moment invidious to ask if they are symmetrically united into a whole. Succeeding generations have acknowledged the pathos and richness of his strains, and the new contour and enlarged dimensions of grace which he gave to English poetry. He is the poetical father of a Milton and a Thomson. Gray habitually read him when he wished to frame his thoughts for composition; and there are few eminent poets in the language who have not been essentially indebted to him.

"Hither, as to their fountain, other stars

Repair, and in their urns draw golden light." The publication of "The Fairy Queen," and the commencement of Shakspeare's dramatic career, may be noticed as contemporary events; for by no supposition can Shakspeare's appearance as a dramatist be traced higher than 1589, and that of Spenser's great poem was in the year 1590. I turn back from that date to an earlier period, when the first lineaments of our regular drama began to show themselves.

Before Elizabeth's reign we had no dramatic authors more important than Bale and Heywood the Epigrammatist. Bale, before the titles of tragedy and comedy were well distinguished, had written comedies on such subjects as the Resurrection of Lazarus, and the Passion and Sepulture of our Lord. He was, in fact, the last of the race of mysterywriters. Both Bale and Heywood died about the middle of the sixteenth century, but flourished (if such a word can be applied to them) as early as the reign of Henry VIII. Until the time of Elizabeth, the public was contented

the interludes became prevalent during the reign of Henry VIII. +

Lord Sackville's Gorboduc, first represented in 1561-2, and Still's Gammer Gurton's Needle, about 1566, were the earliest, though faint, draughts of our regular tragedy and comedy§. They did not, however, immediately supersede the taste for the allegorical moralities. Sackville even introduced dumb show in his tragedy to explain the piece, and he was not the last of the old dramatists who did so. One might conceive the explanation of allegory by real personages to be a natural complaisance to an audience; but there is something peculiarly ingenious in making allegory explain reality, and the dumb interpret for those who could speak. In reviewing the rise of the drama, Gammar Gurton's Needle, and Sackville's Gorboduc, form convenient resting-places for the memory; but it may be doubted if their superiority over the mysteries and moralities be half so great as their real distance from an affecting tragedy, or an exhilarating comedy. The main incident in Gammer Gurton's Needle is the loss of a needle in a man's small-clothes.

Warton also mentions Rastell, the brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, who was a printer; but who is believed by the historian of our poetry to have been also an author, and to have made the moralities in some degree the vehicle of science and philosophy. He published [about 1519] a new interlude on The Nature of the Four Elements, in which The Tracts of America lately discovered and the manners of the natives are described.-[See Collier's Annals, vol. ii. p. 319.]

[§ Sackville became a statesman, and forsook the pleasant paths of poetry; nor does he appear to have encouraged it in others; for in an age rife with poetical commendations he seems to have drawn but one solitary sonnet, and that attached to a book where praises were made cheap-" The Faerie Queene." He died, and received a funeral sermon from Abbot, but no tears of regret from the Muses;-he

Still took to the church and became a bishop-but not before the creator of our comedy had written a supplicatory letter that, for acting at Cambridge, a Latin play should be preferred to an English one.]

[* It is clear that before 1591, or even 1592, Shakspeare had no celebrity as a writer of plays; he must, therefore, ave been valuable to the theatre chiefly as an actor; and if this was the case, namely, that he speedily trode the stage with some respectability, Mr. Rowe's tradition that be was at first admitted in a mean capacity must be taken with a bushel of doubt.-CAMPBELL, Life of Shakspeare, tva 1838, p. xxii]

[The Mysteries Mr. Collier would have called MiraclePlays, and the Moralities, Morals or Moral-Plays.]

[Speaking of Gammer Gurton, Scott writes, "It is a piece of low humour; the whole jest turning upon the loss and the recovery of the needle with which Gammer Gurton was to repair the breeches of her man Hodge; but in

point of manners, it is a great curiosity, as the carta

supellex of our ancestors is scarcely anywhere so well described." "The unity," he continues, of time, place, and action, are observed through the play, with an accuracy of which France might be jealous." And adds, alluding to Gorboduc, "It is remarkable, that the earliest English tragedy and comedy are both works of considerable merit; that each partakes of the distinct character of its class; that the tragedy is without intermixture of comedy; the comedy without any intermixture of tragedy."— Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 333.]

