Shakespeare's Contemporaries
Shakespeare's reputation, at least since the mid-eighteenth century, has been such that drama is perceived to be by far the dominant component of Elizabethan literature. Yet the playwright's educated contemporaries would almost certainly not have privileged the theatre, except perhaps as a form of entertainment, above prose fiction and, especially, poetry.
Elizabethan prose and poetry
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, first published in an unfinished form in 1590, is a complex romance of classical courtly tales of desire and disguise.  | |
| Sir Philip Sidney, author of Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, in a nineteenth-century engraving. |
Written in prose, with interpolated poems, its sophisticated artifice was widely appreciated and much imitated. John Lyly in Euphues: The Triumph of Wyt (1578) similarly wrote rhetorical and fanciful fiction for a learned audience, whilst the novels of Thomas Deloney (including Jack of Newberie written at the end of the 1590s) and of Robert Greene were intended to appeal to a broader readership. Greene's pastoral romance Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588) was the source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, just as the story Rosalynde, Euphues golden legacie (1590) by another author of prose fiction, Thomas Lodge, was a key reference point for As You Like It.
Much of the non-dramatic poetry of the late sixteenth century was written by and intended for a select group amongst the court and the aristocracy. Much of it, too, was addressed to or concerned with, in however allegorical a form, Elizabeth. Sir Walter Ralegh's early lyrics praise the Queen and express the author's courtly love, although his later poem "The Lie" has been taken to reflect his disillusionment with James I. The importance and fashionability of lyric poetry was established by Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, published posthumously in 1591, which was enormously influential on subsequent lyric writers, including Shakespeare as well as Michael Drayton and Sir Fulke Greville.
Edmund Spenser's epic verse tribute to Elizabeth The Faerie Queen (the first three books of which were published in 1590, and the second three in 1596) has interests other than pining after a lost lover or reflecting on time's cruelties.  | |
| Poet, courtier and adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh, from a nineteenth-century engraving. |
Its tale of chivalric knights has been taken by many to be a glorification of its character Gloriana, "that greatest Glorious Quene of Faerie lond. " and Karl Marx dismissed Spenser as "Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet." Yet as Andrew Hadfield reflects, "as virtually all the best recent criticism of the poem has pointed out, what is remarkable about The Faerie Queen is its innovative, experimental, quirky nature, which resists any attempt to pin down the poem as a straightforward apology for the virgin queen it purportedly celebrates." (The English Renaissance 1500-1620, Blackwell, 2001, p.156)
Writing for the stage
As theatres were established on the fringes of London from the late 1570s onwards, there developed the forms of blank-verse drama with which Shakespeare was to work so triumphantly. Earlier surviving texts include John Bale's historical morality play Kyng Johan (c. 1536), depicting King John as a brave precursor to Henry VIII in a fight with the Pope, and broad comedies such as Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552) and the anonymous Gammer Gurton's Needle, probably first performed in the early 1560s. Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc, first acted in 1562, is the most notable early Elizabethan tragedy, and its reflections on the decay of a noble dynasty are echoed by Shakespeare's King Lear some forty years later.
Thomas Kyd (1558-94) and Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), known to have been close associates in the company of actors called Lord Strange's Men, are the key figures in establishing the new drama. Kyd's sole surviving play is the influential revenge drama The Spanish Tragedy (c.1589), and the playwright is more unhappily remembered for denouncing Marlowe as an atheist and heretic after his murder.
Marlowe's sordid death in a Deptford tavern remains a mystery. Was his stabbing simply the result of a drunken brawl? his involvement in activities organised by Elizabeth's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham? And were his writings seen as too scandalous and subversive? The central characters of three eponymous plays are ambitious and amoral dreamers: Tamburlaine the Great (published in 1590), The Jew of Malta (c. 1589-90) and his last creation Dr Faustus, which has survived in two parallel and distinct texts. Each of these threatening anti-heroes achieves military, political or intellectual power, only to be cast down by, respectively, disease, deceit and damnation.
Ben Jonson and the comic theatre
Marlowe was almost certainly Shakespeare's rival as playwright in his early years in London. In James I's reign, this role was taken principally by Ben Jonson, who also enjoyed numerous brushes with authority, and who was arrested in 1598 for killing the actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel. Jonson was a highly learned figure who wrote plays and poems influenced by classical Roman models (such as the 1606 masque Hymenaei and the dramas Sejanus his Fall, 1603, and Catiline, 1611) as well as many broad urban comedies. His first great success, in the 1598 performance of which Shakespeare apparently took a role as an actor, was Every Man in His Humour. This was followed by a collaborative drama about the life of London, Eastward Ho! (1604), by the carnivalesque Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Devil is an Ass (1616).
Despite his acknowledged conversion to Catholicism and his occasional questioning of the crown's legitimacy, Jonson emerged as the court poet and chief dramatist for James I.  | |
| Poet and playwright Ben Jonson, from a nineteenth-century engraving. |
He collaborated with the architect and designer Inigo Jones on elaborate court spectacles, at the same time as writing subtle and energetic satires including Volpone, or, The Fox (1605-6) and The Alchemist (1610). In 1616 he arranged for the publication of a handsome folio volume of his collected works, an act which previously no author had undertaken and which attracted much ribald criticism. And for more than a century, until the actor and entrepreneur David Garrick established Shakespeare's unchallengeable position in the pantheon of English dramatists, Jonson was seen as the more polished and more literary of the two figures.
Shakespeare and Jonson were only two of many writers creating dramas for the stage in the years around 1600. Often their achievements were collaborative, so that George Chapman and John Marston are credited along with Jonson as the authors of Eastward Ho! . A response, Westward Ho! (1606-7), was written by John Webster with the prolific dramatist Thomas Dekker, who is known to have authored or contributed to more than fifty plays, of which only some twenty, including The Honest Whore (1604), The Roaring Girl (1610) have survived. John Fletcher enjoyed a profitable partnership with Francis Beaumont, with whom he wrote the celebrated satire of London merchants The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607). Fletcher also collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both 1613).
Drama in the opening years of the seventeenth century is often seen as becoming darker, bloodier, more disturbing and more sensationalist. Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (first printed in 1607), for example, features a scene in which the hero disposes of one character by arranging that he should kiss the poisoned skull of his murdered mistress. A world in which such events can occur with some frequency can be seen as a distorted reflection of the corruptions emerging in Jacobean England. Webster is the master of such tragedies, and his invention is best displayed in The White Devil (c. 1609-12) and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613). Borrowings from Shakespeare, such as the derivation of a scene in The White Devil from Ophelia's mad-scene in Hamlet demonstrate how aware Webster was of the earlier master, as does his acknowledgement in the preface to the play that he respected not only the authors of classical times but also 'cherish'd [a] good opinion of other men's worthy labours.'
This session draws essays in "The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama", edited by A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, Cambridge University Press, 1990, and "The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600", edited by Arthur F. Kinney, Cambridge University Press, 2000. |
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