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the wrong done to Hero brings Benedick and Beatrice in contact with a stern reality of life. So here even Don Adriano de Armado,

"One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony,"

ends by announcing that he has "vowed to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three years." In the closing songs we have presentments of the Owl and the Cuckoo, one on each side of the stage-visible symbols of the pedant's empty show of wisdom and the idle iteration of the hander-on of phrases, who have more care for the words than for the thoughts they speak.

CHAPTER VII.

Dramatists between 1592 and 1598.

PLAYWRIGHTS AND PAMPHLETEERS.

THE death of Marlowe, in the year 1593, closed that period in the history of the English drama during which Shakespeare was mastering his art in London, with a group of dramatists about him who were really poets, and whose plays live in our literature. Of this group Christopher Marlowe was the greatest, and the last. Robert Greene was dead. George Peele was falling into sickness and poverty. Those of his plays that are known to us had all been acted. Among those unknown to us, his lost play of "The Hunting of Cupid" was entered at Stationers' Hall on the twenty-sixth of July, 1591, and was, no doubt, printed; but no copy of it has been found. The letter to Lord Burleigh from Peele's sick-chamber was sent in January, 1596, and Meres speaks of him as dead in 1598. Thomas Lodge was quitting, or had quitted, the stage in 1593,† and, though there was no want of new plays after that date, there was a want of new poets to write them until 1598. In or about that year there began to come into our literature a new company of dramatic poets, among whom Ben Jonson was the greatest, and of whom all rose to their highest powers in the reign of James I. During the six years from 1592 to 1598, when Shakespeare was pouring out his earlier plays at the rate of

*

"E. W." x. 78.

+"E. W." x. 78, 85.

about two a year, there was no dramatist whom the playgoers could regard as in any way his rival. He may almost be said to have had, during those five or six years, a clear field and all favour.

The First
Use of
Literature as

It was especially among the dramatists that literature in Elizabeth's reign was first followed as a pro. fession. The first Englishman who earned from the public at large by the use of his pen a competence on which he could retire, was William Shakespeare.

a Profession.

All writers in former times had been dependent upon patronage. This was true also in Elizabeth's time of nearly all writers except those who laboured for the public stage, and looked for their reward to the main body of the people. Ready money was also to be earned by writing ballads and short pamphlets that were of a kind to win public attention. There were no newspapers, but there was the natural hunger and thirst for news of all kinds. This was satisfied by ready writers with small pamphlets, that satisfied in return, for a few days at least, their own hunger for beef and thirst for sack. Battles and conspiracies, and horrid murders recently committed; cunning tricks of the thieves, told for instruction and protection of the public, in the fashion of merry tales, with frequent reference by name to the more notorious impostors; little collections, also, of what professed to be no more than merry tales, told about somebody whose name would help the sale of the pamphlet; old and new stories; lively controversies between friends or foes, sometimes each beating furiously on the other with resounding bangs of an air-bladder, sometimes each passionate and combating in earnest with a solid quarterstaff,-the untaught public likes to look on at a fray,-these things, with more of the same temper, furnished safe material for pamphlets that a bookseller would buy. The payment for such writings came as money earned without dependence on a great man's patronage.

The pulpit also brought home to the eyes and ears of the whole body of the people its themes of religion. A very strong religious feeling has always had its part in the rough energy of the English people. The Church also was militant, and its spiritual wars were represented in outpourings of

the pamphleteers.

The Plague in London, 1592-93.

The years 1592 and 1593 were plague years in London. Before the end of the year 1592 two thousand died in London, where the highest mortality was near the Fleet Ditch. On the seventh of September, 1592, soldiers coming from the north to embark at Southampton were marched round London to avoid the infection, which was much spread abroad in the city. The plague clung to London through the winter of 1592-93. mid-winter, those who could afford to do so were still leaving for country places. This time of plague in London grew to its worst in the summer of 1593. By the close of that year its season of great danger had passed away. From the twentieth of December, 1592, to the twenty-third of December, 1593, twenty-five thousand eight hundred and eighty-six persons died in and about London, of whom fifteen thousand and three died of the plague.

Among those who left London in 1592 to avoid the plague was Thomas Nash. He was sheltered in the country

Nash's "Pierce

Penilesse."

house of a patron, probably Sir George Carey, to whose wife and daughter he dedicated pieces, and in whose house in the Isle of Wight he says that he had lived, and learnt the beauty of that island. But he may have been in Whitgift's household at Croydon, for we know that in 1593 he was there producing "Summer's Last Will and Testament" in the Archbishop's house. While Nash was thus in shelter from the plague, there appeared in London, imprinted by Richard Jhones, dwelling at the Signe of the Rose and Crowne, nere Holburne Bridge, "Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the

Deuill. Describing the ouerspreading of Vice, and the Suppression of Vertue. Pleasantly interlac'd with variable delights and pathetically intermixed with conceipted reproofes. Written by Thomas Nash, Gentleman." There was also an address from "The Printer to the Gentlemen Readers," in which the printer began by saying that, in the author's absence, he had been bold to publish this pleasant and witty discourse. Later in the same year there was a second impression printed at London by Abel Ieffes, for Iohn Burbie, with the simpler title-page, "Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Diuell. Barbaria grandis habere nihil. Written by Tho. Nash, Gent." This was preceded by a letter to the Printer from the Author, who did not know of his book's appearance till it had been abroad a fortnight, and, now that a second edition was wanted, said he would have the printer "first cut off that long-tailed title, and let me not in the fore front of my book make a tedious mountebank's oration to the reader, when in the whole there is nothing praiseworthy."

In the whole there is much praiseworthy. Desire to be continuously witty makes the book diverting in two senses. The reader is amused; his attention also is diverted from the fact that the whole piece is meant for a lay sermon against the vices of society. In that respect Nash's "Supplication to the Devil" entitled him to be described as a young Juvenal; for Juvenal attacked the vices of a most corrupt age of the Roman Empire, and wasted no time upon trivial personalities. Thomas Nash was not a Juvenal in his attacks upon Gabriel Harvey. These also began in the year 1592, and will be presently considered. But there is a touch of Juvenal in his "Pierce Penilesse "-a pamphlet meant as honestly as the "Anatomie of Absurditie to lift his readers from low thoughts and fix their minds upon the higher life of man.

*E. W." ix. 286-288.

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