Gorboduc has no interesting plot or impassioned dialogue; but it dignified the stage with moral reflection and stately measure. It first introduced black verse instead of ballad rhymes in the drama. Gascoigne gave a farther popularity to blank verse by his paraphrase of Jocasta, from Euripides, which appeared in 1566. The same author's "Supposes," translated from Ariosto, was our earliest prose comedy. Its dialogue is easy and spirited. Edward's Palamon and Arcite was acted in the same year, to the great admiration of Queen Elizabeth, who called the author into her presence, and complimented him on having justly drawn the character of a genuine lover.

Ten tragedies of Seneca were translated into English verse at different times, and by different authors, before the year 1581. One of these translators was Alexander Neyvile, afterwards secretary to Archbishop Parker, whose Oedipus came out as early as 1563; and though he was but a youth of nineteen, his style has considerable beauty. The following lines, which open the first act, may serve as a specimen.

"The night is gone, and dreadful day begins at length t appear,

And Phoebus, all bedimm'd with clouds, himself aloft doth

rear;

And, gliding forth, with deadly hue and doleful blaze in skies,

Doth bear great terror and dismay to the beholder's eyes. Now shall the houses void be seen, with plague devoured quite,

And slaughter which the night hath made shall day bring forth to light.

Doth any man in princely thrones rejoice? O brittle joy! How many ills, how fair a face, and yet how much annoy In thee doth lurk, and hidden lies what heaps of endless strife!

They judge amiss, that deem the Prince to have the happy life."

In 1568 was produced the tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda," by Robert Wilmot, and four other students of the Inner Temple. It is reprinted in Reed's plays; but that reprint is taken not from the first edition, but from one greatly polished and amended in 1592*. Considered as a piece coming within the verge of Shakspeare's age, it ceases to be wonderful. Immediately subsequent to these writers we meet with several obscure and uninteresting dramatic names, among which is that of Whet

[* Newly revived, and polished according to the decorum of these days. That is, as Mr. Collier supposes, by the removal of the rhymes to a blank-verse fashion.]

66

stone, the author of " Promos and Cassandra," [1578], in which piece there is a partial anticipation of the plot of Shakspeare's Measure for Measure. Another is that of Preston, whose tragedy of Cambyses + is alluded to by Shakspeare, when Falstaff calls for a cup of sack, that he may weep "in King Cambyses' vein." There is, indeed, matter for weeping in this tragedy; for, in the course of it, an elderly gentleman is flayed alive. To make the skinning more pathetic, his own son is witness to it, and exclaims,

"What child is he of Nature's mould could bide the same to see,

His father fleaed in this wise? O how it grieveth me!" It may comfort the reader to know that this theatric decortication was meant to be allegorical; and we may believe that it was performed with no degree of stage illusion that could deeply affect the spectator§.

The

In the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, we come to a period when the increasing demand for theatrical entertainments produced play-writers by profession. earliest of these appears to have been George Peele, who was the city poet and conductor of the civil pageants. His " Arraignment of Paris" came out in 1584. Nash calls him an Atlas in poetry. Unless we make allowance for his antiquity, the expression will appear hyperbolical; but, with that allowance, we may justly cherish the memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our language. His "David and Bethsabe" is the carliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender, and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of

In the title-page it is denominated "A lamentable Tragedy, mixed full of pleasant Mirth."

[ The Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.BEN JONSON. (Gifford, vol. ix. p. 180.)

I suspect that Shakspeare confounded King Cambyses with King Darius. Falstaff's solemn fustian bears not the slightest resemblance, either in metre or in matter, to the vein of King Cambyses. Kyng Daryus, whose doleful strain is here burlesqued, was a pithic and plesaunt Enterlude, printed about the middle of the sixteenth century.-GIFFORD. Note on Jonson's Poctaster, Works, vol. ii. p. 455.]

