Suffolk his axe did ply; To England to carry : Such a King Harry? CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. (1564-1593.) MARLOWE ranks among the most eminent of our Elizabethan dramatists. He was the son of a shoemaker in Canterbury; but he obtained, probably through the patronage of a discerning friend, a good school education, and afterwards studied at Cambridge University. When he took his Master of Arts degree in 1587, he was already known as the writer of Tamburlaine the Great. Other plays followed; and for a time Marlowe and Shakespeare were rivals. This splendid rivalry and all it might have led to was, however, cut short in 1593, when poor Marlowe, still not thirty years of age, received a stab in a brawl in some inn at Deptford, and died from its effects. The Hero and Leander, one of the most luscious pieces of narrative verse in the language, was at the time lying unfinished; and Chapman completed it. That fragment, and the pastoral song contained in England's Helicon, to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a Reply, are all that we possess of Marlowe's non-dramatic verse. FROM HERO AND LEANDER. HERO. On Hellespont, guilty of true love's blood, 1 The Battle of Agincourt was fought on Oct. 25th, 1415. Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune's might; From whence her veil reached to the ground beneath. Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives. A SONG.1 Come live with me, and be my love! And we will sit upon the rocks, And I will make thee beds of roses, A gown made of the finest wool A belt of straw and ivy-buds, The shepherd swains shall dance and sing THE ANSWER. By Sir Walter Raleigh. If all the world and love were young, 1 Marlowe's Song and Raleigh's Reply continued popular for two generations. They are mentioned by Izaak Walton (1593-1683) in his Complete Angler as follows:-"As I left this place and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me: 'twas a handsome milk-maid: she cast away all care and sung like a nightingale. Her voice was good and the ditty fitted for it; it was that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago. And the milk-maid's mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days." Both are contained in England's Helicon, 1600. Y Time drives the flocks from field to fold, The flowers do fade, and wanton fields Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy belt of straw and ivy-buds, But, could youth last and love still breed, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. (1564-1616.) THE so-called "Minor Poems" of Shakespeare, minor merely in the sense of quantity, are of sufficient merit to constitute him second only among our writers of non-dramatic verse. The Venus and Adonis, written possibly before he left Stratford-on-Avon to try his fortune in London, was not published until 1593, while London was still ablaze with the beauty of Spenser's Faerie Queene; and the Lucrece followed in 1594. Both works were at once crowned with the popular praise. Among the Idylls of the ancient Sicilians, one of the most exquisitely beautiful is Bion's Lament for the Death of Adonis, and this theme had a peculiar charm for the pastoral poets of the Middle Ages. Into the familiar story of the Roman Lucretia Shakespeare has 1 Love's spring, but sorrow's autumn. woven some of his finest thinking. The Sonnets of Shakespeare represent him in the full maturity of manhood and at the height of his fame. They were written probably between the years 1595 and 1603, but were not published until 1609, when he had been already for some years living in dignified ease and retirement in his native town. That these Sonnets, or some of them, were, however, known in manuscript from the time when they were first written, may be inferred from the allusion of Francis Meres, a critic of poetry, who, writing in 1598, in the euphuistic style which Lyly had made popular, says of them ;-" As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc." Shakespeare's lyrics scattered through his plays are acknowledged to be the most perfect in the English language; and, although every line of them be familiar to our readers, any collection of verses would seem to us poor which did not contain at least some of them. Nor can the lyrics of our other poets be so fairly judged and enjoyed as by reading them side by side with these our highest standards. FROM VENUS AND ADONIS. VENUS EXCLAIMS ON DEATH FOR SLAYING ADONIS. "Hard-favoured tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean, Hateful divorce of love," thus chides she Death,— Who when he lived,1 his breath and beauty set "If he be dead,-O no, it cannot be, Thy mark is feeble age; but thy false dart I i.e. "Who living" (case absolute). |