John Lyly was born in Kent about 1554. His father was Peter Lyly, Registrar of Canterbury, and his grandfather the well-known grammarian, William Lyly, the friend of Colet and More. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1569, whence he graduated B. A. in 1573, and M. A. in 1575. Here he was more distinguished for wit than for scholarship. Going up to London, and living at first under the protection of Burleigh, be produced in 1578 his Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit, which was followed in 1580 by Euphues and his England, both of which gained a great and immediate popularity. He was now attached to the Earl of Oxford. Campaspe, his first play, was performed in 1581, and most of his dramatic work was done in that decade. The Woman in the Moon, however, may have been produced as late as 1594-5. In 1583, Lyly married Beatrice Browne, a well-connected lady, who bore him eight children. From 1588 he seems to have held an honorary position as Esquire of the Body to the Queen, and he lived for years in the vain hope of succeeding to the office of Master of the Revels. Between 1589 and 1601 he sat in four parliaments, and in his Pappe with an Hatchet (1589) he took part with the Bishops in the Marprelate controversy. In spite of the distinction which Lyly won by his literary work, be failed to obtain from the Queen the substantial preferment which he craved, and he died in 1606, a disappointed place-seeker. Lyly’s reputation has depended largely on the extraordinary vogue of his Euphues, and the immense influence of the style of that work on the prose of the time; but he holds also a highly important position in the development of polite comedy in England.

GEORGE PEELE

The date of Peele’s birth is unknown, but is conjecturally placed about 1558. In 1565 he was a free scholar at Christ’s Hospital, of which his father was clerk, and in 1571 he went to Oxford. He was a student first at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), and later at Christ Church, whence he graduated B. A. in 1577, and M. A. in 1579. From the University, where he had already achieved some reputation as a poet, he went to London, and apparently plunged at once into the irregularities that wrecked his career, for in the same year the governors of Christ’s Hospital forced his father to turn him out of the precincts of the hospital. His wife, whom he had married by 1583, brought him some property, which he soon dissipated; and he became a member of that group of authors who wrote plays, pageants, and all sorts of occasional productions, in the uncertain hope of earning a living. The famous Jests, fathered on Peele, are probably quite unauthentic; but there is an unfortunate appropriateness in many of them to his known mode of life. He seems to have been an actor as well as a playwright. Meres mentions him in Palladis Tamia (1598) as dead.

Peele’s claims to distinction rest upon his treatment of metre, and on his humor. He did much to refine and supple the diction of the drama, and before Marlowe placed his stamp upon blank verse, Peele was writing it with great sweetness and a charming musical quality. In the present play, the realistic element in the dialogue is more notable than the decorative, and this realism is employed in the service of a new type of humor. “He was the first,” says Gummere, “to blend romantic drama with a realism which turns romance back upon itself, and produces the comedy of subconscious humor.”

ROBERT GREENE

Greene was much given to the mingling of autobiography with his fiction, and this has resulted in a much larger body of possibly true biographical details than we possess concerning most of his contemporaries. He was born in Norwich of a respectable family, probably about 1560; entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1575; graduated B. A. in 1578; travelled in Spain and Italy, and, by his own account, lived up to the proverbial reputation of the Italianate Englishman; returned to Cambridge and took his M. A. in 1581; and during the rest of his short life busied himself in the production of the very considerable mass of romances, tracts, songs, and plays which to-day give him his place in literature. About 1585 he married a Lincolnshire woman, who bore him a son, and whom he deserted after spending her portion. The annals of literature hardly bear the record of a more sordid career than that of this university-bred man of letters; and his death was only too fitting a close to it. He died in 1592 in the house of a poor shoemaker, to whom he gave a bond for ten pounds, leaving the following letter to his deserted wife: “Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth and by my soul’s rest that thou wilt see this man paid, for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the streets. Robert Greene.” Following his own wish, the shoemaker’s wife crowned his head with a garland of bay.

In spite of the self-confessed wickedness of his ways, Greene was not a hardened criminal, and no themes are more frequent in his tracts than moral exhortation and repentance. It is further notable that his work is freer from grossness than that of most of his contemporary playwrights, and he is distinguished for the freshness and purity of his female creations. He seems also, to judge from his plays, to have retained a love for the country, where he often chose to lay his scenes; and he ranks high among the lyrists of the time. The vivacity and variety of his humor are well exemplified in the play here printed.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Christopher Marlowe was the eldest son of a substantial burgess of Canterbury, and he was born in that city on February 6, 1564. He entered the King’s School in January, 1579, and two years later became a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, whence he graduated B. A. in 1584, and M. A. in 1587. As Tamburlaine was acted in that year, it appears that Marlowe’s academic and his literary life overlapped. Little is certainly known of his later life, apart from the production of his plays and poems. He belonged to a circle of which Sir Walter Raleigh was the centre, and which contained men like the Earl of Oxford, and Harriot, the mathematician. These men seem to have engaged in scientific and theological speculation, and were suspected of atheism by the narrower spirits of the time. This connection was probably the basis for certain extreme charges made against Marlowe after his death; but there is little evidence worthy of consideration. Even the documents connected with Kyd, in which that author seeks to save his own reputation for orthodoxy at Marlowe’s expense, are under suspicion in point of genuineness. Marlowe died by the hand of a certain Francis Archer, at Deptford, in 1593, but the circumstances are obscure. The later reports, such as that according to which he was stabbed by a serving man in a brawl over a mistress, are inconsistent with one another, and are little worthy of credit. The prevailing impression of the dissoluteness of Marlowe’s life is not based on substantial evidence such as we have, for example, in the case of Greene.

No such uncertainty as surrounds his character and career attaches to the quality of his work. Born in the same year as Shakespeare, he left behind him at twenty-nine work which far surpasses anything his great contemporary had written by that time. In the vastness and intensity of his imagination, the splendid dignity of his verse, and the dazzling brilliance of his poetry at its best, Marlowe exhibited the greatest genius that had so far appeared in the English drama.

THOMAS KYD

The date of Kyd’s birth may with practical certainty be placed in 1558. His father was a London scrivener, and the son was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, which he entered in 1565. Mulcaster was then headmaster, and Edmund Spenser was among his schoolfellows. He does not seem to have attended a university. A habit of anonymity has thrown a cloud over the extent of Kyd’s literary activity, and the list of his plays and translations has been compiled with difficulty and much less than complete certainty. His fame depends upon The Spanish Tragedy, and upon the importance of his contribution to the Senecan tragedy of revenge in this play and probably in the lost pre-Shakespearean Hamlet, which is now usually ascribed to him.

The later years of his life seem to have been unfortunate, and he was arrested on charges of sedition and atheism in 1593. From the latter he sought, if the letter to Puckering (Boas. p. cviii.) is genuine, to clear himself by ascribing the ownership of the incriminating documents to the dead Marlowe, and he endeavored to minimise the closeness of his intimacy with his great contemporary. These charges, it appears, lost him his patron, and perhaps in some degree his theatrical popularity. He died in 1594.

Kyd seems to have been a man of gloomy temperament, and the vividness and intensity with which he presents in his work the darker sides of human nature and experience are probably in some degree the outcome of his own disposition. In spite of tendencies to melodrama that, to the modern taste, border on the ludicrous, Kyd rises at times to the utterance of genuine passion, and even his sensationalism is frequently impressive. But his historical importance in the development of the type of tragedy of which Hamlet is the climax must be granted to be greater than his intrinsic value.

GEORGE CHAPMAN

George Chapman was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in 1557 or 1559, and was educated at Oxford, and perhaps also at Cambridge. His earliest extant work is The Shadow of Night (1594), which was followed in 1595 by Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, The Amorous Zodiac, and other poems, works curiously obscure and contorted in style, though containing distinguished passages. In 1598, he finished Marlowe’s incomplete Hero and Leander, and when Meres published his Palladis Tamia in that year, Chapman was already well-known as a playwright. His reputation, however, is most firmly based on his translations from Homer, issued in detachments in 1598, 1609, 1611, and 1614, and complete in folio in 1616. In this work be was encouraged by Prince Henry, to whom he was “sewer in ordinary.” He was imprisoned in 1605 along with Jonson and Marston on account of the passages against the Scots in Eastward Ho! and in 1608 he again had difficulties with the authorities on account of a scene in Charles, Duke of Byron. He continued his work in translation and in the drama till his death in 1634.

Though one can hardly feel that Chapman’s natural gifts were those of a dramatist, the evidences of intellectual power, and the almost Shakespearean splendor of the poetry in occasional passages throughout his work, entitle him to an honorable place among the writers of the time.