[§ The stage direction excites a smile. Flea him with a false skin.]

versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare*. David's character-the traits both of his guilt and sensibility-his passion for Bethsabe-his art in inflaming the military ambition of Urias, and his grief for Absalom, are delineated with no vulgar skill. The luxuriant image of Bethsabe is introduced by these lines:

Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes
That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love,
And stroke my bosom with thy gentle fan:
This shade, sun-proof, is yet no proof for thee.
Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring,
And purer than the substance of the same,
Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce.
Thou and thy sister, soft and sacred Air,
Goddess of life, and governess of health,
Keeps every fountain fresh, and arbour sweet.
No brazen gate her passage can refuse,
Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath:

Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes,
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes,

To play the wanton with us through the leaves.

Darid. What tunes, what words, what looks, what wonders pierce

My soul, incensed with a sudden fire?

What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise,
Enjoys the beauty of so fair a dame?

Fair Eva, placed in perfect happiness,
Lending her praise-notes to the liberal heavens,
Strock with the accents of archangels' tunes,
Wright not more pleasure to her husband's thoughts,
Than this fair woman's words and notes to mine.
May that sweet plain, that bears her pleasant weight,
Be still enamell'd with discolour'd flowers!
That precious fount bear sand of purest gold;
And, for the pebble, let the silver streams
Play upon rubies, sapphires, chrysolites;
The brims let be embraced with golden curls
Of moss, that sleeps with sound the waters make;
For joy to feed the fount with their recourse
Let all the grass that beautifies her bower
bear manna every morn instead of dew.

Joab thus describes the glory of David :
Beauteous and bright is he among the tribes;
As when the sun, attired in glistering robe,
Comes dancing from his oriental gate,

And, bridegroom-like, hurls through the gloomy air
His radiant beams: such doth King David show,
Crown'd with the honour of his enemies' town,
Sining in riches like the firmament,
The starry vault that overhangs the earth;
So looketh David, King of Israel.

At the conclusion of the tragedy, when David gives way to his grief for Absalom, he is roused

Mr. Dyce, in his edition of Peele, has quoted this pas from Mr. Campbell," a critic," he styles him, "who

is by no means subject to the pardonable weakness of discovering beauties in every writer of the olden time." p. xxxviii.

It is quoted too by Mr. Hallam (Lit. Hist. vol. ii. p.378), who encurs with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive]

with great dignity and energy by the speech of Joab. When informed by Joab of the death of his son, David exclaims :

David. Thou man of blood! thou sepulchre of death! Whose marble breast entombs my bowels quick, Did I not charge thee, nay, entreat thy hand, Even for my sake, to spare my Absalom? And hast thou now, in spite of David's health, And scorn to do my heart some happiness, Given him the sword, and spilt his purple soul?

Joab. What! irks it David, that he victor breathes,
That Juda, and the fields of Israel

Should cleanse their faces from their children's blood?
What! art thou weary of thy royal rule?

Is Israel's throne a serpent in thine eyes,
And he that set thee there, so far from thanks,
That thou must curse his servant for his sake?
Hast thou not said, that, as the morning light,
The cloudless morning, so should be thine house,
And not as flowers, by the brightest rain,
Which grow up quickly, and as quickly fade?
Hast thou not said, the wicked are as thorns,
That cannot be preserved with the hand;
And that the man shall touch them must be arm'd
With coats of iron, and garments made of steel,
Or with the shaft of a defenced spear?

And art thou angry he is now cut off,

That led the guiltless swarming to their deaths,
And was more wicked than an host of men?
Advance thee from thy melancholy den,
And deck thy body with thy blissful robes,
Or, by the Lord that sways the Heaven, I swear,
I'll lead thine armies to another king,
Shall cheer them for their princely chivalry;
And not sit daunted, frowning in the dark,
When his fair looks, with oil and wine refresh'd,
Should dart into their bosoms gladsome beams,
And fill their stomachs with triumphant feasts;
That, when elsewhere stern War shall sound his trump,
And call another battle to the field,

Fame still may bring thy valiant soldiers home,
And for their service happily confess

She wanted worthy trumps to sound their prowess;
Take thou this course, and live;-Refuse, and die.

Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe, were the other writers for our early stage, a part of whose career preceded that of Shakspeare*. Lyly, whose dramatic language

[ An interesting subject of inquiry in Shakspeare's literary history, is the state of our dramatic poetry when he began to alter and originate English plays. Before his time mere mysteries and miracle plays, in which Adam and Eve appeared naked, in which the devil displayed his horns and tail, and in which Noah's wife boxed the patriarch's ears before entering the ark, had fallen comparatively into disuse, after a popularity of four centuries; and, in the course of the sixteenth century, the clergy were forbidden by orders from Rome to perform in them. Meanwhile "Moralities," which had made their appearance about the middle of the fifteenth century, were also hastening their retreat, as well as those pageants and masques in honour of royalty, which nevertheless aided the introduction of the drama. But we owe our first regular dramas to the universities, the inns of court, and public seminaries. The scholars of these

is prose, has traits of genius which we should not expect from his generally depraved taste, and he has several graceful interspersions of "sweet lyric song." But his manner, on the whole, is stilted. "Brave Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs," of whose "mighty muse" Ben Jonson himself speaks reverentially, had powers of no ordinary class, and even ventured a few steps into the pathless sublime. But his pathos is dreary, and the terrors of his Muse remind us more of Minerva's gorgon than her countenance. The first sober and cold school of tragedy, which began with Lord Sackville's Gorboduc, was succeeded by one of headlong extravagance. Kyd's bombast was proverbial in his own day. With him the genius of tragedy might be said to have run mad; and, if we may judge of one work, the joint production of Greene and Lodge, to have hardly recovered her wits in the company of those authors. The piece to which I allude is entitled "A Looking-glass for London" [1594]. There, the Tamburlane establishments engaged in free translations of classical dramatists, though with so little taste, that Seneca was one of their favourites. They caught the coldness of that model, however, without the feeblest trace of his slender graces; they looked at the ancients without understanding them; and they brought to their plots neither unity, design, nor affecting interest. There is a general similarity among all the plays that preceded Shakspeare in their ill-conceived plots, in the bombast and dulness of tragedy, and in the vulgar buffoonery of comedy.

Of our great Poet's immediate predecessors, the most distinguished were Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe. Lyly was not entirely devoid of poetry, for we have some pleasing lyrical verses by him; but in the drama he is cold, mythological, and conceited, and he even polluted for a time the juvenile age of our literature with his abominable Euphuism. Peele has left some melodious and fanciful passages in his "David and Bethsabe." Greene is not unjustly praised for his comedy "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay." Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy" was at first admired, but, subsequently, quoted only for its samples of the mock sublime. Nash wrote no poetry except for the stage; but he is a poor dramatic poet -though his prose satires are remarkably powerful. Lodge was not much happier on the stage than Nash; his prose works are not very valuable; but he wrote one satire in verse of considerable merit, and various graceful little lyrics. Marlowe was the only great man among Shakspeare's precursors; his conceptions were strong and original; his intellect grasped his subject as a whole: no doubt he dislocated the thews of his language by overstrained efforts at the show of strength, but he delineated character with a degree of truth unknown to his predecessors: his "Edward the Second" is pathetic; and his "Faustus" has real grandeur. If Marlowe had lived, Shakspeare might have had something like a competitor. -CAMPBELL, Life of Shakspeare, p. xxiii.] [* Drayton.]

of Kyd is fairly rivalled in rant and blasphemy by the hero Rasni, King of Nineveh, who boasts

"Great Jewry's God, that foil'd stout Benhadab,
Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought;
For be he God in Heaven, yet viceroys know
Rasni is God on earth, and none but he."

In the course of the play, the imperial swaggerer marries his own sister, who is quite as consequential a character as himself; but finding her struck dead by lightning, he deigns to espouse her lady-in-waiting, and is finally converted after his wedding, by Jonah, who soon afterwards arrives at Nineveh. It would be

perhaps unfair, however, to assume this tragedy as a fair test of the dramatic talents of either Greene or Lodge. Ritson recommended the dramas of Greene as well worthy of being collected. The taste of that antiquary was not exquisite, but his knowledge may entitle his opinion to consideration †.

Among these precursors of Shakspeare we may trace, in Peele and Marlowe, a pleasing dawn of the drama, though it was by no means a dawn corresponding to so bright a sunrise as the appearance of his mighty genius. He created our romantic drama, or if the assertion is to be qualified, it requires but a small qualification. There were, undoubtedly, prior

[ His Dramas and Poems were printed together in 1831 by Mr. Dyce. "In richness of fancy Greene," says Mr. Dyce, "is inferior to Peele; and with the exception of his amusing comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, there is, perhaps, but little to admire in his dramatic productions."]

