XV. HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE, FROM 1550 TO 1600…

XV. HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE, FROM 1550 TO 1600

Italian Tragedy and Comedy--Pastoral Drama--Spanish Drama--Lope De Vega--French Dramatists--Early English Drama--Second Æra; of Marlowe and his Contemporaries--Shakspeare--Character of several of his Plays written within this Period.

|Italian tragedy.|

1. Many Italian tragedies are extant, belonging to these fifty years, though not very generally known, nor can I speak of them except through Ginguéné and Walker, the latter of whom has given a few extracts. The Marianna and Didone of Lodovico Dolce, the Œdipus of Anguillara, the Merope of Torelli, the Semiramis of Manfredi, are necessarily bounded, in the conduct of their fable, by what was received as truth. But others, as Cinthio had done, preferred to invent their story, in deviation from the practice of antiquity. The Hadriana of Groto, the Acripanda of Decio da Orto, and the Torrismond of Tasso are of this kind. In all these we find considerable beauties of language, a florid and poetic tone, but declamatory and not well adapted to the rapidity of action, in which we seem to perceive the germ of that change from common speech to recitative, which, fixing the attention of the hearer on the person of the actor rather than on his relation to the scene, destroyed in great measure the character of dramatic representation. The Italian tragedies are deeply imbued with horror; murder and cruelty, with all attending circumstances of disgust, and every pollution of crime, besides a profuse employment of spectral agency, seem the chief weapons of the poet’s armoury to subdue the spectator. Even the gentleness of Tasso could not resist the contagion in his Torrismond. These tragedies still retain the chorus at the termination of every act. Of the Italian comedies little can be added to what has been said before; no comic writer of this period is comparable in reputation to Machiavel, Ariosto, or even Aretin.[1242] They are rather less licentious; and in fact, the profligacy of Italian manners began, in consequence probably of a better example in the prelates of the church, to put on some regard for exterior decency in the latter part of the century.

[1242] Ginguéné, vol. vi.

|Pastoral drama.|

2. These regular plays, though possibly deserving of more attention than they have obtained, are by no means the most important portion of the dramatic literature of Italy in this age. A very different style of composition has, through two distinguished poets, contributed to spread the fame of Italian poetry, and the language itself, through Europe. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were abundantly productive of pastoral verse; a style pleasing to those who are not severe in admitting its conventional fictions. The pastoral dialogue had not much difficulty in expanding to the pastoral drama. In the Sicilian gossips of Theocritus, and in some other ancient eclogues, new interlocutors supervene, which is the first germ of a regular action. Pastorals of this kind had been written, and possibly represented, in Spain, such as the Mingo Rebulgo, in the middle of the fifteenth century.[1243] Ginguéné has traced the progress of similar representations, becoming more and more dramatic, in Italy.[1244] But it is admitted that the honour of giving the first example of a true pastoral fable to the theatre was due to Agostino Beccari of Ferrara. This piece, named Il Sagrifizio, was acted at that court in 1554. Its priority in a line which was to become famous appears to be its chief merit. In this, as in earlier and more simple attempts at pastoral dialogue, the choruses were set to music.[1245]

[1243] Bouterwek’s Spanish Literature, i. 129.

[1244] vi. 327 et post.

[1245] Id. vi. 332.

|Aminta of Tasso.|

3. This pleasing, though rather effeminate, species of poetry was carried, more than twenty years afterwards, one or two unimportant imitations of Beccari having intervened, to a point of excellence, which perhaps it has never surpassed, in the Aminta of Tasso. Its admirable author was then living at the court of Ferrara, yielding up his heart to those seductive illusions of finding happiness in the favour of the great, and even in ambitious and ill-assorted love, which his sounder judgment already saw through, the Aminta bearing witness to both states of mind. In the character of Tirsi he has drawn himself, and seems once (though with the proud consciousness of genius), to hint at that eccentric melancholy, which soon increased so fatally for his peace.

Ne già cose scrivea degne di riso, Se ben cose facea degne di riso.

The language of all the interlocutors in the Aminta is alike, nor is the satyr less elegant or recondite than the learned shepherds. It is in general too diffuse and florid, too uniform and elaborate, for passion; especially if considered dramatically, in reference to the story and the speakers. But it is to be read as what it is, a beautiful poem; the delicacy and gracefulness of many passages rendering them exponents of the hearer’s or reader’s feelings, though they may not convey much sympathy with the proper subject. The death of Aminta, however, falsely reported to Sylvia, leads to a truly pathetic scene. It is to be observed that Tasso was more formed by classical poetry, and more frequently an imitator of it, than any earlier Italian. The beauties of the Aminta are in great measure due to Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Anacreon, and Moschus.

|Pastor Fido of Guarini.|

4. The success of Tasso’s Aminta produced the Pastor Fido of Guarini, himself long in the service of the duke of Ferrara, where he had become acquainted with Tasso; though in consequence of some dissatisfaction at that court, he sought the patronage of the duke of Savoy. The Pastor Fido was first represented at Turin in 1585, but seems not to have been printed for some years afterwards. It was received with general applause; but the obvious resemblance to Tasso’s pastoral drama could not fail to excite a contention between their respective advocates, which long survived the mortal life of the two poets. Tasso, it has been said, on reading the Pastor Fido, was content to observe that, if his rival had not read the Aminta, he would not have excelled it. If his modesty induced him to say no more than this, very few would be induced to dispute his claim; the characters, the sentiments are evidently imitated; and in one celebrated instance a whole chorus is parodied with the preservation of every rhyme.[1246] But it is far more questionable whether the palm of superior merit, independent of originality, should be awarded to the later poet. More elegance and purity of taste belong to the Aminta, more animation and variety to the Pastor Fido. The advantage in point of morality, which some have ascribed to Tasso, is not very perceptible; Guarini may transgress rather more in some passages, but the tone of the Aminta, in strange opposition to the pure and pious life of its author, breathes nothing but the avowed laxity of an Italian court. The Pastor Fido may be considered, in a much greater degree than the Aminta, a prototype of the Italian opera; not that it was spoken in recitative; but the short and rapid expressions of passion, the broken dialogue, the frequent changes of personages and incidents, keep the effect of representation and of musical accompaniment continually before the reader’s imagination. Any one who glances over a few scenes of the Pastor Fido will, I think, perceive that it is the very style which Metastasio, and inferior coadjutors of musical expression, have rendered familiar to our ears.

[1246] This is that beginning, O bella età dell’oro.

|Italian opera.|

5. The great invention, which though chiefly connected with the history of music and of society, was by no means without influence upon literature, the melodrame, usually called the Italian opera, belongs to the very last years of this century. Italy, long conspicuous for such musical science and skill as the Middle Ages possessed, had fallen, in the first part of the sixteenth century, very short of some other countries, and especially of the Netherlands, from which the courts of Europe, and even of the Italian princes, borrowed their performers and their instructors. A revolution in church music, which had become particularly dry and pedantic, was brought about by the genius of Palestrina about 1560; and the art, in all its departments, was cultivated with an increased zeal for all the rest of the century.[1247] In the splendour that environed the houses of Medici and Este, in the pageants they loved to exhibit, music, carried to a higher perfection by foreign artists, and by the natives that now came forward to emulate them, became of indispensable importance; it had already been adapted to dramatic representation in choruses; interludes and pieces written for scenic display were now given with a perpetual accompaniment, partly to the songs, partly to the dance and pantomime which intervened between them.[1248] Finally, Ottavio Rinuccini, a poet of considerable genius, but who is said to have known little of musical science, by meditating on what is found in ancient writers on the accompaniment to their dramatic dialogue, struck out the idea of recitative. This he first tried in the pastoral of Dafne, represented privately in 1594; and its success led him to the composition of what he entitled a tragedy for music, on the story of Eurydice. This was represented at the festival on the marriage of Mary of Medicis in 1600. “The most astonishing effects,” says Ginguéné, “that the theatrical music of the greatest masters has produced, in the perfection of the science, are not comparable to those of this representation, which exhibited to Italy the creation of a new art.”[1249] It is, however, a different question whether this immense enhancement of the powers of music, and consequently of its popularity, has been favourable to the development of poetical genius in this species of composition; and in general it may be said that, if music has, on some occasions, been a serviceable handmaid, and even a judicious monitress, to poetry, she has been apt to prove but a tyrannical mistress. In the melodrame, Corniani well observes, poetry became her vassal, and has been ruled with a despotic sway.

[1247] Ranke, with the musical sentiment of a German, ascribes a wonderful influence in the revival of religion after the middle of the century to the compositions of Palestrina. Church music had become so pedantic and technical that the council of Trent had some doubts whether it should be retained. Pius IV. appointed a commission to examine this question, who could arrive at no decision. The artists said it was impossible to achieve what the church required, a coincidence of expression between the words and the music. Palestrina appeared at this time, and composed the mass of Marcellus, which settled the dispute for ever. Other works by himself and his disciples followed, which elevated sacred music to the highest importance among the accessories of religious worship. Die Päpste, vol. i. p. 498. But a large proportion of the performers, I apprehend, were Germans, especially in theatrical music.

[1248] Ginguéné, vol. vi., has traced the history of the melodrame with much pains.

[1249] P. 474. Corniani, vii. 31, speaks highly of the poetical abilities of Rinuccini. See also Galluzzi, Storia del Gran Ducato, v. 547.

|The national taste revives in the Spanish drama.|

6. The struggle that seemed arduous in the earlier part of this century between the classical and national schools of dramatic poetry in Spain, proved of no long duration. The latter became soon decisively superior; and before the end of the present period, that kingdom was in possession of a peculiar and extensive literature, which has attracted the notice of Europe, and has enriched both the French theatre and our own. The spirit of the Spanish drama is far different from that which animated the Italian writers; there is not much of Machiavel in their comedy, and still less of Cinthio in their tragedy. They abandoned the Greek chorus, which still fettered their contemporaries, and even the division into five acts, which later poets, in other countries, have not ventured to renounce. They gave more complication to the fable, sought more unexpected changes of circumstance, were not solicitous in tragedy to avoid colloquial language or familiar incidents, showed a preference to the tragi-comic intermixture of light with serious matter, and cultivated grace in poetical diction more than vigour. The religious mysteries, once common in other parts of Europe, were devoutly kept up in Spain; and under the name of Autos Sacramentales, make no inconsiderable portion of the writings of their chief dramatists.[1250]

[1250] Bouterwek.

7. Andrès, favourable as he is to his country, is far from enthusiastic in his praises of the Spanish theatre. Its exuberance has been its ruin; no one, he justly remarks, can read some thousand plays in the hope of finding a few that are tolerable. Andrès, however, is not exempt from a strong prejudice in favour of the French stage. He admits the ease and harmony of the Spanish versification, the purity of the style, the abundance of the thoughts, and the ingenious complexity of the incidents. This is peculiarly the merit of the Spanish comedy, as its great defect, in his opinion, is the want of truth and delicacy in the delineation of the passions, and of power to produce a vivid impression on the reader. The best work, he concludes rather singularly, of the comic poets of Spain has been the French theatre.[1251]

[1251] Vol. v. p. 138.

|Lope de Vega.|

|His extraordinary fertility.|

8. The most renowned of these is Lope de Vega, so many of whose dramas appeared within the present century, that although, like Shakspeare, he is equally to be claimed by the next, we may place his name, once for all, in this period. Lope de Vega is called by Cervantes a prodigy of nature; and such he may justly be reckoned; not that we can ascribe to him a sublime genius, or a mind abounding with fine original thought, but his fertility of invention and readiness of versifying are beyond competition. It was said foolishly, if meant as praise, of Shakspeare, and we may be sure untruly, that he never blotted a line. This may also be presumed of Vega. “He required,” says Bouterwek, “no more than four and twenty hours to write a versified drama of three acts in redondillas, interspersed with sonnets, tercets, and octaves, and from beginning to end abounding in intrigues, prodigies, or interesting situations. This astonishing facility enabled him to supply the Spanish theatre with upwards of 2000 original dramas, of which not more than 300 have been preserved by printing. In general the theatrical manager carried away what he wrote before he had even time to revise it; and immediately a fresh applicant would arrive to prevail on him to commence a new piece. He sometimes wrote a play in the short space of three or four hours.” ... “Arithmetical calculations have been employed in order to arrive at a just estimate of Lope de Vega’s facility in poetic composition. According to his own testimony, he wrote on an average five sheets a day; it has therefore been computed that the number of sheets which he composed during his life must have amounted to 133,225; and that, allowing for the deduction of a small portion of prose, Lope de Vega must have written upwards of 21,300,000 verses. Nature would have overstepped her bounds and have produced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity of invention and composition, attained perfection in any department of literature.”[1252]

[1252] P. 361-363. Montalvan, Lope’s friend, says that he wrote 1800 plays and 400 autos. In a poem of his own, written in 1609, he claims 483 plays, and he continued afterwards to write for the stage. Those that remain and have been collected in twenty-five volumes are reckoned at about 300.

|His versification.|

9. This peculiar gift of rapid composition will appear more extraordinary when we attend to the nature of Lope’s versification, very unlike the irregular lines of our old drama, which it is not perhaps difficult for a practised hand to write or utter extemporaneously. “The most singular circumstance attending his verse,” says Lord Holland, “is the frequency and difficulty of the tasks which he imposes on himself. At every step we meet with acrostics, echoes, and compositions of that perverted and laborious kind, from attempting which another author would be deterred by the trouble of the undertaking, if not by the little real merit attending the achievement. They require no genius, but they exact much time; which one should think that such a voluminous poet could little afford to waste. But Lope made a parade of his power over the vocabulary: he was not contented with displaying the various order in which he could dispose the syllables and marshal the rhymes of his language; but he also prided himself upon the celerity with which he brought them to go through the most whimsical but the most difficult evolutions. He seems to have been partial to difficulties for the gratification of surmounting them.” This trifling ambition is usual among second-rate poets, especially in a degraded state of public taste; but it may be questionable, whether Lope de Vega ever performed feats of skill more surprising in this way than some of the Italian improvisatori, who have been said to carry on at the same time three independent sonnets, uttering, in their unpremeditated strains, a line of each in alternate succession. There is reason to believe, that their extemporaneous poetry, is as good as anything in Lope de Vega.

|His popularity.|

10. The immense popularity of this poet, not limited, among the people itself, to his own age, bespeaks some attention from criticism. “The Spaniards who affect fine taste in modern times,” says Schlegel, “speak with indifference of their old national poets; but the people retain a lively attachment to them, and their productions are received on the stage, at Madrid, or at Mexico, with passionate enthusiasm.” It is true that foreign critics have not in general pronounced a very favourable judgment of Lope de Vega. But a writer of such prodigious fecundity is ill appreciated by single plays; the whole character of his composition manifests that he wrote for the stage, and for the stage of his own country, rather than for the closet of a foreigner. His writings are divided into spiritual plays, heroic and historical comedies, most of them taken from the annals and traditions of Spain, and lastly, comedies of real life, or, as they were called, “of the hat and sword,” (capa y espada) a name answering to the comœdia togata of the Roman stage. These have been somewhat better known than the rest, and have, in several instances, found their way to our own theatre, by suggesting plots and incidents to our older writers. The historian of Spanish literature, to whom I am so much indebted, has given a character of these comedies, in which the English reader will perhaps recognise much that might be said also of Beaumont and Fletcher.

|Character of his comedies.|

11. “Lope de Vega’s comedies de Capa y Espada, or those which may properly be denominated his dramas of intrigue, though wanting in the delineation of character, are romantic pictures of manners, drawn from real life. They present, in their peculiar style, no less interest with respect to situation than his heroic comedies, and the same irregularity in the composition of the scenes. The language, too, is alternately elegant and vulgar, sometimes highly poetic, and sometimes, though versified, reduced to the level of the dullest prose. Lope de Vega seems scarcely to have bestowed a thought on maintaining probability in the succession of the different scenes; ingenious complication is with him the essential point in the interest of his situations. Intrigues are twisted and entwined together, until the poet, in order to bring his piece to a conclusion, without ceremony cuts the knots he cannot untie, and then he usually brings as many couples together as he can by any possible contrivance match. He has scattered through his pieces occasional reflections and maxims of prudence; but any genuine morality, which might be conveyed through the stage, is wanting, for its introduction would have been inconsistent with that poetic freedom on which the dramatic interest of the Spanish comedy is founded. His aim was to paint what he observed, not what he would have approved, in the manners of the fashionable world of his age; but he leaves it to the spectator to draw his own inferences.”[1253]

[1253] Bouterwek, p. 375.

|Tragedy of Don Sancho Ortiz.|

12. An analysis of one of these comedies from real life is given by Bouterwek, and another by Lord Holland. The very few that I have read appear lively and diversified, not unpleasing in the perusal, but exciting little interest and rapidly forgotten. Among the heroic pieces of Lope de Vega a high place appears due to the Estrella de Sevilla, published with alterations by Triquero, under the name of Don Sancho Ortiz.[1254] It resembles the Cid in its subject. The king, Sancho the Brave, having fallen in love with Estrella, sister of Don Bustos Tabera, and being foiled by her virtue,[1255] and by the vigilance of her brother, who had drawn his sword upon him, as in disguise he was attempting to penetrate into her apartment, resolves to have him murdered, and persuades Don Sancho Ortiz, a soldier full of courage and loyalty, by describing the attempt made on his person, to undertake the death of one whose name is contained in a paper he gives him. Sancho is the accepted lover of Estrella, and is on that day to espouse her with her brother’s consent. He reads the paper, and after a conflict which is meant to be pathetic, but in our eyes is merely ridiculous, determines, as might be supposed, to keep his word to his sovereign. The shortest course is to contrive a quarrel with Bustos, which produces a duel, wherein the latter is killed. The second act commences with a pleasing scene of Estrella’s innocent delight in her prospect of happiness; but the body of her brother is now brought in, and the murderer, who had made no attempt to conceal himself, soon appears in custody. His examination before the judges, who endeavour in vain to extort one word from him in his defence, occupies part of the third act. The king, anxious to save his life, but still more so to screen his own honour, requires only a pretext to pardon the offence. But the noble Castilian disdains to save himself by falsehood, and merely repeats that he had not slain his friend without cause, and that the action was atrocious, but not criminal.