BEN JONSON

Ben Jonson came of an Annandale family, and was born at Westminster in 1573. He followed his stepfather’s trade of bricklaying for a short time, and later served as a soldier in Flanders. He probably began play-writing about 1595, and two years later we find him in the Admiral’s Company of actors. In 1598 he is mentioned by Meres as a writer of tragedy, and in the same year he killed a fellow-actor in a duel. In prison he became a Roman Catholic, but returned to the Church of England twelve years later. He scored a success with Every Man in his Humour in 1598, Shakespeare acting a part in the play. After several years of work on satirical drama, Jonson turned to tragedy; and on the accession of James I. he began his long series of masques and court entertainments. In 1605 he was again in prison, this time for his share in Eastward Ho! From this date till about 1617 Jonson was at the height of his fame, and was the leading literary figure in London. He visited France in 1613 as tutor to Raleigh’s son; and in 1616 issued a folio edition of his works. In 1618, he visited Scotland, and held his famous conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden; and, on his return, Oxford made him an M. A. After the death of James I, Jonson was less fortunate in court favor, suffered from ill health, and was unsuccessful at the theatre. In 1628, however, he succeeded Middleton as chronologer to the city of London, and the King sent him £100 in his sickness, later raising his salary. But fortune turned against him again; he lost his city office, made further attempts to regain theatrical favor, and died August 6, 1637. Besides plays, he left an interesting prose work, Timber, or Discoveries, and a considerable amount of non-dramatic verse. A second folio edition of his Works appeared in 1640.

Jonson’s artistic ideals were classical rather than romantic, and he stands, in significant respects, in opposition to some of the main literary currents of his time. The plays in the present volume include an example of the “comedy of humours” introduced by him, a typical example of his tragedy, and two of his satirical masterpieces. In these alone one can find abundant evidence that, despite a lack of charm and geniality, one is dealing with the work of a deep student of human nature, a vigorous and independent thinker, and a master of eloquent and virile expression.

THOMAS DEKKER

Dekker’s career is an extreme instance of the hazardous life led by the professional author in the time of Shakespeare. Born in London about 1570, Dekker first appears certainly as a dramatist about 1597, when we find him working on plays in collaboration with other dramatists in the pay of Henslowe. He wrote, in partnership or alone, many dramas; and when the market for these was dull, he turned to the writing of entertainments, occasional verses, and prose pamphlets on a great variety of subjects. No writer of the time gives us a more vivid picture of Elizabethan London. But all his activity seems to have failed to supply a decent livelihood, for he was often in prison for debt, at one time for a period of three years; and most of the biographical details about him which have come down to us are connected with borrowing money, or getting into jail or out of it. He disappears from view in the thirties of the seventeenth century.

In spite of the impression of gloom left by such a record, Dekker’s plays abound in high spirits, and their general tendency in plot and characterization is sane and wholesome. Evidences of hasty and careless workmanship are easily found, yet he was far from an uninspired hack, and passages of a noble and delicate poetry are frequent throughout his work.

JOHN MARSTON

John Marston came of an old Shropshire family, and was born, probably at Coventry, about 1575. His father, who bore the same name, was lecturer of the Middle Temple, and there is evidence that the son was trained for the law. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1592, and, according to Bullen, graduated B. A. in 1594. His first work in poetry was his Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image and Certain Satires, 1598; and later in the same year appeared his Scourge of Villany. In the following year both books were burned on account of their licentiousness by the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, though Marston had professed a reformatory purpose in both. In 1599 he turned to play-writing; but the turgid style of his Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge brought down on him the ridicule of Jonson in The Poetaster. The Malcontent was written during a period of reconciliation with Jonson, and in 1605 Marston collaborated with him and Chapman in Eastward Ho, a comedy containing a passage reflecting on the Scots, which landed all three dramatists in prison.

Marston gave up play-writing in 1607, and later became a clergyman. From 1616 to 1631 he held the living of Christ Church, Hampshire, and in 1634 died in London, and was buried in the Temple Church.

The extreme tendency to fustian which Jonson had attacked in Marston’s early work no longer appears to any great extent in The Malcontent, and the play exhibits favorably Marston’s capacity for the creation of well marked character and effective stage situations. An attempt has recently been made to show that he exerted a considerable influence on Shakespeare, especially in Hamlet.

THOMAS HEYWOOD

The early records of this, the most prolific of the dramatic writers of the time, are extremely scanty. The date of his birth is conjecturally placed about 1575, and he refers to himself as a native of Lincolnshire, and at one time resident at Cambridge. He begins to figure in Henslowe’s accounts in 1596, and he appears as a member of the Lord Admiral’s Company in 1598. He began writing plays with The Four Prentices of London, and in the Address to the Reader prefixed to his English Traveller (1633) he claims to have written or had a “main finger” in two hundred and twenty plays. Outside of the drama, he tried his hand at almost all sorts of literature, and the quality of his work is extremely uneven. He was still alive in 1648, but probably died soon thereafter.

