Ancient Pistol
is fed and stuffed with relic and rags of Marlowesque affectation--
"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia,
Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day."
is a quotation taken straight from _Tamburlaine_.
(3)
A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the limits of a
general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We must take up the
story of the drama with the reign of James and with the contemporaries
of his later period, though of course, a treatment which is conditioned
by the order of development is not strictly chronological, and some of
the plays we shall have to refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth
century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his
heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The
influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose _Spanish Tragedy_
with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the
popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists,
mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day
turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that
caught as an echo from better men than themselves. One of the worst of
these--he is also one of the most typical--was John Marston, a purveyor
of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose
tragedy _Antonio and Mellida_ was published in the same year as
Shakespeare's _Hamlet_.
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