him of the rest; then fell hee on his knees, wrong his handes, and I thinke, on my conscience, wept out all the syder that he had dronke in a weeke before, to move me to have pitie on him; he rose and put his rustie ring on my finger, gave me his greasie purse with that single money that was in it, promised to make mee his heire, & a thousand more favours, if I would expire the miserie of his unspeakable tormenting uncertaintie. I being by nature inclined to Mercie (for indeed I knew two or three good wenches of that name) bad him harden his eares, & not make his eyes abortive before their time, and he should have the inside of my brest turnd outward, heare such a tale as would tempt the utmost strength of life to attend it, and not die in the middest of it. Why (quoth I) my selfe, that am but a poore childish welwiller of yours, with the verie thought, that a man of your desert and state, by a number of pesants and varlets should be so iniuriously abused in hugger mugger, have [immoderately and lavishly wept]. . . The wheele under our Citie bridge carries not so much water over the city, as my braine hath welled forth gushing streames of sorow. ... My eies have bin dronk, outragiously dronke, with giving but ordinary entercourse through their sea-circled Islands to my distilling dreariment. It is buzzed in the kings head that you are a secret friend to the enemy, & under pretence of getting a license to furnish the campe with syder and such like provant [provender], you have furnisht the enemy, and in emptie barrells sent letters of discoverie, and corne innumerable. I might well have left here, for by this time his white liver had mixt it selfe with the white of his eie, & both were turned upwardes, as if they had offered themselves a fayre white for death to shoote at. The troth was, I was verie loth mine hoste and I should parte to heaven with dry lips, wherefore the best meanes that I could imagine to wake him out of his traunce, was to crie loude in his eare, Hough host, whats to pay, will no man looke to the reckning heere? and in plaine veritie, it tooke expected effect, for with the noise he started and bustled, like a man that had beene scared with fyre out of his sleepe, and ranne hastily to his Tapster, and all to belaboured him about the eares, for letting gentlemen call so long and not looke into them. Oh, quoth he, I am bought and solde for doing my Country such good service as I have done. They are afraid of mee, because my good deedes have brought me into such estimation with the communalty, I see, I see it is not for the lambe to live with the wolfe. Answere me, quoth he, my wise young Wilton, is it true that I am thus underhand, dead, and buried by these bad tongues? Nay, quoth I, you shall pardon me, for I have spoken too much alreadie, no definitive sentence of death shall march out of my wel meaning lips, they have but lately suckt milke, and shall they so sodainly change theyr food and seeke after bloud? Oh but, quoth he, a mans friend is his friend. Fill the other pint Tapster. What sayd the king, did hee beleeve it when hee heard it? I pray thee say, I sweare to thee by my nobility, none in the worlde shall ever be made privie, that I received anie light of this matter from thee. That firme affiance, quoth I, had I in you before, or else I would never have gone so farre over the shooes, to plucke you out of the mire. Not to make many wordes (since you will needs know) the king saies flatly, you are a miser & a snudge, and he never hopt better of you. Nay then (quoth he) questionlesse some planet that loves not syder hath conspired against me. Moreover, which is worse, the king hath vowed to give Turwin one hot breakfast, onely with the bungs that hee will plucke out of your barrells. I cannot staie at this time to reporte each circumstance that passed, but the only counsell that my long cherished kinde inclination can possibly contrive, is now in your olde daies to be liberall, such victuals or provisions as you have, presently distribute it frankly amongst poore souldiers; I would let them burst their bellies with syder, and bathe in it, before I would runne into my Princes ill opinion for a whole sea of it. The hunter pursuing the beaver for his stones, hee bites them off, and leaves them behinde for him to gather up, whereby he lives quiet. If greedie hunters and hungry tel-tales pursue you, it is for a little pelfe which you have; cast it behind you, neglect it, let them have it, lest it breed a further inconvenience. Credit my advice, you shall finde it propheticall, and thus I have discharged the parte of a poore friend. With some few like phrases of ceremonie, Your honors suppliant, & so forth, and Farewel my good youth, I thanke thee and will remember thee, we parted. But the next daie I thinke we had a dole of syder, syder in boules, in scuppets, in helmets, & to conclude, if a man would have fild his bootes full, there hee might have had it, provant thrust it selfe into poore souldiers pockets whether they would or no. We made fine peals of shot into the towne together, of nothing but spiggots and faussets of discarded emptie barrels : everie underfoote soildiour had a distenanted tunne, as Diogenes had his tub to sleepe in; I my selfe got as many confiscated Tapsters aprons as made me a Tent, as bigge as any ordinarie commanders in the field. But in conclusion, my welbeloved Baron of double beere got him humbly on his marybones to the king, and complained hee was olde and striken in yeres, and had nere an heire to cast at a dogge, wherefore if it might please his majesty to take his lands into his hands, and allowe him some reasonable pension to live on, hee shoulde bee mervailous wel pleased: as for the warres, he was wearie of them, and yet as long as highnes shoulde venture his owne person, hee would not flinch a foot, but make his withered bodie a buckler, to beare off anie blow that should be advanced agaynst him. The king mervailing at this strange alteration of his great marchant of syder (for so hee woulde often pleasantly tearme him), with a little further talke bolted out the whole complotment. Then was I pittifully whipt for my holy day lie, although they made themselves merrie with it many a faire winters evening after. The page finds his way to France, where there is war with the Switzers; to Munster, where Jack of Leyden and the Anabaptists are annihilated; and to Italy, where he moves in an atmosphere of poison, arson, intrigue, assassination, torture, execution by roasting and breaking on the wheel, and all manner of crimes of violence, and leads a quite unedifying life. In search of a runaway mistress, he runs into a Jew's shop, by whom he is arrested, and-in accordance with Roman law, we are told—is sold to another Jew, a doctor, to be anatomised at leisure; and the destined victim of this Burke-and-Hare adventure describes at length his sensations in the anticipation of a death from which he is rescued by the cunning of an amorous Roman lady of the papal court. The story is very loosely put together, and is not wholly a picaresque novel. The episode of the Earl of Surrey and the fair Geraldine is sheer euphuistic romance (see page 159); there are passages where this odd defender of the Church of England reviles Calvinists and Scots in the style of the anti-Puritan pamphlets. And there is an enthusiastic panegyric of Aretino, who is thus apostrophised: 'Aretino, as long as the world lives thou shalt live. Tully, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca were never such ornaments to Italy as thou hast beene!' Throughout, the victims of crime utter at the crisis of their fate elaborate, overstrained, incredible, and unrealistic speeches. His The story, so interesting in the history of English literature, was in its time so little of a success that Nash never tried this kind of fiction again. last important piece was Lenten Stuffe (1599), in praise of red herrings and of Yarmouth, where he had been well received on a visit. He seems to have died in 1601. See the introduction in Grosart's edition of Nash's works in the Huth Library (6 vols. 1883-85); Collier's introduction to Pierce Pennilesse (Shakespeare Soc. 1842); Gosse's introduction to The Unfortunate Traveller (1892); Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (trans. 1890); and D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors. Gabriel Harvey (1545?–1630) was the son of a ropemaker at Saffron Walden-a fact dwelt on in a variety of offensive ways by Greene and Nash in a long and bitter controversy between them and Harvey. He studied at Cambridge, became a fellow of Pembroke Hall, and subsequently held various posts at Trinity Hall, his election to the Mastership being set aside by a royal mandate. From his undergraduate days a distinguished student, he became a fanatical and pedantic classicist, and sought to conform even English verse to Latin metre; he boasts himself to be the inventor of English hexameters. Spenser's intimate friend-addressed in The Shepherd's Calendar as 'Hobbinol-he persuaded the author of the Faerie Queene for a time to forbear rhyme in his poetry. He was vain, arrogant, cross-grained, and censorious, and a large part of his life was occupied with his controversies, especially that named above. Greene resented Harvey's criticisms; Harvey replied, and after Greene's miserable death published to the world all the unpleasant gossip he could find; and this brought Greene's friend Nash into the feud, in which Nash's power of invective ultimately silenced Harvey, who spent his last years in his native town. He printed a number of Latin orations and treatises on rhetoric, letters, &c.; and his English works, including the letters to and from Spenser, Harvey's own (poor) sonnets, and his numerous pamphlets, fill three volumes (edited by Dr Grosart in 1884-85). Martin Marprelate was the nom de guerre of a series of Puritan pamphleteers who bitterly attacked with trenchant historical argument and savage personal lampoons Episcopacy, the rites and doctrines disapproved by Puritans, and the official and non-official defenders of the Church. Some of the replies were serious; but some of the self-constituted defenders of the Church outMartined Martin in Billingsgate, buffoonery, and scurrility. From 1572 there had been keen controversy between the two parties in the Church, of whom Cartwright and Whitgift were the most conspicuous early champions, and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was the