Andronicus, and the martial pageantry ofHenry VI, but his romance comedies
combined action with literary high spirits. Public drama was crude and refined,
sensational and complex; private theatres were indoor, smaller, quieter. But the
theatres drew high and low, fine and coarse: it was the popular draw which gave the
medium its cultural power, without which its enactment of current and recurrent
human issues, however enriched by humanist thinking, might have lacked salt and
humour.Predecessors
Chapters 2 and 3 followed drama from Mystery and Morality through interlude to
academic Roman comedy and Senecan tragedy. As for Shakespeare’s immediate
exemplars, Jonson wrote: ‘how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, / Or sporting Kyd,
or Marlowe’s mighty line’. After his Euphues, a shining success, John Lyly
(1554–1606) wrote for schoolboys and the choristers of the Chapel Royal, who
played in a private theatre made in the ruins of the Dominican convent of
Blackfriars. His Campaspe (1583) told how Alexander loved a beautiful captive but
allowed her to wed the artist Apelles, whom he had commissioned to paint her. A
humanist debate, conducted in elegant prose with choral interludes, showed a great
man resigning in favour of an artist. But Elizabeth proved a mean patroness to Lyly,
and the theatre and the press did not support subsequent university wits:Robert
Greene (1558–1592), whose play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay gave hints to
Marlowe for Dr Faustus;and Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), whose prose romance
Rosalynde was the source for As You Like It. Lyly is polite, but Greene, Lodge and
Nashe wrote for new middle-class patrons of mixed tastes.
‘Sporting’ is not the obvious epithet for the author ofThe Spanish Tragedy; or,
Hieronymo is Mad Again,Thomas Kyd (1558–1594). A kid is a young goat; perhaps
Jo nson thought his art immature. Kyd pioneered the revenge play; the performance
of his tragedy at the Rose in 1592 may have been a revival. It has an isolated,
agonized avenger, lurid characters and a brilliantly intricate plot. In the Prologue a
ghost cries out for vengeance, and the mad Hieronymo uses a play-within-a-play to
avenge his son Horatio. The stilted end-stopped lines build little momentum, but the
bloody ending is successfully horrific; it was hugely popular. Kyd may also have writ-
ten a lost play about Hamlet.Christopher Marlowe
Shakespeare outshone Lyly and Kyd, but learned from his own contemporary,
Christopher Marlowe (b.1564), who was killed in a tavern in 1593. Marlowe
announced his talent in Tamburlaine the Great (1587):
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering swords.
The ‘mighty line’ was the blank pentameter, not used since Gorboduc, a tragedy of- Its might comes from the rhythmic energy which allowed Marlowe to launch
each ‘astounding term’ like a rocket. Each of the lines has a final stress which begs to
be exc laimed.
The shepherd Tamburlaine rose to rule the Mongol empire, humiliating the rulers
of Persia, Turkey, Egypt and Babylon with a savagery softened only at the request of
114 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA