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The next twenty years saw Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Shakespeare, Chapman, Decker, and Ben Jonson at the head of our drama; Spenser, Warner, Daniel, and Drayton leading narrative poetry; the contributors to England's Helicon, published a year later, at the head of our sonneteers and lyric poets; and Sidney, Lyly, Greene, and Hooker in the van of our prose literature.
Entituled: To the right honorable, and renowmed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of Essex and Ewe, for his welcome into England from Portugall. Done by George Peele.
But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his perception of character and the relations of social life, the playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an influence on his contemporaries which was equalled by that of none but Marlowe and Peele.
The identification seems to me impossible. Peele and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary gentlemen; Lodge, in 1592, was filibustering, though a literary man; he had not yet become a physician. In 1592, none of the three had any profession but that of literature, so far as I am aware.
Perhaps the most that can be said is that the nymphs are already familiar to us from the pastoral tradition, and must have been scarcely less so to a contemporary audience, fresh from the work of Peele and Lyly. In Jupiter and Io, which perhaps made part of the same performance as Amphrissa, Mercury disguises himself as a shepherd, in order to cut off the head of Argus.
The Arraignment was probably produced less than two years after the publication of Spenser's eclogues, and Peele, who was an Oxford man, may even have been ignorant of their authorship . Still more unnecessary are certain other identifications between characters in the play and persons at court which have been propounded.
But one may ask, in 1592 did George Peele "profess the quality" of an actor; was he then a professional actor, and only an occasional playwright? If so, I am not apt to believe that Greene seriously advised him not to put faith in the members of his own profession. Thus I do not see how Chettle's professional actor, reported to have facetious grace in writing, can be identified with Peele.
The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field: Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments.
Holding the pocket-book between finger and thumb, he would say, "Last year I read ten plays by Nash, twelve by Peele, six by Greene, fifteen by Beaumont and Fletcher, and eleven anonymous plays, fifty-four in all." He neither praised nor blamed, he neither extolled nor criticised; he told you what he had read, and left you to draw your own conclusions.
Ben Jonson was often embarrassed, and always poor, borrowing twenty shillings at a time from Henslowe; though he rarely denied himself another jolly night at the "Mermaid." Massinger was often so reduced in circumstances as not to be able to pay his score at the same tavern. Greene, Peele, and Marlowe lived lives of dissipation, and died in poverty. Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl.
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