From the gay tradition of literary history to the test
tube and crucible of critical bibliography is a far cry, but the panorama of Elizabethan literary life needs both. The -helter- skelter life of the playwright, Ben Jonson killing and Kit Marlowe killed, Dekker bailed out of jail, Greene forcing a suitor to eat a sandwich of his writ, Shakespeare becoming respectable, impecuniosity and borrowings, brawls and misery, all come together here in a vivid narrative. Far from thinking of posterity, Greene and Dekker and Drayton and Jonson wrote plays for bread and butter in three weeks, cobbled old plots, wrote happy endings, helped in the business rivalry of the theatres, sold their plays to both companies, collaborated .amid revelry at the ' Sun ' or the Mermaid.' It was a life .more human than the histories would have it, less romantic than the blazonry of legend. Mr. Harrison whittles away the Mermaid -Club and would have us believe it no more than a Café Royal legend of the 'nineties, gone three hundred years astray, with Francis Beaumont dazzled by the heavy beauty of a Chestertonian Ben Jonson. Alas for our dreams, but we could do with more of these sure-footed wanderings amid jumbled research.
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