The best Elizabethan plays ...

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Preface

MY object in this volume is to present specimens of the best work of the five Elizabethan dramatists who stand highest among Shakespeare's contemporaries. Collections of separate scenes and special editions of single plays have frequently been made, and they have their value ; but it seemed to me that in binding together the masterpieces which follow, I should enable not only the general reader but also the college student to taste the quality of Shakespeare's rivals, and thereby to esteem the more adequately Shakespeare himself. Few persons possess the fifteen or twenty large volumes in which the Elizabethan drama is published, and fewer still have the time or the patience to plod through many tedious or dirty pages in order to come upon the treasures they contain. For, just as a traveller in an Oriental city is often obliged to turn his eyes from some mosque or graceful minaret to the ground beneath his feet so as to avoid ordure and garbage, so the reader of the Elizabethan plays has his attention often distracted, and his sense of decency shocked by the vulgarity of many passages in them. This coarseness was due in part to the habit of the time, when men spoke openly to each other and even to women on subjects about which we are, if not ignorant, at least reticent, and in part to the deliberate effort of the playwright to please the vulgarest persons in the audience. But as filth is always filth, though it be thrust upon us in a work of art, or come to us along with much that is noble under the sanction of a great name, and as each age has more than enough of its own obscenity to flounder free from, without faUing back into the sty of a former generation, I have selected plays as little as possible tainted. Moreover, I have not scrupled to strike out phrases or lines where it seemed proper, being guided by decency and not by prudery ; yet it will not be found that this purging interferes in the least in the understanding of the following dramas, — a sufficient evidence, if evidence be needed, of the unnecessariness of obscenity from the artistic as from the ethical standpoint.

In making my selection I had less difficulty than might have been expected. Of Marlowe's four chief works, Tamburlaine is too crude and tedious, in spite of several fine passages ; Doctor Faustiis, though admirable in outline, lacks interest in detail, and is, besides, permanently superseded by the mighty work of Goethe ; finally, Edward II, though its scenes are knitted together more closely than those of its predecessors, and though its murder-scene is indeed masterly, yet as a whole lacks vivid characters. So I have chosen The Jew of Malta, which exhibits Marlowe's great qualities and their defects, and which will always be interesting from the comparisons to be made between Barabas and Shylock.

Among Ben Jonson's plays two have ranked, and deservedly ranked, foremost, — Volpone and The Alchemist. The former seems to me to be the superior, but its ineradicable coarseness precluded its publication in this volume ; whereas The Alchemist is both an admirable example of Jonson's skill in applying the rules of classic composition to an English subject, and a fair representative of his satire and erudition. It is, furthermore, a mirror in which are reflected with wonderful accuracy, the social, scientific, religious, and philosophical quacks of the time of James the First.

Fifty-two plays are printed in the complete edition of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, — many of them being wholly Fletcher's ; but only three of those which I have read come within my scope. These are The Maid's Tragedy, Valejifiniait, and Philastcr : the first two contain passages equal to the best their authors ever wrote, but they are besmirched with so much coarseness, and brutality is so hopelessly interwoven in their plots, that I was forced to reject them ; Philaster shows Beaumont and Fletcher at their best, and is thoroughly characteristic of their genius.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, commonly attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare, is surely one of the most beautiful plays of that period, and deserves from the public such admiration and popularity as it has long enjoyed from scholars. Its right to be published among Shakespeare's works is certainly equal to that of Heiuy VIII, and superior to that of some of the poorer plays which have few marks of his collaboration.

Webster left two masterpieces, — The While Devil and The Duchess of Malfi ; both are great, but the latter excels, and is not only the most original and imaginative drama in this volume, but superior to every other Elizabethan tragedy except Shakespeare's best.

In some measure, therefore, the reader can form from these five plays — supplemented, of course, by acquaintance with Shakespeare — some idea of the methods and range of the amazing dramatic inspiration in the reign of Elizabeth and the first James, — unsurpassed in the history of Hterature, and equalled only once, in Greece. The dominant influence was that of the Renaissance, transmitted to