Heywood’s characteristic power of elicting powerful emotions by a sympathetic treatment of everyday conditions and events, is well illustrated by the play here printed. While much is perfunctory in his work, one constantly finds evidences of a genuine and pious spirit moved by a keen appreciation of the pathos of human life.

FRANCIS BEAUMONT

Francis Beaumont was born 1584, the son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, Leicestershire, a judge of the common pleas. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford, which he entered in 1597. On the death of his father in 1598, he left the university without a degree, and in 1600 became a member of the Inner Temple. The law, however, if he ever really studied it, was soon abandoned for poetry; and Beaumont became an intimate of Jonson and his circle at the Mermaid. His collaboration with Fletcher began early, and seems to have been brought about by personal preference, not, like most collaboration at that time, by the exigencies of the theatrical manager. Aubrey has preserved the tradition of their domestic intimacy and similarity of tastes. Their joint-production seems to have begun about 1605, and there is no evidence that Beaumont wrote any plays after 1612. About 1613 he married, and three years later died and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He had achieved a high contemporary reputation for his non-dramatic poetry, but he survives as a dramatist.

JOHN FLETCHER

John Fletcher came of a family which has given many distinguished names to English literature. His father was Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London. Giles Fletcher the elder was his uncle, and Giles and Phineas Fletcher his cousins. The dramatist was born at Rye, Sussex, in 1579, and entered Benet College (now Corpus Christi), Cambridge, in 1591; but of the details of his life from this time till his appearance as a dramatist little is known. He collaborated with Beaumont from about 1605 till 1612; and, after Beaumont’s withdrawal, with Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, and others. He died of the plague in 1625.

The men who laid the foundations of the Elizabethan drama were generally of somewhat obscure origin; and though some of them had been educated at the universities, they were all poor. Beaumont and Fletcher were the first recruits to the profession of play-writing who came of distinguished families and habitually moved in wealthy circles; and this social environment was early suggested as an explanation of their power of representing naturally the conversation of high-born ladies and gentlemen. The general style of their plays has been thus admirably characterized by Thorndike: “Their plots, largely invented, are ingenious and complicated. They deal with royal or noble persons, with heroic actions, and are placed in foreign localities. The conquests, usurpations, and passions that ruin kingdoms are their themes, there are no battles or pageants, and the action is usually confined to the rooms of the palace or its immediate neighborhood. Usually contrasting a story of gross sensual passion with one of idyllic love, they introduce a great variety of incidents, and aim at constant but varied excitement.... The plays depend for interest not on their observation or revelation of human nature, or the development of character, but on the variety of situations, the clever construction that holds the interest through one suspense to another up to the unravelling at the very end, and on the naturalness, felicity, and vigor of the poetry.”

JOHN WEBSTER

The dates 1580-1625 are usually given as conjectures for Webster’s birth and death, exact information being entirely lacking. His father was a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, of which the son was likewise a freeman; but this does not imply that he was actually a tailor. In 1602, we find him collaborating with seven others in the production of four plays for Henslowe, and the rest of his biography consists in the discussion of the dates of his works.

Webster’s tragedies come towards the close of the great series of tragedies of blood and revenge in which The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet are landmarks, but before decadence can fairly be said to have set in. Webster, indeed, loads his scene with horrors almost past the point which modern taste can bear; but the intensity of his dramatic situations, and his superb power of flashing in a single line a light into the recesses of the human heart at the crises of supreme emotion, redeem him from mere sensationalism, and place his best plays in the first rank of dramatic writing.

THOMAS MIDDLETON

The date of Middleton’s birth is unknown, but is conjecturally placed about 1570. He came of good family, and his writings indicate that he received a good education. We know, however, nothing about his early training before his entering Gray’s Inn, probably in 1593. His plays abound in allusions to law and pictures of lawyers.

The earliest evidence of his writing for the stage is in the date of The Old Law, which was probably composed by Middleton about 1599, and later revised by Massinger and W. Rowley. He was much employed in the writing of pageants and masques, especially by the city, and in 1621 he obtained the post of city chronologer. In 1624 he gave expression to the popular hatred of Spain in his allegorical play, A Game at Chess, which scored a great success, but which was ultimately suppressed at the instigation of the Spanish ambassador, and led to a warrant for Middleton’s arrest. He died in 1627.

In his comedies Middleton shows himself a keen observer of contemporary life and manners, and few writers of the time have left a more vivacious picture of the London of James I. “His later plays,” says Herford, “show more concentrated as well as more versatile power. His habitual occupation with depraved types becomes an artistic method; he creates characters which fascinate without making the smallest appeal to sympathy, tragedy which harrows without rousing either pity or terror, and language which disdains charm, but penetrates by remorseless veracity and by touches of strange and sudden power.”

WILLIAM ROWLEY

William Rowley was born about 1585. He was an actor as well as a dramatist, and is sometimes confused with two other actors, Ralph and Samuel Rowley. In his earlier years he wrote some non-dramatic verse, mostly of a conventional kind. His most important work was done in collaboration with Middleton, with whom he worked from 1614, but he had many other literary partners. His verse is apt to be rough and irregular, his humor broad and rollicking rather than fine, his serious scenes tending to extravagance and bombast. But his constant employment to coöperate with greater men, or revise their work, points to a general serviceableness and a capacity for theatrical effectiveness. His death is conjecturally placed about 1642.

PHILIP MASSINGER

Philip Massinger was born at Salisbury, in November, 1583. His father was in the service of the Earls of Pembroke, and it has been conjectured that the future dramatist was named after the Countess’s brother, Sir Philip Sidney. He entered St. Alban Hall, Oxford, in 1602, and left four years later without a degree, having, according to Wood, “applied his mind more to poetry and romances than to logic and philosophy.” On coming to London he seems to have turned at once to writing for the stage; and, after Beaumont retired from play-writing, Massinger became Fletcher’s chief partner and warm friend. All Massinger’s relations with his fellow-authors of which we have record seem to have been pleasant; and the impression of his personality which one derives from his work is that of a dignified, hard-working, and conscientious man. He seems to have been much interested in public affairs, and he at times came into collision with the authorities on account of the introduction into his plays of more or less veiled allusions to political personages and events. He died in 1640, and was buried in St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in the same grave, it is said by Cokayne, as his friend Fletcher.

Massinger’s great merit lies in his masterly conduct of plot. His characters are usually of a somewhat conventional type, his pictures of passion tend to sheer extravagance, and his ethical quality has in it something mechanical. His verse is often eloquent, but the dialogue is often preposterously remote from life. Yet so skillful was he in the manipulation of the action that he usually holds the attention without difficulty; and in the present play this power is combined with a singularly forceful presentation of the main character and a fairly obvious didacticism that together kept the drama on the stage almost down to modern times.

JOHN FORD

John Ford was born at Ilsington in Devonshire in April, 1586, of good family. A man of his name entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1601; but if this was our Ford, his stay was short, for he became a member of the Middle Temple in November, 1602. Of the rest of his career we know almost nothing, except the names of people to whom he dedicated his plays and verses. He disappears after the publication of his last play in 1639. He seems to have been a man of a somewhat melancholy temperament, independent in his attitude towards the public taste, and capable of espousing unpopular causes.

Ford’s dramas show a tendency to deal with illicit and even incestuous love in a peculiar mood, the dramatist frequently creating strong sympathy for the tempted and the sinner, and leaving the question of guilt open. This, along with his fondness for the theatrical and the sensational, has led to his being frequently chosen as an example of the decadence of the drama. The charge is not to be denied; but in spite of these defects, he shows a power of insight into suffering and perplexity, and writes at times poetry of such beauty and tenderness, that he remains a figure of much intrinsic interest as well as historical importance.

JAMES SHIRLEY

James Shirley, often called “the last of the Elizabethans,” was born in London in September, 1596, and was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and St. John’s College, Oxford. Later he went to Catherine Hall, Cambridge, whence he graduated. About 1619 he took orders, and obtained a living at St. Albans, Hertfordshire; but resigned to enter the church of Rome, and became master of the St. Albans grammar school in 1623. His first play was licensed in 1625, and from this time till the closing of the theatres he devoted himself to the writing of plays and masques, gaining both popular success and the patronage of the court. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Shirley followed his patron, the Earl of Newcastle, to the field; but after Marston Moor he returned to London, published some of his earlier writings, and resumed teaching. Some of his plays were revived at the Restoration, but he wrote no more. He and his second wife were driven from their home by the fire of London in 1666, and both died from shock on the same day.

Shirley wrote many non-dramatic poems, graceful enough but conventional; few of them are read to-day. Out of nearly forty dramas, seven are tragedies, the rest chiefly romantic comedies and comedies of manners. He was a careful student of the work of his predecessors, and he reproduced many of their dramatic effects with skill. He had a distinct comic gift, and his power in tragedy may be judged by The Cardinal. With Shirley, more than with any of his fellow-playwrights, one feels the disadvantage of coming so late in the development of this phase of the drama that originality of conception seems almost impossible. That he is still able to amuse and to thrill with the old instruments is proof of his capacity as a literary workman; and he should not be denied the possession of passages where he displays touches of imagination all his own.