Arnold Wynne

“ We should feel that a much better ending might, and would, have come but for the circumstance that forms the crisis, or for other circumstances at the beginning of the play. If we consider such tragic careers as those of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Othello we recognize that each might have come to a different conclusion if it had not been for the blight of a father's death or a single act of folly, of ambition or jealousy. These men all excite our sympathy, especially Hamlet, whose tragedy is due not at all to himself but to the overshadowing of another's crime. ”

“ The poetry of The Arraignment of Paris, again, is more lyrical than dramatic, harmonizing with the general approximation of that play to the nature of a masque. Marlowe was the first to demonstrate that imagination could riot madly in a wealth of imagery, or soar far above the realms of logic and cold philosophy to summon beautiful and terrible pictures out of the cloud-land of fancy, without losing hold upon earth and the language of mortals. ”

“ Only second in fullness of portraiture, and truer to Nature, is Dame Custance, who—if we exclude Melibaea as not native to English shores—may be said to bring into English secular drama honourable womanhood. Her amused indifference at first, her sharp reproof of her maids who have allowed themselves to act as Ralph's messengers, her gathering vexation at Ralph's tiresome wooing, her genuine alarm when she sees that his boastful words are accepted by the sea-captain as truth—these are sentiments and emotions copied from a healthy and worthy model. ”

“ Each of his first three plays—counting the two parts of Tamburlaine as one play—is wholly given up to the presentment of one man; his tongue speaks on nearly every page, his purpose is the mainspring of almost every action; by mere bulk he fills our mental view as we read, and by the fervour, the poetry of his language, he burns the impression of himself upon our memory. It is not by what they do that we remember Marlowe's heroes or villains. ”

“ The Famous Chronicle History of King Edward the First is almost as complete a medley as the most tangled play of Greene's. Peele's lack of power to concentrate interest makes itself lamentably felt throughout. We are conscious, as we read, that King Edward, or Longshanks, as he is always named, is intended to impress us with his sterling English qualities. He overcomes all difficulties, and if we could only unravel his thread from the skein of characters, we should acknowledge him to be a worthy monarch, brave, loving, wise, just and firm. ”

“ Alexander. It is not for a beggar to ask a talent. Away!
The charm of the play lies in the romance of Apelles' love for Campaspe, and in the delicacy of his wooing. Here is pure Romantic Comedy, such as Greene imitated and Shakespeare made delightful. Not at first will Campaspe yield the gates of her heart, nor does the artist press the attack with heated fervour. So gentle a besieger is he, that we perceive the young couple drifting into love on the stream of destiny, almost reluctant to betray their growing feelings through fear of the wrath of Alexander. ”

“ The realism of everyday scenery, the street, the high road, the ferry, the inn, the breakfast room, cry out with telling emphasis that it is fact, hard deadly fact, which is being shown, not the idle invention of an overheated brain. But while these features impress the action upon our memory, they do not raise it to the level of great drama. For this the supreme requirement is truth to human nature. It is not enough that the actors arrest our attention by their appearance, their speeches and their deeds. ”

“ The dramatic greatness of Tamburlaine lies in the perfect harmony of the central figure with the general purpose of the play. Marlowe sought to present a world conqueror and he creates no less a man. Outwardly the shepherd is formed in a mould of strength and grace; his countenance might serve as a model for a bust of Achilles. Inwardly his mind is full of towering ambition, supported by courage and inflexible resolution. ”

“ Spaniards, Italians, Turks, Moors fill the stage like a pageant; in the best known play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, magicians perform wonders, country squires kill each other for love, prince and fool exchange places, simple folk go a-fairing, kings pay state visits, devils fly off with people, all to hold the eye by their rapidly interchanging diversity; but few of them pause to be painted in detail as individuals. ”

“ Throughout the play we meet with such stage directions as 'the devils are to run about the stage with suitable gestures', or the Devil 'shall make a sally amongst the people'. In this last the seeing eye can already detect the presence of that close intimacy between the play and the people which was to make the drama a 'national possession' in England. The devil, with his grimaces and gambols, was one of themselves, was a true rustic at heart, and they shrieked and shouted with delight as he pinched their arms or slapped them on the back. ”

“ There is an art, too, in this evolution, a close interweaving of events, a chain of cause and effect; a certain harmony and balance are maintained, so that our feelings are neither jerked to extremes nor worn out by strain. Even the history play has freed itself to some extent from the leading strings of chronology, claiming the right to make the same appeal to our common instincts as any other play. Verse has taken a mighty bound from formalism to the free intoxicating air of poetry and nature. Men and women no longer exchange dull speeches ”

“ Thus we have the figure of Dido set out in high relief. Marlowe was fond of experiments in characterization, but he never diverged more completely from the path marked out by his previous steps than when he decided to give the first place in a tragedy to a woman. Hitherto his women have not impressed us: Abigail is probably the best of a shadowy group. Suddenly, in the Queen of Carthage, womankind towers up in majesty, to hold our attention fixed in wonder and pity as she walks with strong, unsuspecting tread the steep descent to death. ”

“ It is in this play that our ears are dinned almost beyond sufferance by the poet's 'high astounding terms', that the hero most nearly 'with his uplifted forehead strikes the sky': incredible victories are won, the vilest cruelties practised; vast empires are shaken to their foundations, kings are overthrown and new ones crowned as easily as the wish is expressed; everywhere pride calls unto pride with the noise of its boastings. There is no plot, unless we give that name to a succession of battles, pageants and camp scenes. ”

“ Something of its fame is due to its association, through its main plot, with Goethe's masterpiece; something may be attributed to the fascination of its theme; something must be granted to the terrible force of one or two scenes. It is hard to believe that its own artistic and dramatic qualities could have secured unaided the reputation which it appears to possess among some critics. More even than Tamburlaine, this play hangs upon one central figure. There is no Bajazeth, no Soldan, no Orcanes, no Zenocrate to help to bear the weight of impressiveness. ”

“ Thus we have such stage-directions as, 'Smite him in the neck with a sword to signify his death', 'Flay him with a false skin', 'A little bladder of vinegar pricked', 'Enter the King without a gown, a sword thrust up into his side, bleeding.' Of real tragedy there is little, the hustle of crime upon crime obliterating the impression which any one singly might produce. Yet even in this crude orgy of bloodshed the melancholy voice of unaffected pathos can be heard mourning the loss of dear ones. ”

“ Yet, as has been frequently pointed out, one of the most delicate passages in the play is spoken by the detestable ruffian, Shakbag, while Mosbie and even Michael soliloquize in language of poetic imagery. In his handling of blank verse he has not travelled beyond the limits of end-stopt lines, and too often he gives it the false balance of unrhymed couplets; nevertheless much that is vigorous and impressive forces the rhythm into a firm and brisk response. The art of conversation in verse has advanced to complete mastery. ”

“ I sigh, Alexander, that, where fortune could not conquer, folly should overcome.
In Endymion we find a much more complex plot, but less that is natural and attractive. Historical tradition and the unchanging habits of lovers give their sanction to most of the scenes in Campaspe. But Endymion carries us into the realm of mythology, where all is unreal and where the least heaviness in the pencil of fancy must convert things that should appear golden into dull lead. ”

“ Greene is a revengeful sleuth-hound, tracking his victim down relentlessly from place to place. Arden is a miser in business, and a weak, gullible fool at home, alternately raging with jealous suspicion, and fawning with fatuous trustfulness upon the man who is wronging him. Mosbie is a cold-blooded, underhand villain whose pious resolutions and protestations of love could only deceive those blinded by fate, and whose preference for crooked, left-handed methods is in tune with his vile intention of murdering the woman who loves him. ”

“ Morality Plays, though theoretically quite as suitable for tragic effect as for comic, since the former only required that Mankind should sometimes fail to reach heaven, seem nevertheless to have developed mainly the lighter side, setting the hero right at the finish and in the meantime discovering, to the relief of otherwise bored spectators, that wickedness, in some unexplained way, was funny. As long as propriety forbade that good should be overcome by evil it is hard to see how tragedy could appear. ”

“ The pert confidence of the prisoner, at the foot of the gallows, in the saving contents of a certain box, which the audience knows to be empty, is dramatic irony in its bitterest form.
Hard words have been written about the horrible scenes in the play, as though it were a huddled-up bundle of [Pg 214] bloodshed and ghosts. Such a conception is far from the truth. Horror is an element in almost all powerful tragedies; it is hardly to be separated from any unexpected or violent death. ”

