Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (35 page)

Kyd demonstrated his new tragic art in
The Spanish Tragedy
, which may have appeared on the London stage as early as 1585. Here was a tale of blood, using the ‘revenge’ motive beloved by the Senecan dramatists. Here were the Senecan ghosts and chorus, but now revitalized by Kyd’s technical skill so that they inspired fear and wonder in the groundlings. Here, in rapid action, were lives of nobility, pathos, cruelty. His blank verse was not great poetry,
but he had a rugged power and an ear for the sharp phrase. The themes that start out of his play go running on through the drama for years to come:

What out-cries pluck me from my naked bed,

And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?

And:

            what murderous spectacle is this?

A man hanged up and all the murderers gone.

And in my bower, to lay the guilt on me.

These were the dire questions that kept the audience hurrying back to Shoreditch and Bankside. Kyd inaugurated ‘the tragedy of blood’ and other dramatists quickly followed him. ‘Yet English Seneca read by candle-light’, Nashe wrote in 1589, scoffing at the influence of Kyd, ‘yields many good sentences as
blood is a beggar
and so forth: and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole
Hamlets
,
³
I should say handfulls of tragical speeches. … The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be dry, and Seneca let blood line by line, and page by page, at length must needs die on our stage.’ That death did not come until the Senecan blood had flowed through Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and into the next century to Webster, Tourneur and Middleton.

The liveliness of the stage, both at the ‘private house’ of Blackfriars and in the public theatres, attracted a new generation of young playwrights. These men, of whom Lyly and Kyd were among the first, were all born about the time, or shortly after, Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558. They had the Elizabethan view, unaffected by the harsh events which had so depressed the drama and the actors in the last years of Henry VIII and in the reigns of Edward and Mary. They came to the drama as a fresh art which they approached not so much through the English theatrical tradition, a tradition grown weak from the knocks of the mid-century, but rather by way of their classical training at school and university and their readings in Renaissance literature. For most of the new playwrights were learned young men, the ‘university wits’, who had taken up writing as a way to earn a living.
They wrote both prose and poetry, ready to turn out by order a romance, a pastoral, a satire, a controversial pamphlet, or a flattering dedication. They were the first hacks of writing, professionals made possible by the spread of printing and the growth of public literacy. They wrote plays because the theatre was flourishing and there was money to be made on the stage. Robert Greene, who was one of them, related in his
Groatsworth of Wit
how he met an actor by the roadside, when his fortunes were low, who advised him to make plays ‘for which you will be well paid, if you will take the pains’. Greene, ‘perceiving no remedy, thought best in respect of his present necessity to try his wit and went with him willingly’.

When the university wits took to plays, most of them had behind them some success in other forms of writing. In pursuit of income, they were prepared to try all types of drama; but being inexperienced they found it best to experiment with plays that would owe something to their former successes in fiction or verse. So Lyly’s court comedy took the notable features of
Euphues
and cast them into dramatic form.

Of this group of new young playwrights, none was more versatile than George Peele. He had been to Oxford where he had made a reputation as a poet, and where he had run into expense through an early marriage. In 1581 he came to London looking for work, and was drawn, like Lyly, to write plays for the children and the court. And his
Arraignment of Paris
, published in 1584, was very close to Lyly’s comedy, with a plot from classical mythology embroidered in the elegant manner of the pastoral romance. Peele, however, wrote his play in verse, in a wide variety of metres—old, lumbering ‘fourteeners’ and new flexible blank verse, rhymed couplets and short lyrics—which tested the possibilities of all kinds of dramatic poetic diction. If Peele was never a master of dramatic construction, he was at least a writer of masterly poetry, and his experiments in beautiful verse pleased greatly. Nashe commended him ‘as the chief supporter of pleasaunce now living’ and praised the
Arraignment of Paris
for ‘present dexterity of wit and manifold variety of invention’.

Peele went on to prove his ‘manifold variety of invention’. Before his early death in 1596, he had produced many pageants for the court and the city. He had written a burlesque of the supernatural in his
Old Wives’ Tale
. He had written a history play on
Edward I
, and another historical chronicle,
The Battle of Alcazar
,
based on the swashbuckling life of the famous Devonshire adventurer Thomas Stukeley. And he had even written a biblical play,
King David and Fair Bethsabe
, making an Elizabethan revenge tragedy out of the second Book of Samuel.

Robert Greene, infamous in his day for bad living, was less experimental than Peele, not such a good poet but a better dramatist. He began his writing career with prose romances, particularly pleasing to the female readers. He, too, was driven to the theatre by the sad state of his purse.
Alphonsus
, produced about 1588, was a perfunctory, ranting imitation of Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
, which also influenced the later and better
Orlando Furioso
, with a plot taken from Ariosto’s epic poem. Greene had little luck competing with the bombast of
Tamburlaine
; he had more success with
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
, written to benefit from the resounding triumph of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus. Friar Bacon
also dabbled in the supernatural, but the most notable part of the play was the picture of romantic love in, a pastoral setting which Greene added. In the days of his prose fiction Greene had been called ‘the Homer of women’, and his great strength in drama was in sympathetic portraits of his heroines. Margaret in
Friar Bacon
and Ida and Dorothea in his Scottish historical play
James IV
, moving in ideal pastoral worlds, where sentiment puts reason to flight, are the ancestors of Viola, Perdita, Rosalind and the other gracious, spirited women that Shakespeare loved to write about.

