ate and irregular. He had no humor, and
the comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery.

George Peele's masterpiece, _David and Bethsabe_, was also, in many
respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than
dramatic, consisting not in the characterization--which is feeble--but
in the eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one noble chorus--

"O proud revolt of a presumptuous man," etc.

which reminds one of passages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and
occasionally Peele rises to such high Aeschylean audacities as this:

"At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful bones."

Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and
careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the
mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and
want of keeping common among the {107} playwrights of the early stage.
He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness
and grace than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay_, and his _Pinner of Wakefield_, there is a fresh breath, as of
the green English country, in such passages as the description of
Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and the picture of the dairy in
the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield.

In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art
proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared
not only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the
inestimable advantage of his example, their work was full of
imperfection, hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native
genius, the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a
whole, are certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more
developed state of the art. But the work of this early school settled
the shape which the English drama was to take. It fixed the practice
and traditions of the national theater. It decided that the drama was
to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and
comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time,
place, and action. It decided that the English play was to be an
action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene
feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays,
drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death. It
e