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Perhaps he first served the theater in some menial capacity, then became an actor, and assisted others in revising or adapting plays before he acquired sufficient skill to write a play entirely by himself. In 1593 he published the non-dramatic poem, Venus and Adonis, which he dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.
The non-dramatic poets of this time begin with Spenser and end with Milton, and between these two there were writers of great excellence. The vice of the age was a laboring after conceits or novel turns of thought, usually false, and resting upon some equivocation of language or remote analogy.
The literature of this age is often called the literature of the Renaissance, though, as we have seen, the Renaissance itself began much earlier, and for a century and a half added very little to our literary possessions. In our study of this great age we have noted the Non-dramatic Poets, that is, poets who did not write for the stage.
John Mandeville. Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology. Political Changes. Literature of the Revival. Wyatt and Surrey. Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology. Political Summary. Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age. The Non-Dramatic Poets. Edmund Spenser. Minor Poets. Thomas Sackville. Philip Sidney. George Chapman. Michael Drayton.
But because of the development in modern times of the physical conditions of the theatre, we have grown to exclude from the drama all non-dramatic elements. Narrative and lyric, for their own sakes, have no place upon the modern stage; they may be introduced only for a definite dramatic purpose.
Massey's indignation, chiefly because it is the leading advocate of "the personal theory" that is, the autobiographical and non-dramatic character of the poems. This implies an acceptance of the statement clearly made in the Sonnets of Shakespeare's infidelity to his wife; and this Mr. Massey pronounces an outrageous and unwarranted slander.
But it differed from the former in its non-political bias, as well as its non-dramatic form: and from the latter in its motive, which is not personal enmity, but public spirit.
A small matter, perhaps, but it is interesting as a sign, still another, of the perpetual tendency of the novel to capture the advantages which it appears to forego. The Ambassadors is without doubt a book that deals with an entirely non-dramatic subject; it is the picture of an état d'âme.
It is only to be conjectured by the tramp of his heavy boots to and fro all the night long in his solitary chamber, heard below by the faithful Caleb. The drama could not have allowed that treatment; the drama must have put into words, as "soliloquy," agonies which the non-dramatic narrator knows that no soliloquy can describe.
In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: "Such-and-such forms and methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods.