhat lengthy introduction, in order that their scope may be understood. The single line, or unit, in a blank verse period is a line of normally five accents, of which the final accent falls on the last syllable, or, if that syllable be not definitely accented, is supplied by the closing pause.1 It 1 As the terminal syllable in the classical metres may be long or short, so the terminal syllable in blank verse may be accented or unaccented, the close of the verse sufficing. Sophocles ends a line, e.g., with eλaúvete, and Shakspere one with alacrity. This observation might lead to further remarks upon what quantity and accent have in common, metrically speaking; but the inquiry would be too long. |