chief reply on the part of the Church. But the form the controversy took in the Marprelate pamphlets-numbering between twenty and thirty-must have vexed and revolted all pious and reverent minds in every party. The authorship of the several pamphlets, usually anonymous or pseudonymous, remains more or less debatable. The chief authors on the Puritan side were apparently John Udall (see page 155), who died in prison; Henry Barrow, a barrister (executed); John Penny, a Welsh clergyman (executed); and Job Throckmorton, a well-to-do country gentleman, in whose house many of the tracts were printed, even if he did not himself write part of them. Perhaps the most notable publication on this side was that called Hay [Have ye] any work for Cooper? named from a London street-cry. The serious Admonition on behalf of the Church issued in his own name by Cooper (Bishop then of Lincoln, afterwards of Winchester) in 1589 should hardly be accounted one of the series, though it fell in the very midst of the controversy, at its height in 1588, 1589, and 1590. Amongst volunteers on the Episcopal side were Lyly and Nash; and the style of their handiwork may be seen from the extract at page 316 from Lyly's Pap with a Hatchett. Richard Stanyhurst (1547-1618), one of Holinshed's collaborators, was by Gabriel Harvey praised as his own aptest scholar, in virtue of his rendering (1582) of the first four books of the Eneid into English hexameters, on Harvey's pedantic principles. But few save Harvey's set thought Stanyhurst an improvement on Phaer (see page 265): Nash and other contemporary critics had too ample reason for ridiculing and parodying this preposterous achievement, which is not merely awkward, uncouth, and lumbering, but prosaic, and here and there grotesquely inept, and adorned with many monstrous word-forms invented for the occasion. He also translated some of the Psalms into classical metres, with equal unsuccess. Yet Stanyhurst, who was born in Dublin and educated at Oxford, was a really learned man, who wrote much on Irish history, produced a profound Latin commentary on Porphyry, the Neoplatonic mystic, and left some Latin dictional works. He was a devout Catholic, and in 1580 settled on the Continent. He took holy orders and died a priest at Brussels. A short specimen of Stanyhurst's Virgil his Eneis (the beginning of Book ii.) will justify his most uncomplimentary critics : With tentive listning eache wight was setled in harckning: Thus father Æneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie. The Greekish captains with wars and destinie mated, A vow for passadge they fainde and brute so reported. armour. Though at first sight it may seem impossible, it will be found that a little violence in misplacing accents makes the lines scan as hideous hexameters. And if readers have difficulty in following the English, the easiest interpretation will be got by looking up the original Latin ! But it may be hinted that ruter is Dutch ruiter, (Ger. reiter, ritter), a horse-soldier; karne is kerne, an (Irish) footsoldier; baine, the French baigner, bathe; engin is ingenuity, contrivance; steaming is apparently an odd misprint for seeming; brute is bruit, rumour; and that the doubling of the e in thee for the, and of the o in too for to, &c., is to mark quantity. Captain Barnabe Rich (c.1540-c.1620), soldier and romance-writer, was of good Essex stock, served in the Low Country wars, and from 1573 spent most of his life in Ireland, latterly in a government post. In his romances he was inspired by Lyly's Euphues; but one of them, The Straunge and Wonderfull Adventures of Don Simonides, a Gentilman Spaniard, has claims to rank as the earliest of modern romances (see above, page 238). From another Shakespeare undoubtedly took the plot of Twelfth Night. He wrote also largely on the distressful condition of his adopted country, denounced the rebellious spirit of the Irish, popery, tobacco-smoking, and feminine extravagance. His verses are very poor; and the translations from Herodotus ascribed to him is by another hand. Reginald Scot (C.1538-99), a Kentish man who studied at Oxford, deserves remembrance for his bold impeachment of the witchcraft superstition in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). George Whetstone (1544?-87?) produced in 1578 the play of Promos and Cassandra, on which Shakespeare founded his Measure for Measure. He rioted a while at court, served in the Low Countries, engaged in Sir Humphrey Gilbert's unsuccessful expedition to Newfoundland (1578-79), and fought at the battle of Zutphen, where Sir Philip Sidney got his death-wound (1586). He contended for a kind of play intermediate between the monotonous classical Senecan type and the absurd kind beloved of the vulgar, full of extravagances and impossibilities; see his criticism of the early Elizabethan dramatists above at page 240. His Promos and Cassandra was a translation, with pieces of poetry interspersed, of one of the Hecatommithi of the Italian, Giraldo Cinthio. Another minor dramatist of this period is Thomas Hughes, who had the chief share in The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588). He was a Cheshire man, who passed from Cambridge to Gray's Inn. Anthony Munday (1553-1633), the son