Detail of a design by Inigo Jones for a procession in The Masque of Augures by Ben Jonson, 1622; in the Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, Eng.Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement
Professional playwrights
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the choristers, endeavoured to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion (1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming. Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation, their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II (c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589; published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God. The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister, ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Faust, detail from the title page of the 1616 edition of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Library; photograph, R.B. Fleming
Shakespeare’s works
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part, Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society. The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully realized.
The early histories
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence, comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III" class="md-crosslink">Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration of English valour against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry VI, Part 3" class="md-crosslink">Henry VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.” Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II" class="md-crosslink">Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2" class="md-crosslink">Part 2 (1596–98), and Henry V" class="md-crosslink">Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other history plays, King John" class="md-crosslink">King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII" class="md-crosslink">Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. The early comedies