English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600; Greene, Robert, 1558-1592
the king's marriage to Dorothea, the revelation of his love for Ida,
the enlistment of Ateukin in the cause of the king's love, and a lover
for Ida to make her inaccessible. Aside from the development of the
tragedy of this situation there enters into the play only one minor
episode, the love of Lady Anderson for the young knight (in reality
Queen Dorothea) whom she is succouring in her castle. That Greene chose
to end the play after the manner of comedy, and not, as the situation
would seem to require, and the taste of the age must have demanded,
with the death of the erring king, is an effective indication of his
later freedom from restraint and of his personal philosophy of art.
As Marlowe moved from the sublime passion of his _Tamburlaine_ theme
to the cold reserve of his _Edward II._, Greene also, casting off the
turgid eloquence of his early style, attained at the end to an art of
contemplative repose and genial humanity. The critic likes to feel that
in stripping away the excrescences from his art he was discovering
his own soul. In treating Greene as a representative Elizabethan, one
should not ignore the individuality of the man that stamps all his
work with a new impress. Without being original in structure or style
Greene was individual in outlook and temper. He had a keener eye for
the little things than any dramatist of his time, and he had also a
better sympathy for the quick flashing moods and manifestations of
human character. His knowledge of the concrete realities of character
is an attribute of the man himself. In depicting fairies he lacks, as
did Lyly, the imagination to vitalise an unreal world in the spirit
of a Shakespeare. He chooses his characters from the world around
him and studies them in their native habitat. His clowns, though
belonging to an ancient family, are racy of the soil of England, and
are fellows with Shadow, and Launce, and Speed and Grumio. Warren and
Ermsby are Englishmen of a sturdy type, and Sir Cuthbert Anderson and
Lady Anderson are studied as if in their Scotch castle. But Greene did
something more than present the exteriors of men as types. He studied
their psychology, and knew the warring forces within the individual
soul, the power of circumstance, and ambition, and love to direct the
forces of character into untoward paths. He knew that logic of human
nature that counts consistency untrue, and constructs motives out of
the syllogisms of perversity. So he divides the part of the Capitano,
in the original story upon which _James IV._ was based, into two parts,
one the working intelligence, Ateukin, and the other the executioner,
Jaques. So also the King of Scots is no puppet. He struggles as he
falls, and his fall is reflected in his distraught mind. And in the
depiction of women Greene lavishes the finest forces of his genius.
Nash called him "the Homer of women," and that phrase is worth the
entirety of _Strange News_ in defending Greene's fame. Sometimes he
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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