Such a play as "Arden of Feversham," which has been credited to Shakespeare by a number of critics, brought the dramatic form to a stage where it needed but the hand of a poet of genius to perfect it. There was still a long distance between the plays of this period, however, and the balance, harmony, and restraint of Shakespeare. "Arden of Feversham," and a host of dramas of the same period, are charged with power; but he who reads them is fed with horrors. Lyly's comedies were acted, with one or two exceptions, before Queen Elizabeth, and were mainly, as Mr. Symonds suggests, elaborately decorated censers in which incense was lavishly burned to a Queen incredibly avid of adulation and flattery. As a writer of comedies for the Court, the author of "Euphues" influenced the language of the later dramatists far more deeply than he influenced the drama itself. He made an art of witty dialogue, and repartee became in his hands a brilliant fence of words; it remained for Shakespeare to carry both to perfection in "Much Ado About Nothing."

When Shakespeare reached London about 1586, he found the art of play-writing in the hands of a group of men of immense force of imagination and of singularly varied gifts of expression. During the decade in which he was serving his apprenticeship to his art England lost Peele, Kyd, Greene, and Marlowe; Lodge, having become a physician, died in 1625. Every member of this group, with the exception of Marlowe, was born to good conditions; they were gentlemen in position, and scholars by virtue of

university training. They were careless and, in some cases, violent and criminal livers; men born out of due time, so far as adjustment between genius and sound conditions was concerned; or committed by temperament to unbalanced, disorderly, and tragical careers. Greene, after a life of dissipation, died in extreme misery of mind and body; Peele involved himself in many kinds of misfortune, and became the victim of his vices; Nash lived long enough to lament the waste and confusion of his career; and the splendid genius of Marlowe was quenched before he had reached his thirtieth year. He who would pass a sweeping and unqualified condemnation on this fatally endowed group of ardent young writers would do well to study the times in which they lived, the attitude of society towards the playwright, the absence of normal conditions for the expression of genius such as they possessed, and the perilous combination of temperament and imagination which seems to have been made in each. It is futile and immoral to conceal or minimize the faults and vices of men of genius; but it is equally futile and immoral to attempt to determine in any individual career the degree of moral responsibility.

Greene was a born story-teller, without having any marked gift for the construction of strong and wellelaborated plots; his study of character was neither vigorous nor convincing. Nash was, on the other hand, a born satirist, with a coarse but very effective method and a humour often grotesque but always virile. Peele was preeminently a poet of taste, with a

gift for graceful and even elegant expression, a touch of tenderness, and a sensitiveness of imagination which showed itself in his use of the imagery of mythology. Lodge wrote dull plays and lightened them by the introduction of charming songs.

Marlowe was the creative spirit of this group of accomplished playwrights. The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he took his Bachelor's degree at Cambridge, and arrived in London, "a boy in years, a man in genius, a god in ambition." His ardent nature, impatient of all restraint and full of Titanic impulses, found congenial society on the stage and congenial work in play-writing. His life was as passionate and lawless as his art; his plays were written in six turbulent years, and his career was one of brief but concentrated energy. The two parts of "Tamburlaine," "The Massacre at Paris," "The Jew of Malta," "Edward II.," and "Dr. Faustus," the glowing fragment of "Hero and Leander," and a few short compositions, among them the exquisite "Come live with me and be my love," evidence the depth and splendour of Marlowe's genius and the lack of balance and restraint in his art. He gave English tragedy sublimity, intensity, breadth, and order; he freed blank verse from rigidity and mechanical correctness, and gave it the freedom, harmony, variety of cadence, and compelling music which imposed it upon all later English tragedy. Neither in his life nor in his art did Marlowe accept the inevitable limitations of human power in action and in creation; he flung himself passionately against the immovable barriers, and grasped at the impossible.

But his failures were redeemed by superb successes. He breathed the breath of almost superhuman life into the English drama both as regards its content and its form; for he was even greater as a poet than as a dramatist :

his raptures were

All air and fire . . .;

For that fine madness still he did retain

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

He left but a single step to be taken in the full unfolding of the drama, and that step Shakespeare took : the step from the Titan to the Olympian.

CHAPTER II

BIRTH AND BREEDING

THE charm of Stratford-on-Avon is twofold; it is enfolded by some of the loveliest and most characteristic English scenery, and it is the home of the greatest English literary tradition. Lying in the very heart of the country, it seems to be guarded as a place sacred to the memory of the foremost man of expression who has yet appeared among the English-speaking peoples. It has become a town of some magnitude, with a prosperous trade in malt and corn; but its importance is due wholly to the fact that it is the custodian of Shakespeare's birthplace, of the school in which he was trained, of the house in which he courted Anne Hathaway, of the ground on which he built his own home, and of the church in which he lies buried. The place is full of Shakespearean associations; of localities which he knew in the years of his dawning intelligence, and in those later years when he returned to take his place as a householder and citizen; the old churches with which as a child he was familiar are still standing, substantially as they stood at the end of the sixteenth century; the grammar school still teaches the boys of to-day within the walls that listened to the same recitations three hundred years ago; the houses of his