Dice que fue atrocidad, Pero que no fue delito.

[1254] In Lord Holland’s Life of Lope de Vega, a more complete analysis than what I have offered is taken from the original play. I have followed the rifaccimento of Triquero, which is substantially the same.

[1255] Lope de Vega has borrowed for Estrella the well-known answer of a lady to a king of France, told with several variations of names, and possibly true of none.

Soy (she says), Para esposa vuestra poco, Paro dama vuestra mucho.

13. In this embarrassment Estrella appears, demanding, not the execution of justice on her brother’s murderer, but that he should be delivered up to her. The king, with his usual feebleness, consents to this request, observing that he knows by experience it is no new thing for her to be cruel. She is, however, no sooner departed with the royal order, than the wretched prince repents, and determines to release Sancho, making compensation to Estrella by marrying her to a ricohombre of Castile. The lady meantime reaches the prison, and in an interview with her unfortunate lover, offers him his liberty, which by the king’s concession is in her power. He is not to be outdone in generous sentiments, and steadily declares his resolution to be executed. In the fifth act this heroic emulation is reported by one who had overheard it to the king. All the people of this city, he replies, are heroes, and outstrip nature herself by the greatness of their souls. The judges now enter, and with sorrow report their sentence that Sancho must suffer death. But the king is at length roused, and publicly acknowledges that the death of Bustos had been perpetrated by his command. The president of the tribunal remarks that, as the king had given the order, there must doubtless have been good cause. Nothing seems to remain but the union of the lovers. Here, however, the high Castilian principle once more displays itself. Estrella refuses to be united to one she tenderly loves, but who has brought such a calamity into her family; and Sancho himself, willingly releasing her engagement, admits that their marriage under such circumstances would be a perpetual torment. The lady therefore chooses, what is always at hand in Catholic fiction, the dignified retirement of a nunnery, and the lover departs to dissipate his regrets in the Moorish war.

14. Notwithstanding all in the plan and conduct of this piece, which neither our own state of manners, nor the laws of any sound criticism can tolerate, it is very conceivable that, to the factitious taste of a Spanish audience in the age of Lope de Vega, it would have appeared excellent. The character of Estrella is truly noble, and much superior in interest to that of Chimene. Her resentment is more genuine, and free from that hypocrisy which, at least in my judgment, renders the other almost odious and contemptible. Instead of imploring the condemnation of him she loves, it is as her own prisoner that she demands Sancho Ortiz, and this for the generous purpose of setting him at liberty. But the great superiority of the Spanish play is at the close. Chimene accepts the hand stained with her father’s blood, while Estrella sacrifices her own wishes to a sentiment which the manners of Spain, and we may add, the laws of natural decency required.

|His spiritual plays.|

15. The spiritual plays of Lope de Vega abound with as many incongruous and absurd circumstances as the mysteries of our forefathers. The Inquisition was politic enough to tolerate, though probably the sternness of Castilian orthodoxy could not approve, these strange representations which, after all, had the advantage of keeping the people in mind of the devil, and of the efficacy of holy water in chasing him away. But the regular theatre, according to Lord Holland, has always been forbidden in Spain by the church, nor do the kings frequent it.

|Numancia of Cervantes.|

16. Two tragedies by Bermudez, both on the story of Ines de Castro, are written on the ancient model, with a chorus, and much simplicity of fable. They are, it is said, in a few scenes impressive and pathetic, but interrupted by passages of flat and tedious monotony.[1256] Cervantes was the author of many dramatic pieces; some of which are so indifferent as to have been taken for intentional satires upon the bad taste of his times, so much of it do they display. One or two, however, of his comedies have obtained some praise from Schlegel and Bouterwek. But his tragedy of Numancia stands apart from his other dramas, and, as I conceive, from anything on the Spanish stage. It is probably one of his earlier works, but was published for the first time in 1784. It is a drama of extraordinary power, and may justify the opinion of Bouterwek that, in different circumstances, the author of Don Quixote might have been the Æschylus of Spain. If terror and pity are the inspiring powers of tragedy, few have been for the time more under their influence than Cervantes in his Numancia. The story of that devoted city, its long resistance to Rome, its exploits of victorious heroism, that foiled repeatedly the consular legions, are known to every one. Cervantes has opened his tragedy at the moment when Scipio Æmilianus, enclosing the city with a broad trench, determines to secure its reduction by famine. The siege lasted five months, when the Numantines, exhausted by hunger, but resolute never to yield, setting fire to a pile of their household goods, after slaying their women and children, cast themselves into the flame. Every circumstance that can enhance horror, the complaints of famished children, the desperation of mothers, the sinister omens of rejected sacrifice, the appalling incantations that reanimate a recent corpse to disclose the secrets of its prison-house, are accumulated with progressive force in this tremendous drama. The love-scenes of Morando and Lira, two young persons whose marriage had been frustrated by the public calamity, though some incline to censure them, contain nothing beyond poetical truth, and add, in my opinion, to its pathos, while they somewhat relieve its severity.

[1256] Bouterwek, 296.

17. Few, probably, would desire to read the Numancia a second time. But it ought to be remembered that the historical truth of this tragedy, though, as in the Ugolino of Dante, it augments the painfulness of the impression, is the legitimate apology of the author. Scenes of agony, and images of unspeakable sorrow, when idly accumulated by an inventor at his ease, as in many of our own older tragedies, and in much of modern fiction, give offence to a reader of just taste, from their needlessly trespassing upon his sensibility. But in that which excites an abhorrence of cruelty and oppression, or which, as the Numancia, commemorates ancestral fortitude, there is a moral power, for the sake of which the sufferings of sympathy must not be flinched from.

18. The Numancia is divided into four jornadas or acts, each containing changes of scene, as on our own stage. The metre, by a most extraordinary choice, is the regular octave stanza, ill-adapted as that is to the drama, intermixed with the favourite redondilla. The diction, though sometimes what would seem tame and diffuse to us, who are accustomed to a bolder and more figurative strain in tragedy than the southern nations require, rises often with the subject to nervous and impressive poetry. There are, however, a few sacrifices to the times. In a finely imagined prosopopœia, where Spain, crowned with towers, appears on the scene to ask the Duero what hope there could be for Numancia, the river-god, rising with his tributary streams around him, after bidding her despair of the city, goes into a tedious consolation, in which the triumphs of Charles and Philip are specifically, and with as much tameness as adulation, brought forward as her future recompense. A much worse passage occurs in the fourth act, where Lira, her brother lying dead of famine, and her lover of his wounds before her, implores death from a soldier who passes over the stage. He replies that some other hand must perform that office; he was born only to adore her.[1257] This frigid and absurd line, in such a play by such a poet, is an almost incredible proof of the mischief which the Provençal writers, with their hyperbolical gallantry, had done to European poetry. But it is just to observe that this is the only faulty passage, and that the language of the two lovers is simple, tender, and pathetic. The material accompaniments of representation on the Spanish theatre seem to have been full as defective as on our own. The Numancia is printed with stage directions, almost sufficient to provoke a smile in the midst of its withering horrors.

[1257] Otra mano, otro hierro ha da acabaros, Que yo solo naciò por adoraros.

|French theatre; Jodelle.|

19. The mysteries which had delighted the Parisians for a century and a half were suddenly forbidden by the parliament as indecent and profane in 1548. Four years only elapsed before they were replaced, though not on the same stage, by a different style of representation. Whatever obscure attempts at a regular dramatic composition may have been traced in France at an earlier period, Jodelle was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the true father of their theatre. His tragedy of Cleopatre, and his comedy of La Rencontre, were both represented for the first time before Henry II. in 1552. Another comedy, Eugene, and a tragedy on the story of Dido, were published about the same time. Pasquier, who tells us this, was himself a witness of the representation of the two former.[1258] The Cleopatre, according to Fontenelle, is very simple, without action or stage effect, full of long speeches, and with a chorus at the end of every act. The style is often low and ludicrous, which did not prevent this tragedy, the first-fruits of a theatre which was to produce Racine, from being received with vast applause. There is in reality, amidst these raptures that frequently attend an infant literature, something of an undefined presage of the future which should hinder us from thinking them quite ridiculous. The comedy of Eugene is in verse, and, in the judgment of Fontenelle, much superior to the tragedies of Jodelle. It has more action, a dialogue better conceived, and some traits of humour and nature. This play, however, is very immoral and licentious; and it may be remarked that some of its satire falls on the vices of the clergy.[1259]

[1258] Cette comedie, et la Cleopatre furent representées devant le roy Henri à Paris en l’Hostel de Rheims, avec un grand applaudissement de toute la compagnie: et depuis encore au college de Boncourt, ou toutes les fenestres estoient tapissées d’une infinité de personnages d’honneur, et la cour si pleine d’escoliers que les portes du college en regorgeoient. Je le dis comme celuy qui y estois present, avec le grand Tornebus en une mesme chambre. Et les entreparleurs estoient tous hommes de nom. Car même Remy Belleau et Jean de la Peruse jouoient les principaux roullets. Suard tells us, that the old troop of performers, the Confrères de la Passion, whose mysteries had been interdicted, availed themselves of an exclusive privilege granted to them by Charles VI. in 1400, to prevent the representation of the Cleopatre by public actors. Jodelle was therefore forced to have it performed by his friends. See Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 6. Fontenelle, Hist. du Theatre François (in Œuvres de Font. edit. 1776) vol. iii. p. 52. Beauchamps, Recherches sur les Theatres de France. Suard, Melanges de Literature, vol. iv. p. 59. The last writer, in what he calls Coup d’Œil sur l’Histoire de l’Ancien Theatre Français (in the same volume) has given an amusing and instructive sketch of the French drama down to Corneille.

[1259] Fontenelle, p. 61.

|Garnier.|

20. The Agamemnon of Toutain, published in 1557, is taken from Seneca, and several other pieces about the same time or soon afterwards, seem also to be translations.[1260] The Jules Cesar of Grevin was represented in 1560.[1261] It contains a few lines that La Harpe has extracted, as not without animation. But the first tragedian that deserves much notice after Jodelle was Robert Garnier, whose eight tragedies were collectively printed in 1580. They are chiefly taken from mythology or ancient history, and are evidently framed according to a standard of taste which has ever since prevailed on the French stage. But they retain some characteristics of the classical drama which were soon afterwards laid aside; the chorus is heard between every act, and a great portion of the events is related by messengers. Garnier makes little change in the stories he found in Seneca or Euripides; nor had love yet been thought essential to tragedy. Though his speeches are immeasurably long, and overladen with pompous epithets, though they have often much the air of bad imitations of Seneca’s manner, from whom probably, if any one should give himself the pains to make the comparison, some would be found to have been freely translated, we must acknowledge that in many of his couplets the reader perceives a more genuine tone of tragedy, and the germ of that artificial style which reached its perfection in far greater men than Garnier. In almost every line there is some fault, either against taste or the present rules of verse; yet there are many which a good poet would only have had to amend and polish. The account of Polyxena’s death in La Troade is very well translated from the Hecuba. But his best tragedy seems to be Les Juives, which is wholly his own, and displays no inconsiderable powers of poetical description. In this I am confirmed by Fontenelle, who says that this tragedy has many noble and touching passages; in which he has been aided by taking much from scripture, the natural sublimity of which cannot fail to produce an effect.[1262] We find, however, in Les Juives a good deal of that propensity to exhibit cruelty, by which the Italian and English theatres were at that time distinguished. Pasquier says, that every one gave the prize to Garnier above all who had preceded him, and after enumerating his eight plays, expresses his opinion that they would be admired by posterity.[1263]

[1260] Beauchamps. Suard.

[1261] Suard, p. 73. La Harpe, Cours de Literature. Grevin also wrote comedies which were very licentious, as those of the 16th century generally were in France and Italy, and were not in England, or, I believe, in Spain.

[1262] P. 71. Suard who dwells much longer on Garnier than either Fontenelle or La Harpe, observes, as I think, with justice: Les ouvrages de Garnier meritent de faire epoque dans l’histoire du theatre, non par la beauté de ses plans; il n’en faut chercher de bons dans aucune des tragedies du seizième siècle; mais les sentimens qu’il exprime sont nobles, son style a souvent de l’elevation sans enflure et beaucoup de sensibilité sa versification est facile et souvent harmonieuse. C’est lui qui a fixé d’une manière invariable la succession alternative des rimes masculines et feminines. Enfin c’est le premier des tragiques Français dont le lecture pût être utile à ceux qui voudraient suivre la même carriere; on a même pretendu que son Hyppolite avait beaucoup aidé Racine dans la composition de Phêdre. Mais s’il l’a aidé, c’est comme l’Hyppolite de Seneque, dont celui de Garnier n’est qu’une imitation, p. 81.

[1263] Ibid.

|Comedies of Larivey.|

21. We may consider the comedies of Larivey, published in 1579, as making a sort of epoch in the French drama. This writer, of whom little is known, but that he was a native of Champagne, prefers a claim to be the first who chose subjects for comedy from real life in France (forgetting in this those of Jodelle), and the first who wrote original dramas in prose. His comedies are six in number, to which three were added in a subsequent edition, which is very rare.[1264] These six are Le Laquais, La Veuve, Les Esprits, Le Morfondu, Les Jaloux, and Les Ecoliers. Some of them are partly borrowed from Plautus and Terence; and in general they belong to that school, presenting the usual characters of the Roman stage, with no great attempt at originality. But the dialogue is conducted with spirit; and in many scenes, especially in the play called Le Laquais, which, though the most free in all respects, appears to me the most comic and amusing, would remind any reader of the minor pieces of Molière, being conceived, though not entirely executed, with the same humour. All these comedies of Larivey are highly licentious both in their incidents and language. It is supposed in the Biographie Universelle that Molière and Regnard borrowed some ideas from Larivey; but both the instances alleged will be found in Plautus.

[1264] The first edition itself, I conceive, is not very common; for few writers within my knowledge have mentioned Larivey. Fontenelle, I think, could not have read his plays, or he would have give him a place in his brief sketch of the early French stage, as the father of comedy in prose. La Harpe was too superficial to know anything about him. Beauchamps, vol. ii. p. 68, acknowledges his pretensions, and he has a niche in the Biographie Universelle. Suard has also done him some justice.

|Theatres in Paris.|

22. No regular theatre was yet established in France. These plays of Garnier, Larivey, and others of that class, were represented either in colleges or in private houses. But the Confrères de la Passion, and another company, the Enfans de Sans Souci, whom they admitted into a participation of their privilege, used to act gross and stupid farces, which few respectable persons witnessed. After some unsuccessful attempts, two companies of regular actors appeared near the close of the century; one, in 1598, having purchased the exclusive right of the Confrères de la Passion, laid the foundations of the Comedie Française, so celebrated and so permanent; the other, in 1600, established by its permission a second theatre in the Marais. But the pieces they represented were still of a very low class.[1265]

[1265] Suard.

|English stage.|

|Gammar Gurton’s Needle.|

23. England at the commencement of this period could boast of little besides the scripture mysteries, already losing ground, but which have been traced down to the close of the century, and the more popular moral plays, which furnished abundant opportunities for satire on the times, for ludicrous humour, and for attacks on the old or the new religion. The latter, however, were kept in some restraint by the Tudor government. These moralities gradually drew nearer to regular comedies, and sometimes had nothing but an abstract name given to an individual, by which they could be even apparently distinguished from such. We have already mentioned Ralph Royster Doyster, written by Udal in the reign of Henry VIII., as the earliest English comedy in a proper sense, so far as our negative evidence warrants such a position. Mr. Collier has recovered four acts of another, called Misogonus, which he refers to the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.[1266] It is, like the former, a picture of London life. A more celebrated piece is Gammar Gurton’s Needle, commonly ascribed to John. Still, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells. No edition is known before 1575, but it seems to have been represented in Christ’s College at Cambridge, not far from the year 1565.[1267] It is impossible for anything to be meaner in subject and characters than this strange farce; but the author had some vein of humour, and writing neither for fame nor money, but to make light-hearted boys laugh, and to laugh with them, and that with as little grossness as the story would admit, is not to be judged with severe criticism. He comes however below Udal, and perhaps the writer of Misogonus. The Supposes of George Gascoyne, acted at Gray’s Inn in 1566, is but a translation in prose from the Suppositi of Ariosto. It seems to have been published in the same year.[1268]

[1266] Hist. of Dramatic Poetry, ii. 464.

