XVIII. PROSE OF THE RENAISSANCE
A great, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this juncture, was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek poetry, and Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had little Greek, arrived in England and visited Oxford (1499), he found there Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet, who had acquired Greek on the continent; and, with Sir Thomas More, were already competent classical scholars. But their Greek learning was mainly turned into the channel of theology, the study of the sources of Christian doctrine, the New Testament, the Greek Fathers; and they were attracted by the philosophy of Plato which appeared to "utter a Christian voice" much more clearly than do the writings of the idol of the Middle Ages, Aristotle.
Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The violent times of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable to severe study and exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, a most desirable corrective of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and of the English passion for horrors in stage plays. To most people knowledge of the contents of the Greek classics came through translations, and these translations, as in the case of the historian Thucydides, were done from French versions, while Plato was read through Italian commentators, much influenced by Plato's disciples in early Christian times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers of beautiful dreams concerning things that cannot be uttered.
Study produced also a very wide acquaintance with Greek mythology--Shakespeare's humblest characters have heard of many a Grecian fable--yet the spirit, the exquisite balance, and the refinement of the Greek genius, hardly affected our authors. We may detect it in More's (1478-1535) "Utopia," where the adventurers carry with them to "Nowhere" a "pretty fardel," or parcel, of the cheap neat Greek books printed by Aldus. The fancied State of Utopia, with its comfortable communism and perfect freedom in religion, is derived from the "Republic" of Plato, and in religion is more liberal than, in his later work, "The Laws," he would have permitted it to be. But the "Utopia," written in Latin, was meant for the learned.
Though the "Utopia" was published in 1516, and became famous in Europe, it did not reach unlearned English readers till an English translation, by Ralph Robynson, appeared in 1551. They now had More's eloquent advocacy of communism before them as regulated in his imaginary state, with a Six Hours' Day, universal training of men and women for war, and habit of assassinating the leaders of hostile nations. There is tolerance of all religions which accept a deity and the immortality of the soul: atheists are disqualified for public offices.
In his English works on religious and social controversy, which are little read, More is not only a Catholic and a Conservative, but in discussion is given to abusive and violent language which would have horrified the courteous Plato, the urbane Aristotle, and that model of a devout and ardent student, and perfect gentleman, Pico della Mirandola, whose Life More gave in English. On both sides the controversialists of the Reformation delighted in violent personal abuse, in some Greek orators they found examples of that art. The first effect of Greek in England, by producing a new Biblical criticism and an attack on the foundations of the mediaeval Church, was to "bring not peace but a sword," the wars of religion.
Elyot.
No man did more for the intelligence of Greek than Sir Thomas Elyot (1499 1546)1 author of "The Governour," a long treatise, on the education of a gentleman, and on the nature of forms of government. Elyot bubbles over with Greek, and translates such passages of Homer as he quotes into English verse, the alternate lines rhyming. He is of the Greek opinion that a gentleman should be taught, if he has a taste for art, to draw, paint, and execute works in sculpture, not as a base professional artist, but as an amateur.[1] Elyot would have a boy, at 7 years old, begin with Greek, learning it through Latin, which he picks up, with French, in conversation. Grammars of Greek are now almost innumerable. Grammar, he says with much truth, "if it be made too long and exquisite to the learner, in a manner mortifieth his courage. And by that time he cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is soon quenched with the burden of grammar." Elyot would start his pupil as early as possible with what will interest a child, Æsop's Fables in Greek, and then pass to Lucian, who is amusing as well as elegant. "But I fear me to be too long from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded all eloquence and learning." Throughout, Elyot wishes first to interest the pupil; but where, he asks, is he to find qualified schoolmasters? They were as cruel as in the days of St. Augustine, and while Elyot's system of education, in sports as well as in books, is free and joyous, like that of Gargantua in Rabelais, little boys were suffering the horrors described by Agrippa d'Aubigné in his Memoirs. Elyot translated works of Isocrates, Plutarch, and others, wrote a medical work "The Castle of Health," was clerk of the Privy Council, and went on various diplomatic missions. Elyot was not a professional instructor of youth: he was, it seems, educated privately, and of neither university; what pleases us in him is his unstaled zest for learning, his fresh enthusiasm.
The best English of the age and the most durable is that of Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) as we read it in the Liturgy of the Church of England, while much of the merit of King James's Authorized Version of the Bible rests on the foundation of Miles Coverdale's translation (1488-1568). How easy it is to translate the Bible into English which is not a marvel of diction and rhythm, we are too frequently reminded by the Revised Version.
Ascham.
Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle classes, who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid him as well as he wished. Going early to St. John's College, Cambridge, he was a pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who introduced the English way of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly wrong--no people pronounce the vowels as we do; but if Cheke resisted the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, perhaps he is not much to be blamed. Ascham obtained a Fellowship and a Readership in Greek, the Fellowship he lost when he married: he did not long retain his tutorship to the Princess Elizabeth; as secretary to an ambassador in Germany he continued to teach Greek to his chief; and in his letters, Latin or English, we find him often in straits for money and begging for assistance. Camden, writing under James I, says that he lost money at dicing, and in his attack on gambling, in his "Toxophilus," a dialogue on Archery (1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy knowledge of all the tricks on the dice-board. Probably he had paid for his education. He contemplated a work on the noble sport of cock fighting, on which, of course, there was betting, and perhaps Ascham was not in all respects so severe a Puritan as in his unworthy attacks on that noblest of romances, "The Morte d'Arthur". Sir Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were to be met at a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian influences that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was certainly profligate and luxurious,
An Englishman that is Italianate Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like his contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew and the grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and French, as in "Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples; therefore he desired that archery should be universally practised. But the harquebus, a musket lighter than the heavy hand gun of the fifteenth century, was already, in disciplined hands, more than a match for the bow.
"Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless classical examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string only to the breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used iron arrow-heads as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, a fact not so certain. When he does come to practice, Ascham's teaching in archery is reckoned sound and good. His ideas are summed up in the prayer that the English
Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow May all manner of enemies quite overthrow.
In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our English tongue in avoiding barbarous rhyming may as well receive right quantity of syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means "quantity" as opposed to accent, as if one said car_pen_ter.) As an example he quotes Mr. Watson's rendering of the third line of the "Odyssey" into two English hexameters
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities.
Obviously if we are to say "men's man_ners_," making "man" in "manners" long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to
Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the tra_vellers._
This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment, nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses, alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly's "Euphues!"
Lyly's Euphues.
The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining decoration and far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous and the exotic, the taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, as we see in the strange over-gaudy costumes of the period, the various ruffs, the jewelled velvets and silks, worn by men and women. A like dressing for thoughts was demanded, and the supply was provided by John Lyly, whose plays are to be mentioned later. Lyly was born a Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen, in Oxford, was his college; his plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul's, are of 1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier, as a prose writer, in his "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit" (1579), and the sequel, "Euphues and his England" (1580). The style became a fashion, a fashion which affected even those who, like Sidney, were in would-be revolt against it. Lyly, like all writers of the periods just before and after him, was copious in classical allusions. He was not the first to hunt in all directions, especially in fictitious natural history, for similes, and needless decorations; but he hunted further and more assiduously: emphatically his style is that of the unresting Bird of Paradise. Every sentence is a thing bristling with points and antitheses and alliterations. The first part of the book was a kind of novel; two friends, at Naples, woo the same woman, quarrel, write long letters, and the question of education, in the wide sense in which the Renaissance understood education, is always prominent. There is endless conversation and discussion of life, love, and learning, always in the same style of fantastic decoration and allusion: all continued when Euphues arrives in England, all conveying general information not verified by experiment. "I have read that the bull, being tied to a fig tree, loseth his strength; that a whole herd of deer stand at the gaze if they smell a sweet apple"; facts on which the cattle-breeder or the hunter would not, if well advised, rely. This was the kind of science against which Bacon uprose. But Lyly appealed, in his Dedication, and with success, "To the Ladies and Gentlewomen of England," who found in the book a kind of love-story, much philosophizing on that dear theme; and a pleasurable example of a new way of being witty and romantic. Lyly was the chief cause of the difficulty in telling a plain tale plainly which besets the minor writers of the age of Elizabeth.
Before approaching the chief prose writers of Elizabeth's time, we must turn aside to her greatest poet, and his friend, to Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, and to the Drama.
Sidney.
Spenser did not more surely attain immortality by his verse than Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) by his life, writings, and character. He was one of those who, as Plato says, are born good, exemplars of natural charm and excellence. He is the ideal gentleman of the type which Spenser professed to educate by the examples of his virtuous knights, brave, pious, courteous, and just. The son of Sir Henry Sidney and nephew of Elizabeth's Leicester, Philip Sidney was born into the Court, but was not of it; his heart was set on other things than pleasure, splendour, flattery, and promotion. Educated at Shrewsbury School, he went to Christ Church at 14, being already the friend of the noble Fulke Greville, who, however, went from Shrewsbury to Cambridge. In 1572 he was attached to the English embassy in France, and, on the night of the Bartholomew massacre was sheltered in the house of his future father-in-law, Walsingham. Till 1575 he travelled, chiefly in Germany, and made the acquaintance of his constant correspondent and adviser, Languet, whom he celebrates as a shepherd of the Ister, and as his own religious Mentor. In Venice his portrait was painted by Veronese; at Vienna he perfected himself in horsemanship under Pugliano, whose enthusiasm he describes so amusingly in his "Defence of Poesie". For a man so earnest as Sidney was, he had a fine sense of humour.
Returning to England in 1575, he, like Gascoigne, was with Elizabeth at the famous pastimes at Kenilworth, now best known through Scott's novel, "Kenilworth". Afterwards, at the house of the Earl of Essex, he met the Earl's daughter, Penelope, later Lady Rich, the Stella of his sonnets. Essex desired their marriage, but fate decided otherwise. In 1577 Sidney went, a young diplomatist, to the Emperor and the German Princes, and later, was obliged to attend the Court, while his mind was set on adventures beyond the Atlantic; on failing in that, he trifled with the idea of introducing Greek metres into English poetry. In 1579, he quarrelled with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court. A duel was not permitted, but as Sidney also gave Elizabeth his opinion about her distasteful flirtation with the odious Duc d'Anjou, the worst of the bad Valois Princes, he retired to Wilton, the house of his sister, Lady Pembroke, and there wrote the pastoral romance, "Arcadia".
He was recalled to Court, sat in Parliament for Kent, and in 1583 parried a daughter of Walsingham. He was forbidden to join Drake's American expedition of 1585, in fact he was always thwarted in his desire for action and for such deeds of chivalry as the conditions of his age permitted--they leaned somewhat to piracy and filibustering. At length, as Governor of Flushing, while Leicester commanded the forces engaged against Spain in the Low Countries, he fell in a cavalry charge against a superior force at Zutphen. His leg was broken by a musket bullet from the Spanish trenches: it was now that he handed the cup of water that was at his lips to the soldier whose need was greater than his. He lingered for some weeks, and died on 17 October, 1586.
The beautiful character of Sidney cannot be more strongly attested than by the agony of grief exhibited, at his death, by the handsome and wicked Master of Gray. He was about to be sent on the Scottish embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, while his desire was to be fighting under Sidney's banner. He expresses, in a touching letter, the sudden revulsion of his nature from his wonted treacheries; and, contrary to the falsehood of tradition, he did not betray, but, to his own loss, did his best to save the Queen whose cause he had previously deserted.
As a poet, Sidney, whose works were all published after his death, is best remembered for the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella, Lady Rich. There is a controversy as to whether these are mere exercises in gallant but "platonic" love-verse, or whether they reveal a true passion, as Charles Lamb maintained. The sonnet in which he says that he has found his fortune too late, and has lost what he had unwittingly won,
O punisht eyes That I had been more foolish or more wise,
seems to set forth a truly tragic situation. Perhaps only poets can be the critics in such a case as this of Sidney.
The sonnets vary much in poetic value; some are written in Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the English Muse.
Sidney's "Defence of Poesie."
Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary poetry between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to note that Sir Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted as he was with the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he could see nothing to admire in the efforts and experiments of such writers as Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and Turbervile. His "Defence of Poesie" (or, according to the title of the first edition (1595), his "Apologie for Poesie") was elicited by the unauthorized dedication to himself of Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young Oxford man who had tried his hand as a playwright, and been disgusted, he says, by the disorders of the playhouses, where his comedy and morality may have been hooted. He therefore tried to make himself notorious, or he expressed his penitence, by assailing poets who deal in the silly conceits of Lyly's "Euphues".
"The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in a cow-shard... it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields and wallow in the mire: and the whole practice of poets, either with fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief, discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison through the world". Gosson chooses Virgil as one of his terrible examples, and whether he is a genuine or a hypocritical puritan, or a mere fribble in search of notoriety, he made a mistake when he thought to find a patron or a butt in Sidney, who does not advertise Gosson's name in the "Defence of Poesie".
After a general defence of poetry furnished with precedents drawn from every quarter, even from the respect paid to their minstrels by the Irish, Sidney defines the final end of poetry as being "to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of...." If poetry does not always attain this end, "it is not the fault of the art, but that by few men that art can be accomplished". He quotes Aristotle's "Poetics" to the effect that poetry is more philosophical and more serious than philosophy. Nothing in history is so noble but that "the poet may, if he list, make it his own, beautifying it both for further teaching, and more delighting, as it please him, having all, from Dante's heaven to his hell, under the authority of his pen". Here Sidney seems to differ from Scott, who regarded some examples of human fortunes, for example in the case of Mary Stuart, as beyond the range of the poetic art. But Sidney, foreseeing the objection, adds, "I speak of the art, not of the artificer". Sidney then discusses the various Kinds of poetry. As to the Comedy, "naughty play-makers and stage-keepers have made it justly odious,"--so far he sides with the Puritans of his time. In speaking of the lyric, he says: "I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas" ("Chevy Chase"), "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet". Indeed the true spirit of poetry did dwell, disregarded by wits and courtiers, in the popular poetry and the ballads. But poetry, he knows not why, finds, in our time, a hard welcome in England: "I think the very earth laments it, and therefore decks our soil with fewer laurels than it was accustomed, for heretofore poets have in England also flourished". If poets are not esteemed it is because they do not deserve esteem, for we are "taking upon us to be poets in despite of Pallas," invita Minerva. Our would-be poets are destitute of genius--which was very true. "Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his 'Troilus and Cressida': of whom truly I know not whether to marvel more either that he, in that misty time, could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, go so stumblingly after him."
What ailed Sidney's age was lack of terseness and clearness. Most poets did not know what they would be at; they were confused by the tumult of religion, the loss of old ideals, the language in transition, the tyranny of the misunderstood classics, the constant effort to imitate Greece, Rome, France, and Italy. They could not yet see life and literature steadily, and see them whole. Sidney found little that "had poetical sinews," except in Chaucer; parts of "The Mirror for Magistrates," the Earl of Surrey's lyrics, and Spenser's "'Shepherd's Calendar' hath much poetry in his 'Eclogues,' indeed worthy the reading, if. I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I cannot allow..."
Sidney then banters the absurdities of the lawless stage, of the alliterative writers, of the seekers after unnatural history, like Lyly in his "Euphues," and of the love poets. "If I were a mistress never would they persuade me that they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches," "swelling phrases" learned from books.
It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney defended, and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which devotes time and scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments by men who wished to be poets without possessing the poetic genius.
Sidney's best poems and his "Defence of Poesie" retain their freshness; but that book of his which was most popular suffers from the changes of time and taste. At most periods prose fiction is more welcome to human nature than poetry or criticism. Sidney's book "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," is a novel, written by the author at Wilton, when, as we saw, he was neither in favour at Court nor permitted to risk himself in adventures on sea or land. The book was to Sidney what "The Faery Queen" was to Spenser, a wilderness of delights of his own creation, a retreat into a world of fantasy. He wrote it in sheets read, or sent as soon as finished, to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke; the book was meant for her, not for the world. Not long after his death, an unauthorized copy was published (1590), and unauthorized edition followed, and the general delight in the romance is attested by its constant reissues.
The author did not construct any regular plot, he allowed his fancy to wander among the shipwrecks and piratical adventures of the late Greek romances; and in an Arcadia which never existed, and a Laconia most unhistorical. But the high and chivalrous ideals of the author, in his rural prose idylls, as in his battles and combats; the truth and constancy of his lovers; the beauty of his descriptions, made this mixture of the Spanish heroic romances that infatuated Don Quixote with the Arcadian pastorals, the delight of four generations. Milton blamed the captive Charles I for copying the beautiful and appropriate prayer of the captive Pamela, long after Shakespeare had interwoven with the story of King Lear, Sidney's tale of the blind King of Paphlagonia.
In its new mode "The Arcadia" was to four generations what Malory's "Morte Arthur" had been in its day. As late as 1660, we find Sir George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in his heroic and historic romance, "Aretina," where Argyll and Montrose play their parts. Indeed the "Arcadia" was a fruitful parent of the interminable heroic French romances which Major Bellenden laughs at in "Old Mortality," and from which Scott did not disdain to borrow a description in "Ivanhoe". It is indeed curious to compare Sidney's description of an Amazon (Book I, Chap, XII.) with an actual representation of a genuine Amazon by a Hittite artist, discovered on the stone work of a gate at Boghaz Keui. That lady-warrior wears a corslet of scale armour, while Sidney's has a doublet of sky-coloured satin, covered with plates of gold. Her feet are shod in crimson velvet buskins, while the massive legs of the real Amazon are naked. The contrast of fact and fancy are violent, of course, throughout the romance. The style is less conceited than that of "Euphues," and is always noble, but the long sentences and overabundance of parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste. The profusion of love-passages and of martial adventures, "with notable images of virtues, vices, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed fancies, were what the world demanded from a novel, and what Sidney gave in the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of the amœbean verse of the shepherds of Theocritus.
Spenser.
After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the second great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599). We know from his "Prothalamion" that Spenser was born in London--
my most kyndly Nurse, That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse, Though from another place I take my name, An house of auncient fame--
that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the ancestry of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills.
Spenser was certainly their kinsman, in what degree is unknown, but his own family must have been poor. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, was aided by the munificent Robert Nowell, and obtained a Sizarship (corresponding to the old Oxford servitorship), at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (1569). Here he made two friends, Gabriel Harvey, a true friend, if a rather pedantic don (the Hobbinol of his "Shepherd's Calendar"), and E. Kirke, the E. K. who furnished the notes explanatory of old English words in that poem. Spenser also gained the good graces of Grindal, then Bishop of London, later Primate, a puritan, who fell into Elizabeth's disgrace, and is applauded as Algrind by Spenser in the "Shepherd's Calendar".
Spenser's youth was passed in an England disturbed by the claims of the captive Mary Stuart to the Crown; by the rebellion of her adherents in the North; by the papal excommunication of Elizabeth, and by the pretensions of the extreme puritan exiles who, driven abroad by the Marian persecution, had imbibed at Geneva the doctrines of Calvin. In their attacks on the English Bishops they out-wearied even the successors of Calvin in Geneva, who regarded them as men not to be satisfied by any concessions; "a sect of perilous consequence who would have no king but a presbytery," said Elizabeth. Here were all the elements which caused Elizabeth's cruel persecution of Catholics, the long struggle of the puritans under Elizabeth and James I, the wars under Charles I, and the strife with Spain and Catholic Ireland. In the words of James VI, it was "a world-wolter," and Spenser, as a poor young man, eager to make his fortune, had to swim as best he might in the cross-currents of this troublesome world. He never enjoyed the peaceful leisure of a Tennyson or a Wordsworth; he had to play an active part in strenuous and most unhappy affairs.
