'I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight. . . . After I had wholly betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise), I was so far from calling upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of living; and for those my vaine discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long. . . . If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied; let me shift after death as I may. "Hell!" quoth I; "what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than myselfe; I shal also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse. If I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God, I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last.'

A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious lines the regularity and calm of an upright life; then returns to London, devours his property and his wife's fortune with a sorry ragged queane,' in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans; drinking, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and orgies; writing for bread sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of his wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy of Rolla; very often disgusted with himself, seized with a fit of weeping between two alehouses, and writing little pieces to accuse himself, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn young people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. By this process he was soon worn out; six years were enough to exhaust him. An indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings finished him. If it had not been for his hostess, who succoured him, he would have perished in the streets.' He lasted a little longer, and then his light went out; now and then he begged her 'pittifully for a penny pott of malmesie;' he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and when his own was a washing,' he was obliged to borrow her husband's. 'His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges,' and the poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the windingsheet, and six and fourpence for the burial. In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced its way, and amongst others, that of the first, of the most powerful, of the true founder of the dramatic school, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces which brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas

1 The hero of one of Alfred de Musset's poems.-TR.

which give them their warrant, break forth impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like Kett,1 is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity, declares Moses 'a juggler,' Christ more worthy of death than Barabbas, says that 'yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent and more admirable methode,' and almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme.' Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of thought gave rise to in these new minds, who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared to walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded with children, from the stirrups and awls, he found himself at Cambridge, probably through the patronage of a great man, and on his return to London, in want, amid the licence of the green-room, the low houses and taverns, his head was in a ferment, and his passions were heated. He turned actor; but having broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was begun, which, if time had not failed, would probably have brought him to the stake. He made love to a drab, and trying to stab his rival, his hand was turned, so that his own blade entered his eye and his brain, and he died, still cursing and blaspheming. He was only thirty years old. Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and occupied in such a manner! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder, atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy soaked in blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations of the English stage, Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo, even the Pericles of Shakspeare, reach the same height of extravagance, force, and horror. It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall Schiller's Robbers, and how modern democracy has recognised for the first time its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor. So here the characters struggle and jostle, stamp on the earth, gnash their teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the drums beat, coats of mail file past, armies clash together, men stab each other, or themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats or lyrical figures; 5

1 Burnt in 1589.

2 The translator always refers to Marlowe's Works, ed. Dyce, 3 vols., 1850. Append. i. vol. 3.

See especially Titus Andronicus, attributed to Shakspeare: there are parricides, mothers whom they cause to eat their children, a young girl who appears on the stage violated, with her tongue and hands cut off.

The chief character in Schiller's Robbers, a virtuous brigand and redresser of wrongs.-TR.

5 For in a field, whose superficies

Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil,

And sprinkled with the brains of slaughter'd men,

My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd;

And he that means to place himself therein,

kings die, straining a bass voice; 'now doth ghastly death with greedy
talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my life.' The
hero in Tamburlaine the Great' is seated on a chariot drawn by chained
kings, burns towns, drowns women and children, puts men to the
sword, and finally, seized with an invisible sickness, raves in monstrous
outcries against the gods, whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he
would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless pride,
of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many devasta-
tions, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of savage
and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this
prodigality of carnage, this display of overloaded splendours and
colours, this railing of demoniac passions, this audacity of grand im-
piety. If in the dramas which succeed it, The Massacre at Paris, The
Jew of Malta, the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas
the Jew, maddened with hate, is thenceforth no longer human; he has
been treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a
beast. He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words:
'Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words,
And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee:
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.
I walk abroad a-nights,

And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian ;

There I enrich'd the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells.
I fill'd the jails with bankrouts in a year,

And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,

And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.'2

Must armed wade up to the chin in blood. . . .
And I would strive to swim through pools of blood,

Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses,

Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks,

Ere I would lose the title of a king.-Tamburlaine, part ii. i. 3.

1 The editor of Marlowe's Works, Pickering, 1826, says in his Introduction: 'Both the matter and style of Tamburlaine, however, differ materially from Marlowe's other compositions, and doubts have more than once been suggested as to whether the play was properly assigned to him. We think that Marlowe did not write it.' Dyce is of a contrary opinion.—TR.

2 Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, ii. p. 275 et passim.

All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like a demon who rejoices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the very extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors; and by forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she takes the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his daughter and the whole convent. Two friars wish to denounce him, then to convert him; he strangles the first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy, and says:

'Pull amain,

'Tis neatly done, sir; here's no print at all.

So, let him lean upon his staff; excellent! he stands as if

he were begging of bacon.'1

O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottle-
nosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had."2

The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the murder:
'Barabas. Heaven bless me! what, a friar a murderer!

When shall you see a Jew commit the like?

Ithamore. Why, a Turk could ha' done no more.
Bar. To-morrow is the sessions; you shall to it-

Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence.

Friar. Villains, I am a sacred person; touch me not. Bar. The law shall touch you; we'll but lead you, we: 'Las, I could weep at your calamity!' 3

Add to that two other poisonings, an infernal machine to blow up the Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the Turkish commander in a well. Barabas falls into it himself, and dies in the hot cauldron, howling, hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he had not done evil enough. These are the ferocities of the middle-age; we might find them to this day among the companions of Ali Pacha, among the pirates of the Archipelago; we retain pictures of them in the paintings of the fifteenth century, which represent a king with his court, seated calmly round a living man who is being flayed; in the midst the flayer on his knees is working conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the skin.5

All this is rough work, you will say; these people kill too readily, and too quickly. It is on this very account that the painting is a true one. For the specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's characters, is the abrupt commission of a deed; they are children, robust children. As a horse kicks out instead of speaking, so they pull out their knives instead of an explanation. Nowadays we hardly know what nature is; we still keep in its place the benevolent prejudices of the eighteenth century; we only see it humanised by two centuries of culture, and we take its acquired calm for an innate moderation. The foundation of the natural man are irresistible impulses, passions, desires,

1 The Jew of Malta, iv. p. 311. 2 Ibid. iii. p. 291. 3 Ibid. iv. p. 313. Up to this time, in England, poisoners were cast into a boiling cauldron. In the Museum of Ghent.

greeds; ail blind. He sees a woman,1 thinks her beautiful; suddenly he rushes towards her; people try to restrain him, he kills these people, gluts his passion, then thinks no more of it, save when at times a vague picture of a moving lake of blood crosses his brain and makes him gloomy. Sudden and extreme resolves are confused in his mind with desire; barely conceived of, the thing is done; the wide interval which a Frenchman places between the idea of an action and the action itself is not to be found here.2 Barabas conceived murders, and straightway murders were accomplished; there is no deliberation, no pricks of conscience; that is how he commits a score of them; his daughter leaves him, he becomes unnatural, and poisons her; his confidential servant betrays him, he disguises himself, and poisons him. Rage seizes these men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill. Benvenuto Cellini relates how, being offended, he tried to restrain himself, but was nearly suffocated; and that he might not die of the torments, he rushed with his dagger upon his opponent. So, in Edward II., the nobles immediately appeal to arms; all is excessive and unforeseen; between two replies the heart is turned upside down, transported to the extremes of hate or tenderness. Edward, seeing his favourite Gaveston again, pours out before him his treasure, casts his dignities at his feet, gives him his seal, himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop of Coventry, suddenly cries: 'Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole,

And in the channel christen him anew. 13

Then, when the queen supplicates:

'Fawn not on me, French strumpet! get thee gone...
Speak not unto her: let her droop and pine.'4

Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in a battle. The Duke of Lancaster draws his sword on Gaveston to slay him, before the king; Mortimer wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl; the noblemen will not even let a dog approach the prince, and rob them of their rank. Lancaster says of Gaveston:

. . . He comes not back,

Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd body.

Warwick. And to behold so sweet a sight as that,

There's none here but would run his horse to death.'"

They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him 'at a bough;' they refuse to let him speak a single minute with the king. In vain they

1 See in the Jew of Malta the seduction of Ithamore, by Bellamira, a rough, but truly admirable picture.

2 Nothing could be falser than Schiller's William Tell, his hesitation and arguments; for a contrast, see Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen. In 1377, Wiclif pleaded in St. Paul's before the Bishop of London, and that raised a quarrel. The Duke of Lancaster, Wiclif's protector, 'threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair;' and next day the furious crowd sacked the duke's palace. Pict. Hist. i. 780. 3 Marlowe, Edward the Second, i. p. 173. • Ibid. p. 186. 5 Ibid. p. 188.

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