A Study of Shakespeare | Page 8

is
no part of my ambition to loose the Gordian knots which others who
found them indissoluble have sought in vain to cut in sunder with
blunter swords than the Macedonian; but after so many adventures and
attempts there may perhaps yet be room for an attempt yet unessayed;
for a study by the ear alone of Shakespeare's metrical progress, and a
study by light of the knowledge thus obtained of the corresponsive
progress within, which found expression and embodiment in these
outward and visible changes. The one study will be then seen to be the
natural complement and the inevitable consequence of the other; and
the patient pursuit of the simpler and more apprehensible object of
research will appear as the only sure method by which a reasonable and
faithful student may think to attain so much as the porch or entrance to
that higher knowledge which no faithful and reasonable study of
Shakespeare can ever for a moment fail to keep in sight as the haven of

its final hope, the goal of its ultimate labour.
When Christopher Marlowe came up to London from Cambridge, a
boy in years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the stage
which he was born to transfigure and re-create by the might and
masterdom of his genius encumbered with a litter of rude rhyming
farces and tragedies which the first wave of his imperial hand swept so
utterly out of sight and hearing that hardly by piecing together such
fragments of that buried rubbish as it is now possible to unearth can we
rebuild in imagination so much of the rough and crumbling walls that
fell before the trumpet-blast of Tamburlaine as may give us some
conception of the rabble dynasty of rhymers whom he overthrew--of
the citadel of dramatic barbarism which was stormed and sacked at the
first charge of the young conqueror who came to lead English
audiences and to deliver English poetry
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, And such conceits as
clownage keeps in pay.
When we speak of the drama that existed before the coming of
Marlowe, and that vanished at his advent, we think usually of the
rhyming plays written wholly or mainly in ballad verse of fourteen
syllables--of the Kings Darius and Cambyses, the Promos and
Cassandra of Whetstone, or the Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes of
George Peele. If we turn from these abortions of tragedy to the metrical
farces which may fairly be said to contain the germ or embryo of
English comedy (a form of dramatic art which certainly owes nothing
to the father of our tragic stage), we find far more of hope and promise
in the broad free stretches of the flagellant head-master of Eton and the
bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells; and must admit that hands used to
wield the crosier or the birch proved themselves more skilful at the
lighter labours of the stage, more successful even in the secular and
bloodless business of a field neither clerical nor scholastic, than any
tragic rival of the opposite party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius
Udall and Silenus Still. These twin pillars of church and school and
stage were strong enough to support on the shoulders of their authority
the first crude fabric or formless model of our comic theatre, while the

tragic boards were still creaking and cracking under the jingling canter
of Cambyses or the tuneless tramp of Gorboduc. This one play which
the charity of Sidney excepts from his general anathema on the nascent
stage of England has hitherto been erroneously described as written in
blank verse; an error which I can only attribute to the prevalence of a
groundless assumption that whatever is neither prose nor rhyme must
of necessity be definable as blank verse. But the measure, I must repeat,
which was adopted by the authors of Gorboduc is by no means so
definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse it assuredly is not. There can
be no verse where there is no modulation, no rhythm where there is no
music. Blank verse came into life in England at the birth of the
shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardless lips, and the
high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to sponsor
was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowd of
rhyming shadows that waited in death on the noble nothingness of its
patrician shade.
These, I suppose, are the first or the only plays whose names recur to
the memory of the general reader when he thinks of the English stage
before Marlowe; but there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then
current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly
a sample is now