His nature, too, was divided. With all his love of pleasure and of beauty he leaned, though not virulently, towards the puritan party, and, as a good patriot, loathed and detested Rome.
It is probable that, when a freshman at the age of 17, he contributed to a Miscellany, Van der Noodt's "Theatre of Worldlings" (1569), translations in blank verse of certain sonnets of the French poet Joachim du Bellay, and of Petrarch. These, re-cast into the form of sonnets, recur in a volume of Spenser's, of 1591.
After taking his Master's degree (1576) Spenser visited Lancashire, and if his words as Colin Clout in the "Shepherd's Calendar" be autobiographical, lost his heart to a lady whom he calls Rosalind, "the widow's daughter of the glen". According to Gabriel Harvey she "christened him her Signior Pegaso," though neither his poetry nor his wooing won her from her cruelty. Many years later he still writes of her with chivalrous affection, so, like Scott, he had his heart broken and cleverly pieced again.
By 1579 Spenser was in London, a literary retainer or protégé of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester; while he also enjoyed the friendship of Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, the Flower of Chivalry, himself a poet, and the best beloved man of his time. Now (1579) Spenser published, and dedicated to Sidney, his "Shepherd's Calendar," a set of twelve eclogues or pastoral poems, one for each month. The pastoral had wandered far from the rural beauty of Theocritus, and, in the hands of Mantuan and Clement Marot, had become a vehicle for allegory, and even of Protestant argumentation. Spenser does not stray far into party and puritanic politics, but they are not unknown to his shepherds. In January, as Colin Clout, he bewails the coldness of Rosalind,
She laughs the songs that Colin Clout doth make,
which is carrying cruelty very far. February is occupied with a rustic dispute between youth and age: the metre is one of the measures of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel":--
Who will not suffer the stormy time, Where will he live tyll the lustry prime? (Shepherd's Calendar, Feb., 11. 15, 16.) They burn'd the chapel for very rage And cursed Lord Cranstoun's Goblin-page. (Lay of the Last Minstrel, C. II., Stanza, 33).
March, with the dialogue of Willie and Thomalin about the strange bird, Love, is adapted from the Greek of Bion in a most pleasant manner, and April contains a melodious song of fair Eliza, a Maiden Queen; which probably procured Spenser's presentation to Elizabeth. The great variety of melodious verse of which Spenser was already a perfect master is, for us, perhaps the chief merit of his pastorals. Through life Spenser keeps up the shepherd's mask, and Raleigh, in his verse, is "The Shepherd of Ocean". The rival Protestant and Catholic clergy also appear as shepherds, good or bad, while in another eclogue the perfect poet, Cuddie, complains, like Theocritus, of public indifference, and is advised to sing of redoubted knights: and, indeed, Spenser had already conceived the idea of his knightly romantic poem "The Faery Queen," and was ambitious to excel his model, Ariosto. In this Harvey discouraged him; "Hobgoblin" must not "run away with the garland from Apollo".
Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he dallied with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English words, as in the English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he dropped many projects at which he had glanced, and was constant to his "Faery Queen".
The manuscript of that great poem must have been the companion of Spenser in many strange wanderings,
In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount,
as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the household of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his to France. To be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring the enmity of Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's brilliant and wavering favourite--who once so nearly brought her into a plight almost as bad as that of Mary Stuart--and her sagacious counsellor, Sir William Cecil (Lord Burleigh)--who now and again saved his Queen "as by fire"--might have furnished Spenser with a high theme for a poetic allegory. But chance had made him Leicester's man, not Burleigh's man, so that he never won the fortune for which he sought. Who, indeed, would seek fortune in Ireland? Spenser did, accompanying Lord Grey of Wilton to an isle more than commonly distressful.
To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English invaders was now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion after rebellion was punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is notorious for his massacre of six hundred disarmed Italian and Spanish filibusters at Smerwick (November, 1580), and the poet of the "Faery Queen" was present at this abominable deed. It was neither without precedent nor imitation. Seventy years later David Leslie, urged on by a preacher, massacred the remnant of Montrose's Irish contingent at Dunaverty. Spenser himself in his most Interesting "View of the Present State of Ireland" says concerning the foreign prisoners, "there was no other way but to make that short way with them which was made". He defends Grey's ruthless policy; he had made Ireland "ready for reformation" when he was recalled, on the charge of being "a bloody man" who had left the country in ashes (1582). Grey was pursued by the clamour of a horrified people, that is, he was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, molested by the Blatant Beast, the public. The idea of the public is a Blatant Beast is borrowed from Plato.
It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that Spenser, acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war in Munster, wrote part of the "Faery Queen". He held public posts, was Clerk of Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, he received 3000 acres of land, and a ruinous castle of the Desmond family, Kilcolman, between Mallow and Limerick (1586).
Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he had the advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical literary society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, its satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conversation of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his friends the aim and scope of the "Faery Queen". Each virtue was to be incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it by example. In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, Spenser says that Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be a perfect exemplar of "the twelve private virtues". The Faery Queen herself is, first, Glory in general and next Gloriana, the royal and "most virtuous and beautiful" Queen Elizabeth, who also appears as Belphœbe. He is to begin in the middle, before telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs, and a palmer bearing an infant with bloody hands came seeking adventures to a festival of the Faery Queen. "Many other adventures are intermeddled."
The "Faery Queen" is not, and does not aim at being an epic. It is without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six books were not written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser was driven from Kilcolman.
The original scheme is that of the "Morte d'Arthur," moralized, and intermingled with allegory. The poem is an allegorical romance adapted to the state of England, Ireland, and the Continent under Elizabeth, and to the war of the Reformation against the dragon of Rome and the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills, the seeming fair and inwardly filthy Duessa, who is occasionally meant for Mary Stuart. Such unity as the poem possesses is given by the conflict of Good, as Spenser understood it, against Evil, private and public, the vices, and the Church of Rome. The Red Cross Knight wears the armour which St. Paul describes, and in which Bunyan equipped Christian and Greatheart.
There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue "sermoned at large, as they use". But while Spenser insists on being taken as a moral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, and it is the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with knights and ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". Like the knights in the "Morte d'Arthur" he "rides at adventure"; in every page a new adventure opens, and leads to others endlessly, through conflicts with Saracens,--Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy,--with the wily Magician, Archimage, and his glamour; with Despair, in a wonderful passage; with dragons and dragonettes, with Acrasia and all the charms of her abode of wanton bliss, which is depicted with great enthusiasm (Book II, Canto XII). This canto is remote indeed from the puritan taste, despite its moral ending
Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind, But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind.
The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of Circe in the Tenth book of the "Odyssey," and it is curious to compare the severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless luxury of the Italian Renaissance in Spenser.
The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, which is perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is a garden of endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for there is a perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing is constant but the long and ever-varying music of the verse, Spenser's own measure, in which each stanza is a poem, while the strong stream of melody carries the half-dreaming reader down the enchanted river, and forth into the fairy seas.
The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the stanza may not be the best vehicle for narrative. But Spenser's stream does flow from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of Lotusland occasionally lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of the the reader. The stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens
One day, as they all three together went To the greene wood to gather strawberries, There chaunst to them'a dangerous accident: A Tigre forth out of the wood did rise,
narrates an accident as unexpected as dangerous! We cannot but be reminded of the "Swiss Family Robinson," and when Spenser makes Sir Calidore kill the tiger and cut off its head with a shepherd's crook, he is plainly overcome by "drowsihead".[2]
It is true that Spenser soon lost hold of his main allegory, and allegorized the moving events and some of the personages of his time. The gods, in Euripides, make a false Helen of clouds and sunbeams and for her the Trojans and Achæans war and die. So, in Spenser's poem, the witch makes a false Florimel of snow, informed by "a wicked spright" with burning eyes for the destruction of mankind, and the false Florimel is another form of the white witch, Mary Stuart. The affairs of Ireland, France, "Belge," and Spain appear in knightly or magical disguise in the procession of dissolving views; a pageant of the rivers of Ireland and England anticipates Drayton's "Polyolbion": the romance becomes, like "Piers Plowman," a farrago of all that is in the poet's mind.
Of Spenser, Ben Jonson might have said, as of Shakespeare, Sufflaminandus erat, "he needed to have the drag put on". Like Pindar in youth, "he sowed from the sack, not from the hand". His archaic words and unsuccessful imitations of archaic words annoyed the critics of his time more than they vex us. If he "writ no language," "writ the language of no time," as Ben Jonson said, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," too, are in the language of no time, represent no one dialect that ever was actually spoken. But Spenser was writing about no actual time: his own age is confused with the fairy age of chivalry, and the ages of the "Morte d'Arthur," and of Greek mythology. With Spenser we are "out of space, out of time," and of his adoration of Chaucer, his ancient words keep us in mind. That great and noble effort towards perfection, the spirit of chivalry, was his ideal; and in Sir Philip he saw the last of the gentle and perfect knights. To the flattery of Elizabeth we must submit: she needed it all if to her subjects she was to, stand for England and their love of England.
Spenser's blemishes are of his age; no pure and perfect work of immaculate art could arise in a poetry which was only emerging from a kind of chaos, too much learning being the successor of too much ignorance, and a divine genius being left at large with no control from sane and temperate criticism.
Somewhat eclipsed by the new star of Elizabeth's fresh favourite, Essex, Raleigh visited his Irish lands in 1589, met Spenser, read the "Faery Queen" in manuscript, and brought "Colin Clout Home again". The poem of that name (1591) while full of sugared compliments to Elizabeth, is also touched with satire of her new courtiers. Sidney was dead, Leicester was dead, Burleigh "hated poetry and painting". The first part of the "Faery Queen" (1590) had made Spenser famous, but had won him no prize of Court favour save a small pension.
His "Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and the Fox" may have been written earlier and now was published; in this the satire is much more keen; the poet finds even "the Comic Stage defaced and vulgarized, in his 'Tears of the Muses,' where "our pleasant Willy that is dead of late," cannot conceivably be Shakespeare--the silence of John Lyly may be intended.
When Spenser returned to Ireland a collection of his miscellaneous poems was published, containing, among other things, "Mother Hubberd's Tale," "The Tears of the Muses," "The Ruines of Rome" (sonnets from the French of Joachim du Bellay).
The "Ruines of Time," dedicated to "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," Lady Pembroke, begins with a vision of the genius of the ruined Roman city, Verulam, and in a far-off way reminds us of the Anglo-Saxon poem on the Ruined City. There is a lament for the fall of ancient empires, and the sorrows of the House of Dudley.
Spenser's mood was that of melancholy and disappointment, presently cheered by his marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. From his love came his sonnets, and his matchless "Epithalamion," his "love-learned song". If the "Faery Queen," and all else that Spenser did were lost, the "Epithalamion" and the "Prothalamion" would win for him the crown of the chief of English poets before Shakespeare. The marriage occurred in June, 1594: then troubles with the Irish whom he had supplanted, or some other cause, sent him to England, with the last three books of his romance. The affair of Duessa's treatment caused James VI to remonstrate through Bower, the English ambassador to Holyrood, and though the poet was not punished, his designs may not have been advanced. He now published his Hymns to Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, the latter under the influence of Plato, and his "Prothalamion" for the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset. These splendid poems were his swan-song; Ireland called him, and in October, 1598, the natives whom he had despoiled drove him from Kilcolman, which they burned. Spenser died, a ruined man, in Westminster (16 January, 1599), Essex paid for his funeral, he lies in Westminster Abbey.
As Hephæstus, when he fashioned the arms of Achilles, melted bronze and gold and silver in his furnace, so Spenser combined the wealth of Greece and Italy, France, Rome, and England in the great crucible of his genius. In the "Epithalamium," for example, we find a translation of four lines from a sonnet of Ronsard, mingling with notes from Theocritus and the Song of Songs, with all the beautiful things of all the creeds. It would, perhaps, be unfair to call the style of Spenser, as it appears in the "Faery Queen," "Corinthian". Yet the metal in which he works is like that "Corinthian bronze" formed, at the conflagration of the city, from the molten gold and silver and copper of the sacred vessels and images of the gods. The spoils of all old poetry are mingled with his own. He has been called "the poets' poet"; his successors have taken from him his very tones. As has been said well, when Spenser writes--
Scarcely had Phœbus in the glowing East Yet harnessëd his fiery-footed team,
that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of "Romeo and Juliet".
And taking usury of time forepast Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights,
that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets.
Many an Angel's voice Singing before the eternal Majesty For their triune triplicities on high:
that is the younger voice of Milton.
And ever and anon the rosy red Flasht thro' her face,
one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.[3]
English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried and forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till Thomson revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, and English poetry came fully to her own again when the magic book of Spenser was opened by Keats.
[1] A well-known diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth, Harry Killigrew, is said to have been "a Holbein in oils".
[2] On this and on the more than mediaeval size of "The Faery Queen," see Mr. Mackail's "Springs of Helicon," pp. 132-28.
[3] Mackail, "Springs of Helicon," pp. 90, 91.
XIX. THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AND PLAYWRIGHTS
The rejoicing age of Elizabeth was fond of "variety entertainments". The Court Masques, such as those of Lyly, and George Peele's "Arraignment of Paris," abounded in songs, music, and dancing, and were expensively furnished. The Universities had their own amateur authors and performers. The "children" of St. Paul's and other schools acted so naturally that, as we read in "Hamlet," they became serious rivals of the professional actors.[1] "An aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for it, these are now the fashion". Polonius indicates the many sorts of plays, "tragedy, comedy, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individual, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy or Plautus too light." From authors of the heavy Senecan school came blank verse: "the light people" continued, when Shakespeare wrote "Love's Labour's Lost," to employ rhymes in many measures; till Peele, and above all Marlowe, introduced a more free and varied and accomplished blank verse. The general taste turned from many imitations of the ponderous Seneca to plays of more freedom, but even moralities and interludes of the old sort continued to be played in the age of the Shakespearean drama.
There were countless troops of players, vagabonds in the eyes of the law--those who held no licence from a noble (as "the Earl of Leicester's men," "the Admiral's men," and many others), "hardly scaped whipping". In "Ratsei's Ghoaste" a company of strollers, Bottoms and Snugs, stage-stricken, are licensed by a highwayman. They acted where they could, mere "barnstormers," mainly in the yards of inns, under the galleries.
The City was puritanic, or, at all events, was adverse to the nuisance caused by crowds of roisterers and hangers-on of the theatre, and by 1577 James Burbage built his theatre beyond the municipal bounds, in Shoreditch. The Curtain and the Fortune were in the same region. Southwark, south of the river, a noisy quarter, gave hospitality to the Rose, and, in 1599, to the Globe, built by Burbage's son, the famous Richard, Shakespeare's friend.
The Diary of Philip Henslowe, who financed players and authors, among his other enterprises, contains the jottings of this avaricious and uneducated patron. There were many small "private theatres," which had a scrambling existence.
The pit was unseated, and open to the rain and sun, the galleries above were less uncomfortable. The noble and wealthy sat in galleries round the pit, or on the stage, which was covered over or partly covered from the air. The arras, or tapestry hangings, concealed the prompter--and Polonius in "Hamlet". Scenes in bedrooms were at the back, and when such a scene closed, the hangings fell over it. There was no scene-shifting, as with us, pasteboard rocks and trees were easily moved about. A painted frame with a name over it in large letters, stood for town-gate, and for the town.[2]
There were no women actors, boys took women's parts till the Restoration.
Such clowns, dancers, singers, and practical jokers as Tarleton and Kemp, and such actors as held shares in their theatres, made good livelihoods. The authors, who sold them dramas for a sum down, and had no more profit from them in any way, were paid sums ranging from £6 to £20: according to modern rate of purchasing power from £50 to £160. The play then became the property of the speculator, like Henslowe, or manager, or company of authors, which had paid for it. Robert Greene, the celebrated literary man of whom we have to speak presently, was accused of selling a copy of a play to one company, and then, when that company went "on tour" through provincial towns, of selling another copy to another company. "He was very capable of having it happen to him." When any speculator or company had once bought a play, they could hand it over to any author with orders to alter it as he pleased. This was annoying to the first author or authors, for sometimes two men, sometimes three, sometimes five or six would combine to make a play. The consequence is that modern critics spend much time and ink in trying to discover which author wrote each part of a comedy or tragedy, and how much of the original work of the first author, or authors, was kept in a play which, perhaps, Shakespeare himself took up and re-wrote.
We have no space for such discussions, which seldom lead to any certain conclusions, but we must remember that the actors much objected to the printing of any plays which they owned, for, once printed, it was not easy to prevent other companies from acting them. But publishers sent shorthand reporters to take down the words during the performance, and wild work they often made of it. These printed plays, small cheap square volumes or "quartoes," may be very correct or very incorrect copies of the author's words; some of Shakespeare's quartos are good texts, some are execrable.
The playwrights were usually young men who had been at one of the Universities, and had picked up all that they could learn of the newest French and Italian literature, ideas, and manners. They were very scornful of play writers who, like Kyd, Shakespeare, and even Ben Jonson, far more learned than any of them, had not been at Oxford or Cambridge. The pamphlets of the University men tell us much of the little we know about their rivals, often their betters, who had not studied at Oxford or Cambridge.
John Lyly.
From the University wits whose plays preluded to Shakespeare, John Lyly (?1554-1606) of Magdalen, Oxford, stands a little apart. He wrote dramas to be acted before the maiden Queen by the boy singers of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's. Unlike some of his brethren, he remembered the reverence due to boys and virgins, and his pieces are remarkable for delicacy of tone, while the refined and romantic sentiment, the pure and hopeless passion of his "Endymion," for example, and the style of the prose in his dialogue, are all in the manner of his "Euphues". When he aimed at broad mirth, he was not broad enough or facetious enough to be amusing. His characters usually, as in "Endymion" and "The Woman in the Moon," are the gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines of classical mythology, but their manners are those of the Court of Elizabeth, though more refined.
Allegory on events of the day is suspected of lurking in the plays: Cynthia, for example, has always some complimentary reference to Elizabeth. "Mother Bombie" is not a successful essay in low comedy: "Campaspe," a love story of the Court of Alexander the Great (where Plato finds himself, somehow), is quite a pretty approach, as is "Galatea," towards the romantic comedy; but in Shakespeare's early "Love's Labour's Lost" we see that, at the first attempt, he far surpassed his predecessor. Puns, alliteration, and anecdotes of unnatural history are nearly as prevalent in the plays as in the "Euphues" of Lyly. Several of his songs are pretty; some of his scenes of love-making when the lady, though coy, is willing to be won, are graceful, and the prose of the dialogue, conceits apart, is lucid and in good taste. His blank verse in "The Woman in the Moon," is not specially characteristic.
Peele.
George Peele would have a far better claim than Kyd to the title of "sporting" if there were even a little truth in the tract about him called "Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman"; while to the title of "gentleman" he would have no moral pretensions. The jests are rough and far from honest practical jokes, but the author had some knowledge of Peele's position as a director of pageants and masques. There is no smoke without fire, and the contemporary stories of the "Bohemian" life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University wits connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely be baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire: he was born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates Hall, now Dr. Johnson's college of Pembroke in Oxford, took his Bachelor's degree about 1577, his Master's in 1579.
His "Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 1589), he probably wrote at Oxford. It is a pocket epic, and summary of the Trojan war--based partly on the "Iliad," partly on the later Ionian legends, as of Palamedes, and the love of Achilles for Polyxena, daughter of Priam. By 1581 Peele was in London. In 1584 his "Arraignment of Paris" was published; it was acted in that year before Elizabeth by the "children" of the Chapel Royal. It is strange sport for ladies, and Mrs. Quickly might have said, "You do ill to teach the child such words". The piece in which Paris is arraigned for giving the apple to Venus, is a pastoral written in a variety of rhymed metres, with some speeches in creditable blank verse: there is a pretty song,
Fair, and fair, and twice as fair, And fair as any may be.
At the close Diana presents the famous apple, with the assent of Venus, Juno, and Pallas, to Queen Elizabeth. Peele also arranged pageants for the Lord Mayor, and wrote (1593) a "Chronicle History of Edward I," a play based on an absurd ballad about the profligacy and fabulous cruelty of Eleanor, the worthy Queen of "Longshanks". Friar David ap Tuck provides a comic part, in prose. John Baliol, King of Scotland, brags and submits in blank verse: the best of the blank verse is assigned to the wicked Eleanor: the lines are not usually "stopped" in the stiff old style.
In 1593 Peele also wrote his "Honour of the Garter," a poetic vision of "lovely knights" of old days. The Prologue contains a lament for Marlowe,
the Muses' darling for thy verse, Fit to write passions for the souls below.
"The Old Wives' Tale" is thought to have suggested a poem very unlike it, Milton's "Comus". The date of Peele's "David and Bathsheba," "a remain of the fashion of Scripture plays," is uncertain (published in 1599). This is the best of Peele's extant work, and the blank verse is not unworthy of Marlowe. David says of the dead Absalom--
touch no hair of him, Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds Delight to play, and love to make it curl, Wherein the nightingales would build their nests, And make sweet bowers in every golden tress, To sing their lover every night to sleep.
With Peele and Marlowe we are coming close to the perfection of the verse of Shakespeare. Peele died in 1597(?); two years earlier he was poor and in sickness. Probably some of his plays are lost; the "Battle of Alcazar" is but doubtfully assigned to him. Peele cannot have taught Shakespeare much: though he greatly improved blank verse, he only proves that spectators were not intolerant of real poetry in plays.
Greene.
Robert Greene was a Norwich man (born about 1560), the son of parents of substance; at St. John's College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1578. Norwich was a puritan town, but the indulgence of Greene's mother, as he tells us, enabled him to make the Italian tour, probably between 1578 and 1580,
An Englishman that is Italianate Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
said the proverb, and Greene, a man greatly given to fits of repentance, describes his dissipations much as St. Augustine describes his own. At all events he learned Italian and could borrow from novels in that language. He lived among "wags as loose as myself," both in Italy and London. Neither the effects of a rousing sermon nor an early marriage (1585, 1586) to a wife with whom he soon parted company could withdraw Greene from the bottle and his wild comrades. He was the conventional "gentleman of the press," living by a very rapid pen, "yarking up a pamphlet" with unprecedented speed, says Nash, and his wares, we learn, were well paid. He had also many noble patrons, at least he dedicated his "love pamphlets," romances in the manner of Lyly, to many ladies. They are pure in tone, and his favourite female character is a chaste and long-suffering Patient Grizel, like Enid in the Welsh "Mabinogion," and Enid in the "Idylls of the King". Between 1583 and 1589 he wrote at least eight of those love stories and pamphlets, including "Euphues, his Censure to Philautus," and, as five were dedicated to ladies of rank, they were probably of the sort which women enjoyed. Later he was either remorseful, or affected remorse, for his way of living, and turned his experience of the town to use, in tracts on "Cosenage" and "Cony-catching," exposures of the devices of courtesans, usurers, and other harpies.
His "Repentance," and his "Groatsworth of Wit" (1592), with the notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last efforts. The "Groatsworth of Wit" describes the jealousies between the playwrights and the actors, who, then as always, gained most of the popularity, and then gained most of the money yielded by the stage. It is almost impossible for unbiased readers to avoid detecting in Greene's "Johannes Factotum," "the only Shake-scene in the country," an allusion to Shakespeare. Whether he partook too freely of pickled herrings and Rhine wine, as gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness, and died in debt to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592.
Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even according to Nash he was a "ruffler". "Penning of plays," Greene says, was his "continual exercise," but at what date he began it is uncertain. He appears to have been stung by some comment in a play by two other authors on the unfashionable character of his own dramas, "for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins"; that is, apparently, he did not try to write the sonorous blank verse of Marlowe; or tried and failed to produce in Nash's words "the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse".
If "Alphonsus, King of Arragon" be his first play, as it gives Tamburlaine on a small scale it may have been suggested by Marlowe's drama: however Alphonsus, after Napoleonic victories, marries his own true love, the daughter of the Sultan and Greene's play, like the tragedies preferred by Charles II, "ends happily". The blank verse is inferior to that of the Ninevite play in which Lodge took part, "A Looking Glass for London and England".
"Orlando Furioso" is a strange medley; there is prose, blank verse, and even a speech in Latin: the materials are drawn, of course, from Ariosto; the Paladins deal enormously in classical allusions.
In "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward I, falls in love with a gamekeeper's daughter, and describes her charms in blank verse, and in a very pretty pastoral manner. By the old trick of novels and of the stage he sends Lacie, a courtier, to woo for him (as in "Much Ado about Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the usual consequences follow.
The Friars Bacon and Bungay are shown at their pranks, with a devil, and Lacie, "in country apparel," flirts with the keeper's daughter in talk of Apollo's courtship of Semele (mother of Dionysus by Zeus). The king beholds their courtship by dint of crystal-gazing; while they are also on the stage.
The plot becomes extremely complicated, and poor Margaret, the keeper's daughter, has to play the patient Grizel to Lacie. She is cruelly treated, but marries Lacie in the end, while Edward pairs off with Eleanor. The servant of Friar Bacon, Miles, and a devil provide some comic matter. The blank verse is now much more accomplished, and imitates the cadences of Marlowe.
The play of "James IV" is so absurdly unhistorical (it transfers the plot of an Italian novel by Cinthio to the Court of Holyrood), that it can hardly be read with patience, but Greene's sweet, patient, long-enduring heroine, Dorothea, appears again, in the part historically filled by a very different person, Margaret Tudor, whose passion for being alternately married (finally to "Lord Muffin") and divorced, was rebuked by her brother, Henry VIII, himself no model of constancy. Greene introduced and Shakespeare continued the practice of taking plots for romantic comedies, (such as "As You Like It") from Italian novels; and, like Shakespeare, he is the poet of good women, "the Homer of women," as his friend Nash said with hyperbole of compliment.
Lodge.
The Memoirs of Thomas Lodge, had he left them to us, would be of more interest than are his writings. He "had an oar in every paper-boat," says the Cambridge satirist in the play, "The Return from Parnassus," but he had oars in other boats that were not of paper. Born about 1558, he was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, an eminent grocer. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, being by one academic generation junior to Lyly. Going to the Inns of Court, London, he answered Gosson's attack on poetry, "The School of Abuse," in an abusive style very unlike that of Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy". He and Barnaby Rich (the supposed author of a most vivacious translation of two books of Herodotus), were friends, and wrote commendatory verses, each for the other's work (1581).
If in his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), Lodge is speaking from his personal experience, he already knew "the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment," thanks to the expensive acquaintance of "Mrs. Minx," and long bills due to his tailor. He warns the young against the temptations of the town, at tedious length and with overabundance of classical allusions. In an unreadable romance (1584) (Lyly's "Euphues" being the model), "Forbonius and Prisceria," he inserts many not unreadable verses.
"Glaucus and Scilla" is a work of the same genre as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas of six lines.
"Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences"
says Lodge, and his tale is too prolix, verbose, and full of "delayes". There are harmonious cadences, and pretty descriptions, but Lodge's poetic vein is best in his brief lyrics. He found time, on sea or land, to write "Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy". This contains the tale which Shakespeare made immortal by transfiguring it in "As You Like It". The vagrant and affected prolixity of this kind of story had a popularity that endured for a century, and surprises us as much as our popular novels will doubtless astonish future generations. Such as the style was, Lodge had mastered it, and redeemed it by the intercalated verses. "Rosalynde" had vogue, and Lodge, who had set forth on a freebooting expedition with young Thomas Cavendish, wrote probably the only novel, "A Margarite of America" (1596), ever composed in the frosty Straits of Magellan. His next novel was "Euphues's Shadow," the euphuism of the shadow is equal to that of the substance. His play, "A Looking Glass for London and England," written in collaboration with Greene, was acted in 1592. We are introduced to Rasni, King of Nineveh, with three Kings of Cilicia, Crete, and Paphlagonia, returning from the overthrow of Jeroboam, King of Jerusalem..
Greene and Lodge are magnificently disdainful of local colour. The Cilician King, in very sonorous blank verse, proclaims the Assyrian monarch to be more beautiful than Hyacinthus and Endymion, personages of Greek mythology. Oseas the prophet, brought in by an angel, listens to an angelic harangue of some thirty lines, and tersely replies: "The will of the Lord be done!" To him enter "Clown and a crew of Ruffians," and we have several pages of humours in prose; mainly the talk is of ale and horses. After a prolonged and chaotic performance, Nineveh repents under the preaching of Jonah, and these amiable moralists, Greene and Lodge, bid London go and do likewise. That the blank verse is not bad, and that the satire of Rasni's flatterers may be a hit at the adulators of Elizabeth, is the best that can be said for this Scriptural drama. After all it is not so tedious as Lodge's play from Roman history, "The Wounds of Civil War".
It is needless to speak of such mere hackwork as his books on William Longbeard and Robert the Devil, but his "Fig for Momus," satires in rhyming heroic couplets, accredit him, contrary to the boast of Joseph Hall, as the first English satirist.
Not popular in literature, Lodge (1600) turned physician, taking his M.D. degree at Avignon. Now he really flourished, and was in good practice, till his death in 1625. His reputation rests on his lyrics; for the advance of the drama he did nothing.
Nash.
With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, or Nashe, made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the history of Elizabethan literature. The son of "William Nash, minister" (not improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk in November, 1567. The Christian names of his brothers and sisters, Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are of the Biblical sort favoured by "the Brethren".
Nash made no claim to the title "gentleman" then used in the heraldic sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar" (at Oxford "servitor") or Lady Margaret's Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, and was in residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 he was in London, a literary hack, employed, for example, to write an "Introduction" to Greene's "Menaphon". He addresses the students of both Universities in his irrepressibly rattling way, and it is hardly possible to doubt that in a long passage he rails at the unfortunate Kyd in his capacities as playwright and translator from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed contemporary literature and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings of Gabriel Harvey.
With him Nash later had a war of pamphlets, the best known is "Have with You to Saffron Walden," containing a full answer to the eldest son of the Halter-maker (1596). The pamphlets are only of interest for their personal hints: the feud arose from a slighting allusion by Greene to Harvey's parentage ("Quip for an Upstart Courtier"). Nash took up the cudgels (as his weapons of wit may be called) for Greene; Harvey pursued Greene's memory beyond the tomb, and Government at last put an end to the publication of the pamphlets.
Nash and Marlowe worked together at the play of "Dido," mainly based on the "Æneid" of Virgil, with an opening scene in un-Virgilian bad taste, and highly unedifying to the players, "the Children of her Majesty's Chapel The play is in blank verse, usually better than Nash's own in his "Summer's Last Will and Testament". Much of this is in Nash's hasty prose; a blank verse tirade in praise of dogs is amusing:--
To come to speech, they have it questionless, Although we understand them not so well, They bark as good old Saxon as may be.
In 1597, Nash was imprisoned for a play "The Isle of Dogs".
It is impossible to enumerate his tracts, of which his turbulent prose satire, "Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil," is the most spirited. His "Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton" (1594) is a crude anticipation of "Gil Blas," and the novel of unscrupulous wandering adventurers, and contains the feigned story of the loves of Surrey and his Geraldine, which was taken to be historical. Nash lived a scrambling life, a bookseller's hack, destitute of patrons, and died about 1601. For the advance of the drama, despite his play-writing, Nash did nothing.
Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe is happily on the right side of the line which separates poets who may be read from poets who must be written about. He was born on 6 February, 1564, being the son of an eminent shoemaker at Canterbury. He was educated at the King's School of that city, where he held a little scholarship of a pound, quarterly, and went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with one of the scholarships founded there for Canterbury boys by Archbishop Parker (1581). In 1584 he took his Bachelor's degree, being a contemporary of Nash and Greene, and three years later put on his Master's gown. His translations of Ovid's "Amores" may have been executed at Cambridge; he did not publish them. His first public work was the first part of the play of "Tamburlaine," acted in 1587 or 1588. The drama, in both parts, is destitute of construction; the hero, Tamburlaine, "the scourge of God," merely overruns a vast extent of country, subduing kings, massacring maidens, and glutting his unbounded rage for universal conquest. His only human weakness is his passion for "divine Zenocratê," his wife, and he might be called a martyr to "megalomania," trampling on divine names no less than on the backs of Emperors. The scene in which he enters in his chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizond and Soria, bit in mouth, and cries:--
Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!
was matter of constant jest and parody, a proof of the popularity of the drama.
In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays, Marlowe was "a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with the thought of what man may achieve. "Nature," he makes Tamburlaine say,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all...
but after this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine sinks to finding felicity in "an earthly crown".
The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, places in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines on the aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful:--
If all the pens that poets ever held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds and muses on admired themes, If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.
This is the vision of beauty which haunts and evades Marlowe, as the shadow of the mother of Odysseus in Hades fades away from his embrace. Sometimes it appears to him
like women or unmarried maids, Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.
Again, in "Dr. Faustus," a new Tamburlaine who seeks the impossible in magic, not by arms, and sells his soul to the Adversary, the vision arises in the form of Helen of Troy, that ancient symbol of the World's Desire.
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium... Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
In this absolute perfection of the magic of verse, we see the true conquest of Marlowe: as in the agonies of the last hour of Faustus,
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight And burned is Apollo's Laurel Bough.
The last act is full of pity and of terror.
The dagger-thrust that slew Marlowe in a Deptford tavern, at the end of May, 1593, robbed English poetry of a genius whose future performance cannot be measured, nor can the form which it might have taken be guessed. The comic prose scenes in "Faustus" are very stupid and may perhaps be by another hand, but nothing in Marlowe indicates the gift of humour.
In "The Jew of Malta" Barabas, on a scale less disproportionate than Tamburlaine, represents immeasurable desire of wealth, not of royalty. In the earlier scenes the speeches of Barabas, with the recurrence of romantic and sonorous names, in a way remind us of Milton. The Jew, ill-treated as he is, is not allowed to be sympathetic, and the monstrosity of his crimes reminds the modern reader of Aytoun's "Firmilian": with a touch of the story of the Hunchback in the "Arabian Nights". Though Barabas has a beloved daughter, rapidly converted to Christianity, though his ducats and his daughter are all that he loves, he lags very far behind Shylock. The play was well calculated for popularity, but, save Barabas, it contains no character of marked merit.
"Edward II" has been much praised in modern times, and even preferred to the "Richard II" of Shakespeare. Neither King was a good subject for tragedy, though both endured the extremes of misfortune. But in Richard there were noble elements, debased by a long struggle with some of his uncles, and undermined by a period of absolute power. In Edward II we know nothing estimable, save a moment of princely valour when he was all but taken at Bannockburn. His doting devotion to Piers Gaveston, who is well sketched by Marlowe, his intolerable insults to his Queen, place him quite beyond sympathy, till his awful last hours and appalling end. The instantaneous change of the Queen from a loving, forgiving, and intolerably wronged woman to a monster of cruel hypocrisy cannot be called artistic; and though the play, compared with Marlowe's other dramas, is "regular," and opens the path to what we may call the legitimate drama, without the monstrosities of "The Jew of Malta," it does not contain such surprising excellencies as occur in "Tamburlaine" and "Faustus". The noblest passage, the speech of the fallen King to Leicester, could scarcely come from the Edward of the earlier acts. The "Massacre of Paris" (the Bartholomew massacre of 1572) is of no importance among Marlowe's works.
If we could agree with his too fond biographer that Marlowe wrote the passages of "Henry VI," in which Jeanne d'Arc is worthy of herself, and that Shakespeare contributed the scandalous scenes of her debasement, we might regard Marlowe as a wonder of clear-sighted appreciation. But nothing in their works confirms this conjecture. What share, if any, Marlowe had in "Henry VI" and "Titus Andronicus," and precisely what Shakespeare did for both of these dramas is unknown. Marlowe's beautiful lyric, "Come live with me and be my Love," is for ever fragrant, and his "Hero and Leander" (stiffly finished by Chapman, it is said at Marlowe's own dying request) is at least the equal of, and may even be preferred by many readers to, the first fruits of Shakespeare's invention, "Venus and Adonis".
Shakespeare's "dead shepherd" did not die unlamented by his brother poets: he had patrons in Raleigh and Sir Thomas Walsingham, and it is not necessary to criticize here certain horrible libels on his life and conversation.[3]
Kyd.
The irony of chance, by a freak of Ben Jonson's, has attached to the most ill-fated of authors the name of "Sporting Kyd". Born about 1558 the son of a scrivener in the City, Kyd was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He was not a member of either University. It is by a piece of luck, for his biographers, that he was satirized by Nash as one who stole from a French translation of Seneca's tragedies; and so produced a play, "Pompey the Great, his fair Cornelia's Tragedie," one who "will afford you whole Hamlets," and who took up the business of translating from the Italian. By pursuing these and other sarcastic hints of Nash's, Kyd has been identified as the author of the most truly popular of early Elizabethan plays "The Spanish Tragedy"; of what the Germans call the "Ur-Hamlet," the oldest English Hamlet play; and the translator of "The Householder's Philosophic," in prose; while he is thought guiltless of the first part of "Jeronimo," a prelude, meant to be humorous, to his "Spanish Tragedy". To that work, again, additions were made, and Ben Jonson was paid for making them, though they are thought not to resemble his manner, and he frequently girds in his own later dramas at the popular "Spanish Tragedy". It is a long tissue of horrors and revenges in blank verse, old Hieronymo slowly pursuing the slayers of his son, Horatio, and contains, like "Hamlet," a play within a play, in which the actors in a fencing scene slay each other in earnest, to glut Hieronymo's revenge. As in "Hamlet" there is a ghost, but ghosts were common in the dramas of Seneca and his English imitators. Hieronymo, when apprehended, bites his tongue out, and stabs himself and a Duke who happens to be convenient in his neighbourhood.
If Kyd were really the author of the first play of "Hamlet," based on a Danish story which English actors who played in Germany in 1587 may have brought home, the fact would be interesting. If we only possessed a copy of this first "Hamlet," we should know how much, if anything at all, Shakespeare retained from the original play. Kyd is credited with being the first to show the change and development of characters under the sway of the events of the drama, though this can scarcely be proved save by a long comparison of all the characters in the plays of other writers. Grotesque as are his horrors, when we compare those of "Titus Andronicus" and of successors of Shakespeare who ought to have known better, we wonder at his moderation.
Kyd's end was lamentable. He was arrested, and tortured, in May, 1593, on suspicion of having written a placard threatening a massacre of undesirable aliens in London, who interfered with home industries. In his papers was found part of a perfectly serious though heterodox discourse on a theological topic, apparently intended to be submitted to a Bishop. He cleared himself of the placard, and, in a letter to Puckering, the Lord Keeper, said that he had the theological piece from Marlowe, that it was among his papers by accident, and that Marlowe, then just dead, was an evil man, and no friend of his.
Kyd now lost the patronage of a peer, unnamed, and by December in the following year he was dead; his family renounced the administration of what possessions he may have left behind him. He has of late been the subject of minute English and German research, like every one who had, or may have had, the faintest connexion with Shakespeare. The indecision of Hieronymo (Act III. scene 12) in revenging himself on Balthasar for slaying Horatio, Hieronymo's son, and hanging him up in Hieronymo's summer-house, has other motives than the indecision of Hamlet. But this indecision, and the play within the play, and Kyd's supposed authorship of the "Ur-Hamlet," which lies behind the First Quarto of "Hamlet," make Kyd interesting to critical specialists.
These predecessors of Shakespeare need to be mentioned, though perhaps only Marlowe's dramas are now commonly read by lovers of poetry. Though these men wandered in the wilderness, so to speak, they pointed out the way to Shakespeare, and made the world familiar with rude forecasts of the forms of the romantic comedy, the historical play, and the tragedy. Several wrote blank verse well, occasionally; Marlowe brought blank verse, not precisely dramatic, but rather reflective, to the highest beauty. Almost all the early dramatists also graced their plays with charming songs.
All of these early dramatists had that sweet and birdlike English note of song, "woodnotes wild," which (to an English ear) is rare in all but the early poetry of France. We have observed this note in the lyrics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Time did not stifle the music, it is prolonged in the fashionable love-romances and in the early dramas. Thus even Nash, the least poetical of his associates, has his
Adieu, farewell earth's bliss This world uncertain is,
which, with its refrain,
Lord, have mercy on us,
recalls Dunbar's lament
Timor Mortis conturbat me. Dust hath closed Helen's eye, Worms feed on Hector brave.
Where are the lovely knights and the ladies of old time?
Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure,
written in a time of pestilence, is another lament of Nash's, and
Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year.
Peele has
His golden locks hath time to silver turned,
and the beautiful song of Bethsabe at the bath,
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air.
Greene has his
Ah, what is love, it is a pretty thing, As sweet unto a shepherd as a king,
which is in the spirit of Burns's best songs of rural love; and his courtly love song with the French refrain,
N'oserez vous, mon bel ami!
and his Lullaby
Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee.
This has the charm of the folk-songs,
Old and plain, And dallying with the innocence of love.
It may also be said that, at the opposite pole, Greene's snatches of English hexameters are the best of their kind then written.
If nothing else Of Lyly's existed his
Cupid and my Campaspe played At cards for kisses--Cupid payed,
would keep his memory green.
Lodge has been blamed as a common plagiary because he translated so many of his lyrics, not always or often with due acknowledgment, from Des Portes and Ronsard. But in some cases he improved the land which he conquered, and his "Love in my bosom like a bee," "Down a down!" "Thus Phyllis sung," and "Pluck the fruit and taste the pleasures," are genuine additions to English song, and prelude to Shakespeare's, and the music of the coming generation.
All of the treasures of his predecessors are not equivalent or nearly equivalent to the small change of Shakespeare's genius. But the best things in his predecessors' work indicate that, in a favourite phrase of Aristotle, "Nature was wishing to make" a Shakespeare. Yet was the birth of his genius none the less a miracle. He did much more than combine all that was good in all the others. He added that which is universal and eternal.
Shakespeare.
Concerning the life of William Shakspere (as he signed it), or Shakespeare (as his name was usually spelled), only a few essential facts are known from records of his own time, mainly documents concerning the legal affairs of himself, his family, and the theatrical company with which he was connected. Unlike many of the contemporary playwrights he was not a member of either University, and so college records about him are necessarily absent: and there is no contemporary roll of names of pupils at the school of his native place, Stratford-on-Avon.
Again, he was not a pamphleteer or journalist, like Nash, Greene, and others, and so he left no account of his friendships and enmities; no prose books about his opinions on art and literature, like Ben Jonson; he wrote no satirical plays, as Ben did, full of angry, contemptuous, and envious attacks on his rivals, and on the actors. As he was no learned scholar, the Universities never dreamed of making him, like Ben Jonson, a Master of Arts. People who wrote criticisms of poetry in prose or verse always spoke highly of him: one, John Davies, remarks that, in the opinion of some, had he not been an actor, he would have been fit company for Kings. But anecdotes of him were not sought for till all who had known him had long been dead. His own dramas contain a few topical allusions, and his sonnets appear to be more or less autobiographical, though to what degree, as in the case of Sidney's sonnets, is matter of dispute. He took almost no part in any public services, and in these circumstances little is known of his life, despite the painful researches of many learned students, and the wildest modern conjectures.
Concerning even the paternal grandfather of the poet, presumed to have been Richard Shakespeare, a farmer at Snitterfield, within four miles of Stratford-on-Avon, we have little more than probable presumptions. Richard's son John, father of the poet, in 1551 set up in business at Stratford-on-Avon, then a town of some 1500 inhabitants. He was a dealer in agricultural commodities; Aubrey, the antiquary, a century later, heard that he was a butcher. But the trade of a butcher in a tiny town is not lucrative, yet by 1556 he could buy two tenements, one in Henley Street, next door to the so-called "Birthplace". He held a succession of municipal offices, and was one of two chamberlains of town accounts. In 1557 (?) he married Mary Arden, a daughter of a far away branch of a good family; she inherited fifty acres of land and a house at Wilmcote, and other property. After the birth of children who died young, came William, baptized on 26 April, 1564. His father, still prospering, was chief magistrate in 1568: that year came licensed play-actors to Stratford--"The Queen's," and "The Earl of Worcester's". But after 1572 the affairs of the father turned gradually to the worse; he mortgaged the property near Wilmcote in 1578; he fell into debt, and in 1586 ceased to be an alderman. His family had increased while his fortunes declined.
As there was a free Grammar School at Stratford, it is natural to suppose that William was educated there from his seventh or eighth to his thirteenth year. If so, he would learn Latin grammar, and read more or less in the popular classics, including, "old Mantuan"--not Virgil, but a writer of the Italian Renaissance. Supposing Shakespeare to have left school at thirteen, he was at the age of Bacon when he went up to Cambridge. Books have been written about the learning or want of learning of Shakespeare. In all probability he could make out most of the meaning of a Roman writer of comedies, like Plautus, or of a philosopher like Seneca. But his use of English translations, whenever he could get them, does not look as if he read Latin with ease: he could ask a friend or pay a poor scholar to help him when he had no translations; and to Ben Jonson his Latin seemed "small," because Ben had so much scholarship, and was so proud of it. All general information Shakespeare acquired as easily as he drew breath. Of schoolmasters, judging from allusions in the plays, he entertained the same opinion as Sir Walter Scott. The classics are most in view in his early plays, in some of which he worked over an earlier manuscript by a more scholarly hand. Moreover classical allusions, mythological and historical, lay loose on the surface of all contemporary literature; and abounded in the conversation of the wits.[4] No man ever cared less for historical accuracy and correct "local colour" than Shakespeare: he piled up anachronisms, making Aristotle live before the Trojan war.
When not yet 19 years of age, at the close of 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who had the same dowry, in money (£6. 13s. 4d.) as his mother. She was seven or eight years older than he: their first child was born at the end of May, 1583, and the circumstances did not promise domestic happiness. Twins, Hamnet (who died young) and Judith, were born in 1585, and whether Shakespeare did, or did not get into trouble for poaching on the lands of Lucy of Charlecote (against whom his heraldic ridicule, in "Merry Wives," Act I, Scene I, indicates a grudge), it was time for him to seek his fortune. Perhaps he made ventures near home (Aubrey, who knew an old actor that had traditions, says he was a schoolmaster), but by 1587 he was probably "hanging loose on the town" in London. Here he had a fellow townsman, Field, who later printed his "Venus," and his "Lucrece". The story that Shakespeare held the horses of playgoers outside the doors of a theatre comes late into literary anecdote.
By 1594 (perhaps by 1592) Shakespeare was a member of the Company of Actors known successively as "Leicester's," "Derby's" (died 1592) "Hunsdon's" (Carey) and, at the accession of James VI and I (1603) "The King's". With him were the great Richard Burbage, John Heminge, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips. By this Company all his plays were first acted. By 1592 they used the Rose Theatre, and others, and in 1599 the Globe. There is no proof that Shakespeare ever played in Scotland (he could not pronounce Dunsinane, and accentuated the final syllable) or abroad.
From the moment of his departure from Stratford nothing is certainly known of Shakespeare, till the dying Greene apparently alludes to him in "A groat's worth of wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592). Adjuring his comrades (Nash, Peele, and Marlowe?), to forswear sack and the stage, Greene seems to remind them of a hardship in their professional position: the rewriting of plays, once sold, by other hands. A new hand might alter it for the owners, the hand might be that of an actor, one of the "puppets," says Greene, "that speak from our mouths.... There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his 'Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute 'Johannes factotum'" (jack-of-all-work) "is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.... It is a pity men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes."
If, as has been suggested (there is no certainty), a piece called "Henry VI" (part I), played by Shakespeare's company in March, 1592, was an older drama "bombasted" by Shakespeare, and if his conduct was one cause of Greene's wrath, we can only regret that Shakespeare set his hand to a work that rejoiced English patriots. The author or authors represent Jeanne d'Arc in two totally different characters, now as a patriot, equally brave, self-sacrificing, and eloquent; now as a loose woman who denies her father, and asserts her pregnancy by one or other of several lovers. History is strangely treated, and the materials must have been taken from Anglo-Burgundian scandals, and from a curious French prose chronicle romance, obviously done into prose out of verse, the "Chronique de Lorraine". This appears to have been the source of the scenes in which Jeanne fights at Rouen, many years after her martyrdom in 1431.
Shakespeare may have "written in" the scenes where Jeanne acts and speaks like herself; the others (let us hope so!) may be by a baser hand. The second and third parts of "Henry VI," were later much altered, probably by Shakespeare; the scenes with Jack Cade are entirely in his manner.
As we have not the original manuscripts, we are often unable to distinguish, in Shakespeare's earlier works, between what is his own and what belongs to a play by an earlier hand, or by a collaborator. The tendency of criticism is to attribute the best passages to Shakespeare and to guess at the authors of what is not so good.
The dates especially of the early plays are far from certain. But we can hardly be mistaken in thinking "Love's Labour's Lost" a very early example of the poet's play-writing. He has not mastered blank verse: the sense usually ends with the end of each line; much of the play is written in rhymed verse of various metres: prose is comparatively little used. Some of the personages, as Biron and Longueville, are of the contemporary Court of Henry of Navarre, a most unlikely person to contemplate seclusion from female society! The play, of which the plot seems to be Shakespeare's own,[5] is full of promise of good things to come. Biron will blossom into Benedick, Costard and Jaquenetta into Touchstone and Audrey; the ladies are predecessors of the poet's many ladies, as Beatrice and Rosalind, who are merry when in love. We have the stock figure of the pedant schoolmaster in Holofernes, of the fantastic talker in Armado, and the songs, "On a day, Alack the day," and "When daisies pied and violets blue," prelude to all the enchantments of Shakespeare's lyrics. The play was revised and worked over in 1598 (?).
"Titus Andronicus" (certainly extant in 1594) is the play which Burns and his brothers, in boyhood, declined to listen to; it is as full of horrors as an Assyrian bas-relief of the torturing of prisoners of war. Tortures were familiar, in practice, to the subjects of Elizabeth, and the horrors are not worse than those of ancient Athenian and other Greek legendary histories. But neither these things nor the over-abundance of pedantic classical allusions are in Shakespeare's mature taste. Much of the play has been guessed at as the work of "Sporting Kyd," and a fairly old tradition (published in 1678) says that Shakespeare only touched it up. Long ago Hallam remarked that criticism might come to be as dubious as to Shakespeare's precise share in the plays, as, after Wolf (1795) she has been uncertain about Homer's part in his epics. It is clear and certain that plays, when Shakespeare came to the town, were often altered and added to by others than the original authors. Though "Titus Andronicus" was, in 1598, assigned to Shakespeare by Francis Meres, and was included in the first collected edition, the Folio, in 1623, he may, perhaps, have been the last and, as the most popular, the titular bearbeiter, or worker-over of the drama.
"Richard III" could scarcely be made to feed more full of horrors on the stage than that prince actually did, as reported by Holinshed, and the play, if inflated, is less so than Marlowe's "Tamburlaine". Marlowe's "Edward II," again, had its influence on "Richard II," a perilous play to be concerned with, from the scene of deposing the king, under the irritable Elizabeth. Acted by order of the Essex conspirators, in 1601, it brought Shakespeare's company under the momentary displeasure of the Queen.
The third Richard has all the elements of popularity. He is as hideous as the second Richard was effeminately beautiful, as resolute as his predecessor was weak. It is well that a dramatist should make himself plainly understood, but Shakespeare seems to play with his own art when the splendid rhetoric of Richard III reveals (he soliloquizes more than Hamlet) the cause why he is "determined to prove a villain"--his spite against the world for his own deformity,--and why he is determined to be a hypocrite,
With odd old ends stolen forth of Holy Writ.
The scene of the wooing of the Lady Anne, and the dream of Clarence, are among the most familiar passages in English poetry, and the second is rich in the magic of Shakespeare's blank verse. The wavering character of Richard II, ever in extremes of confident arrogance and of sudden dread, like that of Agamemnon, would not have seemed to Aristotle fit for a hero of tragedy. But in memorable passages of poetry, single lines that, once read, can never be forgotten, the play is rich, and such lines are the mark and sign manual of Shakespeare's genius. "The real Shakespeare cannot help showing himself here and there; and then we are in the presence of something new--of a kind of English poetry that no one has hit upon before...."[6]
It is in "Romeo and Juliet," and the "Midsummer Night's Dream," both relatively early pieces, even more than in the chronicle plays, that this ever-present magic of genius, the unequalled command of beautiful fresh phrases, the hurrying rush of exquisite ideas, first shines out most conspicuously: the youth of passion in the Romeo, and the soul of romance, are accompanied by the gay wit of glorious Mercutio and the lax humours of the Nurse and the servants. Shakespeare was compelled to kill Mercutio by Tybalt's sword, otherwise a character so congenial to him would have run away with the play, and turned the tragedy into comedy. Shakespeare, says Ben Jonson, "had an excellent phantasy" (fancy), "brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with such facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." Mercutio could only be stopped by a sword thrust! The "Midsummer Night's Dream" is the enchanted consummation of the world-wide fairy belief, relieved against the rustic comedy of Bottom and Snug.
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona," like "Love's Labour's Lost," is a bud full of promise. Launce is as delightfully humorous as Silvia is gay and charming, and Julia is the first of the ladies in page's guise and deep in love; but "Romeo and Juliet," and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" are already nonpareils, full-blown roses that time cannot wither.
The "Comedy of Errors," based on Plautus, with the farcical errors of indistinguishable identities in the masters, reduplicated in the servants, would add by its broad farce to Shakespeare's popularity, though not to his fame. But in "The Merchant of Venice" the blending of moral tragedy in the sombre character of the outraged Jew, Shylock, combined with the delightful and tender romance of the lovers, proved the multifarious versatility of the poet, his power in the delineation of the most various moods and passions, and also the unequalled magic of his verse.
On such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love To come again to Carthage.
Here Virgil is equalled or surpassed in the province where Virgil was greatest; in the use of words that by some inexplicable art suggest more than they seem to say, filling the mind with vague and potent emotion, and a longing not to be appeased, as does the beauty of twilight and moonlight.
Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
In this passage, whether he knew it or not--and we know not how he knew things,--Shakespeare soars to the heights of Plato's dreams, in the "Phædrus" and the "Symposium". Did he go beyond the appreciation of "the groundlings" in such passages? Did they find mirth in the passion of the Jew, and fail to fathom Shakespeare's deep sympathy with the oppressed? Probably he gave them more and other things than he seemed to give; to them Shylock's may have appeared as a comic part, but indeed we cannot judge that strange Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare knew what they wanted, horrors, ghosts, revenges, manslayings. He gave them these things in "Lear" and "Hamlet," but gave with them the deepest and subtlest thoughts, the most magical poetry, treasures of wit, and all this they could enjoy, as they could follow every point, pass, and parry in the wit-combats.
It seems probable that Shakespeare's fame as a poet rested, for a while, rather on his verses, "Venus and Adonis" (published 1593) and "Lucrece" (1594), than on all the treasures of his plays. The two poems, the only works of Shakespeare's which he himself saw through the press, are dedicated, in brief terms, to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, then a lad of twenty, fond of pleasure, art, and letters. The dedications are not fulsome, when we consider the manner of addressing patrons in that age. The second address, of some ten lines, says "the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours." It seems that Southampton had behaved with generosity to the poet, and it looks as if the poet's "love" were more than the trick-phrase of a person obliged.
The poems themselves, "Venus and Adonis" in a six line stanza, "Lucrece" in a seven line stanza, are remarkable for fluent mastery of verse and rhyme, for lusciousness of description of physical beauties, and for the compassionate passage on the poor hunted hare, and the vigorous description of a horse. Shakespeare manifestly loved a good horse, and probably felt compunctions about riding to harriers. But as to the poetry; it certainly is not superior to the luscious descriptions in Spenser; the verse is by no means superior to, nor, to some tastes, equal to Spenser's; and, if we lost Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," the misfortune would be as great as if we lost "Venus" and "Lucrece". The two compositions show us Shakespeare exercising himself on a fashionable class of themes, and with an overflow of fashionable conceits; sufflaminandus erat, says Ben Jonson; "the drag needed to be put on". Had we nothing else of Shakespeare's, we could make no guess at his greatness.
Indeed his contemporaries could hardly do so, till his plays were pirated and printed, because all their innumerable merits could not be fully appreciated till the plays were meditatively and frequently perused. By 1598, Francis Meres, comparing English with ancient poets, names Shakespeare and others with Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, also Ausonius and Claudian. But he places Warner in the same good company (in "Palladis Tamia," or "Wit's Treasury," 1598).
The plays named by Meres are "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labours Lost," "Love's Labour's Won" (?), "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Merchant of Venice," both "Richards," "Henry IV," "King John," "Titus Andronicus," and "Romeo and Juliet". "The soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets, among his private friends." (Not published till 1609.)
Gullio, in the Cambridge comedy, "The Return from Parnassus" (about 1599-1602) is a farcical ignorant braggart who says "let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare," for his "Venus and Adonis". He also quotes "Romeo and Juliet," and the University wits manifestly despised Shakespeare, as no scholar and not a University man. They bade Ben Jonson go back to his brick-making; he was not a University man!