[1267] Mr. Collier agrees with Malone in assigning this date, but it is merely conjectural, as one rather earlier might be chosen with equal probability. Still is said in the biographies to have been born in 1543; but this date seems to be too low. He became Margaret’s professor of divinity in 1570. Gammar Gurton’s Needle must have been written while the protestant establishment, if it existed, was very recent, for the parson is evidently a papist.

[1268] Warton, iv. 304. Collier, iii. 6. The original had been first published in prose, 1525, and from this Gascoyne took his translation, adopting some of the changes Ariosto had introduced when he turned it into verse; but he has invented little of his own. Ibid.

|Gorboduc of Sackville.|

24. But the progress of literature soon excited in one person an emulation of the ancient drama. Sackville has the honour of having led the way. His tragedy of Gorboduc was represented at Whitehall before Elizabeth in 1562.[1269] It is written in what was thought the classical style, like the Italian tragedies of the same age, but more inartificial and unimpassioned. The speeches are long and sententious; the action, though sufficiently full of incident, passes chiefly in narration; a chorus, but in the same blank verse measure as the rest, divides the acts; the unity of place seems to be preserved, but that of time is manifestly transgressed. The story of Gorboduc, which is borrowed from our fabulous British legends, is as full of slaughter as was then required for dramatic purposes; but the characters are clearly drawn and consistently sustained; the political maxims grave and profound; the language not glowing or passionate, but vigorous; and upon the whole it is evidently the work of a powerful mind, though in a less poetical mood than was displayed in the Induction to the Mirror of Magistrates. Sackville, it has been said, had the assistance of Norton in this tragedy; but Warton has decided against this supposition from internal evidence.[1270]

[1269] The 18th of January, 1561, to which date its representation is referred by Mr. Collier, seems to be 1562, according to the style of the age; and this tallies best with what is said in the edition of 1571, that it had been played about nine years before. See Warton, iv. 179.

[1270] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iv. 194. Mr. Collier supports the claim of Norton to the first three acts, which would much reduce Sackville’s glory, ii. 481. I incline to Warton’s opinion, grounded upon the identity of style, and the superiority of the whole tragedy to anything we can certainly ascribe to Norton, a coadjutor of Sternhold in the old version of the Psalms, and a contributor to the Mirror of Magistrates.

|Preference given to the irregular form.|

25. The regular form adopted in Gorboduc, though not wholly without imitators, seems to have had little success with the public.[1271] An action passing visibly on the stage, instead of a frigid narrative, a copious intermixture of comic buffoonery with the gravest story, were requisites with which no English audience would dispense. Thus Edwards treated the story of Damon and Pythias, which, though according to the notions of those times, it was too bloodless to be called a tragedy at all, belonged to the elevated class of dramatic compositions.[1272] Several other objects were taken from ancient history; this indeed became the usual source of the fable; but if we may judge from those few that have survived, they were all constructed on the model which the mysteries had accustomed our ancestors to admire.

[1271] The Jocasta of Gascoyne, translated with considerable freedom, in adding, omitting, and transposing, from the Phœnissæ of Euripides, was represented at Gray’s Inn in 1566. Warton, iv. 196. Collier, iii. 7. Gascoyne had the assistance of two obscure poets in this play.

[1272] Collier, iii. 2.

|First theatres.|

26. The office of Master of the Revels, in whose province it lay to regulate, among other amusements of the court, the dramatic shows of various kinds, was established in 1546. The inns of court vied with the royal palace in these representations, and Elizabeth sometimes honoured the former with her presence. On her visits to the universities, a play was a constant part of the entertainment. Fifty-two names, though nothing more, of dramas acted at court under the superintendence of the Master of the Revels, between 1568 and 1580, are preserved.[1273] In 1574 a patent was granted to the Earl of Leicester’s servants to act plays in any part of England, and in 1576 they erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It will be understood, that the servants of the Earl of Leicester were a company under his protection; as we apply the word, Her Majesty’s Servants, at this day, to the performers of Drury Lane.[1274]

[1273] Collier, i. 193, et post, iii. 24. Of these fifty-two plays eighteen were upon classical subjects, historical or fabulous, twenty-one taken from modern history or romance, seven may by their titles, which is a very fallible criterion, be comedies or farces from real life, and six may, by the same test, be moralities. It is possible, as Mr. C. observes, that some of these plays, though no longer extant in their integrity, may have formed the foundation of others; and the titles of a few in the list countenance this supposition.

[1274] See Mr. Collier’s excellent History of Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakspeare, vol. i., which having superseded the earlier works of Langbaine, Reid, and Hawkins, so far as this period is concerned, it is superfluous to quote them.

|Plays of Whetstone and others.|

27. As we come down towards 1580, a few more plays are extant. Among these may be mentioned the Promos and Cassandra of Whetstone, on the subject which Shakspeare, not without some retrospect to his predecessors, so much improved in Measure for Measure.[1275] But in these early dramas there is hardly anything to praise; or, if they please us at all, it is only by the broad humour of their comic scenes. There seems little reason, therefore, for regretting the loss of so many productions, which no one contemporary has thought worthy of commendation. Sir Philip Sydney, writing about 1583, treats our English stage with great disdain. His censures indeed fall chiefly on the neglect of the classical unities, and on the intermixture of kings with clowns.[1276] It is amusing to reflect, that this contemptuous reprehension of the English theatre (and he had spoken in as disparaging terms of our general poetry) came from the pen of Sydney, when Shakspeare had just arrived at manhood. Had he not been so prematurely cut off, what would have been the transports of that noble spirit, which the ballad of Chevy Chase could “stir as with the sound of a trumpet,” in reading the Faery Queen or Othello!

[1275] Promos and Cassandra is one of the Six Old Plays reprinted by Stevens. Shakspeare found in it not only the main story of Measure for Measure, which was far from new, and which he felicitously altered, by preserving the chastity of Isabella, but several of the minor circumstances and names, unless even these are to be found in the novels, from which all the dramatists ultimately derived their plot.

[1276] “Our tragedies and comedies, not without cause, are cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry;” and proceeds to ridicule their inconsistencies and disregard to time and place. Defence of Poesy.

|Marlowe and his contemporaries.|

|Tamburlaine.|

|Blank verse of Marlowe.|

28. A better æra commenced not long after, nearly coincident with the rapid development of genius in other departments of poetry. Several young men of talent appeared, Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lily, Lodge, Kyd, Nash, the precursors of Shakspeare, and real founders, as they may in some respects be called, of the English drama. Sackville’s Gorboduc is in blank verse, though of bad and monotonous construction; but his followers wrote, as far as we know, either in rhyme or in prose.[1277] In the tragedy of Tamburlaine, referred by Mr. Collier to 1586, and the production wholly or principally, of Marlowe,[1278] a better kind of blank verse is first employed; the lines are interwoven, the occasional hemistich and redundant syllables break the monotony of the measure, and give more of a colloquial spirit to the dialogue. Tamburlaine was ridiculed on account of its inflated style. The bombast, however, which is not so excessive as has been alleged, was thought appropriate to such oriental tyrants. This play has more spirit and poetry than any which, upon clear grounds, can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figurative style, with a far more varied and skilful versification.[1279] If Marlowe did not re-establish blank verse, which is difficult to prove, he gave it at least a variety of cadence, and an easy adaptation of the rhythm to the sense, by which it instantly became in his hands the finest instrument that the tragic poet has ever employed for his purpose, less restricted than that of the Italians, and falling occasionally almost into numerous prose, lines of fourteen syllables being very common in all our old dramatists, but regular and harmonious at other times as the most accurate ear could require.

[1277] It may be a slight exception to this that some portions of the second part of Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra are in blank verse. This play is said never to have been represented. Collier, iii. 64.

[1278] Nash has been thought the author of Tamburlaine by Malone, and his inflated style, in pieces known to be his, may give some countenance to this hypothesis. It is mentioned, however, as “Marlowe’s Tamburlaine” in the contemporary diary of Henslow, a manager or proprietor of a theatre, which is preserved at Dulwich College. Marlowe and Nash are allowed to have written “Dido Queen of Carthage” in conjunction. Mr. Collier has produced a body of evidence to show that Tamburlaine was written, at least principally, by the former, which leaves no room, as it seems, for further doubt, vol. iii. p. 113.

[1279] Shakspeare having turned into ridicule a passage or two in Tamburlaine, the critics have concluded it to be a model of bad tragedy. Mr. Collier, iii. 115-126, has elaborately vindicated its dramatic merits, though sufficiently aware of its faults.

|Marlowe’s Jew of Malta,|

|and Faustus.|

29. The savage character of Tamburlaine, and the want of all interest as to every other, render this tragedy a failure in comparison with those which speedily followed from the pen of Christopher Marlowe. The first two acts of the Jew of Malta are more vigorously conceived, both as to character and circumstance, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakspeare; and perhaps we may think that Barabas, though not the prototype of Shylock, a praise of which he is unworthy, may have suggested some few ideas to the inventor. But the latter acts, as is usual with our old dramatists, are a tissue of uninteresting crimes and slaughter.[1280] Faustus is better known; it contains nothing, perhaps, so dramatic as the first part of the Jew of Malta; yet the occasional glimpses of repentance and struggles of alarmed conscience in the chief character are finely brought in. It is full of poetical beauties; but an intermixture of buffoonery weakens the effect, and leaves it on the whole rather a sketch by a great genius than a finished performance. There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is wanting; and Marlowe has hardly earned the credit of having breathed a few casual inspirations into a greater mind than his own.[1281]

[1280] “Blood,” says a late witty writer, “is made as light of in some of these old dramas as money in a modern sentimental comedy; and as this is given away till it reminds us that it is nothing but counters, so that is spilt till it affects us no more than its representative, the paint of the property-man in the theatre.” Lamb’s specimens of Early Dramatic Poets, i. 19.

[1281] The German story of Faust is said to have been published for the first time in 1587. It was rapidly translated into most languages of Europe. We need hardly name the absurd supposition, that Faust, the great printer, was intended.

|His Edward II.|

|Plays whence Henry Vl. was taken.|

30. Marlowe’s Life of Edward II. which was entered on the books of the Stationers’ Company in 1593, has been deemed by some the earliest specimen of the historical play founded upon English chronicles. Whether this be true or not, and probably it is not, it is certainly by far the best after those of Shakspeare.[1282] And it seems probable that the old plays of the Contention of Lancaster and York, and the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which Shakspeare remodelled in the second and third parts of Henry VI., were in great part by Marlowe, though Greene seems to put in for some share in their composition.[1283] These plays claim certainly a very low rank among those of Shakspeare: his original portion is not inconsiderable; but it is fair to observe, that some of the passages most popular, such as the death of Cardinal Beaufort, and the last speech of the Duke of York, are not by his hand.

[1282] Collier observes that, “the character of Richard II. in Shakspeare seems modelled in no slight degree upon that of Edward II.” But I am reluctant to admit that Shakspeare modelled his characters by those of others; and it is natural to ask whether there were not an extraordinary likeness in the dispositions as well as fortunes of the two kings.

[1283] These old plays were reprinted by Stevens in 1766. Malone, on a laborious comparison of them with the second and third parts of Henry VI., has ascertained that 1771 lines in the latter plays were taken from the former unaltered, 2373 altered by Shakspeare, while 1899 were altogether his own. It remains to inquire, who are to claim the credit of these other plays, so great a portion of which has passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakspeare. The solution seems to be given, as well as we can expect, in a passage often quoted from Robert Greene’s Groat’sworth of Wit, published not long before his death in September 1592. “Yes,” says he, addressing himself to some one who has been conjectured to be Peele, but more probably Marlowe, “trust them (the players) not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tyger’s heart wrapped 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, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country.” An allusion is here manifest to the “tyger’s heart, wrapt in a woman’s hide,” which Shakspeare borrowed from the old play. The Contention of the Houses, and which is here introduced to hint the particular subject of plagiarism that prompts the complaint of Greene. The bitterness he displays must lead us to suspect that he had been one himself of those who were thus preyed upon. But the greater part of the plays in question is in the judgment, I conceive, of all competent critics, far above the powers either of Greene or Peele, and exhibits a much greater share of the spirited versification, called by Jonson the “mighty line,” of Christopher Marlowe. Malone, upon second thoughts, gave both these plays to Marlowe, having, in his dissertation on the three parts of Henry VI., assigned one to Greene, the other to Peele. None of the three parts have any resemblance to the manner of Peele.

|Peele.|

31. No one could think of disputing the superiority of Marlowe, to all his contemporaries of this early school of the English drama. He was killed in a tavern fray in 1593. There is more room for difference of tastes as to the second place. Mr. Campbell has bestowed high praises upon Peele. “His David and Bethsabe is the earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender: and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity [sic] and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare.”[1284] I must concur with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive. Peele has some command of imagery, but in every other quality it seems to me that he has scarce any claim to honour; and I doubt if there are three lines together in any of his plays that could be mistaken for Shakspeare’s. His Edward I. is a gross tissue of absurdity, with some facility of language, but nothing truly good. It has also the fault of grossly violating historic truth, in hideous misrepresentation of the virtuous Eleanor of Castile; probably from the base motive of rendering the Spanish nation odious to the vulgar. This play, which is founded on a ballad equally false, is referred to the year 1593. The versification of Peele is much inferior to that of Marlowe; and though sometimes poetical he seems rarely dramatic.

[1284] Specimens of English Poetry, i. 140. Hawkins says of three lines in Peele’s David and Bethsabe, that they contain a metaphor worthy of Æschylus:--

At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt; And his fair spouse with bright and fiery wings Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.

It may be rather Æschylean, yet I cannot much admire it. Peele seldom attempts such flights. “His genius was not boldly original; but he had an elegance of fancy, a gracefulness of expression, and a melody of versification which, in the earlier part of his career, was scarcely approached.” Collier, iii. 191.

|Greene.|

32. A third writer for the stage in this period is Robert Greene, whose “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay” may probably be placed about the year 1590. This comedy, though savouring a little of the old school, contains easy and spirited versification, superior to Peele, and though not so energetic as that of Marlowe, reminding us perhaps more frequently of Shakspeare.[1285] Greene succeeds pretty well in that florid and gay style, a little redundant in images, which Shakspeare frequently gives to his princes and courtiers, and which renders some unimpassioned scenes in the historic plays effective and brilliant. There is great talent shown, though upon a very strange canvas, in Greene’s “Looking-glass for London and England.” His angry allusion to Shakspeare’s plagiarism is best explained by supposing that he was himself concerned in the two old plays which have been converted into the second and third parts of Henry VI.[1286] In default of a more probable claimant, I have sometimes been inclined to assign the first part of Henry VI. to Greene. But those who are far more conversant with the style of our dramatists do not suggest this; and we are evidently ignorant of many names, which might have ranked not discreditably by the side of these tragedians. The first part, however, of Henry VI. is, in some passages, not unworthy of Shakspeare’s earlier days, nor, in my judgment, unlike his style; nor in fact do I know any one of his contemporaries who could have written the scene in the Temple Garden. The light touches of his pencil have ever been still more inimitable, if possible, than its more elaborate strokes.[1287]

[1285] “Green in facility of expression and in the flow of his blank verse is not to be placed below his contemporary Peele. His usual fault, more discoverable in his plays than in his poems, is an absence of simplicity; but his pedantic classical references, frequently without either taste or discretion, he had in common with the other scribbling scholars of the time. It was Shakspeare’s good fortune to be in a great degree without the knowledge, and therefore, if on no other account, without the defect.” Collier, iii. 153. Tieck gives him credit for “a happy talent, a clear spirit, and a lively imagination, which characterise all his writings.” Collier iii. 148.

[1286] Mr. Collier says, iii. 146, Greene may possibly have had a hand in the True History of Richard Duke of York. But why possibly? when he claims it, if not in express words, yet so as to leave no doubt of his meaning. See the note in p. 377.

In a poem written on Greene in 1594, are these lines:--

Green is the pleasing object of an eye; Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him: Green is the ground of every painter’s die; Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him: Nay more, the men that so eclipsed his fame, Purloined his plumes, can they deny the same?

This seems an allusion to Greene’s own metaphor, and must be taken for a covert attack on Shakspeare, who had by this time pretty well eclipsed the fame of Greene.