[ Untaught, unpracticed, in a barbarous age, I found not, but created first the stage,And if I drain'd no Greek or Latin store, 'Twas that my own abundance gave me more. DRYDEN of Shakspeare.

The English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakspeare. Had he received an education more extensive, and possessed a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient Drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius, as comprehensive and versatile as intense and powerful, Shakspeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order; and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic

occupants of the dramatic ground in our language; but they appear only like unprosperous settlers on the patches and skirts of a wilderness, which he converted into a garden. He is, therefore, never compared with his native predecessors. Criticism goes back for names worthy of being put in competition with his, to the first great masters of dramatic invention; and even in the points of dissimilarity between them and him, discovers some of the highest indications of his genius. Compared with the classical composers of antiquity, he is to our conceptions nearer the character of a universal poet; more acquainted with man in the real world, and more terrific and bewitching in the preternatural. He expanded the magic circle of the drama beyond the limits that belonged to it in antiquity; made it embrace more time and locality; filled it with larger business and action-with vicissitudes of gay and serious emotion, which classical taste had kept divided-with characters which developed humanity in stronger lights and subtler movements and with a language more wildly, more playfully diversified by fancy and passion, than was ever spoken on any stage. Like Nature herself, he presents alternations of the gay and the tragic; and his mutability, like the suspense and precariousness of real existence, often deepens the force of our impressions. He converted imitation into illusion. To say that, magician as he was, he was not faultless, is only to recal the flat and stale truism, that everything human is imperfect. But how to estimate his imperfections *! To praise him

restriction to classical rule. Nothing went before Shakspeare which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national Drama; and certainly no one will sanceed him capable of establishing, by mere authority, a form more restricted than that which Shakspeare used. - WALTER SCOTT, Misc. Pr. Works, vol. iii. p. 336. Shakspeare began his literary career by alterations and adaptations of former dramas and copyright pieces to more popular and poetical purposes. He seems to have extended his desire for emendation to the works of living writers; and, taught by nature, to have done for the writing of University Men what Pope did (with equal offence) for the rhymes and lines of Wycherley. It was the common practice of his age to call in the pen of a living writer to aid with additions the Muse of a fellow dramatist. He soon, however, learned to depend on his w myriad-minded genius, on his own thousandngued soul]

• He (Shakspeare) was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comjovi ensive soul. All the images of nature were still preent to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily:

is easy--In facili causa cuivis licet esse diserto-But to make a special, full, and accurate estimate of his imperfections would require a delicate and comprehensive discrimination, and an authority which are almost as seldom united in one man as the powers of Shakspeare himself. He is the poet of the world. The magnitude of his genius puts it beyond all private opinion to set defined limits to the admiration which is due to it. We know, upon the whole, that the sum of blemishes to be deducted from his merits is not great +, and we should scarcely be thankful to one who should be anxious to make it. No other poet triumphs so anomalously over eccentricities and peculiarities in composition which would appear blemishes in others; so that his blemishes and beauties have an affinity which we are jealous of trusting any hand with the task of separating. We dread the interference of criticism with a fascination so often inexplicable by critical laws, and justly apprehend that any man in standing between us and Shakspeare may show for pretended spots upon his disk only the shadows of his own opacity.

Still it is not a part even of that enthusiastic creed, to believe that he has no excessive mixture of the tragic and comic, no blemishes of language in the elliptical throng and impatient pressure of his images, no irregularities of plot and action, which another Shakspeare would avoid, if "nature had not broken the mould in which she made him," or if he should come back into the world to blend experience with inspiration ‡.

when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

DRYDEN.]

[+ If Shakspeare's embroideries were burnt down, there would still be silver at the bottom of the melting-pot.DRYDEN, Malone, vol. ii. p. 295.]

[Of the learning of Shakspeare, Mr. Campbell says elsewhere: "There is not a doubt that he lighted up his glorious fancy at the lamp of classical mythology :Hyperion's curls-the front of Jove himself,