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, Have now quite lost their natural delight. 66 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 which a single one of his original dramas would suffice for so fine a poetical appreciation. In 1593, the year after Greene's death, Christopher Marlowe came to a violent end, struck through the eye into the brain with his own dagger, in an unhappy brawl, which the enemies of his sentiments and profession have no doubt made the worst of. In the same year the theatres in London were closed, by order of Privy Council, as a precaution against the spread of the plague; a little previously, the prohibition of plays on Sundays had been confirmed in an order, which also restricted performances on a Thursday, which the Bearwards, suffering by competition of wit, claimed as appropriated to bear-baiting by ancient custom. In this year Shakespeare published his Venus and Adonis, prefixing the following dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a young nobleman of twenty, or nine years the poet's junior ; "Right Honourable, "I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey and your honour to your heart's content; which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world's hopeful expectation. "Your honour's in all duty, "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE." The rapidity with which the poem was reprinted proves its instant popularity, and this was long sustained; at the present time, I apprehend, it is but little read, and perhaps still less admired; and the same may be said of the Rape of Lucrece, published in the ensuing year, and dedicated to the same nobleman. Probably, however, no powers but those of.Shakespeare could have produced them in their only too indiscriminate and exhausting concentration of intellect, imagination, and fancy. It is likely they were written in early days at Stratford; and in their minute finishing of external and internal delineation they appear like the early conscientious copies of natural detail, that genius subjects itself to as discipline before it obtains the rights and the mastery of its creative power. The second dedication has lost much of the formal ceremoniousness of the first-is expressed in terms indeed, which, considering the time, imply almost the familiarity of private friendship and personal attachment, perhaps obligation. "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater: meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with happiness. "Your lordship's in all duty, "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE." With every disposition to be squeamish in such matters, we cannot but see that even the first dedication is independence itself, as compared with the terms addressed by Nash to the same patron about the same period :"Incomprehensible is the height of your spirit, both in heroic resolution and matters of conceit; unreprievably perisheth that book whatsoever to waste paper, which on the diamond rock of your judgment disasterly chanceth to be shipwrecked." Florio's dedication of his "World of Words" to the Earl, in 1598, is remarkably parallel to Shakespeare's-to the same effect it may be, only less delicately worded:-" In truth, I acknowledge an entire debt, not only of my best knowledge but of all; yea, of more than I can or know to your bounteous lordship, in whose pay and patronage I have lived some years; to whom I owe and vow the years I have to live. But as to me, and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life." Nash calls him " a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of poets themselves." There is, therefore, no doubt that the tradition was true, in the main, that came down to Rowe through D'avenant, "that my Lord Southampton at one time gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he had heard he had a mind to." Tradition is not to be trusted for figures,—the value of money at that time was four or five times the present,— but however large the sum may have been, the wonder, without precedent as without imitation, is not that a nobleman should have parted with it so freely, but that he should have had such an opportunity of bestowing it worthily, and availed himself of it. It will be time enough to consider the propriety of the acceptance of the gift when we know time, amount, and circumstances; in the meantime there is no evidence to connect it, as has been done, with the building of the Globe Theatre, by James Burbage. Burbage's first playhouse was "The Theatre " in Shoreditch, north-east of Finsbury Fields, and situate, almost beyond doubt, in what is now called Curtain Road. He built it in 1576," with many hundred pounds taken up at interest," but in consequence of quarrels with his landlord, he pulled it down in 1598, and with its materials, and fresh ones, built the Globe, on Bankside, Southwark, in 1598-9. This was a wooden structure, probably on an octagonal plan. To judge from the drawings of these old theatres that remain, the galleries were protected by a roof, sloping outwards, the central part was open to the sky, and the portion occupied by the stage and tiring rooms was surmounted by apartments for dwelling or storage of properties and wardrobe. It was probably much larger than the Blackfriars theatre formed out of converted rooms, but, of course, was only suitable for summer, and for performances by daylight; whereas at the private theatres the daylight itself seems often to have been excluded; though not always, as mention occurs of the darkening of private theatres by clapping to the windows, when a scene of night or |