[1287] “These three gifted men (Peele, Greene, and Marlowe), says their late editor, Mr. Dyce (Peele’s Works, preface xxxv.), though they often present to us pictures that in design and colouring outrage the truth of nature, are the earliest of our tragic writers who exhibit any just delineation of the workings of passion; and their language, though now swelling into bombast, and now sinking into meanness, is generally rich with poetry, while their versification, though somewhat monotonous, is almost always flowing and harmonious. They as much excel their immediate predecessors as they are themselves excelled by Shakspeare.” Not quite as much.

|Other writers of this age.|

|Heywood’s Woman killed with Kindness.|

33. We can hardly afford time to dwell on several other writers anterior to Shakspeare. Kyd, whom Mr. Collier places, as a writer of blank verse, next to Marlowe,[1288] Lodge,[1289] Lily, Nash, Hughes, and a few more, have all some degree of merit. Nor do the anonymous tragedies, some of which were formerly ascribed to Shakspeare, and which even Schlegel, with less acuteness of criticism than is usual with him, has deemed genuine, always want a forcible delineation of passion, and a vigorous strain of verse, though not kept up for many lines. Among these are specimens of the domestic species of tragic drama, drawn probably from real occurrences, such as Arden of Feversham and the Yorkshire Tragedy, the former of which, especially, has very considerable merit. Its author, I believe has not been conjectured; but it may be referred to the last decade of the century.[1290] Another play of the same kind, A Woman killed with Kindness, bears the date of 1600, and is the earliest production of a fertile dramatist, Thomas Heywood. The language is not much raised above that of comedy, but we can hardly rank a tale of guilt, sorrow, and death, in that dramatic category. It may be read with interest and approbation at this day, being quite free from extravagance either in manner or language, the besetting sin of our earlier dramatists, and equally so from buffoonery. The subject resembles that of Kotzebue’s drama, the Stranger, but is managed with a nobler tone of morality. It is true that Mrs. Frankfort’s immediate surrender to her seducer, like that of Beaumelé in the Fatal Dowry, makes her contemptible; but this, though it might possibly have originated in the necessity created by the narrow limits of theatrical time, has the good effect of preventing that sympathy with her guilt, which is reserved for her penitence.

[1288] Collier, iii. 207. Kyd is author of Jeronymo, and of the “Spanish Tragedy,” a continuation of the same story. Shakspeare has selected some of their absurdities for ridicule, and has left an abundant harvest for the reader. Parts of the Spanish Tragedy, Mr. C. thinks, “are in the highest degree pathetic and interesting.” This perhaps may be admitted, but Kyd is not, upon the whole, a pleasing dramatist.

[1289] Lodge, one of the best poets of the age, was concerned, jointly with Greene, in the Looking Glass for London. In this strange performance the prophet Hosea is brought to Nineveh, and the dramatis personæ, as far as they are serious, belong to that city: but all the farcical part relates to London. Of Lodge Mr. C. says, that he is “second to Kyd in vigour and boldness of conception, but as a drawer of character, so essential a part of dramatic poetry, he unquestionably has the advantage,” iii. 214.

[1290] The murder of Arden of Feversham occurred under Edward VI., but the play was published in 1592. The impression made by the story must have been deep to produce a tragedy so long afterwards. It is said by Mr. Collier, that Professor Tieck has inclined to think Arden of Feversham a genuine work of Shakspeare. I cannot but venture to suspect that, if this distinguished critic were a native, he would discern such differences of style, as render this hypothesis improbable. The speeches in Arden of Feversham have spirit and feeling, but there is none of that wit, that fertility of analogical imagery, which the worst plays of Shakspeare display. The language is also more plain and perspicuous than we ever find in him, especially on a subject so full of passion. Mr. Collier discerns the hand of Shakspeare in the Yorkshire Tragedy, and thinks that “there are some speeches which could scarcely have proceeded from any other pen,” Collier, iii. 51. It was printed with his name in 1608; but this, which would be thought good evidence in most cases, must not be held sufficient. It is impossible to explain the grounds of internal persuasion in these nice questions of æsthetic criticism, but I cannot perceive the hand of Shakspeare in any of the anonymous tragedies.

|William Shakspeare.|

34. Of William Shakspeare,[1291] whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested; he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakspeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of “the blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle,” an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakspeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us, than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary can be produced.

[1291] Though I shall not innovate in a work of this kind, not particularly relating to Shakspeare, I must observe, that Sir Frederic Madden has offered very specious reasons (in the Archæologia, vol. xxvi.), for believing that the poet and his family spelt their name Shakspere, and that there are, at least, no exceptions in his own autographs, as has commonly been supposed. A copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne, a book which he had certainly read (see Malone’s note on Tempest, act ii. scene 1), has been lately discovered with the name W. Shakspere clearly written in it, and there seems no reason to doubt that it is a genuine signature. This book has, very properly, been placed in the British Museum, among the choice κειμηλια [keimêlia] of that repository.

|His first writings for the stage.|

35. It is generally supposed that he settled in London about 1587, being then twenty-three years old. For some time afterwards we cannot trace him distinctly. Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, he describes in his dedication to Lord Southampton, as “the first heir of his invention.” It is however certain that it must have been written some years before, unless we take these words in a peculiar sense, for Greene, in his Groat’sworth of Wit, 1592, alludes, as we have seen, to Shakspeare as already known among dramatic authors. It appears by this passage, that he had converted the two plays on the wars of York and Lancaster into what we read as the second and third parts of Henry VI. What share he may have had in similar repairs of the many plays then represented, cannot be determined. It is generally believed that he had much to do with the tragedy of Pericles, which is now printed among his works, and which external testimony, though we should not rely too much on that as to Shakspeare, has assigned to him; but the play is full of evident marks of an inferior hand.[1292] Its date is unknown; Drake supposes it to have been his earliest work, rather from its inferiority than on any other ground. Titus Andronicus is now by common consent denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakspeare; very few passages, I should think not one, resemble his manner.[1293]

[1292] Malone, in a dissertation on the tragedy of Pericles, maintained that it was altogether an early work of Shakspeare. Stevens contended that it was a production of some older poet, improved by him; and Malone had the candour to own that he had been wrong. The opinion of Stevens is now general. Drake gives the last three acts, and part of the former, to Shakspeare; but I can hardly think his share is by any means so large.

[1293] Notwithstanding this internal evidence, Meres, so early as 1598, enumerates Titus Andronicus among the plays of Shakspeare, and mentions no other but what is genuine. Drake, ii. 287. But, in criticism of all kinds, we must acquire a dogged habit of resisting testimony, when res ipsa per se vociferatur to the contrary.

|Comedy of Errors.|

36. The Comedy of Errors may be presumed by an allusion it contains to have been written before the submission of Paris to Henry IV. in 1594, which nearly put an end to the civil war.[1294] It is founded on a very popular subject. This furnishes two extant comedies of Plautus, a translation from one of which, the Menœchmi, was represented in Italy earlier than any other play. It had been already, as Mr. Collier thinks, brought upon the stage in England; and another play, later than the Comedy of Errors, has been reprinted by Stevens. Shakspeare himself was so well pleased with the idea that he has returned to it in Twelfth Night. Notwithstanding the opportunity which these mistakes of identity furnish for ludicrous situations and for carrying on a complex plot, they are not very well adapted to dramatic effect, not only from the manifest difficulty of finding performers quite alike, but because, were this overcome, the audience must be in as great embarrassment as the represented characters themselves. In the Comedy of Errors there are only a few passages of a poetical vein, yet such perhaps as no other living dramatist could have written; but the story is well invented and well managed; the confusion of persons does not cease to amuse; the dialogue is easy and gay beyond what had been hitherto heard on the stage; there is little buffoonery in the wit, and no absurdity in the circumstances.

[1294] Act iii. scene 2. Some have judged the play from this passage to be as early as 1591, but on precarious grounds.

|Two Gentlemen of Verona.|

37. The Two Gentlemen of Verona ranks above the Comedy of Errors, though still in the third class of Shakspeare’s plays. It was probably the first English comedy in which characters are drawn from social life, at once ideal and true; the cavaliers of Verona and their lady-loves are graceful personages, with no transgression of the probabilities of nature; but they are not exactly the real men and women of the same rank in England. The imagination of Shakspeare must have been guided by some familiarity with romances before it struck out this play. It contains some very poetical lines. Though these two plays could not give the slightest suspicion of the depth of thought which Lear and Macbeth were to display, it was already evident that the names of Greene, and even Marlowe, would be eclipsed without any necessity for purloining their plumes.

|Love’s Labour Lost.|

|Taming of the Shrew.|

38. Love’s Labour Lost is generally placed, I believe, at the bottom of the list. There is indeed little interest in the fable, if we can say that there is any fable at all; but there are beautiful coruscations of fancy, more original conception of character than in the Comedy of Errors, more lively humour than in the Gentlemen of Verona, more symptoms of Shakspeare’s future powers as a comic writer than in either. Much that is here but imperfectly developed came forth again in his later plays, especially in As you Like it, and Much Ado about Nothing. The Taming of the Shrew is the only play, except Henry VI., in which Shakspeare has been very largely a borrower. The best parts are certainly his, but it must be confessed, that several passages, for which we give him credit, and which are very amusing, belong to his unknown predecessor. The original play, reprinted by Stevens, was published in 1594.[1295] I do not find so much genius in the Taming of the Shrew as in Love’s Labour Lost; but, as an entire play, it is much more complete.

[1295] Mr. Collier thinks that Shakspeare had nothing to do with any of the scenes where Katherine and Petruchio are not introduced. The underplot resembles, he says, the style of Haughton, author of a comedy called Englishmen for my Money, iii. 78.

|Midsummer Night’s Dream.|

39. The beautiful play of Midsummer Night’s Dream is placed by Malone as early as 1592; its superiority to those we have already mentioned affords some presumption that it was written after them. But it evidently belongs to the earlier period of Shakspeare’s genius; poetical as we account it, more than dramatic, yet rather so, because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses till we can hardly observe anything else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For in reality the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity of Shakspeare, as much as in any play he has written. No preceding dramatist had attempted to fabricate a complex plot, for low comic scenes, interspersed with a serious action upon which they have no influence, do not merit notice. The Menœchmi of Plautus had been imitated by others as well as by Shakspeare; but we speak here of original invention.

|Its machinery.|

40. The Midsummer Night’s Dream is, I believe, altogether original in one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet, the fairy machinery. A few before him had dealt in a vulgar and clumsy manner with popular superstitions; but the sportive, beneficent, invisible population of the air and earth, long since established in the creed of childhood, and of those simple as children, had never for a moment been blended with “human mortals” among the personages of the drama. Lily’s Maid’s Metamorphosis is probably later than this play of Shakspeare, and was not published till 1600.[1296] It is unnecessary to observe that the fairies of Spenser, as he has dealt with them, are wholly of a different race.

[1296] Collier, iii. 185. Lily had, however, brought fairies, without making them speak, into some of his earlier plays. Ibid.

|Its language.|

41. The language of Midsummer Night’s Dream is equally novel with the machinery. It sparkles in perpetual brightness with all the hues of the rainbow; yet there is nothing overcharged or affectedly ornamented. Perhaps no play of Shakspeare has fewer blemishes, or is from beginning to end in so perfect keeping; none in which so few lines could be erased, or so few expressions blamed. His own peculiar idiom, the dress of his mind, which began to be discernible in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, is more frequently manifested in the present play. The expression is seldom obscure, but it is never in poetry, and hardly in prose, the expression of other dramatists, and far less of the people. And here, without reviving the debated question of Shakspeare’s learning, I must venture to think, that he possessed rather more acquaintance with the Latin language than many believe. The phrases, unintelligible and improper, except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in his plays, seem to be unaccountable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream, these are much less frequent than in his later dramas. But here we find several instances. Thus, “things base and vile, holding no quantity,” for value; rivers, that “have overborn their continents,” the continente ripa of Horace; “compact of imagination;” “something of great constancy,” for consistency; “sweet Pyramus translated there;” “the law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate.” I have considerable doubts whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth’s reign, which was less overrun by pedantry than that of her successor; but, could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one, who did not understand their proper meaning, would have introduced them into poetry. It would be a weak answer that we do not detect in Shakspeare any imitations of the Latin poets. His knowledge of the language may have been chiefly derived, like that of schoolboys, from the dictionary, and insufficient for the thorough appreciation of their beauties. But, if we should believe him well acquainted with Virgil or Ovid, it would be by no means surprising that his learning does not display itself in imitation. Shakspeare seems now and then to have a tinge on his imagination from former passages; but he never designedly imitates, though, as we have seen, he has sometimes adopted. The streams of invention flowed too fast from his own mind to leave him time to accommodate the words of a foreign language to our own. He knew that to create would be easier, and pleasanter, and better.[1297]

[1297] The celebrated essay by Farmer on the learning of Shakspeare, put an end to such notions as we find in Warburton and many of the older commentators, that he had imitated Sophocles, and I know not how many Greek authors. Those indeed who agree with what I have said in a former chapter as to the state of learning under Elizabeth, will not think it probable that Shakspeare could have acquired any knowledge of Greek. It was not a part of such education as he received. The case of Latin is different: we know that he was at a grammar school, and could hardly have spent two or three years there without bringing away a certain portion of the language.

|Romeo and Juliet.|

42. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is referred by Malone to the year 1596. Were I to judge by internal evidence, I should be inclined to date this play before the Midsummer Night’s Dream; the great frequency of rhymes, the comparative absence of Latinisms, the want of that thoughtful philosophy, which, when it had once germinated in Shakspeare’s mind, never ceased to display itself, and several of the faults that juvenility may best explain and excuse, would justify this inference.

|Its plot.|

43. In one of the Italian novels to which Shakspeare had frequently recourse for his fable, he had the good fortune to meet with this simple and pathetic subject. What he found he has arranged with great skill. The incidents in Romeo and Juliet are rapid, various, unintermitting in interest, sufficiently probable, and tending to the catastrophe. The most regular dramatist has hardly excelled one writing for an infant and barbarian stage. It is certain that the observation of the unity of time, which we find in this tragedy, unfashionable as the name of unity has become in our criticism, gives an intenseness of interest to the story, which is often diluted and dispersed in a dramatic history. No play of Shakspeare is more frequently represented, or honoured with more tears.

|Its beauties and blemishes.|

44. If from this praise of the fable we pass to other considerations, it will be more necessary to modify our eulogies. It has been said above of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, that none of Shakspeare’s plays have fewer blemishes. We can by no means repeat this commendation of Romeo and Juliet. It may be said rather that few, if any, are more open to reasonable censure; and we are almost equally struck by its excellencies and its defects.

45. Madame de Stael has truly remarked, that in Romeo and Juliet we have, more than in any other tragedy, the mere passion of love; love, in all its vernal promise, full of hope and innocence, ardent beyond all restraint of reason, but tender as it is warm. The contrast between this impetuosity of delirious joy, in which the youthful lovers are first displayed, and the horrors of the last scene, throws a charm of deep melancholy over the whole. Once alone each of them, in these earlier moments, is touched by a presaging fear; it passes quickly away from them, but is not lost on the reader. To him there is a sound of despair in the wild effusions of their hope, and the madness of grief is mingled with the intoxication of their joy. And hence it is that, notwithstanding its many blemishes, we all read and witness this tragedy with delight. It is a symbolic mirror of the fearful realities of life, where “the course of true love,” has so often “not run smooth,” and moments of as fond illusion as beguiled the lovers of Verona have been exchanged, perhaps as rapidly, not indeed for the dagger and the bowl, but for the many-headed sorrows and sufferings of humanity.

|The characters.|

46. The character of Romeo is one of excessive tenderness. His first passion for Rosaline, which no vulgar poet would have brought forward, serves to display a constitutional susceptibility. There is indeed so much of this in his deportment and language, that we might be in some danger of mistaking it for effeminacy, if the loss of his friend had not aroused his courage. It seems to have been necessary to keep down a little the other characters, that they might not overpower the principal one; and though we can by no means agree with Dryden, that if Shakspeare had not killed Mercutio, Mercutio would have killed him, there might have been some danger of his killing Romeo. His brilliant vivacity shows the softness of the other a little to a disadvantage. Juliet is a child, whose intoxication in loving and being loved whirls away the little reason she may have possessed. It is however impossible, in my opinion, to place her among the great female characters of Shakspeare’s creation.

|The language.|

47. Of the language of this tragedy what shall we say? It contains passages that every one remembers, that are among the nobler efforts of Shakspeare’s poetry, and many short and beautiful touches of his proverbial sweetness. Yet, on the other hand, the faults are in prodigious number. The conceits, the phrases that jar on the mind’s ear, if I may use such an expression, and interfere with the very emotion the poet would excite, occur at least in the first three acts without intermission. It seems to have formed part of his conception of this youthful and ardent pair, that they should talk irrationally. The extravagance of their fancy, however, not only forgets reason, but wastes itself in frigid metaphors and incongruous conceptions; the tone of Romeo is that of the most bombastic commonplace of gallantry, and the young lady differs only in being one degree more mad. The voice of virgin love has been counterfeited by the authors of many fictions: I know none who have thought the style of Juliet would represent it. Nor is this confined to the happier moments of their intercourse. False thoughts and misplaced phrases deform the whole of the third act. It may be added that, if not dramatic propriety, at least the interest of the character, is affected by some of Juliet’s allusions. She seems indeed to have profited by the lessons and language of her venerable guardian; and those who adopt the edifying principle of deducing a moral from all they read, may suppose that Shakspeare intended covertly to warn parents against the contaminating influence of such domestics. These censures apply chiefly to the first three acts; as the shadows deepen over the scene, the language assumes a tone more proportionate to the interest; many speeches are exquisitely beautiful; yet the tendency to quibbles is never wholly eradicated.

|Second period of Shakspeare.|

48. The plays we have hitherto mentioned, to which one or two more might be added, belong to the earlier class, or, as we might say, to his first manner. In the second period of his dramatic life, we should place his historical plays, and such others as were written before the end of the century or perhaps before the death of Elizabeth. The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Much Ado about Nothing, are among these. The versification in these is more studied, the pauses more artificially disposed, the rhymes, though not quite abandoned, become less frequent, the language is more vigorous and elevated, the principal characters are more strongly marked, more distinctly conceived, and framed on a deeper insight into mankind. Nothing in the earlier plays can be compared, in this respect, with the two Richards, or Shylock, or Falstaff, or Hotspur.

|The historical plays.|

49. Many attempts had been made to dramatise the English chronicles, but with the single exception of Marlowe’s Edward II., so unsuccessfully, that Shakspeare may be considered as almost an original occupant of the field. He followed historical truth with considerable exactness; and, in some of his plays, as in that of Richard II., and generally in Richard III. and Henry VIII., admitted no imaginary personages, nor any scenes of amusement. The historical plays have had a great effect on Shakspeare’s popularity. They have identified him with English feelings in English hearts, and are very frequently read more in childhood, and consequently better remembered than some of his superior dramas. And these dramatic chronicles borrowed surprising liveliness and probability from the national character and form of government. A prince, and a courtier, and a slave are the stuff on which the historic dramatist would have to work in some countries; but every class of freemen, in the just subordination, without which neither human society, nor the stage, which should be its mirror, can be more than a chaos of huddled units, lay open to the selection of Shakspeare. What he invented is as truly English, as truly historical, in the large sense of moral history, as what he read.

|Merchant of Venice.|

50. The Merchant of Venice is generally esteemed the best of Shakspeare’s comedies. This excellent play is referred to the year 1597.[1298] In the management of the plot, which is sufficiently complex without the slightest confusion or incoherence, I do not conceive that it has been surpassed in the annals of any theatre. Yet there are those who still affect to speak of Shakspeare as a barbarian; and others who, giving what they think due credit to his genius, deny him all judgment and dramatic taste. A comparison of his works with those of his contemporaries, and it is surely to them that we should look, will prove that his judgment is by no means the least of his rare qualities. This is not so remarkable in the mere construction of his fable, though the present comedy is absolutely perfect in that point of view, and several others are excellently managed, as in the general keeping of the characters, and the choice of incidents. If Shakspeare is sometimes extravagant, the Marstons and Middletons are seldom otherwise. The variety of characters in the Merchant of Venice, and the powerful delineation of those upon whom the interest chiefly depends, the effectiveness of many scenes in representation, the copiousness of the wit, and the beauty of the language, it would be superfluous to extol; nor is it our office to repeat a tale so often told as the praise of Shakspeare. In the language there is the commencement of a metaphysical obscurity which soon became characteristic; but it is perhaps less observable than in any later play.