“ When, therefore, we say that Marlowe's greatness as a dramatist depends on his poetry, that outside his poetry his best known work reveals almost every kind of weakness, we have not denied his claim to be the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors. Into indifferent material poetry can breathe that quickening flame without which the most dramatic situations fail to satisfy. Marlowe had a supreme gift for creating moments, sometimes extended to whole scenes ”

“ Murders that cannot find room elsewhere are perpetrated in dumb-show, ghosts within the wings cry out Vindicta!, and the leading characters suffer the usual inflatus of windy rant to make their dimensions more kingly. Still the play fails to achieve the right effect. There is no dominant hero, the central figure, if such there is, being the villain, Muly Mahamet the Moor. But his is not the career, nor his the character, at all likely to win either the sympathy or the interest of an English audience. ”

“ The supreme quality of Tragedy is in its power to raise feelings of intense emotion, of horror or grief, or of both. Failing in this, it fails altogether. To this end Seneca introduced his Ghost, and his disciples filled their speeches with passionate outcry and lurid pictures of horrible events unfit to be presented in actuality. Gorboduc rained death upon a whole nation, Tancred and Gismunda invoked every awful epithet and gruesome description of dungeon and murder, for the same purpose. ”

“ There is not the least attempt at characterization: in their glorious moments Bajazeth, the Soldan of Egypt, Orcanes are indistinguishable from the Scythian shepherd himself. The popularity of Tamburlaine was not won by fine touches, but by spectacular magnificence, by the pomp and excitement of war, and by the thrills of responsive pride and boastfulness awakened in the hearers by the convincing magniloquence of the speeches. This was possibly the first appearance upon the public stage of matured drama as opposed to the moralities and interludes. ”

“ On a well-furnished stage the valley of Mount Ida, where Pan, Flora and others of Nature's guardians direct her wild fruitfulness, where shepherds converse in groups or alone sing their grief to the skies, and Paris and Oenone, seated beneath a tree, renew their mutual pledges, must have looked very delightful. One cannot help thinking, however, that the gods and goddesses, probably magnificently arrayed and carrying splendour wherever they went, seriously detracted from the appearance of free Nature. ”

“ Kyd does not serve up crime and the supernatural world thus. He shows us terrible things, it is true. But the causes are to be found deep down in the primary impulses of man, in jealousy, in fear, in despair, in blood-revenge. These impulses are not vile; our moral code does not cry out against them as it does against lust, greed, and motiveless cruelty. When we rise from the play it is not with a sense that we have moved amongst base creatures. Lorenzo repels us; but it is Hieronimo who dominates the stage, filling us with pity for his wrongs and weakness. ”

“ It is when we compare Arden of Feversham with Macbeth that we realize how the meanness of the action and the comparative absence of morality outweigh any accuracy of detail, degrading the dramatist to the level of a mere purveyor of excitement. The truth is, even the interest palls, for there is no skill displayed in the evolution of the plot. ”

“ Quite undeniably of classical influence, however, is the refinement and restraint noticeable throughout the play. These we welcome. They prune the tree of native drama without hacking off its stoutest limbs. Under their control tragedy steps upon the stage in an English dress to prove herself worthy of her Roman sister and ultimately capable of far greater achievements.
To select details in proof of the success of Damon and Pythias as a pioneer in tragedy is made difficult by the fact that it ends happily. ”

“ The cohesion of incidents was firmer, the evolution of the plot more vigorous, the crisis more surprising, the opportunities for originality more plentiful. The very fact that they could not easily be welded together as scenes in a larger play is a testimonial to their art. They are more complete in themselves. They are, that is to say, a further stage on the way to that Elizabethan drama which only became possible when all idea of a day-long play had been discarded in favour of scenes more single and self-contained. ”

“ It would be possible to show by numerous quotations how Marlowe has everywhere selected epithets and imagery of magnitude to enhance the impressiveness of his hero in proportion to his astounding achievements. We will be content with only one more. It describes Tamburlaine's attitude towards those that resist him, and, by its slow, measured intensification of colour to a terrible climax, forces home resistlessly the suggestion of invincible power and relentlessness. ”