Meanwhile Shakespeare, with his share in the company and what he received for his written plays, and from patrons, was thriving, while his father struggled with debt and difficulties. None the less, probably aided pecuniarily and advised by Shakespeare, he applied to the College of Arms for a grant of armorial bearings (1596). A memorandum exists in which John Shakespeare is said to have "lands and tenements of good wealth and substance". The grant was not made till 1599, and the heralds appear to have been very good-natured in permitting these Shakespeares to write themselves gentlemen. The financial basis, however, was supplied when, in 1597, Shakespeare bought New Place, a large house in the town of Stratford, and two gardens. Sir Sidney Lee reckons his income, allowing for the altered values of money, at £1040 in our currency.
In short, like Scott, Shakespeare lived to found a family of gentility, though Scott naturally inherited the gentility and heraldic quarterings, which Shakespeare did not. He prospered continually; he held, later, shares in the Globe theatre, and there is abundant proof that in money, acres, and goods he throve to an extent that denotes careful living. He appears as a strict exactor of debts: in nothing was he careless and indifferent except as regarded the immortal works, which, after his death, his 'stage friends, Heming and Condell, published as best they might (1623, the first folio).
Shakespeare seems, in fact, to have had even more than Scott's indifference to his literary fame, unless we suppose him to have been firmly persuaded that his works, once given to the stage, must secure their own immortality. Even so, he might have employed the leisure of his last years in preparing a correct text for the press.
Yet who knows that Shakespeare did not dream of doing what was unprecedented, of revising and collecting his plays for publication? Playwrights seldom printed their dramas, for reasons already given. But, in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson published his "works" (he was laughed at for calling them "works") in a tall and stately folio. It may have been in Shakespeare's mind to do the same thing: but "to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow"! He may have contemplated the difficult task, he may even have made fair copies of some of his manuscripts of his many unprinted plays,--the papers which his friends, the actors, say had "scarce a blot". But his older manuscripts may have been tattered and worn, and altered for better or worse. To collect and revise all was a serious labour for a retired, perhaps a weary man. He was but 52 when he died; he may, we repeat, have dreamed of a task which he put off from day to day: there is no mystery in delays so natural when the custom of play writers was not to publish.
The Sonnets.
It is difficult or impossible to date Shakespeare's Sonnets. As we know from Meres, "sugared sonnets" of his were circulating in manuscript in 1598: the book of Sonnets was (piratically?) published in 1609 with a dark dedication to "Mr. W. H.," by the pirate, or procurer of piracy, Thorpe, "To the only begetter of these sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T.T.". T.T. did not wish to be understood. The two most popular theories are that Mr. W. H. is William Herbert, in 1601 Earl of Pembroke; before his accession to the Earldom, he was known by "courtesy title" as Lord Herbert. To him then, about 1598-1601, the Sonnets to a man are addressed.
The second theory lays stress on Shakespeare's known devotion to the Earl of Southampton; certainly his patron, and assured of his love in the dedications of "Venus" and "Lucrece," in 1593, 1594. The Sonnets are therefore dated about 1594, whereas, by the Pembroke theory, they are dated about 1598-1601.
It is not possible, in this place, to criticize the two theories. The matter is of no importance in itself, but some partisans of the Pembroke theory represent Shakespeare as embittered almost to madness by the affair, constantly alluded to in the Sonnets, of a double betrayal by his mistress, the Dark Lady, and by his adored friend the Earl of Pembroke. Henceforth we are to suppose, he revealed his passions in his tragedies, and was a fevered creature, dreaming of "bloody vengeance".
There is not a shadow of proof for the hypothesis that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was a Maid of Honour, Mary Fitton, whose portraits demonstrate that she was of a fair complexion, with grey eyes and brown hair. We have not the slightest reason to believe that, in 1597-1601, when he was building up an estate, Shakespeare was mad with love of Mary, and jealousy of her lovers who, after 1601, are unknown, till, in 1606, she committed a fault, in the country. Of the two Earls, Southampton, rather more probably than Pembroke, was, if either of them was, the beloved friend of the Sonnets.[7]
The Sonnets are not in the Italian or Petrarchian form of recurring rhymes, but are in three verses of four lines, with a rhyming couplet to conclude. In many respects they resemble the sonnets fashionable at the time, with praise of a patron whom the poet loves and who is the inspiration of the poet. The accustomed conceits of Petrarch and his French followers, des Portes, Ronsard, and many others, are transfigured by the poet's genius. It was usual to applaud the beauty of the patron, and to exaggerate the love of the poet.
This was matter of common form, but the sonnets of Shakespeare reflect the actual passion of love, or of friendship "passing the love of women," yet always respectful. People wrote thus to Elizabeth in her old age, but Shakespeare conveys an impression of sincerity, whether because he felt what he expresses, or whether his genius makes real and glowing that which was, with other writers, mere matter of compliment. He may be "unlocking his heart," in either case, for he must have known, for some one, the passion which, on the second theory, he dramatically employs to glorify his young inspirer. Yet again, he could imitate and express "all thoughts, all passions": his "sweetest nature" can scarcely have known the emotions of Shylock!
However we may try to distinguish between what is conventional and what is felt in the Sonnets, they apparently refer to real persons and real situations. Sonnets I-XVII urge marriage on the beautiful young patron and friend: his beauties and virtues must live in his children as well as in verse. Sonnets XXXIII-XXXVI hint at some measure of estrangement, some wrong done to the poet by the friend.
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.
Sonnets XL-XLIII suggest that the friend has drawn away the poet's mistress.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty.
Such are
The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.
The suffering poet appears to bear no malice, it must be admitted. Thenceforward there are regrets for the absence of the friend, beautiful reflections, promises of immortality in verse, till (LXVII) the poet hears that the friend keeps bad company, and though (LXX) this may be an envious slander, the poet has his doubts. In LXVIII-XCIII the poet feels that the patron is preferring other minstrels, and one of these he applauds for
the proud full sail of his great verse.
This singer is inspired by
that affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.[8]
Here are personal allusions to some facts, or jests, which we cannot hope to discover: the rival poet has been guessed at as Barnabe Barnes ("Parthenope and Parthenophil," 1593), who certainly wrote a sonnet on the inspiration of Southampton's eyes. Others think that George Chapman, the translator of Homer, is the rival whom Shakespeare writes of admiringly. In XCV-XCVI the poet recurs to the stories which "spot the beauty of thy budding name". In CIV he has loved his friend for three years,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned.
Yet he goes on in the old strain of love and praise, though
What's new to speak, what new to register?
In CX-CXI he perhaps laments his own profession as a player; perhaps he refers to changes in his affections. Taking the whole of this and the preceding sonnet together, the second seems the more natural interpretation. In Sonnet CXI, Fortune is blamed
That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds, Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.
The name of actor was, indeed, branded as no better than that of vagabond, while the play-writers constantly called the players "apes," and "mimics". Here Shakespeare does seem to speak of his profession:--
I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view.
With CXXVII begin Sonnets addressed to a woman, a dark lady, but (CXXX) not very beautiful.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
This may be a mere criticism of the absurd hyperboles of admiration by contemporary sonneteers. In CXXXIII the poet seems to upbraid the lady for taking his friend from him, and through three sonnets this plaint is poured out with obscure puns on "will" and "Will," his name, and--some think--his friend's name. The poet is (CXLIV) placed between "two spirits that suggest me still", One good, is a man; one evil, a woman.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil.
In addressing the woman, the poet is much more outspoken than when addressing the man on
The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.
The poet, like Catullus with Lesbia, loves against his reason and his knowledge of the woman's true nature (CXLVII),
Past cure am I, now reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest; My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are, At random from the truth vainly expressed; For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
If all this be in earnest, we have a tragedy of the heart, whether in 1594, or in 1598-1601, or in neither. Again and again, in his plays, Shakespeare mocks at sonnets and sonneteers; and though his, in parts, are personal, the depth of their significance, and the persistence of his emotions, must be left to the literary instinct of the reader. We cannot reconstruct Shakespeare's self out of his works, lyrical or dramatic. Had the sonnets been recognized as reflecting a scandalous episode in society, it could scarcely have followed that "no sequence of such poems was received more coldly". Those of Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Constable, were often reprinted. Shakespeare's had not even a second edition till 1640.[9]
It is unfortunate that literary history can scarcely pass by, leaving these strange guesses about a strange matter unnoticed. The sonnets in themselves are a book of golden verse, shining with gems of beautiful phrases,
The stretched metre of an antique song.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
The painful warrior famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foiled. Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.
When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
This beautiful poem (CVII) most manifestly refers to Shakespeare's forebodings about "my true love," who was "supposed as forfeit to a confined doom" (Southampton, in 1601, was sentenced to captivity for life). But "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured," that is Elizabeth, Cynthia, is dead, "Luna's extinct," as contemporary versifiers said. "In this most balmy time," Peace "proclaims olives of endless age," that is the accession of James VI and I put an end to fears of wars of a disputed succession. On 10 April, 1603, James released Southampton.[10] The Sonnets, like "the floor of heaven," are "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,".never to be dimmed by mists of conjecture, or nonsense about Shakespeare as a sensual sycophantic snob, mad with jealousy and foiled desire.
Later Plays.
Returning to the plays, we find, between 1597 and 1601, Shakespeare in his second period, with "Henry IV," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Henry V," "Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night," and "Julius Cæsar". Such was the astonishing harvest of five years. Probably "Henry IV" is the play which we would retain, could we keep but one, so delightful is Falstaff, the fat knight, the embodiment of the richest humour. He "has given us medicines to make us love him," and even the delightful characters of Hotspur, the Mercutio of the history, and of Lady Percy, take a far lower place. We would banish all, and keep honest Jack. Many cannot bear to see Falstaff have much the worse of the jest, as in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," said to have been composed in a fortnight, at the desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see that impossibility, Falstaff in love. The characters of Shallow, Slender, Sir Hugh, even the transient Anne Page, and all the broad humours of life in an English country town, do not console us for the defeat of the hero.
It is in "Henry V" that Shakespeare not only emphasizes his love of England, nobly expressed by John of Gaunt in "Richard II," but makes it the mainspring of the drama. The yeomen soldiers in the play frankly tell the disguised king that they doubt the justice of his cause--and well they may, for no man ever had a worse, and Shakespeare must have known it,--but "our country, right or wrong," must be the motto of the playwright, and he puts into Henry's mouth the speeches that still stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet. Much has been written on Henry's hardness to Falstaff, whose heart he broke,--but Henry at least acts in accordance with his actual character, a brave, able, ruthless, and hard man, always convinced of his own righteousness. Pistol's braggart humour is as good as ever, and that learned man of the sword, Fluellen, is a forerunner of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty.
"Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night" (1599-1600) are the three central stars in the crown of Shakespeare's comic Muse. More humorous than "Henry IV" they cannot be, but in them is no admixture of history, and the women in the three are ladies, whereas in "Henry IV" Lady Percy is the chief contrast with Falstaff's Mrs. Quickly, and her crew. Shakespeare cannot, we may suppose, have lived in the intimate society of the ladies of Elizabeth's Court; he must have divined and created Beatrice ("a star danced, and under that was she born") and Hero, sweetly bearing the accusations of her intolerable lover, Claudio:--
I have marked A thousand blushing apparitions To start into her face, a thousand shames In angel whiteness beat away these blushes, And in her eye there hath appeared a fire To burn the errors that these princes hold Against her maiden truth.
The mirth and high spirit of Beatrice, the humours of Benedick, endear the comedy to every reader, yet the end is "huddled up," like the ends of many of the plays; Claudio is lightly taken back into favour, with Shakespeare's almost limitless tolerance. He can scarcely ever bring himself to punish one of his rogues, such as Lucio and Parolles, and is as clement to the less deserving Claudio.
The mirth of "Twelfth Night" might border on the farcical, if Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the light people, were not so delightfully human and living, like their butt, Malvolio; and did not Viola and Olivia lend their exquisite grace. Meanwhile, in "As You Like It," we fleet our time carelessly as they did in the golden world, under the greenwood tree, in the enchanted company of Rosalind, Touchstone, the greatest of Shakespeare's clowns, and the melancholy and humorous Jaques, the contemplator.
Returning to historical drama, and using North's translation of Plutarch as his material, fusing North's prose into blank verse, he now produced "Julius Cæsar," in which the chief personages are Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and the Roman populace. Brutus appears as the virtuous and irresolute man, slave to a pedantic conscience which pushes him on to the slaying of great Cæsar. All readers note Shakespeare's way of placing a man of nature more or less noble, but irresolute, in a crisis which demands decision. Hamlet, Brutus, and Macbeth are the great examples. It does not follow that Shakespeare himself was irresolute, and that, when he thought of a man who is obliged to take a constant part, he felt that, had he been that man, he would have wavered. He simply, chose to illustrate that tragedy of a soul. Where would be the interest in a play of Hamlet had the prince gone straight to his mark and slain the king "at sight"? There would have been no play! How could we endure a Brutus who, in his relations with Cæsar, mobbed and stabbed the greatest of mortals, in a forthright business manner, with no hesitations? If there were not enough of nobility in Macbeth to unman him, he would be a vulgar usurper. When he chose, Shakespeare could design men as true to their single aim as Richard III and Iago. Tragedy requires in the chief sufferer, as the Greeks saw, greatness with a fatal blemish; this idea runs through their poetry from Achilles to the Aias and Œdipus of Sophocles. The purpose of Brutus, a deed, to reverse his own words, "to make whole men sick," when in contemplation, would not let him eat, nor talk, nor sleep; but, once resolved, his heart is steeled, nor does the ghost of Cæsar fright him, as the spectres of his fancy appal Macbeth.
The other great character is the fickle Roman crowd, played on by the rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare was not hostile to the people, but the mob he knew, and drew it relentlessly again and again.
"Hamlet" (1602) is believed to have been based on a lost drama of 1589, perhaps by Kyd; the original source is the "History of the Danes" by Saxo Grammaticus, and there was a French version by Belleforest. Of Shakespeare's play there are three versions, a hopelessly imperfect text in a pirated quarto of 1603; abetter, "enlarged to almost as much again" (1604); and the Folio edition of 1623. None of these is good, as a text; and the inconsistencies of the play may in part be due to an admixture of the old piece, and to tamperings with the manuscript.
Of "Hamlet" it is vain to speak briefly, and more than enough of speaking at large has been done by a myriad of commentators. The young prince, full of good qualities, is bound with knots which a real Dane of the Saga time would have cut with the short sword. But Hamlet has "the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming" of life, and death, and love, and contrary duties. Thus he, like Œdipus in the Greek tragedy, becomes as fatal to all around him as if he bore the Evil Eye; and while, like David at Ziklag, he is playing the madman, actual madness hangs over him like the sword of Damocles. Thus Shakespeare has left to the world a marvel of subtle and penetrative thought, of tenderness, of humour; to the critics a wrangle over psychological problems.
The same unparalleled powers, the same universality, the same gloomy vision of life, and, in "King Lear," another study of true and of feigned madness, inspire "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello," the last the most piteous of all. For in Othello it is not the error of a wavering hero, or the ambition of a man tempted, like Macbeth, by portents and prophecies, but the sheer inborn devilry of a creature in human form, Iago, that "breaks, and brings down death" on the most innocent of victims, Desdemona. "The pity of it" is too awful: the sense of wyrd, of masterful destiny, is too cruel.
Yet, if Shakespeare were to write tragedies, and to write them on the traditional materials which are the bases of these plays, it was inevitable that, as he wrote, he should have regarded life as he does, and human fortunes as the spoil of wayward and cruel fate. Æschylus could not make pretty melancholy pieces out of the materials of the "Agamemnon" and "Eumenides". He, to be sure, tried to justify the ways of the gods to men, and Shakespeare makes no such effort. His characters, in the immortal words of Nicias to his doomed Athenian army, "have done what men may, and endure what men must". "The rest is silence."
Of Troilus and Cressida (1603), printed 1609, we can only say that Shakespeare when he wrote it "was for one hour less noble than himself". The piece makes mockery--save for Odysseus,--of the heroes of Homer, and of Cressida, whom Chaucer treats with such fine chivalry. Thersites is merely loathsome, Aias a fool, Achilles a treacherous procurer of the death of Hector. Shakespeare made an impossible blend of Homer (of whom he clearly knew a little),[11] of Ovid, and of the mediaeval forms of the Tale of Troy. The elements are wholly incompatible, and the mood of the poet, whether he wrote the play early or late, was unenviable.
"Unpleasantness" is also the not undeserved charge against "Measure for Measure"; but Cinthio's Italian tale, on which it is founded, was "a sordid record of lust and cruelty". Shakespeare, altering the plot, redeemed it by the figure of Isabella, and by the sad Mariana in her "moated grange".
It cannot be denied that when Shakespeare added "Timon of Athens," the tragedy of a misanthrope, to "Troilus," and then produced the extremely unpleasant scenes in "Pericles" (which is not in the Folio of 1623, the first edition of his collected plays) he was selecting topics that encourage the belief in his own bitterness of spirit, while in "Antony and Cleopatra" the magnificent study of "the serpent of old Nile," and of the ruin she wrought, he continues his vein of thought on the accidents that bring courage and greatness to the dust.
In "Coriolanus" he contrasts the fickleness of the mob with an heroic soul ruined by its relentless exaggeration of its own merits and overweening greatness; the tragedy of Napoleon is a modern instance. Dating the play in 1608-1609, critics derive the character of the mother of Coriolanus from Shakespeare's thoughts of his own mother, who died in 1608. Of her character, of course, we know absolutely nothing.
The "tranquillity" of "Cymbeline" so rich in poetry, and so recklessly constructed; of the "Winter's Tale," where the poetry is yet more divine, and the plot is as heaven pleases; and of "The Tempest" (1613), where much of the "local colour" is derived from the adventures of English sea-men in the Bermudas (1609-1610), is explained by the resignation of increasing years.
We cannot reason thus with much confidence. Shakespeare could only have produced "The Tempest" in the plenitude of his genius, but he might have created it as it stands at any date after 1596, when he happened to take up the materials.
"Henry VIII" was being played in 1613 when the Globe Theatre was burned. That parts are by Shakespeare, parts by Fletcher, is a theory resting on the elusive internal evidence of style and quality.
From 1611 till his death in 1616, Shakespeare is thought to have lived mainly at home, at Stratford, where his daughters married men in their own situation of life. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616. By 1623 his monument in Stratford Church had been erected.
Ben Jonson wrote, "I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature."
Shakespeare, in accordance with Greek and Roman wisdom, had chosen the fallentis semita vitæ; in his private course he was studiously obscure. His all-embracing and unparalleled genius was exhibited only in his art, and in his profession by which he lived and prospered. He had carried blank verse from the point at which Marlowe left it to a never equalled pitch of various perfection; while his lyrics are worthy of "all the angels singing out of heaven". His creations of character are in number, variety, and excellence, unrivalled; he touched with the surest hand every chord in the human heart; he explored every height and depth, and despite the inevitable stains left by his age, and the haste necessitated by his profession, his work attains the high-water mark of human genius.
Jonson.
Ben Jonson (born 1572-73) is believed to have been descended from the Annandale border clan of the Johnstones. His father, after suffering troubles under Mary Tudor, became a Protestant preacher. Ben was a posthumous child, his mothers second husband was a bricklayer or builder. The boy was educated at Westminster school, under Camden, the antiquarian and historian, to whom he more than once expressed his gratitude. His name as an undergraduate is not found in the records of either Oxford or Cambridge. Jonson did not long practise his stepfather's useful art: he served through a campaign in Flanders, and told Drummond of Hawthornden that he slew, in single combat, a champion of the enemy. He had more than a literary acquaintance with the fencing terms which his Captain Bobadil uses with so much gusto. Returning to England he fell among actors and playwrights, is mentioned as a tragedian by Meres ("Palladis Tamia") in 1598, was challenged by an actor, Gabriel Spencer, whom he slew in fair fight; was imprisoned; turned Catholic, not for long; and, on his release, married. By 1596 he had worked with very minor playwrights at forgotten plays, and had tinkered at "The Spanish Tragedy ". He now wrote "Every Man in His Humour," an early form of the play, which he revised; removing the scene from Florence to London, for its repetition in 1598, when Shakespeare's company were the players. In the Prologue he ridiculed, as Sidney had done, the reckless early dramas, in which the hero lives a long life on the stage, while "three rusty swords" furnish forth a stage army, and squibs and stage thunder delight the audience. He aims at good-humoured comedy of everyday life, laughs at "such errors as you'll all confess," and in Master Stephen draws a shadowy Shallow, a predecessor of Bob Acres, while that stock-figure, the poltroon bragging copper-Captain Bobadil, survives in loving memory as an excellent study in a familiar "character-part," the "Miles Gloriosus," of the Roman comedian.
The personages are citizens of the day, the anxious father; the downright squire; a "Town Gull," or dupe, Master Matthew, to match the country gull, the melancholy and gentlemanlike Master Stephen; while Kitely illustrates the humours of jealousy. The characters are types, each with his "humour," or ruling passion of foible, and the standing butt is Hieronymo in Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy". As the author parodies forgotten plays, and makes use of forgotten catch-words, it may justly be said that "much of his humour still remains in obscurity". In Shakespearean humour, with its sweet tolerance, enduring quality, and sympathy and gentle melancholy, Ben is totally deficient. His "humours" are idiosyncrasies or "fads" or "ruling passions" carried into ludicrous extremes.
The success of "Every Man in His Humour" prompted "Every Man out of His Humour," acted in 1599, by Shakespeare's company, and printed, "Containing more than hath been publicly spoken or acted," in 1600. Jonson was as eager to print his plays as Shakespeare was indifferent. The comedy was much too long, and had been "cut" severely by the players. It has a kind of chorus of spectators and critics, and is an exhibition of "humours" (the word was then a piece of popular slang), or types. Sogliardo is an amusing bourgeois gentilhomme, who, like Shakespeare, "lacks" what he calls a "cullisen" (scutcheon) and will stick at no expense to purchase one. The romantic and euphuistic humours of Puntarvolo and his lady are excellent fooling; Macilente, the bitterly envious, suggests, in a more tragic style, his contemporary, Scott's Sir Mungo Malagrowther (in "The Fortunes of Nigel"); the coxcomb, Fastidious Brisk, is an agreeable rattle, especially in his account of his duel and his dresses, boots, hat, and jewellery; and the compliment by Macilente to the Queen is charmingly courtly, coming from that blustering mountain of a man, the author. But the play was not a success. For this, or for any other reason (perhaps because they cut down his plays into manageable size), Ben quarrelled with the actors, Shakespeare's company, and began to write satirical plays on the players, and on the poets who were more successful than himself, or who had theories that were not his about how plays should be written, about "art," in his favourite phrase. In different moods he spoke differently about Shakespeare's "art," now saying that he had none; now that without art and labour Shakespeare could not have produced his "true-filed" phrases.
"Cynthia's Revels" (1600) was acted by "the children of the Royal Chapel," and printed in 1601. (New scenes were added in the Folio edition of 1616). A lively prologue is acted by the boys, who quarrel for the privilege of speaking it. One of them mimics a coxcomb spectator, with three sorts of tobacco to smoke on the stage. Among the humours of the Court, Crites is taken to represent the author himself, "this Crites is sour". The exquisite song (ex forti dulcedo) "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," outlives the humours, and the satire, which was personal, for the gentlemen of the press and stage, then, as now, liked personal controversy, "it is such easy writing".
The "Poetaster"(1601) runs amuck against actors. "They forget that they are in the statute" (against vagabonds) "the rascals; they are blazoned there... they and their pedigrees; they need no other heralds, I wis." This was an anachronism, at the Court of Augustus, the scene of the play, but appropriate to Shakespeare's new scutcheon. The loves of Ovid and Julia, Virgil reading the "Æneid" to Augustus, are mixed with contemporary satire to which Dekker replied in "Satiro-Mastix, or the untrussing of the Humorous Poet" (acted by Shakespeare's company, 1602).
Marston (Crispinus) was also assailed, and war raged on the lower slopes of the Muses' hill. Since the beginnings of the theatre, play-writers have parodied and mocked each others' works, as Aristophanes caricatured Euripides, as ancient Pistol parodied Marlowe's "jades of Asia," and Molière made mirth of the tragedies played by the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. But Ben, though a huge, noisy, and truculent adversary, was placable, and he and Marston became friends. Much ingenuity has been spent in detecting hits at Shakespeare in Ben's plays and epigrams; very probably some of his cutting allusions are aimed at his successful rival, but it needs two to make a quarrel.
When James VI of Scotland came to the English throne, and lived no longer on the allowance of £3000 a year from Elizabeth, he spent very largely on elaborate masques, courtly entertainments, not unlike the ballets in which Louis XIV later danced his parts. The hosts of Greek mythology were let loose on the stage, all the sea-nymphs, daughters of Oceanus, for example, floating in a shell of mother-of-pearl, among Tritons better schooled in their parts than honest Mike Lambourn in "Kenilworth". The dresses scenery, and decorations, "the bodily parts, were of Master Inigo Jones his design and act" (see "The Masque of Blackness," 1605). The Queen and the Court ladies acted, or at least appeared as sea-nymphs, and Ben produced the words, which were deeply learned, and the exquisite songs. Unrefined as he was, he became intimate with hospitable and generous lords and ladies. Their gifts and his payment from the Royal coffers in pensions were of more profit to him than his plays, for which he said that he received only £200. It is hardly necessary to add that he had bitter quarrels with Inigo Jones.
Jonson's Roman tragedy, "Sejanus" (1603) on the fortunes and fall of that favourite of the Emperor Tiberius, is deeply learned. The author, in the printed version, gave references in footnotes, to his authorities, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, and many others, as if he had been writing a severe work of history. Nothing can be less like Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, with his free handling of North's translation of Plutarch, with his wild mobs, and murder done openly. Ben was classical and accurate; his Romans speak a stately blank verse: his Tiberius, slow, formal, hypocritical, and deceitful above all things, is the Tiberius of Tacitus; his all-daring Sejanus is a less candid Richard III; and though Ben admitted that the ancient Chorus, with its chants, was impossible on the English stage, he was, in other respects, conscientiously classical. The whole heavy air of Rome, the terror, the duplicity, the political influence of women, their passion, the servility and the discontent, live in the somewhat ponderous blank verse, of which Ben first wrote the matter in prose, an uninspired method.
The "Catiline and His Conspiracy," acted 1611, "did not please the populace," nor the Court much, as Ben admits in a quotation from Horace: in these "jig-given times" he asked Pembroke's patronage for "a legitimate poem". In fact Jonson with all his amazing energy, vigour, and appreciation of character--that of Cicero is excellent--was too pedantic, and the orations of his Cicero were too long for the stage. The odes of the Chorus were not apt to increase the pleasure of the audience.
Ben's recognized comic masterpieces were "The Fox (Volpone)" first acted at the Universities, then at the Globe, 1605; "The Silent Woman" (1609), "The Alchemist" (1610), and "Bartholomew Fair" (1614). Both in "The Fox" and "The Alchemist," there is something that reminds us of Marlowe. The Fox, Volpone, a Venetian magnifico, a childless man, for years pretends to be dying, surrounded by his little court of obscene depravities, and aided by his parasite, Mosca, gulls men who, each in his degree, is an incarnation of cruel greed.
Volpone is a voluptuary in his devilish delight in human corruption. The aged Corbaccio he tempts to disinherit his son; the madly jealous Corbino he tempts to prostitute his wife, from the avaricious Volt ore and from all of them he wrings rich presents. It is a masque of the Deadly Sins, and behind them stands Murder, hesitating between poison, the dagger, and the smothering pillow, for all the fortune-hunters would slay their tormentor if they dared.
The scene with the English Lady Would-be, an affected literary lady, who tires Volpone to death with literary chatter, is more than the rest in the true spirit of comedy. Celia, the suffering wife of Corbino, and Bonario, the young son of the evil dotard, Corbaccio, alone represent the soul of good in things evil. The plot is ingeniously entangled and untied, and justice can scarcely add to the torments which the characters owe to their own insatiate greed.
In "The Alchemist," three scoundrels, occupying by connivance of a servant an empty house, and captained by Subtle, an alchemist, play on the greed and lust of many "coneys". These each, in Jonson's way, represent a "humour". Sir Epicure Mammon, the City Knight, is all for unlimited lust, secured by the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone. He is as eager as Faustus for the unlimited, and as learned in his gloating discourses as Jonson himself, who, in Subtle, displays all his knowledge of the jargon of alchemy. Dol Common, the decoy, the Fairy Queen, has an extensive and peculiar knowledge of Billingsgate; Abel Drugger, the tobacconist, hopes to prosper in his trade by magical spells; the gamester, Pertinax Surly, strong in his own marked cards and loaded dice, has a salutary scepticism; and the two puritans, Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome, are ready for anything which will supply finance for their godly crew of Anarchists at Amsterdam. Ben well understood these extreme fanatics, "a sect of dangerous consequence that will have no king, but a presbytery," said Queen Elizabeth. They were soon to put an end to "merry England," and, when we look at the quality of much of the mirth in the later Jacobean plays, we are not enamoured of either party in the conflict. The play, with its constant bustle was and long remained popular. So did "Bartholomew Fair," a colossal exhibition of a London festival, with all the humours of the joyous populace, interrupted by Rabbi Busy, the fanatic, who has eaten more roast pig than any one, and rushes about denouncing all the other "Dagons" and "idols," like a bloated English Tartuffe, le pauvre homme. The stocks do not daunt him, his tongue remains as free as Mause Headrigg's. In an introduction to this enormous burlesque Jonson throws scoffs at "The Tempest" of Shakespeare.
"The Silent Woman" is truly a roaring farce on a singular subject, Morose, a gentleman as impatient of noise, and as certain that all silence except his own was golden, as the Sage of Chelsea. How he is saddled with a wife who, from being "mim as a mouse" becomes the most vociferous of Roaring Boys, and, indeed to the confusion of some boastful gallants, is a boy pranked up for the practical jokes whereby Morose's nephew extracts Morose's money, may be read, with much other mirthful noisy matter, by the curious.
"The Devil is an Ass" (1616) is a satire on conjurers, crystal-gazers, projectors, or, as we say, "promoters" of bubble enterprises, and their gulls and "coneys".
A walking tour to Scotland (1618-1619), where Jonson was entertained by Drummond of Hawthornden, had for its fruit Drummond's brief notes of his conversation and literary opinions. He did not care much for Drummond's Petrarchian sonnets, "cross-rhymes"; and, as to Shakespeare (whom Drummond himself does not seem to have appreciated), merely said that "he wanted art," and that, in his geography, he was wrong when he gave Bohemia a sea-coast. Happily Ben left splendid tributes other-where (in verses attached to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, "The Folio" (1623), and in prose), to Shakespeare's genius and character. Drummond's estimate of Ben as a braggart about himself, and a contemner of others, as jealous and vindictive, is only true in part. No man had more or more admiring friends; at taverns he reigned, among the great wits "Sealed of the Tribe of Ben," like an earlier Dryden.
His last plays "The New Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," were badly received: in an Ode he
left the loathèd stage And the more loathsome age;
he lost his place of Masque-maker in 1632, but was still befriended by Charles I. He died on 6 August, 1637, before the troubles of the Covenant came to a head.
His great collection of books and his treatise on the "Poetics" of Aristotle and the "Art of Poetry" of Horace had already been destroyed by a fire. Many of his beautiful lyrics exhibit that grace, delicacy, and, in the best sense, poetry which are not conspicuous in his plays. "His throne is not with the Olympians but with the Titans," and Tennyson could not endure the gloom which he found in Jonson's comedies.
Scott, on the other hand, seems to have known them almost by heart, and constantly quotes them, and, indeed, the whole host of minor Elizabethan playwrights. The learning of Jonson, in Greek no less than in Latin, is a marvel,
Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,
in his prodigious activity of production. His immortal lyrics attest the delicacy and grace which seldom inspire his plays, and, indeed, are most noted in the lover; "a scholar and a gentleman," of his incoherent play "The New Inn" (1629). Ben's drama is the work of a "made" writer, the fruit of reflection on what the stage ought to be, and of ponderous industry and diligent observation. We feel that the plays, despite their richness and vigour, their masculine energy, are somewhat prolix, rather pedantic, and they do not hold the stage, like those of Shakespeare, at whom Ben scratched so often, without moving the master to reply in kind.
Jonson's Prose.
It is not easy to sympathize with the sweet enthusiasts who place Ben Jonson's "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter," above Bacon's Essays. These sayings, maxims, and very brief essays were mainly written when Ben was old, and not yet wise enough to be contented. He appears as a contemner of times present, when the poet is no longer taken at his own estimate, which, in Jonson's case, was rather high. Many of the "Discoveries" had, not infrequently or of recent date, been discovered before. Thus of Fortune, "That which happens to any man, may to every man. But it is in his reason what he accounts it, and will make it." This has been put more briefly and better: "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so". Nothing can be more trite than this of waste of time, but the expression is admirable, "What a deal of cold business doth a man" (and do most women) "mis-spend the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner." But Jonson was not profuse in venting compliments, and, with his enormous reading, can hardly have spent much time in paying calls. The sentences on the decay of taste are passed by elderly men of letters in all ages on "railing and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more greedily read..." "Expectation of the vulgar is more drawn with newness than goodness," yet a poet is nothing if he has not something new in manner if not in matter.
Jonson says that his memory was once excellent, till he was past 40. Certainly it had ceased to be trustworthy: he attributes to Homer what Homer never said, and to Orpheus what Homer did say. Ben finds the new poems in his old age so bad that a man "never would light his tobacco with them". We all remember his sentences on Shakespeare: and "how there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned". He had three ways of viewing Shakespeare: one when he had well drunk, and was magnificent, as Howell tells us, about himself and his Muse. Thus he said to Hawthornden that Shakespeare "wanted art," and did not know that Bohemia lacks a sea-coast. The second way is that of his "Discoveries". The third and excellent way is in his poem, in which he speaks of Shakespeare as the mind of the great world does,
He was not for an age but for all time,
was greater than
the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome, Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
To the oratory of Bacon he gives the same praise in the same noble measure. "I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself..." Against Machiavel's "a Prince should exercise his cruelty by his ministers and not by himself," Jonson nobly replies, "But I say he puts off man, and goes into a beast, that is cruel," though indeed beasts are not wittingly cruel, and the man that is cruel goes into a devil. Jonson is always manly: his thoughts are ponderous and just rather than remarkable for novelty; they do not cling, like Bacon's, to the memory of the race, nor shine in so many facets with such imperishable colours.
[1] They also ran every chance of becoming desperately wicked dogs, according to Charles Kingsley in his essay, "Plays and Puritans".
[2] See an interesting discussion in Mr. Darrell Figgis's "Shakespeare" (1911), Chap. III.
[3] Marlowe was summoned before the Privy Council, and "entered his appearance" on 20 May, 1593. The Council had heard of a "school of Atheists," and Marlowe appears to have been named among them. There is no hint of atheism in the fragmentary paper which Kyd said that he had from Marlowe, who was at liberty in the end of May, but was killed at Deptford, and buried on 1 June. On Whitsun Eve, 2 June, a horrible libel against Marlowe was brought to the Privy Council. The circumstances are mysterious. Cf. Mr. Boas, "Works of Thomas Kyd," 1901, and Mr. Ingram, "Christopher Marlowe and His Associates," 1904.
[4] The curious, almost verbal coincidences, between passages in Shakespeare and passages in the Athenian tragedians are probably due to parity of genius, not to imitation. On the other side see Mr. Churton Collins's "Studies in Shakespeare," p. 72, et sqq.
[5] Shakespeare's other plays are based either on actual chronicles and histories; or on legends, as in "King Lear" and "Cymbeline"; or on tales, mainly Italian, founded as a rule on old traditional stories, and sometimes done by others into English novels. Earlier plays, of similar origin, are also employed. Such, too, were the usual sources of Molière, and almost all Greek tragedy rests on Achæan or Ionian myths, current in older epic poems.
[6] Saintsbury.
[7] Mr. Tyler, in his edition of the Sonnets (1890), Dr. Brandes, in his "William Shakespeare," and Mr. Harris, in "The Man Shakespeare," support the Pembroke theory. Sir Sidney Lee's "Life of William Shakespeare" contains the arguments in favour of Southampton.
[8] Ben Jonson was something of a visionary.
[9] Jusserand, "Literary History of the English People," Vol. III, p. 233.
[10] Lee, pp. 147-150.
[11] Shakespeare could read parts of Homer in Chapman's translation of Books I, II, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, published in 1598. But certain touches indicate his acquaintance with Book XXII, 320, 321, 391-393. The drama begins with the situation in Book VII.
XX. OTHER DRAMATISTS
Beaumont and Fletcher.
John Fletcher was born at Rye in December, 1579; being the son of that Dean of Peterborough who troubled the last moments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and later was bishop, successively, of Bristol, Worcester, and London. Very early, aged about 12, the son entered Benet College, Cambridge, but before he was 17 the death of his father, in poverty, caused him to leave the University. We hear no more of him, on sound authority, till he began to write plays with Francis Beaumont, born in 1584, the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, a judge. In 1597 Beaumont entered Pembroke College, Oxford, then known as Broadgates Hall; three years later he entered the Inner Temple. In 1605 Beaumont wrote some prefatory verses to Jonson's play "The Fox (Volpone)" as also did Fletcher. "Philaster" (1610?) is believed to have been the first play composed in their prolific partnership, but it was also attributed to Beaumont alone. Beaumont died in March, 1616, the death-year of Shakespeare; Fletcher in 1625.
One need not be a Charles Lamb to discover that "after all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Sidneys and Shakespeares". But perhaps only a reader who is himself a poet can discover, with Mr. Swinburne's certainty, in Beaumont "the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour"; in Fletcher "a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness of bright original speech".
Others cannot pretend to assign to each author, or to their various allies, their own contributions to each of the fifty-two dramas, which Mr. Swinburne suspected Coleridge of "never having really read". Whether Coleridge did or did not carefully peruse the fourteen stout volumes of Weber's edition, it is certain that very few people are more industrious. A French critic, M. Jusserand, affirms that a friendly hand could make a pleasing selection of scenes, displaying tragical vigour, eloquence, poetry, wit, and that the selection would give "the falsest idea of their work," for "the lugubrious and the ribald were their chief domain".
At all events other qualities than ribaldry will win their readers at present, and it is unnecessary to direct readers to a play in which a woman "makes the very satyrs blush at her sight." Coleridge thought it would be interesting to settle a question of statistics, "how many of these plays are founded on rapes, how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies". Mr. Swinburne provided the statistics, Plays 52, Rapes 2, Incestuous Passions 0, Lunacies 2.
In the throng of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher (of which a folio edition was published in 1647; an uncertain amount of the writing was ascribed to Massinger), it must suffice to speak of but a few. The bald analysis of any of these Jacobean dramas cannot do justice to its merits. The plots of the greatest dramas, those of the Athenian stage and of Shakespeare, rest, now on history, now on inventions of prehistoric antiquity, myths and legends. The story of Lear has elements as impossible, and as primitive, as the stories of Œdipus or of Thyestes. The events are monstrous--"people don't do these things,"--but they afford to the dramatist great situations, and they were already familiar in tradition.
The events in "The Maid's Tragedy," on the other hand, could not have occurred, and have no traditional source. There have been callous and profligate kings, but Charles II, who declared that "in my reign all tragedies must end happily," and for whom Waller later made "The Maid's Tragedy" end happily, did not seduce innocent girls, hand them over as brides to courtiers who were already betrothed to other ladies, and retain his victims as his mistresses.
The king in "The Maid's Tragedy" does these things, and is a moral monster. Amintor being in love with Aspatia, and she with him, the king forces him--for loyalty and passive obedience are his guiding stars--to reject Aspatia, and wed Evadne, whom nobody suspects of being the royal mistress. At Courts, however, these graces are not hid.
The bridal eve is not much enlivened by a masque of Neptune and Æolus, and is saddened by the wails and prophecies of the forlorn Aspatia. Other bridesmaids talk ribaldry enough, but the bridegroom, whose heart is with Aspatia, feels
A grief shoot suddenly through all my veins; Mine eyes rain: this is strange at such a time.
The bride receives him coldly. A man has wronged her, will he slay that man? She names the king: "To cover shame I took thee" she says. The situation,--with the horror-stricken loyalty of Amintor; his heart already a chaos of remorse, regret, and desire; the implacable resolution of Evadne; "the murderess-Magdalen, whose penitence is of one crimson colour with her sin--" is undeniably tragically great. Ribaldries as of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida" greet the happy pair in the morning. The secret reaches Melanthius, brother of Evadne and the king's bravest captain. Evadne binds the sleeping king in his bed, wakens him, taunts him, and stabs him for her husband, her brother, and herself. Aspatia disguises herself as her own avenging brother, challenges Amintor who has deserted her, strikes him, kicks him; at last he draws, and she falls by the hand of the man she loves. Evadne enters, red-handed from regicide,
Am I not fair? Looks not Evadne beauteous with these rites?
The seeming dead speaks,--
I am Aspatia yet--
and takes farewell. Amintor stabs himself, but not before Evadne has set him the example. Had Ophelia fallen by the sword of Hamlet the tragedy would not have been "deeper".
"Philaster," again, is a romantic comedy, that deserves its second title "Love lies a'bleeding". Philaster is kept out of his royalty by the king, who is wedding his daughter, Arethusa, beloved by Philaster, to Pharamond, prince of Spain, a random debauchee. His intrigue with the audacious wanton Megra, a Court lady, and the besetting of him by the armed burgesses, devoted to Philaster, yield the grim comic material. Philaster gives his page, Bellario (really the disguised Euphrasia, who loves him), to Arethusa. She is accused of an intrigue with the page, who is the soul of loyalty to her and to Philaster. He, in jealousy, rejects both his lady and his page: they meet in a forest: he dismisses Bellario, and bids Arethusa stab him, or he will stab her.
We are two Earth cannot bear at once.
He does stab her, and is attacked by a country fellow, who wounds him; he then flies from some of the Court who are approaching. Finding Bellario asleep in a glade, Philaster wounds her; so that the pursuers, who
Have no mark to know me but my blood,
may suppose Bellario to be the assailant of Arethusa! "Oh, my heart, what a varlet's this, to offer manslaughter upon the harmless gentlewoman," we may cry, with the grocers wife in "The Knight of the Burning Pestle". We "could hurl things at him," at Philaster: whose jealousy does not palliate his cruelty and treachery.
Through many complications the plot winds its way; Bellario, who is about to be tortured, proves to be a woman; both she and Arethusa survive; Philaster, of whom nobody thinks the worse, marries Arethusa; Pharamond is mobbed; all ends happily except for that most pathetic of patient Grizels, Bellario, who remains contented in the happiness of the others. The purity and sweetness of Arethusa, the loyalty of the loving Bellario, and her beautiful speeches, cannot enable this play to escape the blame of being unnatural and repulsive.
The naked analysis of the plays of this age, is, of course, no fair criterion of their merit. A bare exposure of the plot of "Cymbeline" would deter a man from reading it. The authors are protected by the magic of their poetry, which conveys them off in a golden cloud as Aphrodite saved Æneas. A bare analysis of "A King and No King" (1611), with the alternate valour and nobility, brag, and unintelligible clemencies and ferocities of Arbaces, King of Iberia, who has defeated and captured Tigranes, King of Armenia, would move the most austere to mirth. But there is a method in the apparent madness of Arbaces; and Bessus, the braggart poltroon, is an officer worthy to fight under the same standard as Parolles and Bobadil, while virtue and happiness are kept for Arbaces and Panthea, Tigranes and the faithful Spaconia, through the sudden revelation of Gobrias, the Lord Protector, that Arbaces is a warming-pan pretender, and neither son of Queen Arane (who unceasingly tries to have him stabbed or poisoned), nor the brother of Panthea.
The last tragedies are "The False One," and "Valentinian". Concerning "Thierry and Theodoret" it is not pleasant to speak out, and it is not honest to be silent. "Derived," we are told, "from the French chronicles of the reign of Clotaire the Second," the play is rancid with the humours of the lowest London haunts; marked by wild anachronisms--the Merovingian troops carry muskets,--and crammed with impossible crimes. For a contrast we have the eloquence of Thierry (poisoned by a handkerchief that robs him of sleep, after he has been drugged to deprive him of offspring), and the spotless virtues of his wife Ordella, whom Thierry has been on the point of sacrificing to the gods. The blank verse almost uniformly moves with a loose superfluous foot; as
The most remarkable thing in which kings differ, From private men,
and so on, is a specimen. There is a pearl to be found on this dust-heap, the stainless Ordella, "the most perfect idea of the female heroic character," says Lamb; but she is found after we have passed through a malodorous labyrinth of "unnatural and violent situations".
Plays like this, or even like "The Spanish Comedy," which opens pleasantly and humorously, and in the cure and his sexton suggests the influence of Cervantes, but closes in a mist of evil passions, give some show of reason to the opinion of our French critic. "A friendly hand selecting with care" might give all of Beaumont and Fletcher's that can please readers not specially devoted to the study of the Drama. Even in the beautiful scenes of "The Faithful Shepherdess," in poetry worthy of Spenser's pastoral vein, the author, quite needlessly, introduces a shepherdess who resembles the Brunhault of "Thierry and Theodoret" as Brunhault may have been in girlhood.
"The Knight of the Burning Pestle," on the other hand, with the grocer-critic who insists on a play in which a grocer shall "do admirable things"; with the humours of the grocer's wife, and the Quixotic adventures of Ralph, the apprentice, is lively, and, says the Prologue, "has endeavoured, to be far from unseemly words to make your ears glow". Yet, in the jail delivery of the Barber, the authors go out of their way to find ugly ribaldries. Famous among the comedies are "The Scornful Lady," "The Humorous Lieutenant," "The Wild-goose Chase," and "The Little French Doctor". The lyrics and songs are especially beautiful, even in the Elizabethan wealth of song.
A peculiarity of Fletcher's blank verse is his fondness for redundant syllables at the close, and indeed anywhere in the line. This manner was gaining on Shakespeare in his latest plays, and, in authors after Fletcher, led to the decay, almost to the death, of blank verse. Yet Fletcher's lines, as before Marlowe and Shakespeare, were often "end-stopped": the sense closed with the close of each line; this is not the manner of Shakespeare, or of Beaumont. In his later days Fletcher went for his plots to Spanish tales and romances.
Chapman.
The date of the birth (near Hitchin) of George Chapman, conjecturally placed in 1559, is unknown. He was at Oxford in 1574. The exactness of his scholarship must not be estimated by his translation of Homer; translations, whether in prose or verse, did not then aim at precision. In 1594 he published "The Shadow of Night," containing verses which have been used to support the theory that he was the poet concerning whose favour Shakespeare expresses uneasiness in his Sonnets. He wrote a conclusion to Marlowe's "Hero and Leander"; attempted the luscious (which did not suit his genius), in Ovid's "Banquet of Sense"; celebrated Henry, Prince of Wales, in "The Tears of Peace," is mentioned as a dramatist by Meres in 1598, and in that year published his version of "Seven Books of the 'Iliad'" (not the first seven), while he finished his "Iliad" in 1611, his "Odyssey," some years later.
Thanks mainly to the perfect sonnet of Keats, Chapman's Homer is the work by which his memory is kept green except among special students of the Elizabethan drama. To have made Homer "common coin" was a great benefit to the English public, that had known only the mediaeval romances based on Ionian (700 B.C.), Athenian, and Roman perversions of the poet. The "Iliad" he did into "fourteeners," a jigging old measure,--[1] "a splendid swinging metre," says Saintsbury, "better able than any other English metre to cope with the body as well as the rhythm of the English hexameter". Tastes differ! Here are four lines ("Iliad" XV, 596-600). The poet speaks of Zeus,
For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about To make him cast the fleet such fire as never should go out; Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
"The last line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour at his best," says a critic, and this may be the best of Chapman. But it does not express the meaning of Homer, who says nothing about the "foulness" of the prayer of Thetis, and whose Zeus does not desire to satiate his eyes with "the splendour of the burning ships," but to see one ship set on fire; as, on that signal, he intends to cause the instant rout of the Trojans. It will be observed that Chapman here compresses four Greek hexameters into four English "fourteeners"; and that the movement of his verse is as rapid as the nature of the "fourteener" permits. He is, however, rugged and obscure and overloads the simplicity of Homer with Elizabethan conceits of his own invention. The "Odyssey" he rendered into heroic couplets with a free movement, and, had he been more sparing of his own conceits, the version would be more satisfactory. Unhappily no English measure represents the Homeric hexameter.
In 1604-5, Chapman with Marston was imprisoned for a very faint piece of satire on the Scots, in "Eastward Ho"; and Ben Jonson, who had been no partner to the passage, as a collaborator in tie play magnanimously insisted on sharing the punishment.
Chapman's comedy, "All Fools" opens with an imitation of a play of Terence (followed by Molière in "L'École des Pères"). We have the sensible and indulgent, and the severe and deceived father. But the plot becomes painfully involved, and jokes on cuckolds are no longer so delightful as they were for two centuries to English taste. His other comedies are not below the level of his contemporaries, excluding Shakespeare and Jonson.
Among Chapman's plays on contemporary French history, the two on Bussy d'Amboise vary much from "Byron's' (Biron's) Conspiracy," and "The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron". "Bussy d'Ambois" has all the faults of fustian, obscurity, bloodshed, torture exercised on the stage, and great palpable ghosts. A friar is the go-between of le brave Bussy and Madame de Monsoreau, Chapman's "Tamyra, Countess of Mountsurry". He appears and disappears through a trap door, and when he dies "Umbra Friar" (the ghost of the holy man), "keeps on the business still". Mountsurry (Monsoreau) too, disguised as the friar, is very busy. A magician summons Behemoth, a monstrous fiend with whom Joan of Arc was accused of being too familiar. Tamyra is stabbed frequently on the stage, to make her write a letter inviting Bussy to a fatal tryst; and next, being tortured, she complies and writes in her own blood. Bussy is overpowered by numbers and slain. Charles Lamb admired a long description of a duel between six minions of Henry III, three on each side. The Nuntius (the messenger), a looker-on, tells how Bussy charged his foe exactly as, in his youth, the Nuntius had seen a unicorn charge an Armenian jeweller, and
Nailed him with his rich antler to a tree.
In "The Revenge of Bussy" his ghost enters and dances with the ghosts of the Duc de Guise, the Cardinal, and Châtillon. The lookers-on are surprised, believing the Guises to be alive and well, when Aumale enters with the news that both have just teen assassinated! The "Revenge" contains some very noble passages of reflection, in which Chapman always shines, and some reminiscences of Homer. The ghosts, though "affable familiar sprites," might be excused by the example of Seneca's tragedies. Dryden found in "Bussy d'Ambois" "a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense," but not all of the poetry is false. There are, indeed, in Chapman's blank verse, passages of exquisite beauty and charm: praise which cannot be denied to passages in the works of all his contemporaries in dramatic writing.
John Marston.
John Marston was of an old Shropshire family: he is supposed to have been born in 1575 and educated at Coventry school. He was a member of Brasenose College, Oxford. His father intended him to be a barrister, but observes in his will that "man proposeth but God disposeth". He wrote satires first, and then plays, later took orders, in 1616 received the living of Christchurch in Hampshire, and died in London in 1634. His plays had been collected and published in 1633. Marston's earliest publications, under the assumed name of Kinsayder, 1598, were "The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certain Satires," and, in the same year, "The Scourge of Villainy". As to "Pygmalion,"
My wanton Muse lasciviously doth sing,
he says: the verses are in the stanza of "Venus and Adonis". With a cheerful anachronism, Pygmalion, having made his ivory statue of a woman, invokes the shade of Ovid--who lived much after his time. At his prayer the statue lives, and Marston ceases to sing lasciviously.
Of the Satires we may say in the words addressed by Mr. Toots to the Chicken, "the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure". The first attacks one Ruscus, for writing, like Mr. Toots, letters to himself. Parasites and boasting soldadoes are also satirized. A quarrel with Hall who styled himself "the first English satirist," arose; the authors of "The Return from Parnassus" (1601) spoke of Marston with coarse but effective contempt. In 1599 this "new poet" sold a play to Henslowe. His "Antonio and Mellida," "Sophonisba," "What You Will," and "The Malcontent" (a misanthrope, as in Molière and Wycherley), do not receive much praise even from the greatest enthusiasts for the old drama. In the dedication to "The Malcontent" Marston made up his quarrel with Ben Jonson, whom he had assailed in "Satiromastix" in reply to Ben's "Poetaster" (1601), not before Ben, according to his own account, had beaten him. In 1605 Marston joined Chapman and Ben in composing "Eastward Ho". The remarks on the Scots, for which the authors were imprisoned, are merely such as Dr. Johnson used to make for the purpose of teasing Boswell. The play, on the whole, is a very good-humoured study of life in London--rather in Hogarth's manner,--with the honest goldsmith, his industrious and his idle apprentice; his ambitious daughter, who would marry a knight with a castle in the air; his quiet daughter, betrothed to the industrious apprentice; the usual number of jokes connected with "horns," and local colour that was useful to Scott in "The Fortunes of Nigel". Probably Marston did little in this favourite comedy; he wearied of play-writing, and was contemptuous of his own works, and careless of his own fame.
Dekker.
Thomas Dekker, as genial as Marston is crabbed, was a playwright and bookseller's hack, concerning whose life little is known except that he was one of Henslowe's "hands" in 1597; was redeemed by Henslowe from prison in the Poultry in 1598; and was still producing pamphlets in 1637. A Londoner by birth, he knew some Dutch, and as his Bryan in "The Honest Whore" proves, a little Gaelic. His most popular work in prose was "The Gull's Hornbook," which is full of the details of life in the taverns; the thieves; the bona robas, usurers, fops, gamblers, all the world which is best known to the modern reader in "The Fortunes of Nigel".
The social historian finds matter gloomy enough as a rule, in "The Wonderful Year" of the accession of James I; and "The Seven Deadly Sins of London" shows a helpless horror of the crowded poverty of the town. Mr. Swinburne found in one of Dekker's tracts a genius akin to Goldsmith's, Thackeray's, Sterne's, Molière's, Dickens's, and not unlike Shakespeare's; with Goldsmith he is often compared; he has given men medicines to make them love him.
Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, and his contributions are discerned by the bewildering light of internal evidence. Of his own pieces, "The Shoe Maker's Holiday" (1600) is a broadly cheerful comedy; the jolly son of St. Hugh, Simon Eyre, becomes Lord Mayor, and, in the upper plot, the hero, Lacy, is very readily pardoned after deserting his regiment in France to woo another Mayor's daughter in the disguise of a shoemaker.
"The Honest Whore," in two parts, shows Bellafront as a Magdalen redeemed by a sudden love which does not find its earthly close; she marries a scamp to whom, in the Second Part, she plays the Patient Grizel, backed by her father disguised as an old serving-man. There is abundance of the inevitable ribaldry.
In a play devoted to "Patient Grissil," that ideal of the dramatists, occurs the lovely lyric "Art thou poor, Yet hast thou golden slumbers"; in "Old Fortunatus" (in the story of the Magical Purse) is "Fortune's kind, cry holiday": other pretty songs occur in "The Sun's Darling" (Ford and Dekker).
"Satiromastix," as we have seen, secures for Dekker the praise of audacity, for no craven would have attacked Ben Jonson. There are fine tirades of imaginative blank verse in "Fortunatus". Dekker admired a thoroughly good woman, whether converted or needing no conversion, as most of his fraternity and as Fielding did. But Fortune, if she sometimes "cried holiday" to Dekker, was never "kind". He is best remembered for his songs and for the words
the best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer, A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
When Lamb tells us that Dekker "had poetry enough for anything": when Mr. Swinburne declares that Dekker "was endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humour, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement, and an exquisite simplicity of expression," we wish to search for his privately reprinted works in prose, and the solitary edition of his plays.
But on the other hand we are told that his "Satiromastix" is not too severely called "a preposterous medley": that his "besetting vice" is "reckless and sluttish incoherence"; that one play can be best explained as the work of an intoxicated man in a debtor's prison; that "there are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens and of sluts." Dekker wrote several pamphlets, which, in a sort, resemble some minor work of Daniel de Foe.
Middleton.
Though Ben Jonson said in his haste that Middleton was "a base fellow," he was of a gentle house. The date of his birth is unknown (1570?), as early as 1597 he was writing for the Press; by 1602 he was working at plays in which five or six other men collaborated. Probably they settled on a plot, or rather on two plots, upper and under, and each author wrote an act: a little ready money came in, but the dramas must have been "in the veniable part of things lost". Middleton frequently worked with Dekker, also with Rowley. They are usually thought to have mainly contributed the noisy and incoherent underplots, but Dekker's admirers credit him with the dénouement of "The Old Law" (Middleton, Massinger, Dekker).
Mr. Bullen finds this passage the drollest of things droll. There can be no doubt that it must have evoked hearty laughter on the stage.
Easily are Hoard and Lucre gulled in "A Trick to Catch the Old One," namely the uncle of the young profligate Witgood. Granting that these ancient chuffs were incredibly credulous, the play is a bustling comedy, with abundance of tricks and turns. The Mayor of Queenburgh in the play so styled was contemporary with Hengist and Horsa; is full of very serious matter, merrily set down. We must not approach in a spirit of historical pedantry a drama in which the Earls of Devonshire and Staffordshire, the sons of Constantine (namely Aurelius Ambrosius, Constantius, and Uther Pendragon), with Vortiger and Horsus, Hengist, the tanner Mayor of Quinborough, Aminada, and a number of button-makers and professional murderers, also two monks, play their parts. The incoherencies, the button-makers, the chaste Constantius, an unwilling monarch, his murder by the minions of Vortiger, their murder (in Macbeth's manner) by Vortiger, are the drollest of unconscious drolleries. This monstrous medley of dull disconnected humours, unspeakable villainies, and speeches in excellent blank verse, with the sufferings of the angelic Castiza, contains, as usual, a pearl of wronged and innocent womanhood.
Middleton is thought by some to walk more closely in Shakespeare's footsteps than even Webster, and his acknowledged masterpiece is "The Changeling," so called from the underplot (by Rowley), in which two sane men smuggle themselves as maniac and idiot into a private lunatic asylum. The cheerful interludes of lunacy set off the tragedy.
Beatrice Joanna, betrothed to Alonzo de Piracquo, loves Alsemero at first sight, and for Piracquo's murderer suborns de Flores, a man whom she loathes, and whose face seems charged with disaster. De Flores has a violent physical passion for Beatrice, endures her insults, haunts her, and accepts her murderous command. After slaying her betrothed, and cutting off his finger that wears the ring of betrothal, he has that scene with Beatrice in which he rejects all her offers, even her whole fortune, and, by threatening to divulge her crime, compels her to be his mistress. This scene is justly celebrated; it does indeed move terror, and pity for the pitiless. But the adventures of Beatrice's bridal night with Alsemero; the absurd affair of the glasses marked M and C; the burning by de Flores of the girl who here plays the part of Brangwain in the romance of Tristram and Iseult; all these things prove Middleton's inability to keep on the level of his own high conception.
After some powerful passages and the reappearance of the bleeding finger with the ring, de Flores murders Beatrice, and dies rejoicing in his success. Tragedy, as Shakespeare and Aristotle understood it, was not concerned with resolute ruffians and girls with violent passions, but with Cordelia and Hamlet, Othello and Desdemona, noble souls; with fate-driven and fallen Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; or Coriolanus ruined by the excess of his own qualities.
Middleton's comedy of "The Roaring Girl," a contemporary virago with pipe and sword, idealized as the champion of her sex; his prodigal old Sir Bounteous in "A Mad World," and his "Chaste Maid in Cheapside" were long popular; while the humours of the duel, and the sterling excellence of Captain Ager in "A Fair Quarrel," are contrasted with the horseplay of Middleton's constant partner, Rowley. In 1620, Middleton was appointed Chronologer to the City, and did the work for which he was paid. He continued to write for the stage, and his "Spanish Gipsy," an intermezzo of a very serious plot with the humours of gentlefolks playing gipsies; his "The Witch," with curious resemblances to the Witches in "Macbeth," and the highly successful "topical" play, "A Game of Chess," with the intrigues in the affairs of the Spanish match for Charles, Prince of Wales, are among the most notable of his many dramas. The Spanish ambassador, in August, 1624, caused the political "Game of Chess" to be withdrawn, for "his Majesty," James I, "remembers well there was a commandment and restraint given against the representing of any modern Christian kings in those stage plays". James might well remember it! In 1604 Shakespeare's company had brought him on the stage, playing his part in the mysterious affair of 1600, the Gowrie Conspiracy. The play was stopped on the third night.
Middleton also wrote many City masques. He died on 4 July, 1627.
Heywood.
Thomas Heywood was born in Lincolnshire, was a Cambridge man, and by 1596-1598 was an actor and a writer for the stage and the Press. He says that it is no custom of his to print his plays, being faithful to the actors (who lost their rights in a play, when printed). He confesses to having "had a hand or at least a main finger" in two hundred and twenty plays.
The strong point in Heywood is his study of domestic manners in Englishmen at home, and as adventurers abroad, as in "The English Traveller," and "The Fair Maid of the West". Here Clem, the son of a baker who, "when corn grew to be at a high rate, never doughed after," frankly says of four sea captains, "I believe they be little better than pirates".
Heywood's most celebrated play, "A Woman Killed with Kindness," reads as much like a modern novel as a Jacobean drama. There is no ribaldry, no horrors, only a duel between two sets of men over a disputed hawking match. The hero, Frankford, shelters and entertains a broken gentleman who flees from the field, and the man, though thoroughly conscious of his own villainy, seduces Frankford's wife, who is beautiful and hitherto a pearl of virtue. She yields at a word: Frankford discovers and spares them, the lady makes a pathetic end, and, dying of remorse (of which her lover has his full share), she is "killed with kindness".
The pathos and the details of manners are entirely in the style of many modern novels, and the underplot, also serious, if improbable, has the favourite stainless heroine, Susan; a girl of great nobility.
There is a most amusing list of the practising "Mediums" of the day, in "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon". They have their specialities, one "doth pretty well for a thing that is lost." Mother Sturton deals in prevision--"is for fore-speaking"; another "practised the book and key" (an automatism, the key is tied into the book, the fingers hold it up under the handle of the key, and the book turns in answer to questions). "All do well," says the witch, "according to their talent. For myself, let the world speak There are some good speeches and good blank verse in "The Iron Age," one of four dramas on the "Four Ages of Hesiod's Mythology". In "The Rape of Lucrece" is an extraordinary set of popular songs, some coarse enough, one in Dutch, and among them the beautiful lyric,
Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day,
which, more than his twenty-four surviving dramas, keeps Heywood's memory green and fragrant. He wrote miscellaneous pamphlets and books with enormous industry.
There is something sympathetic in his very carelessness,--what Lamb precisely meant when he called Heywood "a prose Shakespeare" is disputed. Possibly he meant that Heywood has sweetness of nature, humour, and knowledge of character, without much poetry.
Webster.
Concerning the life and adventures of John Webster next to nothing is known. In 1602 the account books of Henslowe, the financier of the stage, mention two lost plays as being, the first by Dekker, Drayton, Middleton, Munday, and Webster; and the second by Webster, Chettle, T. Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and Dekker. Dramas by so many hands cannot be masterpieces. Webster was a great and busy collaborator; in the bustling "citizen comedies," "Northward Ho" and "Westward Ho" he worked with Dekker. He is best known by Lamb's extracts from his "White Devil" and "Duchess of Malfi".
"The White Devil" (printed in 1612) is a chronicle play of the career of Vittoria Corombona, but Webster has altered the facts as he pleased. The more tragic humours of the betrayed husband (our liberal fathers gave him a shorter name) are exemplified in her lord Camillo, who, in the interests of her lover, the Duke of Brachiano, is murdered in a manner intended to disguise the crime: the device is about as subtle as the blowing up of Darnley with gunpowder. The Duchess, another patient Grizel, except so far as Vittoria is concerned, men slay by poisoning the portrait of her faithless husband, which she kisses, and thus imbibes the infection. Cornelia, the mother of Vittoria and of her leading murderer Flamineo, is a pathetic figure, and it is she who sings the beautiful lyric.
Call for the robin red breast and the wren.
Lamb says of Cornelia, "she speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, this only a Webster can do." But if this is all that a Webster can do, and if to do this he needs an accumulation of unnatural horrors--fratricide, the murderer of a brother contemplating the madness which his deed has wrought in his mother; if the slain brother has just been kicking his strumpet sister; then we may ask whether an art that flourishes in these odious and extravagant conditions produces "one of the imperishable and ineradicable landmarks of literature".
The serene and audacious impudence of Vittoria, when accused of her first husband's, Camillo's, murder; and the Ophelia-like laments and the song of Cornelia; with the all-but imperturbable wickedness of Flamineo, yield the extracts which Charles Lamb made current coin. Webster, in fact, returned, with abundant genius, but without discretion, to the class of Revenge-plays opened by Kyd in "The Spanish Tragedie".
The behaviour of the Duchess of Malfi, in the play of that name (printed 1623), introduced as she is by a noble panegyric, does not prepare us for her sudden wooing of her steward, Antonio. Her brothers, like the brothers of Keats's Isabella, determine to punish her: their instrument, Bosolo, is a character not wholly lost, who deliberately sells himself to guilt; and the scene in which eight madmen are let loose to dance round the Duchess--they do not shake her resolution,--is much admired. She is strangled, the children are strangled on all sides, the servant Cariola is strangled, though "she bites and scratches". The Fifth Act is a scene of the Kilkenny cats; almost everybody, including Bosolo, is stabbed, and Ford, in commendatory verses, applauds Webster, as at least the equal of the Athenian tragedians.
Webster's genius was confessedly "subdued to that it worked in". In the preface to "The White Devil" he complains that the public will not endure a tragedy which observes the critical laws; "the sententious Chorus," and "the passionate and weighty Nuntius," the messenger who, in Greek tragedy, reports the horrors done off the stage. Deprived of the messenger, obliged to work his massacres on the scene, Webster was unsparing in horrors. His "Devil's Lawsuit" is a complicated web of squalid intrigue; the blank verse is utterly degenerate; and "Appius and Virginia" is not remarkable for originality in the representation of that famous Roman story.
Webster's idea of a ghost was rather unconventional; Brachiano's phantasm in "The White Devil" wore no common sheet, but "leather cassock and breeches, and boots; with a cowl, in his hand a pot of lily flowers, with a skull in't". Dekker advises his Gull at the play to laugh aloud in the crisis of the tragedy, and probably there were some hardy or hysterical spectators who thus received the too, too solid spirit of Brachiano. The Tragedy of Revenge inspired Cyril Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," and horror has her home in this play and his "Atheist's Tragedy". What in them deserves reading may be found in Lamb's extracts.
Massinger.
Philip Massinger (born 1583) was the son of a gentleman patronized by the noble house of Pembroke. The poet was educated at St. Alban Hall, Oxford, but left without taking a degree (1606). He had fallen into debt, and commenced play-writing in 1614; his earliest known piece, in which Dekker took part, "The Virgin Martyr," was acted in 1622. The period represented is that of the persecution under Diocletian, and the piece is old-fashioned enough; introducing the angelic companion of St. Dorothea, and the devil who attends the persecutor, Theophilus, a very late convert. Torture is introduced on the stage, and Theophilus slays his daughters, whom he had tortured out of Christianity back into the Olympian faith, and whom Dorothea reconverts by arguments with which they must already have long been familiar. There is a tendency to credit Dekker both with the most gracious passages of verse in the piece and with the stupid but energetic ribaldries of Hircius and Spungius.
"The Unnatural Combat" (duel between a son and a father who rivals Cenci in Shelley's tragedy), "The Duke of Milan," with a most unnatural plot, "The Roman Actor," "The Fatal Dowry," are among Massinger's tragedies; some twelve of his plays were burned in manuscript by Betty Baker, or Barnes, the cook of Warburton, the herald. If they contained such scenes as that of "the ghost of young Malefort," slain by his father, "naked from the waist, full of wounds, leading in the Shadow of a lady, her face leprous," our regret for them may not be overwhelming. We have plays enough in which a man is poisoned by the venomed paint on a canvas or on a dead lady's face; plays enough in which victims (as in "The Roman Actor") are cruelly tortured on the stage.
That Massinger has noble passages and great tirades is undeniable, and he is one of the four or five successors of Shakespeare who are said by their admirers to follow most closely in his footsteps. The play which keeps Massinger's memory green in common recollection is his "A New Way to pay Old Debts". The great part is that of Sir Giles Overreach, a financial ruffian, suggested probably by a real character equally nefarious, Sir Giles Mompesson. A victim of Overreach's in his own nephew, Wellborn, and the play shows how Wellborn, with the aid of a rich and virtuous widow, Lady Allworth, cozens Overreach into advancing money; how his creature, Marrall, chouses him; and how his daughter, Margaret, marries young Allworth, and not the peer for whom the usurer designed her. Described as "both lion and fox," Overreach, always ready to fight, is more successful in the furious than in the furtive part of his nature. He bullies man and defies God in seeking satisfaction of his two chief desires, to ruin and humiliate his social superiors and to plunder the widow and the orphan or any other victim whose loss may be his gain.
But like the Mammon-worshippers in "A Trick to Catch the Old One," Overreach himself is credulous enough, an easy victim of the conspirators against his pride and pocket. Massinger's indelicacy "has not always the apology of wit," indeed he is not remarkable for humour, any more than most of his contemporaries, who sought and doubtless got a laugh by stereotyped and witless ribaldries.
The character part of Greedy, a parasite of Overreach's, remarkable for his appetite,--a shield of brawn and a barrel of Colchester oysters "were to him a dish of tea" before breakfast,--must have been diverting on the stage; and when Marrall turns against his master, we are reminded of similar surprises by Mr. Micawber and Newman Noggs, though they were not accomplices in the iniquities which they exposed.
Massinger's plays are often interwoven with the work of other hands, and deal, in a more or less veiled way, with the political situations of his time. He lived in poverty, as his petitions to the Herbert family prove; and he died in 1640. He was dissatisfied with his fortunes and with public indifference; poverty had forced him into poetry, and hunger had made him hasty in his work; the too common calamity of poor authors.
Ford.
John Ford was a native of Ilsington in Devonshire, baptized on 17 April, 1586. He was of good family, entered the Inns of Court, and is said to have practised in his profession. A contemporary rhymer speaks of him "deep in a dump," "with folded arms and melancholy hat". He worked at plays with Dekker, and in "The Witch of Edmonton" (1622?).
Four of his comedies were burned or otherwise put out of being by Betty Barnes, or Baker, the celebrated cook of Warburton, Somerset herald, who made away with at least fifty manuscripts of old plays: his earliest known comedy (1613) was among Betty's victims. His earliest independent surviving piece, "The Lover's Melancholy," was played in 1628. The more serious part has a rather improbable plot turning on the disguise of a girl as a man, but there are many beautiful romantic passages in the loves of Palador, Prince of Cyprus, and Eroclea. A masque of Bedlamites within the play indicates the strange contemporary taste for the terrors and humours of maniacs.
In 1633 the famous plays "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," and "The Broken Heart," were printed. The former has a plot of incestuous loves, ending in a pretty general massacre. Given the inspiration of the unnatural, Ford could do great things. In the Prologue to "The Broken Heart" (the scene is Sparta, of all unlikely places) Ford reprobates the staple of low contemporary comedy, "jests fit for a brothel court's applause," "apish laughter," "lame jeers at place or persons"; perhaps Ford was not unaffected by Prynne's famous attack on the stage, "Histriomastix" (1632).
"The Broken Heart" is free from the customary ribaldries; it is a tragedy of fate, the characters are noble. Ithocles is noble, despite the original wrong which he has committed in separating Orgilus and Penthea, and wedding Penthea to "the grey dissimulation" of the jealous Bassanes. Orgilus, who murders Ithocles, is noble in his death, the death of Seneca without the bath. Penthea is noble, and the wanderings of her mind at the end of her slow suicide, are beautiful in their sad fantasy; finally the dancing of Calantha, while one after another come messengers with the tidings that break her heart, is noble, and probably her endurance is the reason for the placing of the scene in Sparta. As in Greek tragedy, all are doomed by Fate; the Oracle of Delphi has spoken truth, with the wonted obscurity which only Time can unriddle. It is true that the interest shifts, in the last scenes, from Penthea to Calantha, whom we have scarcely looked on previously. But Ford aimed high, and came near to hitting his mark. He ought never to have, attempted his crazy low comedy scenes.
Ford's "Perkin Warbeck" is by far the most readable historical play of the old stage, after Marlowe's "Edward II," and Shakespeare's Chronicle plays. Perkin's character is resolute and princely, as is that of his Gordon bride, "The White Rose". "If he lost his life he died a king" in royal bearing. As King Henry says
The custom, sure, of being called a king Has fastened in his thought that he is such.
Ford, in his Tragedies, is not to be reckoned among Mr. Swinburne's "splendid slovens". His blank verse never degenerates into skimble-skamble slackness, but, compared with most of his contemporaries, he does not shine as a lyric poet. He retired to the country after the overthrow of the stage and the beginning of the civil war.
Shirley.
James Shirley, of an honourable family, was born in London, in 1596. He entered the Merchant Taylors' School, and, in 1612, went to St. John's, Oxford, where Laud was then master. Laud, who believed in "the beauty of holiness," is said to have prevented Shirley, as a blemished man, with a large mole on his face, from taking holy orders. He migrated to Cambridge, to St. Catherine's Hall, published a poem in 1616, did take orders, received a living; left it on becoming a Catholic, turned schoolmaster at St. Albans, and then went to town as a playwright.
His "Love's Tricks" was licensed in 1624-1625,--"a silly play," writes Mr. Pepys in 1667. Shirley was prolific; his "Witty Fair One" (acted 1628) is thought one of his best comedies. These dramas have a touch of the modern; we hear of "balls," a new name then for dancing parties. In "The Lady of Pleasure" (1635) Lady Bornwell's contempt for the country life and for country gentlemen, and her determination to spend her husband's fortune on the gaieties of the Court, are amusing, and we expect her to be a Lady Teazle. But, despite her husband's stratagem of beating her at her own game, and the humours of the nephew whom she has brought from Oxford, the piece can hardly be read with enthusiastic delight. It is deemed Shirley's masterpiece in comedy, and preludes to the comic drama of the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688. Dryden expresses extreme contempt for both Hey wood and Shirley; it is to be feared that his own plays are now no more popular than theirs.
After residing at Dublin under the great Earl of Strafford, and producing plays at the Viceregal Court, and after insulting in an ironic dedication of "The Bird in a Cage," the Puritan Prynne, who had been most cruelly punished for allusions in his work against the stage ("Histriomastix"), Shirley returned to London. His "The Cardinal" is imitated from Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," and with "The Traitor" is reckoned (though Shirley preferred "The Cardinal"), "the best of his flock" in tragedy. Pepys (1662) writes "there is no great matter in it," but Pepys's dramatic criticisms are no great matter. In 1642 came the shutting up of the theatres, and Shirley, after seeing the wars under his patron, the Duke of Newcastle, returned to his old profession as a schoolmaster.
He wrote a preface (1647) to some hitherto unprinted plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, commending their stage as a school of moral discipline, "In this silence of the stage thou hast a liberty to read these inimitable plays". In 1659 Shirley published his "Contention of Ajax and Ulysses," containing the noble lines which embalm his memory:--
The glories of our blood and state. Are shadows, not substantial things.
His
Bid me no more good night, because 'Tis dark, must I away?
is also a pretty piece, like his "Song" (attributed wrongly to Carew).
Shirley's works were often acted at the beginning of the Restoration, but he refused to write more dramas. The shock of the great fire of 1666 is said to have caused the deaths, on the same day, of himself and of his wife. The blank verse of Shirley is seldom distinguished. His numerous works suffer somewhat because they come at the end of a long period in which talent like his, with defects of taste often greater than his, have satiated and wearied all but the special student and enthusiastic devotee of the drama. The minor stars in the galaxy of playwrights almost defy enumeration.
Space does not permit estimates of the last dramatists of "the first temple," Randolph, Suckling--whose dramatic verse is as chaotically bad as several of his lyrics are exquisite; Davenant, who tried to keep alive a semblance of the drama at the end of Cromwell's protectorate; Brome, Cartwright, Mayne, and others. The blank verse in which the elder poets had so often excelled was left to the care of Milton; the blank verse of the stage became formless, and, during the Restoration, rhymed heroic couplets usurped its place.
[1] As I write, an accidental "fourteener" meets the eyes in the heading of a magazine article--"Discovery of the Missing Link by Georgiana Knight". This metre does not seem the best in which to render Homer.