In conquering love, as Ceasar's victories,

Margaret, as mild and humble in her thoughts

As was Aspasia unto Cyrus' self,

Yields thanks. ...

Both Greene and Peele wrote tragedies and histories, but, as Kyd was greater in the tragic field, it is more convenient to think of these two as comedy specialists.

London was growing into a large and prosperous city and the places for staging performances were gradually transforming into Elizabethan theatres - buildings with a stage in it, buildings being indistinguishable from an inn in architecture. Four sides of the building looked into a large yard with the stage at one end of the yard. Tiers of galleries (or verandas), leading originally into inn bedrooms, would provide viewing-places for the 'better sort', while the common people could stand in the yard itself. The old facilities of the inn would be kept for liquid refreshment, and the very names of these new theatres would suggest their oridin as hostelries - The Black Bull, The Swan, The Rose, and so on.

In 1574 the Earl of Leicester obtained a patent for his 'servants (actors who wore his livery) to perform in public places, either in London or in provinces. But the City Council immediately banned performances within the City of London itself. Then, James Burbage, the chiel man of Leicester's company, built a theatre outside London, safe from the play-hating Council, and called it the Theatre. This was in 1576. Soon afterwards came another playhouse - the Curtain. In 1587 came the Rose and in 1594 - the Swan. Shakespeare's 'great Globe' was built in 1598, out of the timbers of the old Theatre. All these playhouses followed the same architectural lines -- the inn-yard surrounded by galleries, the stage which jutted out into the audience and itself had, at the back, two or three tiers of galleries. We can think of the popular drama of the period as being divided among two great companies of players - the Lord Chamberlain's and the Lord Admiral's; the Lord Chamberlain's (later called the King's Men) operating in their greatest days at the Globe; the Lord Admiral's at the Fortune. These two companies were only nominally the 'servants' of the noble person who lent their titles; they were virtually free agents, protected by their noble patrons from the charge of being vagabonds or 'masterless men'.

The greatest ornament of the public theatre until Shakespeare was Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was stabbed to death in a 'tavern brawl'. Like all the University Wits, he had a wild reputation - it was believed that he was an atheist, consorted with thieves and ruffians, kept mistresses, fought the police. Yet this reputation may well have been the deliberate disguise of a man whose true nature was not at all wild and irresponsible. Marlowe's reputation as a dramatist rests on five plays - Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Dido, Queen of Carthage. To these five masterpieces might be added The Massacre at Paris, a bloodthirsty melodrama now, it seems, little read. In this handful of plays appears the first true voice of the Renaissance, of the period of new learning, new freedom, new enterprise, of the period of worship of Man rather than God:

That dawn that Marlowe sang into our skies

With mouth of gold and morning in his eyes.

Marlowe sums up the New Age. The old restrictions of the Church and the limitations on knowledge have been destroyed; the world is opening up and the ships are sailing to new lands; wealth is being amassed; the great national aggressors are rising. But above all, it is the spirit of human freedom, of limitless human power and enterprise that Marlowe's plays convey. Tamburlaine is the great conqueror, the embodiment of tyrannical power; Barabas, the Jew of Malta, stands for monetary power; Faustus represents the most deadly hunger of all, for the power which supreme knowledge can give. In the part of the Duke of Guise in The Massacre at Paris we find the personification of a curious 'dramatic motive' which is to fascinate many Elizabethan playwrights - intrigue and evil almost for their own sake, a complete lack of any kind of morality, what is sometimes called the 'Machiavellian principle'. The reference to Niccolo Machiavelli and his book The Prince, a treatise on statecraft which had the aim of bringing about a united Italy through any means which Italian leaders found workable: cruelty, treachery, tyranny were acceptable so long as they produced, in the end, a strong and united state. It is the note we also hear sustained throughout the two parts of Tamburlaine.

Tamburlaine is a procession of magnificent scenes, each representing some stage in the rise of Tamburlaine from humble Scythian shepherd to conqueror of the world. Everything is larger than life in the play. Tamburlaine is not content merely to conquer; he impresses his greatness on the conquered by such acts as slaughtering all the girls of Damascus; using the captive Soldan of Turkey as a footstool and carrying him about in a cage till he beats out his brains against the bars; burning the town in which his mistress, Zenocrate, dies; killing his own son because of his alleged cowardice; harnessing two kings to his chariot and shouting:

Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!

What! can ye draw but twenty miles a day,

And have so proud a chariot at your heels,

And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?

Tamburlaine takes Babylon and has the Governor pierced with arrows and every inhabitant of the town drowned in a lake.

The Jew of Malta is the story of Barabas, whose wealth is magnificently celebrated in the long opening speech. Barabas is deprived of all his wealth by the governor of Malta, who wants it to pay the turks their tribute. After this, Barabas embarks on a long career of revenge, not only on the governor himself, but on Christians and Muslims generally. He contrives a great deal of slaughter but in the long run finds himself caught in his own trap: he dies, dropping - through a trick of the governor - into a cauldron of boiling oil which he has prepared for his enemies.