of a London draper, was a pamphleteer, translator, chivalry romancer, playwright, balladmaker, and poet; as also actor, stationer, and spy on the English Catholics at Rome In the latter capacity he went abroad in 1578; in 1579, on his return, he was reproving sin in the Mirrour of Mutabilitie, partly in rhyme, partly in blank verse. He was concerned in eighteen plays, of which only four are extant. Francis Meres, in 1598, calls him the 'best plotter' among the writers for the stage; but he showed little originality, and his style is rather poor, both in prose and verse. John a Kent (1595) is based on an old humorous ballad. The best of his extant plays, The Downfall of Robert Earle of Huntington, afterward called Robin Hood of Merrie Sherwodde (1598), was reproduced, with additions by Chettle, in 1599. It was reprinted (modernised) both by Dodsley and by Collier. Robin thus addresses Much, the clown, and Marian : Wind once more, jolly huntsmen, all your horns, Whose shrill sound, with the echoing woods' assist, Shall ring a sad knell for the fearful deer, Before our feathered shafts, death's winged darts, Bring sudden summons for their fatal ends. . . . Give me thy hand: now God's curse on me light, If I forsake not grief in grief's despite. Much, make a cry, and yeomen, stand ye round : I charge ye, never more let woful sound Be heard among ye; but whatever fall, Laugh grief to scorn, and so make sorrow small. Marian, thou seest, though courtly pleasures want, Yet country sport in Sherwood is not scant. For the soul-ravishing delicious sound Of instrumental music, we have found The winged quiristers, with divers notes, Sent from their quaint recording pretty throats, On every branch that compasseth our bower, Without command contenting us each hour. For arras hangings and rich tapestry, We have sweet nature's best embroidery. For thy steel glass, wherein thou wont'st to look, Thy crystal eyes gaze in a crystal brook. At court a flower or two did deck thy head, Now with whole garlands it is circled ; For what in wealth we want, we have in flowers, And what we lose in halls, we find in bowers. ... In the Dictionary of National Biography Munday is credited with the translation of nine romances (Palladino of England, Amadis de Gaule, &c.), the writing of seven pageants, and the production of twenty-four miscellaneous pieces-some of them edifying but tedious, as The Defence of Povertie and The Paine of Pleasure. Henry Chettle (1565-1607) was a pamphleteer and dramatist who edited Greene's Groats-worth of Wit (1592; see above at page 327), wrote thirteen plays of considerable merit (one of which, Hoffmann, was reprinted in 1851), and was partauthor (with Dekker, Ben Jonson, Day, Webster, and others) of thirty-five others, including Robin Hood, Patient Grissill, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, and Jane Shore. Patient Grissill, apparently by Chettle, Dekker, and Haughton, is based on an English prose version of Boccaccio's story, and on a ballad founded on that; but there are marked alterations and great additions for dramatic effect. Many of the characters are Welsh, and speak the broken English we know from some of Shakespeare's plays. Besides the ordeal to which Grissill is subjected, there is a subordinate experiment (unsuccessful) by Sir Owen to subdue the spirit of Gwenthian. It has been argued (as by Hübsch in his edition of the play in the Erlanger Beiträge, xv., 1893) that both plots, as well as the phrase, 'To tame a shrew,' which occurs four times in this piece, may have influenced Shakespeare in his Taming of the Shrew; though, on the other hand, Shakespeare may have been first in the field-the dates of both plays are doubtful; and the too plentiful Welsh-English jargon in Patient Grissill, as well as single phrases like 'pribles and prables,' would, if we knew Grissill to be the earlier play, almost prove that it had helped to mould the talk of Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The marquis-lover thus describes the perfections of Grissill, the poor basketmaker's daughter : See where my Grissill and her father is ; Me thinkes her beautie, shining through those weedes, She would cast off rich robes, forsweare rich state, I tried my Grissills patience when twas greene, Like a young osier, and I moulded it Like waxe to all impressions. Married men That long to tame their wives must curbe them in, Before they need a bridle; then they'll proove All Grissils, full of patience, full of love. His picaresque novel, Pierce Plainnes Seaven Yeres Prentiship (1595), came but a year after Nash's Jack Wilton. Anonymous Plays. From the diary of Philip Henslowe (d. 1616) it appears that between 1591 and 1597 upwards of a hundred different plays were performed by four of the ten or eleven theatrical companies which then existed. Henslowe, successively a dyer, money-lender, pawnbroker (who advanced money and dresses to the players), and owner of house property, had much to do with the building and management of theatres. Chapman, Drayton, Dekker, and other well-known dramatists had works of theirs produced under his management, but not Shakespeare, who was mainly connected with other management. Most of the plays named by him are lost; but several good dramas