A History of Elizabethan Literature. Saintsbury George
and constant – such as the curious and childish habit of making speakers speak of themselves in the third person, and by their names, instead of using "I" and "me." And on the other hand, the merits, though less evenly distributed in degree, are equally constant in kind. In Kyd, in Greene still more, in Peele more still, in Marlowe most of all, phrases and passages of blinding and dazzling poetry flash out of the midst of the bombast and the tedium. Many of these are known, by the hundred books of extract which have followed Lamb's Specimens, to all readers. Such, for instance, is the
"See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament"
of Marlowe, and his even more magnificent passage beginning
"If all the pens that ever poets held;"
such Peele's exquisite bower,
"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams,"
which is, with all respect to Charles Lamb, to be paralleled by a score of other jewels from the reckless work of "George Pyeboard": such Greene's
"Why thinks King Henry's son that Margaret's love
Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time?"
such even Kyd's
"There is a path upon your left hand side
That leadeth from a guilty conscience
Unto a forest of distrust and fear."
But the whole point of the thing is that these flashes, which are not to be found at all before the date of this university school, are to be found constantly in its productions, and that, amorphous, inartistic, incomplete as those productions are, they still show Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream in embryo. Whereas the greatest expert in literary embryology may read Gorboduc and The Misfortunes of Arthur through without discerning the slightest signs of what was coming.
Nash and Lodge are so little dramatists (the chief, if not only play of the former being the shapeless and rather dull comedy, Will Summer's Testament, relieved only by some lyrics of merit which are probably not Nash's, while Lodge's Marius and Sylla, while it wants the extravagance, wants also the beauty of its author's companions' work), that what has to be said about them will be better said later in dealing with their other books. Greene's prose pieces and his occasional poems are, no doubt, better than his drama, but the latter is considerable, and was probably his earliest work. Kyd has left nothing, and Peele little, but drama; while beautiful as Marlowe's Hero and Leander is, I do not quite understand how any one can prefer it to the faultier but far more original dramas of its author. We shall therefore deal with these four individually here.
The eldest of the four was George Peele, variously described as a Londoner and a Devonshire man, who was probably born about 1558. He was educated at Christ's Hospital (of which his father was "clerk") and at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and had some credit in the university as an arranger of pageants, etc. He is supposed to have left Oxford for London about 1581, and had the credit of living a Bohemian, not to say disreputable, life for about seventeen years; his death in 1597(?) being not more creditable than his life. But even the scandals about Peele are much more shadowy than those about Marlowe and Greene. His dramatic work consists of some half-dozen plays, the earliest of which is The Arraignment of Paris, 1581(?), one of the most elaborate and barefaced of the many contemporary flatteries of Elizabeth, but containing some exquisite verse. In the same way Peele has been accused of having in Edward I. adopted or perhaps even invented the basest and most groundless scandals against the noble and stainless memory of Eleanor of Castile; while in his Battle of Alcazar he certainly gratifies to the utmost the popular anti-Spanish and anti-Popish feeling. So angry have critics been with Peele's outrage on Eleanor, that some of them have declared that none but he could have been guilty of the not dissimilar slur cast on Joan of Arc's character in Henry VI., the three parts of which it has been the good pleasure of Shakesperian commentators to cut and carve between the University Wits ad libitum. I cannot myself help thinking that all this has arisen very much from the idea of Peele's vagabondism given by the untrustworthy "Jests." The slander on Queen Eleanor was pretty certainly supplied to him by an older ballad. There is little or nothing else in Peele's undoubted writings which is at all discreditable. His miscellaneous poems show a man by no means given to low company or low thoughts, and one gifted with the truest poetic vein; while his dramas, besides exhibiting a greater command over blank verse than any of his predecessors and than any except Marlowe of his contemporaries can claim, are full of charming passages. Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, which has been denied to him – an interesting play on the rare basis of the old romance – is written not in blank verse but in the fourteener. The Old Wives' Tale pretty certainly furnished Milton with the subject of Comus, and this is its chief merit. Edward I. and The Battle of Alcazar, but especially the latter, contain abundance of the hectoring rant which has been marked as one of the characteristics of the school, and which is half-excused by the sparks of valour that often break from its smoke and clatter. But Peele would undoubtedly stand higher, though he might not be so interesting a literary figure, if we had nothing of his save The Arraignment of Paris and David and Bethsabe. TheArraignment (written in various metres, but mainly in a musical and varied heroic couplet), is partly a pastoral, partly a masque, and wholly a Court play. It thus comes nearest to Lyly, but is altogether a more dramatic, livelier, and less conceited performance than anything by the author of Euphues. As for David and Bethsabe, it is crammed with beauties, and Lamb's curiously faint praise of it has always been a puzzle to me. As Marlowe's are the mightiest, so are Peele's the softest, lines in the drama before Shakespere; while the spirit and humour, which the author also had in plenty, save his work from the merely cloying sweetness of some contemporary writers. Two of his interposed or occasional lyrics will be given later: a blank verse passage may find room here: —
Bethsabe. "Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes
That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love,
And stroke my bosom with thy silken fan:
This shade, sun-proof,20 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,
Keep every fountain fresh and arbour sweet;
No brazen gate her passage can repulse,
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."
Robert Greene, probably, if not certainly, the next in age of the group to Peele, was born in 1560, the son of apparently well-to-do parents at Norwich, and was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he took his Master's degree in 1553. He was subsequently incorporated at Oxford, and being by no means ill-inclined to make the most of himself, sometimes took the style of a member "Utriusque Academiæ." After leaving the university he seems to have made a long tour on the Continent, not (according to his own account) at all to the advantage of his morals or means. He is said to have actually taken orders, and held a living for some short time, while he perhaps also studied if he did not practise medicine. He married a lady of virtue and some fortune, but soon despoiled and deserted her, and for the last six years of his life never saw her. At last in 1592, aged only two and thirty, – but after about ten years it would seem of reckless living and hasty literary production, – he died (of a disease caused or aggravated by a debauch on pickled herrings and Rhenish) so miserably poor that he had to trust to his injured wife's forgiveness for payment of the money to the extent of which a charitable landlord and landlady had trusted him. The facts of this lamentable end may have been spitefully distorted by Gabriel Harvey in his quarrel
Cf. Milton's "elms star-proof" in the