Doctor Faustus is, perhaps, Marlowe's greatest play. This is the story of the learned man who has mastered all arts and all sciences, finds nothing further in the world to study, and so turns to the supernatural. He conjures up Mephistopheles, 'servant to great Lucifer', and through him concludes a bargain whereby he obtains twenty-four years of absolute power and pleasure in exchange for his soul. Faustus makes the most of his time. He brings the glorious past of Greece back to life and even weds Helen of Troy. Despite faults of construction, obvious carelessness and other artistic flaws attendant on youth, Marlowe's achievement is a very important one. He is a great poet and dramatist who, had he not been killed untimely in a tavern in London, might well have become greater even than Shakespeare. And not even Shakespeare could do all that Marlowe could do: the peculiar power gained from caricature; the piled-up magnificence of language; above all, 'Marlowe's mighty line' - these are great individual achievements.

Shakespeare's greatest contemporary after Marlowe was Ben Jonson (1574 - 1637). Jonson's aims were different from those of Shakespeare. Shakespeare followed no rules and had no dramatic theory. Jonson was a classicist, whose masters were the ancients, and whose every play was composed on an established ancient pattern. Jonson's plays generally obey the rules of 'unity': the action takes less than a day and the scene never moves from the initial setting - Venice in Volpone, a London house in The Alchemist. Moreover, Jonson had a theory of dramatic character already out-of-date in his own day. While Shakespeare sees human beings as strange mixtures, walking masses of conflict and contradiction, unpredictable, always surprising, Jonson sees them as very simple and almost mechanical combinations of four elements. This was a medieval idea: the human soul was made out of 'humours' - sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic - which,mixed in various proportions, gave different human 'types'. Jonson's characters are all 'humours', and his comedy Every Man in His Humour seems to be little more than a demonstration of the theory. In each character one quality predominates: amorousness, cowardice, avarice, irascibility, boastfulness. The character, once established, never changes - indeed, any hint of complexity or capacity for change would destroy the self-contained worlds that Jonson builds.

Jonson, despite the limitations that this theory imposes on him, is a very great playwright. His tragedies have little appeal (in tragedy one needs a conflict and capacity to change). His comedies are admirable. Volpone and The Alchemist both have the same theme - the rogue and his assistant who get fat and rich on the credulity of the stupid. In Volpone, the old fox who gives the name to the title pretends to be very rich and ill: lying on his pretended death-bed he informs every one of his visitors that he, and he only, shall inherit Volpone's wealth.Needless to say, each visitor brings substantial presents so that Volpone shall not change his mind. The Alchemist deals with twop rogues who pretend to have discovered the magic formula for turning base metal to gold. They receive dupe after dupe, take money and goods from them, and become involved in a series of rollicking comic situations which are often far less 'knock about', more keenly satirical than anything in Shakespeare's comedies. Romance is outside Jonson's scope, but he has a wonderful lyrical gift that owes a lot to Marlowe. Jonson is a great dramatist of 'realism'. He is concerned with making his comedy out of the situations of his own time: he is always contemporary in his themes and settings. But he can be fanciful as well as realistic, as his masques show (the masque - was the later version of the interlude: an elaborate but short piece with music, dance, gods, goddesses, and abstractions, played in the great houses on great occasions). And Jonson is the greatest purely lyric poet of the early seventeenth century, the founder of a whole school of poets - the 'Tribe of Ben'.

The greatest tragic dramatist after Shakespeare was undoubtedly John Webster (1580 - 1638). He collaborated in comedies with Dekker, but his two great tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, seem to be entirely his own work. Webster, like Jonson and Shakespeare, has a strong verbal gift; he is a remarkable poet able to convey a situation or a state of mind in the fewest possible words. But he approaches Shakespeare in his ability to create characters, and the tortured, haunted creatures of his two tragedies, once known, can never leave the memory. The White Devil concerns the Duke of Brachiano and his illicit love for Vittoria Corombona, wife of Camillo. Vittoria's brother Flamineo arranges for Camillo to be killed, and for the Duke's seduction of Vittoria. Flamineo also kills his virtuous brother Marcello after a violent quarrel. For his part, the Duke kills his wife Isabella. Revenge inevitably follows - the Duke is poisoned by Isabella's brother, Vittoria and Flamineo are murdered. This plot sounds uncompromising - sheer blood and thunder, like an early Senecan play - but Webster's psychology and language raise it to the level of high seriousness.

The Duchess of Malfi is another serious tale of many murders. Its climax comes when the Duchess of the title undergoes mental torture from her brother and his hired villain and is then strangled with her two children.After that followvengeful murders, madness, and sublime and terrible poetry. Both his tragedies are visions of hell displaying a verbal power and an imagination that Shakespeare only could touch.