of this golden age have descended to us, the authors of which are unknown or only guessed at. Several there were, without authority, attributed to Shakespeare; a few possess merit enough to have by serious critics been considered first sketches by Shakespeare. Most of them were republished in Dodsley's Old Plays. Among the most notable are The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The London Prodigal, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Lord Cromwell, The Birth of Merlin, The Widow of WatlingStreet, Mucedorus, Locrine, Arden of Feversham, The Misfortunes of Arthur, Edward III., The Two Noble Kinsmen, &c. The latter two have scenes in which versification and dialogue are wonderfully Shakespearian: in the Noble Kinsmen Mr Lee thinks there are frequent and unmistakable signs of Shakespearian work. Of the comedies the Merry Devil of Edmonton is the best (edited by Warnke and Proescholdt, Halle, 1884, and by Walker for Dent, 1897). Hazlitt thought it was 'assuredly not unworthy of Shakespeare' (though the Merry Devil,' a magician called Fabell, has no real share in the plot); and Charles Lamb thought it written to make the reader happy.' The Birth of Merlin is probably an old play worked up by Rowley, possibly with help from Middleton; the Misfortunes of Arthur seems to be mainly by Thomas Hughes (page 333) Arden of Feversham (printed 1592), the most important of a series of what Mr Bullen calls murder-plays, is founded on the story, told at length by Holinshed, of a murder which took place in 1551. Alice, the unfaithful wife of Arden, a Kentish gentleman, joined with her paramour Mosbie and two assassins in murdering her hus band. Alice was a step-daughter of Sir Edward North, father of the translator; Mosbie, a tailor by trade, was a servant of Lord North. In 1770 a local Faversham editor of the plays argued strongly that it was Shakespeare's. Tieck translated it into German as a genuine production of Shakespeare. Mr Swinburne inclines to the belief that it may have been the work of Shakespeare's youth; and Mr Bullen (who edited Arden in 1887) thinks Shakespeare may have revised and improved an older version into this shape (adding single lines and longer passages in the extract given below), though there is no evidence that he did. Mr Symonds, who values the piece almost as highly as does Mr Swinburne, thought it safer meanwhile to be content to rank it amongst anonymous works. We subjoin one touching scene between Alice and her paramour-a scene of mutual recrimination, guilt, and tenderness : Mosbie. How now, Alice? What, sad and passionat? Make me partaker of thy pensivenes: Fyre divided burnes with lesser force. Alice. But I will damme that fire within my brest, Till by the force thereof my part consume, Ah Mosbie ! Mos. Such deep pathaires like to a Cannons burst, Discharg'd against a ruinated wall, Breake my relenting heart in thousand pieces. It is not love, that loves to anger love. Al. It is not love, that loves to murther love. that? Mos. How meane you Al. Thou knowest how dearely Arden loved me. Al. And then-conceale the rest, for tis too bad, Al. Ay, to my former happy life againe : I was bewitched, woe worth the haples howre, Mos. Nay, if thou ban, let me breathe curses forth, And if you stand so nicely at your fame, Let me repent the credit I have lost. I have neglected matters of import, That would have stated me above thy state: Ay, fortune's right hand Mosbie hath forsooke, To take a wanton giglote by the left. I left the mariage of an honest maid, Whose dowry would have weyed down all thy wealth, I was bewitcht, that is no theame of thine, Go get thee gone, a copsemate for thy hyndes, companion Al. Ay, now I see, and too soone find it trew, If thou cry warre, there is no peace for me, And burne this prayer booke, which I here use, And hould no other sect but such devotion. And hearde as quickly as the fearefull hare, Waigh all my good turns, with this little fault, Mos. Ah, how you women can insinuate, And cleare a trespasse with your sweete set tongue! I will forget this quarrel, gentle Ales, The word 'pathaires' is a crux. Some assume it to be a form of petarre or petard; others get a better sense by taking 'deep pathaires' as a misprint for 'deep-fet aires,' deep-fetched breaths or sighs, like Shakespeare's 'deep-fet groans.' Mr The Yorkshire Tragedy, another domestic tragedy or murder-play, coarser and cruder, was-impudently-printed with Shakespeare's name in 1608, and included in the 1664 folio. Schlegel, Dyce, and Collier thought they recognised passages which only Shakespeare could have written. Bullen thinks it stands apart from the other murderplays and has nothing in common with them: A storm of frenzy sweeps over the stage, and we see a maniac raging furiously, and shudder as the victims fall before his violence. The ravings of Bedlam are mellow music to the murderer's curses in the Yorkshire Tragedy. The play, based on Stow, turns on the actual murder of his two children and the attempted murder of his wife by Walter Calverley, a Yorkshire squire, who was pressed to death for the crime in 1605. This despairing utterance by the unhappy wife gives a powerful picture of a luckless, reckless gambler: What will become of us? |