[1298] Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury, 1598, has a passage of some value in determining the age of Shakspeare’s plays, both by what it contains, and by what it omits. “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakspeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour Lost, his Love’s Labour Won [the original appellation of All’s Well that Ends Well], his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard II., his Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.” Drake, ii. 287.

|As You Like It.|

51. The sweet and sportive temper of Shakspeare, though it never deserted him, gave way to advancing years, and to the mastering force of serious thought. What he read we know but very imperfectly; yet, in the last years of this century, when five and thirty summers had ripened his genius, it seems that he must have transfused much of the wisdom of past ages into his own all-combining mind. In several of the historical plays, in the Merchant of Venice, and especially in As You Like It, the philosophic eye, turned inward on the mysteries of human nature, is more and more characteristic; and we might apply to the last comedy the bold figure that Coleridge has less appropriately employed as to the early poems, that “the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace.” In no other play, at least, do we find the bright imagination and fascinating grace of Shakspeare’s youth so mingled with the thoughtfulness of his maturer age. This play is referred with reasonable probability to the year 1600. Few comedies of Shakspeare are more generally pleasing, and its manifold improbabilities do not much affect us in perusal. The brave injured Orlando, the sprightly but modest Rosalind, the faithful Adam, the reflecting Jaques, the serene and magnanimous Duke, interest us by turns, though the play is not so well managed as to condense our sympathy, and direct it to the conclusion.

|Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour.|

52. The comic scenes of Shakspeare had generally been drawn from novels, and laid in foreign lands. But several of our earliest plays, as has been partly seen, delineate the prevailing manners of English life. None had acquired a reputation which endured beyond their own time till Ben Jonson in 1596 produced, at the age of twenty-two, his first comedy, Every Man in His Humour; an extraordinary monument of early genius, in what is seldom the possession of youth, a clear and unerring description of human character, various, and not extravagant beyond the necessities of the stage. He had learned the principles of comedy no doubt, from Plautus and Terence; for they were not to be derived from the moderns at home or abroad; but he could not draw from them the application of living passions and manners; and it would be no less unfair, as Gifford has justly observed, to make Bobadil a copy of Thraso, than to deny the dramatic originality of Kitely.

53. Every Man in his Humour is perhaps the earliest of European domestic comedies that deserves to be remembered; for the Mandragola of Machiavel shrinks to a mere farce in comparison.[1299] A much greater master of comic powers than Jonson was indeed his contemporary, and, as he perhaps fancied, his rival; but for some reason, Shakspeare had never yet drawn his story from the domestic life of his countrymen. Jonson avoided the common defect of the Italian and Spanish theatre, the sacrifice of all other dramatic objects to one only, a rapid and amusing succession of incidents; his plot is slight and of no great complexity; but his excellence is to be found in the variety of his characters, and in their individuality very clearly defined with little extravagance.

[1299] This would not have been approved by a modern literary historian. Quelle etait, avant que Molière parût et même de son temps, la comedie moderne comparable à la Calandria, à la Mandragore, aux meilleures pieces de l’Arioste, à celles de l’Aretin, du Cecchi, du Lasca, du Bentivoglio, de Francesco d’Ambra, et de tant d’Autres? Ginguéné, vi. 316. This comes of deciding before we know anything of the facts. Ginguéné might possibly be able to read English, but certainly had no sort of acquaintance with the English theatre. I should have no hesitation in replying that we could produce at least forty comedies, before the age of Molière, superior to the best of those he has mentioned, and perhaps three times that number as good as the worst.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVI. HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE FROM 1550 TO 1600

SECT. I.

Style of best Italian Writers--Those of France--England.

|Italian writers.|

|Casa.|

|Tasso.|

1. I am not aware that we can make any great distinction in the character of the Italian writers of this and the preceding period, though they are more numerous in the present. Some of these have been already mentioned on account of their subjects. In point of style, to which we now chiefly confine ourselves, Casa is esteemed among the best.[1300] The Galateo is certainly diffuse, but not so languid as some contemporary works; nor do we find in it, I think, so many of the inversions which are common blemishes in the writings of this age. The prose of Tasso is placed by Corniani almost on a level with his poetry for beauty of diction. “We find in it,” he says, “dignity, rhythm, elegance, and purity without affectation, and perspicuity without vulgarity. He is never trifling or verbose, like his contemporaries of that century; but endeavours to fill every part of his discourses with meaning.”[1301] These praises may be just, but there is a tediousness in the moral essays of Tasso, which, like most other productions of that class, assert what the reader has never seen denied, and distinguish what he is in no danger of confounding.

[1300] Corniani, v. 174. Parini called the Galateo, Capo d’opera di nostra lingua.

[1301] Corniani, vi. 240.

|Firenzuola. Character of Italian prose.|

2. Few Italian writers, it is said by the editors of the voluminous Milan collection, have united equally with Firenzuola the most simple naïveté to a delicate sweetness, that diffuses itself over the heart of the reader. His dialogue on the Beauty of Women is reckoned one of the best of his works. It is diffuse, but seems to deserve the praise bestowed upon its language. His translation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius is read with more pleasure than the original. The usual style of Italian prose in this, accounted by some its best age, is elaborate, ornate, yet not to excess, with a rhythmical structure apparently much studied, very rhetorical and for the most part trivial, as we should now think, in its matter. The style of Machiavel, to which, perhaps the reader’s attention was not sufficiently called while we were concerned with his political philosophy, is eminent for simplicity, strength, and clearness. It would not be too much to place him at the head of the prose writers of Italy. But very few had the good taste to emulate so admirable a model. “They were apt to presume,” says Corniani, “that the spirit of good waiting consisted in the artificial employment of rhetorical figures. They hoped to fertilize the soil barren of argument by such resources. They believed that they should become eloquent by accumulating words upon words, and phrases upon phrases, hunting on every side for metaphors, and exaggerating the most trifling theme by frigid hyperboles.”[1302]

[1302] Corniani, vi. 52.

|Italian letter-writers.|

3. A treatise on Painting, by Raffaelle Borghino, published in 1584, called Il Riposo, is highly praised for its style by the Milan editors; but it is difficult for a foreigner to judge so correctly of these delicacies of language, as he may of the general merits of composition. They took infinite pains with their letters, great numbers of which have been collected. Those of Annibal Caro are among the best known;[1303] but Pietro Aretino, Paolo Manuzio, and Bonfadio are also celebrated for their style. The appearance of labour and affectation is still less pleasing in epistolary correspondence than in writings more evidently designed for the public eye; and there will be found abundance of it in these Italian writers, especially in addressing their superiors. Cicero was a model perpetually before their eyes, and whose faults they did not perceive. Yet perhaps the Italian writings of this period, with their flowing grace, are more agreeable than the sententious antitheses of the Spaniards. Both are artificial, but the efforts of the one are bestowed on diction and cadence, those of the other display a constant strain to be emphatic and profound. What Cicero was to Italy, Seneca became to Spain.

[1303] It is of no relevancy to the history of literature, but in one of Caro’s letters to Bernardo Tasso about 1544, he censures the innovation of using the third person in addressing a correspondent. Tutto questo secolo (dice Monsignor de la Casa) è adulatore; ognuno che scrive dà de le signorie; ognuno, a chi si scrive, le vuole; e non pure i grandi, ma i mezzani e i plebei quasi aspirano a questi gran nomi, e si tengono anco per affronto, se non gli hanno, e d’errore son notati quelli, che non gli danno. Cosa, che a me pare stranissima e stomachosa, che habbiamo a parlar con uno, come se fosse un altro, e tutta via in astratto, quasi con la idea di colui, con chi si parla, non con la persona sua propria. Pure l’abuso è gia fatto, ed è generale, &c., lib. i. p. 122. (edit. 1581.) I have found the third person used as early as a letter of Paolo Manuzio to Castlevetro in 1543; but where there was any intimacy with an equal rank, it is not much employed; nor is it always found in that age in letters to men of very high rank from their inferiors.

|Davanzati’s Tacitus.|

4. An exception to the general character of diffuseness is found in the well-known translation of Tacitus by Davanzati. This, it has often been said, he has accomplished in fewer words than the original. No one, as in the story of the fish, which was said to weigh less in water than out of it, inquires into the truth of what is confidently said, even where it is obviously impossible. But whoever knows the Latin and Italian languages must know that a translation of Tacitus into Italian cannot be made in fewer words. It will be found, as might be expected, that Davanzati has succeeded by leaving out as much as was required to compensate the difference that articles and auxiliary verbs made against him. His translation is also censured by Corniani,[1304] as full of obsolete terms and Florentine vulgarisms.

[1304] vi. 58.

|Jordano Bruno.|

5. We can place under no better head than the present, much of that lighter literature which, without taking the form of romance, endeavours to amuse the reader by fanciful invention and gay remark. The Italians have much of this; but it is beyond our province to enumerate productions of no great merit or renown. Jordano Bruno’s celebrated Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante is one of this class. Another of Bruno’s light pieces is entitled, La Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo, con l’Aggiunta del’Asino Cillenico. This has more profaneness in it than the Spaccio della Bestia. The latter, as is well known, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sydney; as was also another little piece, Gli Eroici Furori. In this he has a sonnet addressed to the English ladies: “Dell’Inghilterra o Vaghe Ninfe e Belle;” but ending, of course, with a compliment, somewhat at the expense of these beauties, to “l’unica Diana Qual’è trà voi quel, che tra gl’astri il sole.” It had been well for Bruno if he had kept himself under the protection of Diana. The “chaste beams of that watery moon” were less scorching than the fires of the Inquisition.

|French writers. Amyot.|

6. The French generally date the beginning of an easy and natural style in their own language from the publication of James Amyot’s translation of Plutarch in 1559. Some earlier writers, however, have been mentioned in another place, and perhaps some might have been added. The French style of the sixteenth century is for the most part diffuse, endless in its periods, and consequently negligent of grammar; but it was even then lively and unaffected, especially in narration, the memoirs of that age being still read with pleasure. Amyot, according to some, knew Greek but indifferently, and was perhaps on that account a better model of his own language; but if he did not always render the meaning of Plutarch, he has made Plutarch’s reputation, and that, in some measure, of those who have taken Plutarch for their guide. It is well known how popular, more perhaps than any other ancient, this historian and moralist has been in France; but it is through Amyot that he has been read. The style of his translator, abounding with the native idiom, and yet enriching the language, not at that time quite copious enough for its high vocation in literature, with many words which usage and authority have recognised, has always been regarded with admiration, and by some, in the prevalence of a less natural taste, with regret. It is in French prose what that of Marot is in poetry, and suggests, not an uncultivated simplicity, but the natural grace of a young person, secure of appearing to advantage, but not at bottom indifferent to doing so. This naïveté, a word which, as we have neither naturalised nor translated it, I must adopt, has ever since been the charm of good writing in France. It is, above all, the characteristic of one who may justly be called the disciple of Amyot, and who extols him above all other writers in the language--Montaigne. The fascination of Montaigne’s manner is acknowledged by all who read him; and with a worse style, or one less individually adapted to his character, he would never have been the favourite of the world.[1305]

[1305] See the articles on Amyot in Baillet, iv. 428, Bayle, La Harpe. Biogr. Universelle. Préface aux Œuvres de Pascal, par Neufchateau.

|Montaigne; Du Vair.|

7. In the essays of Montaigne a few passages occur of striking, though simple eloquence. But it must be admitted that the familiar idiomatic tone of Amyot was better fitted to please than to awe, to soothe the mind than to excite it, to charm away the cares of the moment than to impart a durable emotion. It was also so remote from the grand style which the writings of Cicero and the precepts of rhetoric had taught the learned world to admire, that we cannot wonder to find some who sought to model their French by a different standard. The only one of these, so far as I am aware, that falls within the sixteenth century is Du Vair, a man not less distinguished in public life than in literature, having twice held the great seals of France under Louis XIII. “He composed,” says a modern writer, “many works, in which he endeavoured to be eloquent; but he fell into the error, at that time so common, of too much wishing to Latinise our mother tongue. He has been charged with fabricating words, such as sponsion, cogitation, contumélie, dilucidite, contemnement, &c.”[1306] Notwithstanding these instances of bad taste which, when collected, seem more monstrous than as they are dispersed in his writings, Du Vair is not devoid of a flowing eloquence, which, whether perfectly congenial to the spirit of the language or not, has never wanted its imitators and admirers, and those very successful and brilliant, in French literature.[1307] It was of course the manner of the bar and of the pulpit after the pulpit laid aside its buffoonery, far more than that of Amyot and Montaigne.

[1306] Neufchateau, in Préface à Pascal, p. 181. Bouterwek, v. 326, praises Du Vair, but he does not seem a favourite with his compatriot critics.

[1307] Du Vair’s Essay de la Constance et Consolations ès Malheurs Publiques, of which the first edition is in 1594, furnishes some eloquent declamation in a style unlike that of Amyot. Repassez en votre memorie l’histoire de toute l’antiquité; et quand vous trouverez un magistrat qui aura eu grand credit envers un peuple, ou auprès d’un prince, et qui se sera voulu comporter vertueusement, dites hardiment; Je gage que cestui-ci a été banni, que cestui-ci a été tué, qui cestui-ci a été empoisonné. A Athènes, Aristidès, Themistoclès, et Phocion; à Rome infinis desquels je laisse les noms pour n’emplir le papier, me contentant de Camille, Scipion, et Ciceron pour l’antiquité, de Papinien pour les temps des empereurs Romains, et de Boece sous les Gots. Mais pourquoi le prenons nous si haut. Qui avons nous vu de notre siècle tenir les sceaux de France, qui n’ait été mis en cette charge, pour en être dejetté avec contumelie? Celui qui auroit vu M. le Chancelier Olivier, ou M. le Chancelier de l’Hospital, partir de la cour pour se retirer en leurs maisons, n’auroit jamais envié de tels honneurs, ni de tels charges. Imaginez vous ces braves et venerables vieillards, esquels reluisoient toutes sortes de vertus, et esquels entre une infinité de grandes parties vous n’cussiez sçu que choisir, remplis d’erudition, consommez ès affaires, amateurs, de leur patrie, vraiment dignes de telles charges, si le siècle eust été digne d’eux. Apres avoir longuement et fidèlement servis la patrie, on leur dresse des querelles d’Allemans, et de fausses accusations pour les bannir des affaires, on plutot pour en priver les affaires; comme un navire agité de la conduite de si sages et experts pilotes, afin de le faire plus aisément briser, p. 76 (edit. 1604.)

|Satire Menippée.|

8. It is not in my power to communicate much information as to the minor literature of France. One book may be named as being familiarly known, the Satire Menippée. The first edition bears the date of 1593, but is said not to have appeared till 1594, containing some allusions to events of that year. It is a ridicule on the proceedings of the League, who were then masters of Paris, and has commonly been ascribed to Leroy, canon of Rouen, though Passerat, Pithou, Rapin, and others, are said to have had some share in it. This book is historically curious, but I do not perceive that it displays any remarkable degree of humour or invention. The truth appears so much throughout, that it cannot be ranked among works of fiction.[1308]

[1308] Biog. Univ. Vigneul-Marville, i. 197.

|English writers.|

|Ascham.|

9. In the scanty and obscure productions of the English press under Edward and Mary, or in the early years of Elizabeth, we should search, I conceive, in vain for any elegance or eloquence in writing. Yet there is an increasing expertness and fluency, and the language insensibly rejecting obsolete forms, the manner of our writers is less uncouth, and their sense more pointed and perspicuous than before. Wilson’s Art of Rhetorique is at least a proof that some knew the merits of a good style, if they did not yet bring their rules to bear on their own language. In Wilson’s own manner there is nothing remarkable. The first book which can be worth naming at all is Ascham’s Schoolmaster, published in 1570, and probably written some years before. Ascham is plain and strong in his style, but without grace or warmth; his sentences have no harmony of structure. He stands, however, as far as I have seen, above all other writers in the first half of the queen’s reign. The best of these, like Reginald Scott, express their meaning well, but with no attempt at a rhythmical structure or figurative language; they are not bad writers, because their solid sense is aptly conveyed to the mind; but they are not good, because they have little selection of words, and give no pleasure by means of Style. Puttenham is perhaps the first who wrote a well-measured prose; in his Art of English Poesie, published in 1586, he is elaborate, studious of elevated and chosen expression, and rather diffuse, in the manner of the Italians of the sixteenth century, who affected that fulness of style, and whom he probably meant to imitate. But in these later years of the queen, when almost every one was eager to be distinguished for sharp wit or ready learning, the want of good models of writing in our own language gave rise to some perversion of the public taste. Thoughts and words began to be valued, not as they were just and natural, but as they were removed from common apprehension, and most exclusively the original property of those who employed them. This in poetry showed itself in affected conceits and in prose led to the pedantry of recondite mythological allusion, and of a Latinised phraseology.

|Euphues of Lilly.|

10. The most remarkable specimen of this class is the Euphues of Lilly, a book of little value, but which deserves notice on account of the influence it is recorded to have had upon the court of Elizabeth; an influence also over the public taste, which is manifested in the literature of the age. It is divided into two parts, having separate titles; the first, “Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit;” the second, “Euphues and his England.” This is a very dull story of a young Athenian, whom the author places at Naples in the first part and brings to England in the second; it is full of dry commonplaces. The style which obtained celebrity is antithetical, and sententious to affectation; the perpetual effort with no adequate success rendering the book equally disagreeable and ridiculous, though it might not be difficult to find passages rather more happy and ingenious than the rest. The following specimen is taken at random, and though sufficiently characteristic, is perhaps rather unfavourable to Lilly, as a little more affected and empty than usual.

11. “The sharpest north-east wind, my good Euphues, doth never last three days, tempests have but a short time, and the more violent the thunder is, the less permanent it is. In the like manner it falleth out with jars and carpings of friends, which, begun in a moment, are ended in a moment. Necessary it is that among friends there should be some thwarting, but to continue in anger not convenient: the camel first troubleth the water before he drink; the frankincense is burned before it smell; friends are tried before they be trusted, lest, shining like the carbuncle as though they had fire, they be found, being touched, to be without fire. Friendship should be like the wine, which Homer much commending calleth Maroneum, whereof one pint being mingled with five quarts of water, yet it keepeth his old strength and virtue, not to be qualified by any discurtesie. Where salt doth grow nothing else can breed; where friendship is built no offence can harbour. Then, Euphues, let the falling out of friends be the renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones of the lion, which, lying still and not moved, begin to rot, but being stricken one against another, break out like fire, and wax green.”

12. “The lords and gentlemen in that court (of Elizabeth) are also an example,” he says in a subsequent passage, “for all others to follow, true types of nobility, the only stay and staff of honour, brave courtiers, stout soldiers, apt to revel in peace and ride in war. In fight fierce, not dreading death; in friendship firm, not breaking promise; courteous to all that deserve well, cruel to none that deserve ill. Their adversaries they trust not--that showeth their wisdom; their enemies they fear not--that argueth their courage. They are not apt to proffer injuries, not fit to take any; loth to pick quarrels, but longing to revenge them.” Lilly pays great compliments to the ladies for beauty and modesty, and overloads Elizabeth with panegyric. “Touching the beauty of this prince, her countenance, her majesty, her personage, I cannot think that it may be sufficiently commended, when it cannot be too much marvailed at; so that I am constrained to say, as Praxiteles did when he began to paint Venus and her son, who doubted whether the world could afford colours good enough for two such fair faces, and I whether my tongue can yield words to blaze that beauty, the perfection whereof none can imagine; which, seeing it is so, I must do like those that want a clear sight, who being not able to discern the sun in the sky, are inforced to behold it in the water.”

|Its popularity.|

13. It generally happens that a style devoid of simplicity, when first adopted, becomes the object of admiration for its imagined ingenuity and difficulty; and that of Euphues was well adapted to a pedantic generation who valued nothing higher than far-fetched allusions and sententious precepts. All the ladies of the time, we are told, were Lilly’s scholars; “she who spoke not Euphuism being as little regarded at court as if she could not speak French.” “His invention,” says one of his editors, who seems well worthy of him, “was so curiously strung, that Elizabeth’s court held his notes in admiration.”[1309] Shakspeare has ridiculed this style in Love’s Labour Lost, and Jonson in Every Man out of his Humour; but, as will be seen on comparing the extracts I have given above, with the language of Holofernes and Fastidious Brisk, a little in the tone of caricature, which Sir Walter Scott has heightened in one of his novels, till it bears no great resemblance to the real Euphues. I am not sure that Shakspeare has never caught the Euphuistic style, when he did not intend to make it ridiculous, especially in some speeches of Hamlet.

[1309] In Biogr. Britannica, art. Lilly.

|Sydney’s Arcadia.|

14. The first good prose writer, in any positive sense of the word, is Sir Philip Sydney. The Arcadia appeared in 1590. It has been said of the author of this famous romance, to which, as such, we shall have soon to revert, that “we may regard the whole literary character of that age as in some sort derived and descended from him, and his work as the fountain from which all the vigorous shoots of that period drew something of their verdure and strength. It was indeed the Arcadia which first taught to the contemporary writers that inimitable interweaving and contexture of words, that bold and unshackled use and application of them, that art of giving to language, appropriated to objects the most common and trivial, a kind of acquired and adventitious loftiness, and to diction in itself noble and elevated a sort of superadded dignity, that power of ennobling the sentiments by the language, and the language by the sentiments, which so often excites our admiration in perusing the writers of the age of Elizabeth.”[1310] This panegyric appears a good deal too strongly expressed, and perhaps the Arcadia had not this great influence over the writers of the latter years of Elizabeth, whose age is, in the passage quoted, rather too indefinitely mentioned. We are sometimes apt to mistake an improvement springing from the general condition of the public mind for imitation of the one writer who has first displayed the effects of it. Sydney is, as I have said, our earliest good writer; but if the Arcadia had never been published, I cannot believe that Hooker or Bacon would have written worse.

[1310] Retrospective Review, vol. ii. p. 42.

|His Defence of Poesie.|

15. Sydney’s Defence of Poesie, as has been surmised by his last editor, was probably written about 1581. I should incline to place it later than the Arcadia; and he may perhaps allude to himself where he says; “some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral.” This treatise is elegantly written, with perhaps too artificial a construction of sentences; the sense is good, but the expression is very diffuse, which gives it too much the air of a declamation. The great praise of Sydney in this treatise is, that he has shown the capacity of the English language for spirit, variety, gracious idiom, and masculine firmness. It is worth notice that under the word poesy he includes such works as his own Arcadia, or in short any fiction. “It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy; one may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry.”

|Hooker.|

16. But the finest, as well as the most philosophical, writer of the Elizabethan period is Hooker. The first book of the Ecclesiastical Polity is at this day one of the masterpieces of English eloquence. His periods indeed are generally much too long and too intricate, but portions of them are often beautifully rhythmical; his language is rich in English idiom without vulgarity, and in words of a Latin source without pedantry; he is more uniformly solemn than the usage of later times permits, or even than writers of that time, such as Bacon, conversant with mankind as well as books, would have reckoned necessary; but the example of ancient orators and philosophers upon themes so grave as those which he discusses may justify the serious dignity from which he does not depart. Hooker is perhaps the first in England who adorned his prose with the images of poetry; but this he has done more judiciously and with more moderation than others of great name; and we must be bigots in Attic severity, before we can object to some of his grand figures of speech. We may praise him also for avoiding the superfluous luxury of quotation, a rock on which the writers of the succeeding age were so frequently wrecked.

|Character of Elizabethan writers.|

17. It must be owned, however, by every one not absolutely blinded by a love of scarce books, that the prose literature of the queen’s reign, taken generally, is but very mean. The pedantic Euphuism of Lilly overspreads the productions which aspire to the praise of politeness; while the common style of most pieces of circumstance, like those of Martin Mar-prelate and his answerers (for there is little to choose in this respect between parties), or of such efforts at wit and satire as came from Greene, Nash, and other worthies of our early stage, is low, and, with few exceptions, very stupid ribaldry. Many of these have a certain utility in the illustration of Shakspeare and of ancient manners, which is neither to be overlooked in our contempt for such trash, nor to be mistaken for intrinsic merit. If it is alleged that I have not read enough of the Elizabethan literature to censure it, I must reply that, admitting my slender acquaintance with the numberless little books that some years since used to be sold at vast prices, I may still draw an inference from the inability of their admirers, or at least purchasers, to produce any tolerable specimens. Let the labours of Sir Egerton Brydges, the British Bibliographer, the Censura Literaria, the Restituta, collections so copious, and formed with so much industry, speak for the prose of the queen’s reign. I would again repeat that good sense in plain language was not always wanting upon serious subjects; it is to polite writing alone that we now refer.[1311] Spenser’s dialogue upon the State of Ireland, the Brief Conceit of English Policy, and several other tracts are written as such treatises should be written, but they are not to be counted in the list of eloquent or elegant compositions.

[1311] It is not probable that Brydges, as a man of considerable taste and judgment, whatever some other pioneers in the same track may have been, would fail to select the best portions of the authors he has so carefully perused. And yet I would almost defy any one to produce five passages in prose from his numerous volumes, so far as the sixteenth century is concerned, which have any other merit than that of illustrating some matter of fact, or of amusing by their oddity. I have only noted, in traversing that long desert, two sermons by one Edward Dering, preached before the queen (British Bibliographer, i. 260 and 560), which show considerably more vigour than was usual in the style of that age.

SECT. II.--ON CRITICISM.

State of Criticism in Italy--Scaliger--Castelvetro--Salviati--In other Countries--England.

|State of criticism.|

18. In the earlier periods with which we have been conversant, criticism had been the humble handmaid of the ancient writers, content to explain, or sometimes aspiring to restore, but seldom presuming to censure their text, or even to justify the superstitious admiration that modern scholars felt for it. But there is a different and far higher criticism, which excites and guides the taste for truth and beauty in works of imagination; a criticism to which even the great masters of language are responsible, and from which they expect their reward. But of the many who have sat in this tribunal, a small minority have been recognised as rightful arbiters of the palms they pretend to confer, and an appeal to the public voice has as often sent away the judges in dishonour as confirmed their decision.

|Scaliger’s Poetry.|

|His preference of Virgil to Homer.|

19. It is a proof at least of the talents and courage which distinguished Julius Cæsar Scaliger, that he, first of all the moderns (or, if there are exceptions, they must be partial and inconsiderable), undertook to reduce the whole art of verse into system, illustrating and confirming every part by a profusion of poetical literature. His Poetics form an octavo of about 900 pages, closely printed. We can give but a slight sketch of so extensive a work. In the first book he treats of the different species of poems; in the second, of different metres; the third is more miscellaneous, but relates chiefly to figures and turns of phrase; the fourth proceeds with the same subject, but these two are very comprehensive. In the fifth we come to apply these principles to criticism; and here we find a comparison of various poets one with another, especially of Homer with Virgil. The sixth book is a general criticism on all Latin poets, ancient and modern. The seventh is a kind of supplement to the rest, and seems to contain all the miscellaneous matter that he found himself to have omitted, together with some questions purposely reserved, as he tells us, on account of their difficulty. His comparison of Homer with Virgil is very elaborate, extending to every simile or other passage, wherein a resemblance or imitation can be observed, as well as to the general management of their epic poems. In this comparison he gives an invariable preference to Virgil, and declares that the difference between these poets is as great as between a lady of rank and an awkward wife of a citizen. Musæus he conceives to be far superior to Homer, according to the testimony of antiquity; and his poem of Hero and Leander, which it does not occur to him to suspect, is the only one in Greek that can be named in competition with Virgil, as he shows by comparison of the said poem with the very inferior effusions of Homer. If Musæus had written on the same subject as Homer, Scaliger does not doubt but that he would have left the Iliad and Odyssey far behind.[1312]

[1312] Quod si Musæus ea, quæ Homerus Scripsit, scripsisset, longè melius eum scripturum fuisse judicamus.

The following is a specimen of Scaliger’s style of criticism, chosen rather for its shortness than any other cause:--

Ex vicesimo tertio Iliadis transtulit versus illos in comparationem; μαστιγι δ' αιεν ελαυνε κατωμαδον αἰ δέ οἱ ἱπποι ὑψοσ' αειρεσθην ῥιμφα πρησσοντε κελευθον. [mastigi d’ aien elaune katômadon; ai de hoi hippoi hypsos' aeiresthên rhimpha prêssonte keleuthon.] ισχνολογια [ischnologia] multa; at in nostro animata oratio; Non tam præcipites bijugo certamine campum Corripuere, ruuntque effusi carcere currus, &c. Cum virtutibus horum carminum non est conferenda jejuna illa humilitas; audent præferre tamen grammatici temerii. Principio, nihil infelicius quam μαστιγι αιεν ελαυνεν [mastigi aien elaunen]. Nam continuatio et equorum diminuit opinionem, et contemptum facit verberum. Frequentibus intervallis stimuli plus proficiunt. Quod vero admirantur Græculi, pessimum est, υψοσ' αειρεσθην [hypsos' aeiresthên]. Extento namque, et, ut milites loquantur, clauso cursu non subsiliente opus est. Quare divinus vir, undantia lora; hoc enim pro flagro, et præcipites, et corripuere campum; idque in præterito, ad celeritatem. Et ruunt, quasi in diversa, adeo celeres sunt. Illa vero supra omnem Homerum, proni in verbera pendent. l. v. c. 3.

20. These opinions will not raise Scaliger’s taste very greatly in our eyes. But it is not perhaps surprising that an Italian, accustomed to the polished effeminacy of modern verse, both in his language and in Latin, should be delighted with the poem of Hero and Leander, which has the sort of charm that belongs to the statues of Bacchus, and soothes the ear with voluptuous harmony, while it gratifies the mind with elegant and pleasing imagery. It is not, however, to be taken for granted that Scaliger is always mistaken in his judgments on particular passages in these greatest of poets. The superiority of the Homeric poems is rather incontestable in their general effect, and in the vigorous originality of his verse, than in the selection of circumstance, sentiment, or expression. It would be a sort of prejudice almost as tasteless as that of Scaliger, to refuse the praise of real poetic superiority to many passages of Virgil, even as compared with the Iliad, and far more with the Odyssey. If the similes of the older poet are more picturesque and animated, those of his imitator are more appropriate and parallel to the subject. It would be rather whimsical to deny this to be a principal merit in a comparison. Scaliger sacrifices Theocritus as much as Homer at the altar of Virgil, and of course Apollonius has little chance with so partial a judge. Horace and Ovid, at least the latter, are also held by Scaliger superior to the Greeks whenever they come into competition.

|His critique on modern Latin poets.|

21. In the fourth chapter of the sixth book, Scaliger criticises the modern Latin poets, beginning with Marullus; for what is somewhat remarkable, he says that he had been unable to see the Latin poems of Petrarch. He rates Marullus low, though he dwells at length on his poetry, and thinks no better of Augurellus. The continuation of the Æneid by Maphæus he highly praises; Augerianus not at all. Mantuan has some genius, but no skill; and Scaliger is indignant that some ignorant schoolmasters should teach from him rather than from Virgil. Of Dolet he speaks with great severity; his unhappy fate does not atone for the badness of his verses in the eyes of so stern a critic; “the fire did not purify him, but rather he polluted the fire.” Palingenius, though too diffuse, he accounts a good poet, and Cotta as an imitator of Catullus. Palearius aims rather to be philosophical than poetical. Castiglione is excellent; Bembus wants vigour, and sometimes elegance; he is too fond, as many others are, of trivial words. Of Politian Scaliger does not speak highly; he rather resembles Statius, has no grace, and is careless of harmony. Vida is reckoned, he says, by most the first poet of our time; he dwells, therefore, long on the Ars Poetica, and extols it highly, though not without copious censure. Of Vida’s other poems the Bombyx is the best. Pontanus is admirable for everything, if he had known where to stop. To Sannazarius and Fracastorius he assigns the highest praise of universal merit, but places the last at the head of the whole band.

|Critical influence of the academies.|

22. The Italian language, like those of Greece and Rome, had been hitherto almost exclusively treated by grammarians, the superior criticism having little place even in the writings of Bembo. But soon after the middle of the century, the academies established in many cities, dedicating much time to their native language, began to point out beauties, and to animadvert on defects beyond the province of grammar. The enthusiastic admiration of Petrarch poured itself forth in tedious commentaries upon every word of every sonnet; one of which, illustrated with the heavy prolixity of that age, would sometimes be the theme of a volume. Some philosophical or theological pedants spiritualised his meaning, as had been attempted before; the absurd paradox of denying the real existence of Laura is a known specimen of their refinements. Many wrote on the subject of his love for her; and a few denied its Platonic purity, which, however, the academy of Ferrara thought fit to decree. One of the heretics, by name Cresci, ventured also to maintain that she was married; but this probable hypothesis had not many followers.[1313]

[1313] Crescimbeni, Storia della Volgar Poesia, ii. 295-309.

|Dispute of Caro and Castelvetro.|

23. Meantime a multitude of new versifiers, chiefly close copyists of the style of Petrarch, lay open to the malice of their competitors, and the strictness of these self-chosen judges of song. A critical controversy that sprung up about 1558 between two men of letters, very prominent in their age, Annibal Caro and Ludovico Castelvetro, is celebrated in the annals of Italian literature. The former had published a canzone in praise of the king of France, beginning--

Venite all’ombra de’ gran gigli d’oro.