These ‘wits’ were the best of the experimenters. Other busy writers, sometimes alone and sometimes in collaboration, threw off a play for the money from time to time in the midst of their fiction and controversy. Munday, Chettle and Nashe had a hand in several kinds of drama; Nashe, in
Summer’s Last Will and Testament
, even gave a fresh turn to allegory. Besides the work of the known writers, many anonymous plays were acted, especially those based on history, legend or biography. An old
King John
, an old
King Henry V
and an old
King Leir
appeared on the London stage before Shakespeare took up the same subjects. There were plays on Sir Thomas More, Thomas Lord Cromwell and Robert Earl of Huntingdon, alias ‘Robin Hood’. All these plays had serious defects: the comedies were too often ill-constructed, things of awkward parts and more froth than substance; the tragedies were full of weary noise; and the histories disjointed and episodic, improbable where they weren’t downright impossible.

But remarkable things had been done. The young writers from university had brought their education, their taste and their wide knowledge of European literature to bear upon the drama. They broadened the scope of both comedy and tragedy. Older academic playwrights at the colleges and the Inns had given the English play a sense of classical form. The new men breathed into this form the sentiment and feeling of contemporary Europe. And because they were writing for the public rather than scholars, in theatres where success was measured by vulgar applause, their plays, though full of faults, were more active, better characterized, more ‘theatrical’ than the old dramas. They set out to please a wayward audience and in doing so accurately reflected the world of those who watched the plays. The grace of Lyly and Peele was a grace learnt from the Queen’s court; their fulsome praise of Elizabeth echoed the general opinion of the country as the power and reputation of England increased under her guidance. Greene’s attractive heroines were women taken from experience, tributes to the place that women had in England where, foreigners agreed, they had a freedom almost unknown on the continent. The female influence was felt particularly in literature. The writers of pastorals and romances discovered that they had, in the sixteenth-century woman, a new audience for their wares, which they steadily cultivated. In the Dedication of
Euphues and his England
, Lyly commended his work to the ladies, saying that ‘
Euphues
had rather lie shut in a lady’s casket than open in a scholar’s study’. The refinement that Lyly introduced to please the ladies was carried over into the court comedy. The lyrical songs of Peele were another compliment to the cultivation and taste of the audience at Blackfriars. His lyrical experiments were part of the general attempt by English poets, Sidney and Spenser amongst them, to give a new Renaissance form to the native music of English poetry. And Peele succeeded as well as any. He ranged widely, using many different forms, portraying subtle feelings. He was capable of both the pastoral gaiety of:

Fair and fair and twice as fair,

    As fair as any may be:

The fairest shepherd on our green,

    A love for any lady.

            (
The Arraignment of Paris
)

and the intricate evocation of passion and sensuous feeling that would do credit to John Donne:

Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,

Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair:

Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me;

Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me, and please me:

Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning,

Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.

(
King David and Fair Bethsabe
)

The comedies, for the court audience, reflected the light of society; the tragedies, and sometimes the histories, for the rougher public stage, showed the dark side of the contemporary portrait. The intrigue, treachery and ferocious bloodletting in the plays was an image of part of polity. With good reason the name of Machiavelli was invoked again and again in the drama. As Marlowe wrote in the Introduction to his
Jew of Malta
:

Albeit the world think Machiavel is dead,

Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps,

And now the Guise is dead, is come from France

To view this land, and frolic with his friends.

The remorseless men of the plays—Lorenzo in Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
, Tamburlaine, Mortimer and the Duke of Guise in Marlowe’s
Edward II
and
Massacre at Paris
—had traits which were to be seen clearly in the high-flying ambitions of great men—Leicester, Raleigh, Essex in England, the hated Guise and the Duke of Anjou in France, Alva and William the Silent in the Netherlands, Philip II, and many another. Persecution, torture, murder on the stage mirrored the use of these same horrors in the State. The consuming selfish greed of Marlowe’s Barabas was hardly greater than that of an Elizabethan financier, a Palavicino, a Stoddart, a Gresham. The ruthless pursuit of power of Tamburlaine was but one aspect of Renaissance individualism.

The production of Lyly’s
Campaspe
, at Blackfriars on New Year’s Day 1584, announced the great age of English drama. Kyd and the university wits made the plantation and nourished the shoots. The flowering was delayed a short while, until 1587, when the young graduate Christopher Marlowe astonished the town with his
Tamburlaine
. Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker,
was born on 6th February 1564. He went to King’s School in his home town, where it is known that plays were performed, and passed on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1581. He was thus representative of the kind of student who made up the company of the ‘university wits’: he was of humble family and had risen to university by his own brilliance; he was ambitious and wished to make a place in the world, but his lowly position and lack of money stood in his way; his talent had made him a poet, and he took to literature to advance his fame and to make a living. Starting so low and with so far to climb, Marlowe was reckless even by the standards of his fellows. By the time he came down from Cambridge with his M.A. in July 1587, he had already been employed by the secret service of the government. In the rest of his very short life he played out his dreams of power, beauty and grandeur against the reality of his poor existence, scheming, threatening, plotting, drinking, brawling until, in 1593, amid spies and informers, the random thrust of a dagger killed him in a Deptford tavern.

Yet Marlowe’s tempestuous youth and grandiose dreams were the making of the dramatist. Tamburlaine, the ‘Scythian shepherd’ who conquered the world, was an emblem of Marlowe’s own ambition. And when the Lord Admiral’s Men acted the two parts of
Tamburlaine
in 1587 the London stage had never seen such energy, such power and such poetry. The theme was terrific, a running war that leapt across expanses of geography and dazzled the home-bound heads of insular Englishmen so that the hero could exult: