"If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, If these had made one poem's period, And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Still more clearly, however, the lasting power of Marlowe shows itself in his whole conception even of Tamburlaine. If we will but accept the conventions, and forget them; if we will admit the monotony of end-stopped lines and the sonorous bombast which delighted the crude lyric appetite of early Elizabethan playgoers; if we will only ask ourselves what all this was meant to express, we shall find in Tamburlaine itself a profound, lasting, noble sense of the great human truth reiterated by the three later plays 1 which Marlowe has left us. Like these, Tamburlaine expresses, in grandly symbolic terms, the eternal tragedy inherent in the conflict between human aspiration and human power. No poet ever felt this more genuinely than Marlowe ; none ever expressed it more firmly or more constantly. By 1587, then, the English stage had already become the seat not only of very animated play-writing, and of charming lyric verse, 1 Dr. Faustus, the Jew of Malta, and Edward II. but actually, though unobserved, of noble philosophic poetry. It is with these men, and other men like them, that Shakspere is grouped by Robert Greene in the Groatsworth of Wit, which we remember belongs to 1592. Perhaps even more than theirs, however, the dramatic work of John Lyly marks the permanent divergence of English taste from the pseudo-classic principles commended by Sidney. Lyly's Euphues, as we have seen, was in its day the most popular book in the English language. It appeared in 1579; the next year appeared its sequel, Euphues and his England. Like the play-writing roysterers at whom we have just glanced, Lyly was a university man; unlike them, he seems to have had a strong tendency to respectable life. For some ten years after the success of Euphues there is evidence that he hung about the court, seeking office or some such advancement; and during these ten years, his literary work took a dramatic form. Written rather for court pageants, or for performance by choir-boys, than for the popular stage, Lyly's plays seem nowadays thin and amateurish; they quite lack the robust, unconscious carelessness of the regular Elizabethan theatre. Like Euphues, however, they are distinctly things of fashion ; as such, they prove that, in theatrical affairs as well as in popular, fashionable taste had taken a definitely romantic turn. While Lyly threw classic form to the winds, caring as little for the unities as the wildest scribbler of Moralities, a thousand allusions and turns of thought and phrase prove that he had read pretty deep in the classics, and read for fun. He was romantic in form, then, not for want of knowing better, but as a matter of deliberate taste or policy. As such, too, he was not only persistently euphuistic in style, but he was also constantly experimental in matters of mere stage-business. In his comedies, for example, one finds, for the first time in English, such fantastically ingenious plays on words and repartee as nowadays, reaching their acme in Much Ado About Nothing, are commonly thought peculiar to Shakspere. Again, perhaps influenced by the fact that all his players were male, and consequently ill at ease in skirts, he first introduced on the English stage the device so repeatedly used by Shakspere of disguising his heroine as a man. Throughout, in short, with frankly persistent ingenuity, these light, graceful, fantastic plays of Lyly's appeal, like the style of Euphues, to a taste which delights above all else in clever, apparently civilized novelty. Such, in general, was the state of the English stage in 1587. Committed to the still untrammelled freedom of romantic form, it displayed in its fashionable aspect and in its popular alike every evidence of appealing to an insatiable taste for novelty. The very simplicity of its material conditions, however, combined with the prevalent literary taste of the time to make the actual novelties it offered to its public principally verbal. With none of the modern distractions of scenery or of realistic costume, with hardly any mechanical help to the temporary illusion which must always be dear to a theatre-going heart, an Elizabethan audience found its attention centred, to a degree now hardly imaginable, on the actual words of the play. While certain conventional kinds of drama, then, which may be discussed best in connection with the actual works of Shakspere, were beginning to define themselves, all had in common the trait of a constantly ingenious, experimental phrasing, to be appreciated nowadays only when you can force yourself into the mood of an every-day theatre-goer who should enjoy a new turn of language as heartily as a modern playgoer would enjoy a new popular tune. What now appeals to us in Marlowe's Tamburlaine is the profound tragic feeling which underlies it; in its own day what made it popular was the ranting sonorousness of its verse. In all but purely lyric style, clearly enough, the taste of 1587 was still rather childishly crude. With lyric verse the case was different. The fashion of verbal experiment, which had persisted since the time of Wyatt, combined with the thin melody of contemporary music not only to make words do much of the essentially musical work of which modern songwriters are relieved by our enormous musical development, but also to develop the positive lyric power of the language to a degree which has never been surpassed. Wyatt himself, we have seen, wrote Forget not Yet; John Lyly wrote Cupid and Campaspe. What delights one in these, and in the hundreds of songs for which we must here let them be typical, is not that they mean much, but that, with indefinable subtlety, they are so exquisitely musical. To such effects as theirs the public of 1587 was sensitive to a degree now hard to imagine; the purity of a sense of beauty new to a whole nation had not yet been corrupted. By 1587, then, the Elizabethan lyric was almost at its best. Fantastic as the statement seems, though, it is probably true that the ultimate secret of lyric beauty -the only permanent effect which Elizabethan literature had as yet achieved — is identical with that which made Euphues so popular. The lyric poet is technically the most ingenious conceivable juggler with words. For all their common verbal ingenuity, however, and their common, eager endeavor to carry out the work begun by Wyatt and lastingly to civilize what had seemed a wildly barbarous language, the pure men of letters, for whom Sidney and Lyly may stand representative, differed very widely in private consideration from the men of the theatre, such as Greene, or Peele, or Marlowe. As a class the former were respectable or better; as a class the latter were disreputable. For the moment fashion favored polite literary effort to a degree unusual in human history; the theatre, meanwhile, was what the theatre always has been everywhere, the centre not only of artistic activity, but also of organized vice. We touch here on a delicate matter, which of late it has been the fashion to ignore. By rather deliberately ignoring it, however, most modern critics have |