Castelvetro made some sharp animadversions on this ode, which seems really to deserve a good deal of censure, being in bad taste, turgid, and foolish. Caro replied with the bitterness natural to a wounded poet. In this there might be nothing unpardonable, and even his abusive language might be extenuated at least by many precedents in literary story; but it is imputed to Caro that he excited the Inquisition against his suspected adversary. Castelvetro had been of the celebrated academy of Modena, whose alleged inclination to Protestantism had proved, several years before, the cause of its dissolution, and of the persecution which some of its members suffered. Castelvetro, though he had avoided censure at that time, was now denounced about 1560, when the persecution was hottest, to the Inquisition at Rome. He obeyed its summons, but soon found it prudent to make his escape, and reached Chiavenna in the Grison dominions. He lived several years afterwards in safe quarters, but seems never to have made an open profession of the reformed faith.[1314]

[1314] Muratori, Vita del Castelvetro, 1727. Crescimbeni, ii. 431. Tiraboschi, x. 31. Ginguéné, vii. 365. Corniani, vi. 61.

|Castelvetro on Aristotle’s Poetics.|

24. Castelvetro himself is one of the most considerable among the Italian critics; but his taste is often lost in subtlety, and his fastidious temper seems to have sought nothing so much as occasion for censure. His greatest work is a commentary upon the Poetics of Aristotle; and it may justly claim respect, not only as the earliest exposition of the theory of criticism, but for its acuteness, erudition, and independence of reasoning, which disclaims the Stagyrite as a master, though the diffuseness usual in that age, and the microscopic subtlety of the writer’s mind may render its perusal tedious. Twining, one of the best critics on the Poetics, has said, in speaking of the commentaries of Castelvetro and of a later Italian, Beni, that “their prolixity, their scholastic and trifling subtlety, their useless tediousness of logical analysis, their microscopic detection of difficulties invisible to the naked eye of common sense, and their waste of confutation upon objections made only by themselves, and made on purpose to be confuted--all this, it must be owned, is disgusting and repulsive. It may sufficiently release a commentator from the duty of reading their works throughout, but not from that of examining and consulting them; for in both these writers, but more especially in Beni, there are many remarks equally acute and solid; many difficulties will be seen clearly stated, and sometimes successfully removed; many things usefully illustrated and clearly explained; and if their freedom of censure is now and then disgraced by a little disposition to cavil, this becomes almost a virtue when compared with the servile and implicit admiration of Dacier.”[1315]

[1315] Twining’s Aristotle’s Poetics, preface, p. 13.

|Severity of Castelvetro’s criticism.|

25. Castelvetro in his censorious humour did not spare the greatest shades that repose in the laurel groves of Parnassus, nor even those whom national pride had elevated to a level with them. Homer is less blamed than any other; but frequent shafts are levelled at Virgil, and not always unjustly, if poetry of real genius could ever bear the extremity of critical rigour, in which a monotonous and frigid mediocrity has generally found refuge.[1316] In Dante he finds fault with the pedantry that has filled his poem with terms of science, unintelligible and unpleasing to ignorant men, for whom poems are chiefly designed.[1317] Ariosto he charges with plagiarism, laying unnecessary stress on his borrowing some stories, as that of Zerbino, from older books; and even objects to his introduction of false names of kings, since we may as well invent new mountains and rivers, as violate the known truths of history.[1318] This punctilious cavil is very characteristic of Castelvetro. Yet he sometimes reaches a strain of philosophical analysis, and can by no means be placed in the ranks of criticism below La Harpe, to whom, by his attention to verbal minuteness, as well as by the acrimony and self-confidence of his character, he may in some measure be compared.

[1316] One of his censures falls on the minute particularity of the prophecy of Anchises in the sixth Æneid; peccando Virgilio nella convenevolezza della profetia, la quale non suole condescendere a nomi proprj, ne a cose tanto chiare e particolari, ma, tacendo i nomi, suole manifestare le persone, e le loro azioni con figure di parlare alquanto oscure, si come si vede nelle profetie della scrittura sacra e nell’Alessandra di Licophrone, p. 219 (edit. 1576). This is not unjust in itself; but Castelvetro wanted the candour to own, or comprehensiveness to perceive, that a prophecy of the Roman history, couched in allegories, would have had much less effect on Roman readers.

[1317] Rendendola massimamente per questa via difficile ad intendere e meno piacente a uomini idioti, per gli quali principalmente si fanno i poemi, p. 597. But the comedy of Dante was about as much written for gl’idioti, as the Principia of Newton.

[1318] Castelvetro, p. 212. He objects on the same principle to Giraldi Cinthio, that he had chosen a subject for tragedy which never had occurred, nor had been reported to have occurred, and this of royal persons unheard of before, il qual peccato di prendere soggetto tale per la tragedia non è da perdonare, p. 103.

|Ercolano of Varchi.|

26. The Ercolano of Varchi, a series of dialogues, belongs to the inferior but more numerous class of critical writings, and after some general observations on speech and language as common to men, turns to the favourite theme of his contemporaries, their native idiom. He is one who with Bembo contends that the language should not be called Italian, or even Tuscan, but Florentine, though admitting, what might be expected, that few agree to this except the natives of the city. Varchi had written on the side of Caro against Castelvetro, and though upon the whole he does not speak of the latter in the Ercolano with incivility, cannot restrain his wrath at an assertion of the stern critic of Modena, that there were as famous writers in the Spanish and French as in the Italian language. Varchi even denies that there was any writer of reputation in the first of these except Juan de la Mena, and the author of Amadis de Gaul. Varchi is now chiefly known as the author of a respectable history, which, on account of its sincerity, was not published till the last century. The prejudice that, in common with some of his fellow-citizens, he entertained in favour of the popular idiom of Florence, has affected the style of his history, which is reckoned both tediously diffuse, and deficient in choice of phrase.[1319]

[1319] Corniani, vi. 43.

|Controversy about Dante.|

27. Varchi, in a passage of the Ercolano, having extolled Dante even in preference to Homer, gave rise to a controversy wherein some Italian critics did not hesitate to point out the blemishes of their countryman. Bulgarini was one of these. Mazzoni undertook the defence of Dante in a work of considerable length, and seems to have poured out, still more abundantly than his contemporaries, a torrent of philosophical disquisition. Bulgarini replied again to him.[1320] Crescimbeni speaks of these discussions as having been advantageous to Italian poetry.[1321] The good effects, however, were not very sensibly manifested in the next century.

[1320] Id. vi. 260. Ginguéné, vii. 491.

[1321] Hist. della Volgar Poesia, ii. 282.

|Academy of Florence.|

28. Florence was the chief scene of these critical wars. Cosmo I., the most perfect type of the prince of Machiavel, sought by the encouragement of literature in this its most innocuous province, as he did by the arts of embellishment, both to bring over the minds of his subjects a forgetfulness of liberty, and to render them unapt for its recovery. The Academy of Florence resounded with the praises of Petrarch. A few seceders from this body established the more celebrated academy Della Crusca, of the sieve, whose appellation bespoke the spirit in which they meant to sift all they undertook to judge. They were soon engaged, and with some loss to their fame, in a controversy upon the Gierusalemme Liberata. Camillo Pellegrino, a Neapolitan, had published in 1584 a dialogue on epic poetry, entitled Il Caraffa, wherein he gave preference to Tasso above Ariosto. Though Florence had no peculiar interest in this question, the academicians thought themselves guardians of the elder bard’s renown; and Tasso had offended the citizens by some reflections in one of his dialogues. The academy permitted themselves, in a formal reply, to place even Pulci and Boiardo above Tasso. It was easier to vindicate Ariosto from some of Pellegrino’s censures, which are couched in the pedantic tone of insisting with the reader that he ought not to be pleased. He has followed Castelvetro in several criticisms. The rules of epic poetry so long observed, he maintains, ought to be reckoned fundamental principles, which no one can dispute without presumption. The academy answer this well on behalf of Ariosto. Their censures on the Jerusalem apply, in part to the characters and incidents, wherein they are sometimes right, in part to the language, many phrases, according to them, being bad Italian, as pietose for pie in the first line.[1322]

[1322] In the second volume of the edition of Tasso at Venice, 1735, the Caraffa of Pellegrino, the Defence of Ariosto by the Academy, Tasso’s Apology, and the Infarinato of Salviati, are cut into sentences, placed to answer each other like a dialogue. This produces an awkward and unnatural effect, as passages are torn from their context to place them in opposition.

The criticism on both sides becomes infinitely wearisome; yet not more so than much that we find in our modern reviews, and with the advantage of being more to the purpose, less ostentatious, and with less pretence to eloquence or philosophy. An account of the controversy will be found in Crescimbeni, Ginguéné, or Corniani, and more at length in Serassi’s Life of Tasso.

|Salviati’s attack on Tasso.|

29. Salviati, a verbose critic, who had written two quarto volumes on the style of Boccaccio, assailed the new epic in two treatises, entitled L’Infarinato. Tasso’s Apology followed very soon; but it has been sometimes thought that these criticisms, acting on his morbid intellect, though he repelled them vigorously, might have influenced that waste of labour, by which, in the last years of his life, he changed so much of his great poem for the worse. The obscurer insects whom envy stirred up against its glory are not worthy to be remembered. The chief praise of Salviati himself is that he laid the foundations of the first classical dictionary of any modern language, the Vocabulario della Crusca.[1323]

[1323] Corniani, vi. 204. The Italian literature would supply several more works on criticism, rhetoric, and grammar. Upon all these subjects it was much richer, at this time, than the French or English.

|Pinciano’s Art of Poetry.|

30. Bouterwek has made us acquainted with a treatise in Spanish on the art of poetry, which he regards as the earliest of its kind in modern literature. It could not be so according to the date of its publication, which is in 1596; but the author, Alonzo Lopez Pinciano was physician to Charles V., and it was therefore written, in all probability, many years before it appeared from the press. The title is rather quaint, Philosophia Antigua Poetica, and it is written in the form of letters. Pinciano is the first who discovered the Poetics of Aristotle, which he had diligently studied, to be a fragment of a larger work, as is now generally admitted. “Whenever Lopez Pinciano,” says Bouterwek, “abandons Aristotle, his notions respecting the different poetic styles are as confused as those of his contemporaries; and only a few of his notions and distinctions can be deemed of importance at the present day. But his name is deserving of honourable remembrance, for he was the first writer of modern times who endeavoured to establish a philosophic art of poetry; and, with all his veneration for Aristotle, he was the first scholar who ventured to think for himself, and to go somewhat farther than his master.”[1324] The Art of Poetry, by Juan de la Cueva, is a poem of the didactic class, containing some information as to the history of Spanish verse.[1325] The other critical treatises which appeared in Spain about this time seem to be of little importance; but we know by the writings of Cervantes, that the poets of the age of Philip were, as usual, followed by the animal for whose natural prey they are designed, the sharp-toothed and keen-scented critic.

[1324] Hist. of Sp. Lit., p. 323.

[1325] It is printed entire in the eighth volume of Parnaso Español.

|French treatises of criticism.|

31. France produced very few books of the same class. The Institutiones Oratoriæ of Omer Talon is an elementary and short treatise of rhetoric.[1326] Baillet and Goujet gave some praise to the Art of Poetry by Pelletier, published in 1555.[1327] The treatise of Henry Stephens, on the Conformity of the French Language with the Greek, is said to contain very good observations.[1328] But it must be (for I do not recollect to have seen it) rather a book of grammar than of superior criticism. The Rhetorique Française of Fouquelin (1555) seems to be little else than a summary of rhetorical figures.[1329] That of Courcelles, in 1557, is not much better.[1330] All these relate rather to prose than to poetry. From the number of versifiers in France, and the popularity of Ronsard and his school, we might have expected a larger harvest of critics. Pasquier, in his valuable miscellany, Les Recherches de la France, has devoted a few pages to this subject, but not on an extensive or systematic plan; nor can the two Bibliothéques Françaises, by La Croix du Maine and Verdier, both published in 1584, though they contain a great deal of information as to the literature of France, with some critical estimates of books, be reckoned in the class to which we are now adverting. In this department of literature, without doing a great deal, we had perhaps rather the advantage over our neighbours.

[1326] Gibert, Baillet, printed in Jugemens des Savans, viii. 181.

[1327] Baillet, iii. 351. Goujet, iii. 97. Pelletier had previously rendered Horace’s Art of Poetry into French verse, id. 66.

[1328] Baillet, iii. 353.

[1329] Gibert, p. 184.

[1330] Id. p. 366.

|Wilson’s Art of Rhetorique.|

32. Thomas Wilson, afterwards secretary of state, and much employed under Elizabeth, is the author of an “Art of Rhetorique,” dated in the preface January 1553. The rules in this treatise are chiefly from Aristotle, with the help of Cicero and Quintilian, but his examples and illustrations are modern. Warton says that it is the first system of criticism in our language.[1331] But in common use of the word it is no criticism at all, any more than the treatise of Cicero de Oratore; it is what it professes to be, a system of rhetoric in the ancient manner; and, in this sense, it had been preceded by the work of Leonard Cox, which has been mentioned in a former chapter. Wilson was a man of considerable learning, and his Art of Rhetorique is by no means without merit. He deserves praise for censuring the pedantry of learned phrases, or, as he calls them, “strange inkhorn terms,” advising men “to speak as is commonly received;” and he censures also what was not less pedantic, the introduction of a French or Italian idiom, which the travelled English affected in order to show their politeness, as the scholars did the former to prove their erudition. Wilson had before published an Art of Logic.

[1331] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iv. 157.

|Gascoyne; Webbe.|

33. The first English criticism, properly speaking, that I find, is a short tract by Gascoyne, doubtless the poet of that name, published in 1575; “Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rhyme in English.” It consists only of ten pages, but the observations are judicious. Gascoyne recommends that the sentence should as far as possible be finished at the close of two lines in the couplet measure.[1332] Webbe, author of a “Discourse of English Poetry” (1586), is copious in comparison with Gascoyne, though he stretches but to seventy pages. His taste is better shown in his praise of Spenser for the Shepherd’s Kalendar, than of Gabriel Harvey for his “Reformation of our English verse;” that is, by forcing it into uncouth Latin measures, which Webbe has himself most unhappily attempted.

[1332] Gascoyne, with all the other early English critics, was republished in a collection by Mr. Haslewood in two volumes, 1811 and 1815.

|Puttenham’s Art of Poesie.|

34. A superior writer to Webbe was George Puttenham, whose “Art of English Poesie,” published in 1589, is a small quarto of 258 pages in three books. It is in many parts very well written, in a measured prose, rather elaborate and diffuse. He quotes occasionally a little Greek. Among the contemporary English poets, Puttenham extols “for eclogue and pastoral poetry Sir Philip Sydney and Master Chaloner, and that other gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Kalendar. For ditty and amorous ode I find Sir Walter Rawleigh’s vein most lofty, insolent, [bold? or uncommon?] and passionate; Master Edward Dyer for elegy most sweet, solemn, and of high conceit; Gascon [Gascoyne] for a good metre and for a plentiful vein; Phaer and Golding for a learned and well connected verse, specially in translation, clear, and very faithfully answering their author’s intent. Others have also written with much facility, but more commendably perhaps, if they had not written so much nor so popularly. But last in recital and first in degree is the queen our sovereign lady, whose learned, delicate, noble muse easily surmounteth all the rest that have written before her time or since, for sense, sweetness, and subtilty, be it in ode, elegy, epigram, or any other kind of poem, heroic or lyric, wherein it shall please her majesty to employ her pen, even by so much odds as her own excellent estate and degree exceedeth all the rest of her most humble vassals.”[1333] On this it may be remarked, that the only specimen of Elizabeth’s poetry which, as far as I know, remains, is prodigiously bad.[1334] In some passages of Puttenham, we find an approach to the higher province of philosophical criticism.

