sweetness marks the quality by which Shakespeare advanced dramatic verse beyond the harshness, tedious monotony or uncertainty of his predecessors and his competitors, and that which is most frequently adverted to in contemporary praise; the epithet gentle again became almost appropriated to him both personally and poetically, though it is one too current with Spenser to be much insisted on, had he not repeated it a few years later, 1594, in lines to which we cannot deny an application to Shakespeare, after accepting the earlier. The epithet is the more remarkable here as praise is directed to qualities of severer nerve :— "And there though last not least is Ætion; A gentler shepherd may no where be found, There is an incongruity in Spenser's dedication of verses with such a dismal and discontented theme, as his tears of the Muses, to Lady Strange. The histrionic patronage of her lord was extended as far as a company of tumblers, professors of "activities," and this, methinks, was in the mind of Shakespeare, (little reason as he had to complain himself,) when to the suggestion of amusement from "The thrice three Muses mourning for the death Of Learning late deceased in beggary." he makes Theseus rejoin:— "That is some satire keen and critical Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony." Mr. Knight has well set forth the peculiarities in the condition of the stage, about 1590, that gave point to the denouncements of Spenser. Fierce polemics were raging between the church and the sectaries or at least the sectarian tendency, and the players who had interests as well as sympathies concerned, fanned the flames. In consequence, in 1589, Lord Burleigh not only directed the Lord Mayor to inquire what companies of players had offended, but a commission was appointed for the same purpose. The war of pamphlets concerning the consti tution and discipline of the church at this time is known as the Martin Marprelate controversy, and among the chief writers on the side of the attack were more than one who commanded the double utterance of both printing press and public stage. "There was not only one Martin Marprelate," says Izaak Walton, "but other venomous books daily printed and dispersed,— books that were so absurd and scurrilous, that the graver divines disdained them an answer. And yet these were grown into high esteem with the common people, till Tom Nash appeared against them all, who was a man of a sharp wit, and the master of a scoffing, satirical, merry pen." John Lyly, whose prose play of Alexander and Campaspe was printed and acted in Shakespeare's twentieth year, was forward in the fray, with a pamphlet, pleasantly entitled "Pap with a Hatchet;" and Gabriel Harvey, an intimate friend of Spenser and also embroiled in a personal controversy with Nash, confronted the now plain spoken Euphuist, and, in a pamphlet dated from Trinity Hall, furnishes illustration of the atmosphere of heat and fury amidst which Shakespeare lived and wrought and still remained "That same gentle shepherd, from whose tongue Nash had written, "Methought Vetus Comadia began to prick him at London in the right vein, when he brought forth Divinity with a scratched face, holding of her heart, as if she were sick, because Martin would have forced her; but missing of his purpose, he left the print of his nails upon her cheeks, and poisoned her with a vomit, which he ministered unto her to make her cast up her dignities." By Vetus Comoedia, Nash of course alludes to the Old Comedy of Athens, with its bold treatment of matters of state and individual character, whether by way of personation or personification. When this license was checked, the new comedy of Menander arose, and the succession of the drama of Shakespeare to a like condition of the stage is but part of a general parallel between the development of the art in England and in Greece. Lyly ay be quoted to the same effect:-" Would these come dres might be allowed to be played that are penned, and then I am sure he [Martin Marprelate] would be deciphered, and so perhaps discouraged.” To these attacks and menaces Gabriel Harvey gives a straight blow in return : "I am threatened with a Babel and Martin menaced with a comedy-a fit motion for a jester and a player, to try what may be done by employment of his faculty. Babels and Comedies are parlous fellows to decipher and discourage men (that is the point) with their witty flouts and learned jerks, enough to lash any man out of countenance. Nay, if you shake the painted scabbard at me, I have done; and all you that tender the preservation of your good names were best to please Pap-hatchet and fee Euphues betimes, for fear lest he be moved, or some of his apes hired, to make a play of you, and then is your credit quite undone for ever and ever. Such is the public reputation of their plays. He must be needs discouraged whom they decipher. Better anger an hundred other than two such that have the stage at commandment, and can furnish out vices and devils at their pleasure." "The stately tragedy scorneth the trifling comedy, and the trifling comedy flouteth the new ruffianism." Of the proceedings of Lord Burleigh's commissionthe Master of the Revels, with a divine selected by the Primate, and a "sufficient person, learned and of judgment," by the Lord Mayor,-no record remains. They had in charge to obtain from the players "their books, and thereupon to strike out or reform such part or matters as they shall find unfit or indecent to be handled in plays, both of divinity and state," and it appears probable that authority showed itself sufficiently in earnest to repress the chief abuse easily, and then fell gently asleep again. The offensive and often scurrilous polemics of the stage about this time,-still I have no doubt often very witty and amusing, which fully account for the picture of it given by Spenser, by no means exclusively engrossed it. Within the same few years its poetical character had changed, to some extent sympathetically, and tragic verse escaped from rhyme to riot in extravagances which were in quite as marked a contrast to the tone of Shakespeare's verse and the spirit of his ideal art, and, I think, denounced as equally repugnant to the taste of Spenser. However extensive may have been the employment of blank verse on the stage previously, it appears to have been first established as the proper vehicle of tragedy through the effect which was given to it by Christopher Marlowe. The absence of documentary evidence forbids us to say positively that it may not have been effectively employed still earlier by Shakespeare; but still it would remain that the very extravagances with which Marlowe connected it associated it with his name. It is not safe to infer dates from mere indications of skilfulness and style; the blank verse of Marlowe is harmonized with a much happier variety of pause than that of any other of his competitors but Shakespeare; but this may have been because he was superior in genius, not later in time. Even he cannot be placed in comparison with Shakespeare for a moment, in the power of vivifying and sustaining a rhythmical period of any length without monotony or jar, much less an entire scene of numerous interchanges. In this respect, the praise of sweetness belongs as little to him as to the others; and that of tempered gentleness must assuredly be quite set aside. His Tamburlaine, as we have seen, was alluded to in 1588, and may have been known the previous year, when he graduated M. A. and, no doubt, left the university. In the Prologue he professes,— "From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine a promise he redeems in this wise, "Where'er I come the fatal sisters sweat Have swelling clouds drawn from wide-gasping wounds, A meteor that might terrify the earth And make it quake at every drop it drinks." This is evidently the vein that is referred to in an angry allusion to stage blank verse by Nash in his epistle prefixed to his friend Greene's Menaphon, in 1587, though he lived to be at least accessory to it in his coauthorship with Marlowe. He ridicules "the servile imitation of vain-glorious tragedians, who contend not so seriously to excel in action as to embowel the clouds in a speech of comparison; thinking themselves more than initiated in poet's immortality if they but once get Boreas by the beard and the heavenly Bull by the dewlap." He satirizes their "drumming decasyllibon," and says they "think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse." The last terms, it will be observed, are the same that Greene made use of some five years later, in his splenetic denouncement of Shakespeare, seizing in his anger the readiest weapon, and imputing, where it was least in place, the fault that elsewhere was all but universal. The last plaint of Polyhymnia, in Spenser's Tears of the Muses, I cannot but think has reference to this double revolution of metre and of taste: "A doleful case desires a doleful song, Without vain arts or curious complements, Doth scorn the pride of wonted ornaments; "For the sweet numbers and melodious measures, By those which have no skill to rule them right, "Heaps of huge words uphoarded hideously, With horrid sound, though having little sense, They think to be chief praise of poetry, And thereby wanting due intelligence, On the whole, the dramatic ideal of Spenser, no dramatist himself, was assuredly realized by Shakespeare alone, and it is most likely was penned after the realization, for |