-historical,[173] allegorical,[174] and
satirical[175] comedies. But his real service to the progress of English
drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his
imagery--though to his fondness for fairylore and for the whole
phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his
contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a
stimulative precedent, and though in his _Endimion_ at all events he
excites curiosity by an allegorical treatment of contemporary characters
and events. It does not even lie in the songs interspersed in his plays,
though none of his predecessors had in the slightest degree anticipated
the lyric grace which distinguishes some of these incidental efforts. It
consists in his adoption of Gascoigne's innovation of writing plays in
prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and
pretentious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious
dialogue--an example to which even such successors as Shakespeare and
Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd, the author of the _Spanish Tragedy_
(preceded or followed by the first part of _Jeronimo_), and probably of
several plays whose author was unnamed, possesses some of the
characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic
dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is
assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe, whose violent end prematurely
closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play,
_Tamburlaine the Great_, in which the use of blank verse was introduced
upon the English public stage, while full of the "high astounding terms"
of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the
passion which was the poet's most characteristic feature, and which was
to find expression so luxuriantly beautiful in his _Doctor Faustus,_ and
so surpassingly violent in his _Jew of Malta_. His masterpiece, _Edward
II._, is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power
unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele was a far more
versatile writer even as a dramatist; but, though his plays contain
passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by
the side of Marlowe's _Edward II._, compared with which, if indeed not
absolutely, Peele's _Chronicle of Edward I._ still stands on the level
of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His
finest play is undoubtedly _David and Bethsabe_, which resemble