[1333] Puttenham, p. 51. of Haslewood’s edition, or in Censura Literaria, i. 348.

[1334] Ellis’s Specimens, ii. 162.

|Sydney’s Defence of Poesy.|

35. These treatises of Webbe and Puttenham may have been preceded in order of writing, though not of publication, by the performance of a more illustrious author, Sir Philip Sydney. His Defence of Poesy was not published till 1595. The Defence of Poesy has already been reckoned among the polite writings of the Elizabethan age, to which class it rather belongs than to that of criticism; for Sydney rarely comes to any literary censure, and is still farther removed from any profound philosophy. His sense is good, but not ingenious, and the declamatory tone weakens its effect.

SECT. III.--ON WORKS OF FICTION.

Novels and Romances in Italy and Spain--Sydney’s Arcadia.

|Novels of Bandello;|

36. The novels of Bandello, three parts of which were published in 1554, and a fourth in 1573, are perhaps the best known and the most admired in that species of composition after those of Boccaccio. They have been censured as licentious, but are far less so than any of preceding times, and the reflections are usually of a moral cast. These however, as well as the speeches, are very tedious. There is not a little predilection in Bandello for sanguinary stories. Ginguéné praises these novels for just sentiments, adherence to probability, and choice of interesting subjects. In these respects, we often find a superiority in the older novels above those of the nineteenth century, the golden age, as it is generally thought, of fictitious story. But, in the management of these subjects, the Italian and Spanish novelists show little skill; they are worse cooks of better meat; they exert no power over the emotions beyond what the intrinsic nature of the events related must produce; they sometimes describe well, but with no great imagination; they have no strong conception of character, no deep acquaintance with mankind, not often much humour, no vivacity and spirit of dialogue.

|of Cinthio.|

37. The Hecatomithi, or Hundred Tales, of Giraldi Cinthio have become known in England by the recourse that Shakspeare has had to them in two instances, Cymbeline and Measure for Measure, for the subjects of his plays. Cinthio has also borrowed from himself in his own tragedies. He is still more fond of dark tales of blood than Bandello. He seems consequently to have possessed an unfortunate influence over the stage; and to him, as well as his brethren of the Italian novel, we trace those scenes of improbable and disgusting horror, from which, though the native taste and gentleness of Shakspeare for the most part disdained such helps, we recoil in almost all the other tragedians of the old English school. Of the remaining Italian novelists that belong to this period, it is enough to mention Erizzo, better known as one of the founders of medallic science. His Sei Giornate contain thirty-six novels, called Avvenimenti. They are written with intolerable prolixity, but in a pure and even elevated tone of morality. This character does not apply to the novels of Lasca.

|of the Queen of Navarre.|

38. The French novels, ascribed to Margaret Queen of Navarre, and first published in 1558, with the title “Histoire des Amans fortunés,” are principally taken from the Italian collections or from the fabliaux of the trouveurs. Though free in language, they are written in a much less licentious spirit than many of the former, but breathe throughout that anxiety to exhibit the clergy, especially the regulars, in an odious or ridiculous light, which the principles of their illustrious authoress might lead us to expect. Belleforest translated, perhaps with some variation, the novels of Bandello into French.[1335]

[1335] Bouterwek, v. 286, mentions by name several other French novelists of the sixteenth century: I do not know anything of them.

|Spanish romances of chivalry.|

39. Few probably will now dispute, that the Italian novel, a picture of real life, and sometimes of true circumstances, is perused with less weariness than the Spanish romance, the alternative then offered to the lovers of easy reading. But this had very numerous admirers in that generation, nor was the taste confined to Spain. The popularity of Amadis de Gaul and Palmerin of Oliva, with their various continuators, has been already mentioned.[1336] One of these, “Palmerin of England,” appeared in French at Lyons in 1555. It is uncertain who was the original author, or in what language it was first written. Cervantes has honoured it with a place next to Amadis. Mr. Southey, though he condescended to abridge Palmerin of England, thinks it inferior to that Iliad of romantic adventure. Several of the tales of knight-errantry that are recorded to have stood on the unfortunate shelves of Don Quixote, belong to this latter part of the century, among which Don Bellianis of Greece is better known by name than any other. These romances were not condemned by Cervantes alone. “Every poet and prose writer,” says Bouterwek, “of cultivated talent, laboured to oppose the contagion.”[1337]

[1336] La Noue, a severe Protestant, thinks them as pernicious to the young as the writings of Machiavel had been to the old. This he dwells upon in his sixth discourse. “De tout temps,” this honest and sensible writer says, “il y a eu des hommes, qui ont esté diligens d’escrire et mettre en lumière des choses vaines. Ce qui plus les y a conviez est, que ils sçavoient que leurs labeurs seroient agréables a ceux de leurs siècles, dont la plus part a toujours heimé [aimé] la vanité, comme le poisson fait l’eau. Les vieux romans dont nous voyons encor les fragmens par-ci et par-la, a savoir de Lancelot du Lac, de Perceforest, Tristan, Giron le courtois, et autres, font foy de ceste vanité antique. On s’en est repeu l’espace de plus de cinq cens ans, jusques à ce que nostre langage estant devenu plus orné, et nostres esprits plus fretillans, il a fallu inventer quelque nouveauté pour les egayer. Voila comment les livres d’Amadis sont venus en evidence parmi nous en ce dernier siècle. Mais pour en parler au vrai, l’Espagne les a engendrez, et la France les a seulement revetus de plus beaux habillemens. Sous le regne du roy Henry second, ils ont eu leur principale vogue; et croy qui si quelqu’un les eust voulu alors blasmer, en luy eust craché au visage,” &c. p. 153, edit. 1588.

[1337] In the opinion of Bouterwek (v. 282), the taste for chivalrous romance declined in the latter part of the century, through the prevalence of a classical spirit in literature, which exposed the mediæval fictions to derision. The number of shorter and more amusing novels might probably have more to do with it; the serious romance has a terrible enemy in the lively. But it revived, with a little modification, in the next age.

|Diana of Montemayor.|

40. Spain was the parent of a romance in a very different style, but, if less absurd and better written, not perhaps much more interesting to us than those of chivalry, the Diana of Montemayor. Sannazaro’s beautiful model of pastoral romance, the Arcadia, and some which had been written in Portugal, take away the merit of originality from this celebrated fiction. It formed, however, a school in this department of literature, hardly less numerous, according to Bouterwek, than the imitators of Amadis.[1338] The language of Montemayor is neither laboured nor affected, and though sometimes of rather too formal a solemnity, especially in what the author thought philosophy, is remarkably harmonious and elevated; nor is he deficient in depth of feeling or fertility of imagination. Yet the story seems incapable of attracting any reader of this age. The Diana, like Sannazaro’s Arcadia, is mingled with much lyric poetry, which Bouterwek thinks, is the soul of the whole composition. Cervantes indeed condemns all the longer of these poems to the flames, and gives but limited praise to the Diana. Yet this romance, and a continuation of it by Gil Polo, had inspired his own youthful genius in the Galatea. The chief merit of the Galatea, published in 1584, consists in the poetry which the story seems intended to hold together. In the Diana of Montemayor, and even in the Galatea, it has been supposed that real adventures and characters were generally shadowed--a practice not already without precedent, and which, by the French especially, was carried to a much greater length in later times.

[1338] Hist. Span. Lit. p. 305.

|Novels in the picaresque style.|

|Guzman d’Alfarache.|

41. Spain became celebrated about the end of this century for her novels in the picaresque style, of which Lazarillo de Tormes is the oldest extant specimen. The continuation of this little work is reckoned inferior to the part written by Mendoza himself; but both together are amusing and inimitably short.[1339] The first edition of the most celebrated romance of this class, Guzman d’Alfarache, falls within the sixteenth century. It was written by Matthew Aleman, who is said to have lived long at court. He might there have acquired, not a knowledge of the tricks of common rogues, but an experience of mankind, which is reckoned one of the chief merits of his romance. Many of his stories also relate to the manners of a higher class than that of his hero. Guzman d’Alfarache is a sort of prototype of Gilblas, though, in fact, La Sage has borrowed very freely from all the Spanish novels of this school. The adventures are numerous and diversified enough to amuse an idle reader, and Aleman has displayed a great deal of good sense in his reflections, which are expressed in the pointed condensed style affected by most writers of Spain. Cervantes has not hesitated to borrow from him one of Sancho’s celebrated adjudications, in the well-known case of the lady, who was less pugnacious in defence of her honour than of the purse awarded by the court as its compensation. This story is, however, if I am not mistaken, older than either of them.[1340]

[1339] In a former chapter, on the authority of Nicolas Antonio, which I do not find very trustworthy, I have said that the first edition of Lazarillo de Tormes was in 1586. It seems, however, to be doubtful, from what we read in Brunet, whether this edition exists. In return he mentions one printed at Burgos in 1554, and three at Antwerp in 1553 and 1555. Supplement au Manuel du Libraire, art. Hurtado. The following early edition is also in the British Museum, of which I transcribe the title-page. La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, nuevamente impressa, corregida, y de nuevo anadida en este segunda impression. Vendense en Alcala de Henares en casa de Salzedo librero año de N.D. 1554. A colophon recites the same date and place of impression. The above-mentioned Antwerp edition of 1553 seems to be rather apocryphal. If it exists, it must be the first; and is it likely that the first should have been printed out of Spain?

Though the continuation of Lazarillo de Tormes is reckoned inferior to the original, it contains the only story in the whole novel which has made its fortune, that of the man who was exhibited as a sea-monster.

[1340] The following passage, which I extract from the Retrospective Review, vol. v. p. 199, is a fair and favourable specimen of Aleman as a moralist, who is however apt to be tedious, as moralists usually are.

“The poor man is a kind of money that is not current, the subject of every idle housewife’s chat, the offscum of the people, the dust of the street, first trampled under foot, and then thrown on the dunghill; in conclusion, the poor man is the rich man’s ass. He dineth with the last, fareth with the worst, and payeth dearest; his sixpence will not go so far as the rich man’s threepence; his opinion is ignorance, his discretion foolishness, his suffrage scorn, his stock upon the common, abused by many, and abhorred by all. If he come into company he is not heard; if any chance to meet him, they seek to shun him; if he advise, though never so wisely, they grudge and murmur at him; if he work miracles, they say he is a witch; if virtuous, that he goeth about to deceive; his venial sin is a blasphemy; his thought is made treason; his cause, be it never so just, is not regarded; and to have his wrongs righted, he must appeal to that other life. All men crush him; no man favoureth him. There is no man that will relieve his wants; no man that will bear him company when he is alone and oppressed with grief. None help him, all hinder him; none give him, all take from him; he is debtor to none, and yet must make payment to all. O the unfortunate and poor condition of him that is poor, to whom even the very hours are sold which the clock striketh, and payeth custom for the sunshine in August.”

This is much in the style of our English writers in the first part of the seventeenth century, and confirms what I have suspected, that they formed it in a great measure on the Spanish school. Though this sententiousness and antithetical balancing of clauses is not pleasant to read, it is less insipid than the nerveless elegance of the Italians. Guzman d’Alfarache was early translated into English, as most other Spanish books were; and the language itself was more familiar in the reigns of James and Charles than it became afterwards.

|Las Guerras de Granada.|

42. It may require some excuse that I insert in this place Las Guerras de Granada, a history of certain Moorish factions in the last days of that kingdom, both because it has been usually referred to the seventeenth century, and because many have conceived it to be a true relation of events. It purports to have been translated by Gines Perez de la Hita, an inhabitant of the city of Murcia, from an Arabic original of one Aben Hamili. Its late English translator seems to entertain no doubt of its authenticity; and it has been sagaciously observed that no Christian could have known the long genealogies of Moorish nobles which the book contains. Most of those, however, who read it without credulity, will feel, I presume, little difficulty in agreeing with Antonio, who ranks it “among Milesian fables, though very pleasing to those who have nothing to do.” The Zegris and Abencerrages, with all their romantic exploits, seem to be mere creations of Castilian imagination; nor has Conde, in his excellent history of the Moors in Spain, once deigned to notice them even as fabulous; so much did he reckon this famous production of Perez de la Hita below the historian’s regard. Antonio mentions no edition earlier than that of Alcala in 1604; the English translator names 1601 for the date of its publication, an edition of which year is in the Museum; nor do I find that any one has been aware of an earlier, published at Saragoça in 1595, except Brunet, who mentions it as rare and little known. It appears by the same authority that there is another edition of 1598.

|Sydney’s Arcadia.|

43. The heroic and pastoral romance of Spain contributed something, yet hardly so much as has been supposed, to Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, the only original production of this kind, except such wretched and obscure attempts at story as are beneath notice, which our older literature can boast. The Arcadia was published in 1590, having been written, probably, by its highly accomplished author about ten years before.

|Its character.|

44. Walpole, who thought fit to display the dimensions of his own mind, by announcing that he could perceive nothing remarkable in Sir Philip Sydney (as if the suffrage of Europe in what he admits to be an age of heroes were not a decisive proof that Sydney himself over-topped those sons of Anak), says of the Arcadia, that it is “a tedious lamentable pedantic pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through.” We may doubt whether Walpole could altogether estimate the patience of a reader so extremely unlike himself; and his epithets, except perhaps the first, are inapplicable; the Arcadia is more free from pedantry than most books of that age; and though we are now so accustomed to a more stimulant diet in fiction, that few would read it through with pleasure, the story is as sprightly as most other romances, sometimes indeed a little too much so, for the Arcadia is not quite a book for “young virgins,” of which some of its admirers by hearsay seem not to have been aware. By the epithet “pastoral,” we may doubt whether Walpole knew much of this romance beyond its name; for it has far less to do with shepherds than with courtiers, though the idea might probably be suggested by the popularity of the Diana. It does not appear to me that the Arcadia is more tiresome and uninteresting than the generality of that class of long romances, proverbially among the most tiresome of all books; and, in a less fastidious age, it was read, no doubt, even as a story, with some delight.[1341] It displays a superior mind, rather complying with a temporary taste than affected by it, and many pleasing passages occur, especially in the tender and innocent loves of Pyrocles and Philoclea. I think it, nevertheless, on the whole inferior in sense, style, and spirit, to the Defence of Poesy. The following passage has some appearance of having suggested a well-known poem in the next age to the lover of Sacharissa; we may readily believe that Waller had turned over, in the glades of Penshurst, the honoured pages of her immortal uncle.[1342]

[1341] “It appears,” says Drake, “to have been suggested to the mind of Sir Philip by two models of very different ages, and to have been built, in fact, on their admixture; these are the Ethiopic History of Heliodorus, bishop of Tricca in Thessaly, and the Arcadia of Sannazaro,” p. 549. A translation of Heliodorus had been published a short time before.

[1342] The poem I mean is that addressed to Amoret, “Fair! that you may truly know,” drawing a comparison between her and Sacharissa.

45. “The elder is named Pamela, by many men not deemed inferior to her sister; for my part, when I marked them both, methought there was (if at least such perfections may receive the word of more) more sweetness in Philoclea, but more majesty in Pamela: methought love played in Philoclea’s eyes, and threatened in Pamela’s; methought Philoclea’s beauty only persuaded, but so persuaded as all hearts must yield; Pamela’s beauty used violence, and such violence as no heart could resist, and it seems that such proportion is between their minds. Philoclea so bashful, as if her excellencies had stolen into her before she was aware; so humble, that she will put all pride out of countenance; in sum, such proceeding as will stir hope, but teach hope good manners; Pamela, of high thoughts, who avoids not pride with not knowing her excellencies, but by making that one of her excellencies to be void of pride; her mother’s wisdom, greatness, nobility, but, if I can guess aright, knit with a more constant temper.”

|Inferiority of other English fictions.|

46. The Arcadia stands quite alone among English fictions of this century. But many were translated in the reign of Elizabeth from the Italian, French, Spanish, and even Latin, among which Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, whence Shakspeare took several of his plots, and the numerous labours of Antony Munday may be mentioned. Palmerin of England in 1580, and Amadis of Gaul in 1592, were among these; others of less value, were transferred from the Spanish text by the same industrious hand; and since these, while still new, were sufficient to furnish all the gratification required by the public, our own writers did not much task their invention to augment the stock. They would not have been very successful, if we may judge by such deplorable specimens as Breton and Greene, two men of considerable poetical talent, have left us.[1343] The once famous story of the Seven Champions of Christendom, by one Johnson, is of rather a superior class; the adventures are not original, but it is by no means a translation from any single work.[1344] Mallory’s famous romance, La Morte d’Arthur, is of much earlier date, and was first printed by Caxton. It is, however, a translation from several French romances, though written in very spirited language.

[1343] The Mavilia of Breton, the Dorastus and Fawnia of Greene, will be found in the collections of the indefatigable Sir Egerton Brydges. The first is below contempt; the second, if not quite so ridiculous, is written with a quaint affected and empty Euphuism. British Bibliographer, i. 508. But as truth is generally more faithful to natural sympathies than fiction, a little tale, called Never too Late, in which Greene has related his own story, is unaffected and pathetic. Drake’s Shakspeare and his Times, i. 489.

[1344] Drake, i. 529.

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