England by way of France, and modified by an intensely English patriotism, — the Renaissance, when classical learning revived, when great discoveries in geography opened new lands and peoples to the view of Europe ; when a bolder commerce brought not only richer merchandise, but strange and fascinating lore, from the races of the Orient ; when the sway of a single religion was broken, and throughout Christendom men ordered their lives by new behefs; when science, assisted by experiment and criticism, began its conquest of nature ; when the legends of chivalry, and the traditions of the crusades, and mediaeval myths and superstitions, were still so fresh as to appeal to the imaginations while they no longer distorted the convictions of poets. It was the age when romance seemed real, and when the revelations of science seemed romantic. Curiosity, insatiable and enthusiastic, scrutinized all things. The divorce between passion and action, between the scholar and the man of affairs, had not yet been proclaimed : many-sided men were common, — philosophers were courtiers and diplomats ; soldiers were poets. Intense individualism produced extreme types of character, prodigies of virtue or monsters of wickedness. Political conditions, the strife of noble with noble and of king with king, the dangers and excitements of foreign voyages, awakened qualities and passions which in quieter times lie dormant. It was as if mankind conspired to place the whole circle of its capacities on exhibition. To the great stimulus of the recovered appreciation of classical antiquity was added the impulsion of that modern spirit, which mysteriously and almost imperceptibly was remoulding society. And just as Bacon took all knowledge for his province, so the great poets of the age of Elizabeth took all human nature for theirs. Literary precedents and the conventional rules prescribed by writers of rhetorics and grammars did not hamper them. They were too busy endeavoring to portray the mighty pageant sweeping before them, to rummage old attics for the musty colors and warped palettes of by-gone painters.

Taking the implements at hand, — tj\e tedious moralities and the loosely spun miracle plays, — they soon improved upon them, soon invented a drama-form not so rigid as to be cramped, nor so loose as to be redundant, but articulate like a highly developed organism, and as elastic as the various material furnished by nature required. And for their metre they adopted and perfected a line susceptible of almost infinite modulations, suited alike to the simplest narration, and to the highest outbursts of passion, and to the most delicate whisperings of fancy. In their hands, blank verse became the peer of the Homeric hexameter, and of Dante's /e7-za n'ma, — a metre superior to that which any other modern language offers to its dramatic writers.

To Christopher Marlowe is due the honor of having first shown the capacity of this " mighty line." We know but little about his life. He was born at Canterbury, and christened there on Feb. 26, 1564, almost exactly two months before the date of Shakespeare's birth. He attended the King's School in his native place, and, in March, 1581, matriculated at Benet (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, where he took a bachelor's degree two years later. In 1588 Tamburlaine was acted, and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustiis appeared a little later. Then followed The Jew of Alalia and Edward II. These, and The Massacre of Pai'is, Dido (in Which he was assisted by Nash), some journeyman work on the three parts of Henry VI , and a fragmentary poem entitled Hero and Leander, — comparable with Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, — were all that he had time to do before he was killed in a quarrel over a courtesan, at Deptford, June i, 1593. It is common, while deploring his early death, to speculate whether he might not, had he lived to maturity, have equalled Shakespeare himself; but such speculation seems to me to betray the uncritical temperament of those who indulge in it. We cannot reasonably doubt but that Marlowe, at forty, would have produced works far superior to any he has left : he had great powers, and they were surely ripening, but there is no indication that he could ever have excelled in two very important fields, where Shakespeare is supreme, — in humor and in fancy. Humor is inborn, and shows itself early, — yet there are not among Marlowe's creations any germs of such characters as Falstaff or Mercutio ; fancy, again, is preeminently a young poet's gift, yet Marlowe's lack of it is almost as surprising as are the ease and confidence with which he steps upon the stage for the first time.

There is no bashfulness, no imitation, but the air of one who feels sure of his powers. He was full of vitality, intoxicated at beholding the mighty forces which uphold and perpetuate the universe ; and he seems to have believed that man, let him but cultivate his titanic possibilities, may master those forces, and cease to be their puppet. So his heroes are marvels of energy, devoting themselves to the acquisition of power which shall place them above the limitations of human nature : with Tamburlaine, it is desire of empire, — the whole world shall be his slave ; with Faustus, it is desire of knowledge and pleasure, — the mysteries of fate shall be revealed to him, and all delights shall be concentrated in a cup for him to quaff ; with Barabas, it is desire of gold, — he will have the means of exterminating all Malta to satisfy his vengeance. Even Edward II, who seems an exception, illustrates the power of weakness, — if I may use an apparent paradox. For the most part, therefore, the personages of Marlowe's dramas are types of amazing passions, rather than sharply defined individuals : he did not attain the supreme excellence of dramatic characterization in which the type lives in the individual, as, for example, in Shylock. Vigor and exuberance, — those are the qualities which distinguish Marlowe's thought ; and in his rhythm we meet lines and passages, now informed by an imperial stateliness, now by a subtle unforgetable melody, to find parallels for which we must turn to Shakespeare himself. '

Of very different mettle was Ben Jonson, the posthumous son of a clergyman, born at Westminster in 1574, and educated there at the famous school, then under Camden's direction. But the widow Jonson married a bricklayer, and young Ben was forced for a time to work at his step- father's trade. When he could endure this no longer, he ran away, joined a regiment in the Low Countries, and after a brief military service, turned up in London, where his first comedy, Every Man in his Humour, was produced in 1596. Then followed, in 1599, 1600, and 1601, Every Ma7i out of his Humour, Cynthia's Revels, and The Poetaster, comedies in which he satirized the foibles of the day, — and as, among other affectations, he laughed at the new romantic fashion of writing plays, he was in turn ridiculed by Dekker and Marston in Sati7'o?nastix. Yet, while they laughed at him, no man was so great a favorite as he among that illustrious group of playwrights and poets which used to meet and carouse at the Mermaid ; and although, in spite of his protests, the Elizabethan drama steadily progressed along romantic lines, no plays were more popular than his. In lO PREFACE.

1603 he wrote Sejanus, a tragedy; in 1605, Volpone ; in 1609, The Silent Woman; in 16 10, The Alchemist ; in 161 1, another tragedy, Catiline. Eastward Ho, in which he had Chapman and Marston for collaborators, proved too strong a satire on the Scottish people for the taste of the Scotchborn James I, and its authors were imprisoned, only to be restored to liberty and favor a little while afterward. In 1 6 19 Jonson was appointed Poet Laureate, with the usual perquisite of ^100, and a butt of canary from the royal cellars, every year. In his old age he published The Sad Shepherd, and, having outlived all his great companions, he died Aug. 16, 1^37. In erudition, he was reputed the most learned poet of his time, and it is even asserted that no other English poet except Milton has had a wider and more various knowledge than he. His models in the drama were the classic playwrights of Rome and Athens. Condemning the romantic principles of his contemporaries, which led to excess and a luxuriant confusion, he insisted on a rigid observance of the three unities, of time, place, and subject. His own plays, constructed in obedience to the Aristotelian methods, are marvels of ingenuity. No other English plots are more homogeneous and skilful ; in none is there so httle superfluity, so few digressions. In scene after scene you behold the author compressing a spring, till its tension is ready for the final, sudden discharge ; yet he does this so adroitly, that your interest is excited from moment to moment, lest that discharge burst upon you unawares. In this respect he is the true descendant of the classic dramatists, and the kinsman of the Frenchmen who, in the seventeenth century, created the French drama on classic models. Unlike Marlowe, who sketches his plot but vaguely, and wanders whithersoever his love of splendor points, Jonson has drawn every detail before sitting down to write. His material is the humors — or, as we should now say, the moods — of mankind, rather than their elemental passions; he produces his effects by cumulation and repetition, rather than by the swift, single, perfect strokes of a Shakespeare or a Webster. In The Alchemist this is well illustrated : he proposes to expose a popular imposture ; to do this he introduces two varieties of the same species of quacks, and their female accomplice ; and then he marshals before us, not one or two gulls, but a whole flock of them, — an epicure, a bragging young gentleman from the country, a sanctimonious Puritan, a simpleton of a clerk, a conceited tobacconist, — and we see how the same greed for unearned wealth affects each differently, yet drives all into a communion of dupery. So clever a weaving of various threads in one compact web has rarely been achieved ; Jonson leaves no seams and no thrums in his work. He had not the highest imagination : but he had its best substitutes, — judgment, taste, sense of form, and culture.

As he is pre-eminently classic, so Beaumont and Fletcher are pre-eminently romantic. Most of the Elizabethan dramatists sprang from lowly families : not so Francis Beaumont, who came of noble stock. His father. Sir John Beaumont, was a Justice of the Common Pleas in Leicestershire, where Francis was born in 1586. At the age of eleven he was admitted a gentleman commoner at Broadgate-hall (now Pembroke) College, Oxford. Going to London, he read law in the Inner Temple, but soon was drawn towards the stage. He formed a literary partnership with John Fletcher, and had already become renowned, when he was cut off by death in 161 5. Fletcher, whose father was Dean of Peterborough, and then Bishop of Worcester, was born at Rye, in Sussex, in December, 1579. We know little about him, except that he was educated at Benet College, Cambridge, went to London eariy, devoted himself to playwriting, died of the plague in 1625, and was buried at St. Saviour's, Southwark. An old tradition has it that Beaumont supplied judgment, and Fletcher fancy, to their joint productions. Owing to the early death of the former, it is easy to separate those plays which they wrote together from those which Fletcher wrote alone, and by this process the reader who is curious can determine more or less accurately which parts should be assigned to Beaumont, and which to Fletcher, in their united works. That eminent critics, despite this clue, should have hitherto failed to agree, seems to indicate that no ultimate certainty can be reached, and that therefore opinions which have only probability for their basis ought not to be too vehemently attacked or defended. Be the division what it may, the quality which prevails in their dramas is the quaHty of romance. Their best heroes are earlier Hernanis, bred in the ideals of Castilian honor ; even their villains — and monstrous villains some of them are — utter very noble sentiments. You feel that such persons never existed, and yet you know the thoughts to be true, and you cannot resist the fascination, the glamour — if you will — of ideals borrowed from the age of chivalry. There is, in Beaumont and Fletcher, " a constant recognition of gentility," as Emerson has remarked ; this, and their picturesque descriptions, their genuine sentiment, and their occasional flashes of imagination reveaUng intense passion, constitute their chief merits, and interfuse through their dramas the spirit of romance I have noted. To be delightfully unnatural is their privilege at their best ; they approach the actual human nature of their time only on its most depraved side, and are abominably coarse at their worst.

The Two Noble Kinsmen has furnished critics with a multitude of pleasant difficulties. Even a novice, in reading the play for the first time, must detect the impression of two different minds upon it ; and, since it was known that those two were Shakespeare and Fletcher, every resource of criticism has been employed to determine the share of each. The tests appHed have been intellectual and metrical : Has a given scene those imaginative qualities peculiar to Shakespeare ? Has its versification his familiar style ? The latter test is perhaps the more helpful ; for Fletcher adopted, whether from preference or carelessness, a form of blank verse by which he can usually be recognized. More frequently than any of his contemporaries, he writes hnes with a double ending. Again, Shakespeare employs " run-on lines" — those, that is, which do not stop at the end of a verse — much more freely than Fletcher. The construction of the play gives further hints. Besides the main story of the two Kinsmen, there is the subordinate story of the gaoler's daughter. Her mad-scenes, drawn without pathos or much skill, are evidently copied from Ophelia's. Indeed, the style of the prose passages, and the commonplaceness of the secondary characters, afford other clues as to their authorship. Nevertheless, it must not be inferred that all the inferior work is Fletcher's ; one of the finest scenes in the play — the dialogue of Palamon and Arcite in prison — was almost certainly written by him. Concerning the date of its composition, we have only vague suggestions. It must have come between 1603 or 1604, — the latest date assigned to Hamlet, and 16 13, when Shakespeare retired to Stratford. As Fletcher's talents began to be renowned only about 1607,

PREFACE.

and as he worked with Shakespeare on Henry VIII after that time, we may probably assign The Two Noble Kinsme7i to the period between 1608 and 161 2. It may well be, as Mr. Skeat suggests, that the play in its present form was revised by Fletcher, and even that parts of Shakespeare's share were altered by him after Shakespeare's death. As I have given in the notes the opinions of the critics most competent to decide the question of authorship, I need not pursue the matter here, and will only add that The Two Noble Kins7nen deserves to be known and admired because it is, first of all. a fine drama ; that it happens to be a first-rate puzzle in literary criticism, is a minor reason for its republication.

Of John Webster's personal history we can learn nothing. A few entries in Henslowe's Diaiy, of payments made to Webster for theatrical properties, a few dates of the performances of his plays — and " the rest is silence." The first mention of him is in 1601, as the author of The Guise, or the Massacre of France, which may have been, as Dyce suggests, only a rifacimento of Marlowe's piece ; together with Dekker, he wrote Westward Ho and Northward Ho, pubHshed in 1607 ; The White Devil was printed in 161 2 ; The Ditchess of Malfim 1623 (but performed earher) ; long afterwards, in 1654, Appius and Virginia issued from the press. On one title-page Webster is styled " merchanttailor," and there are commendatory epigraphs by Middleton, Rowley, and Ford. All that we know of his character we glean from two or three short addresses to the reader, and from two dedications : these show him to have .been conscious of his own powers, yet modest ; not withoiit a dignified contempt of the opinions of the majority of filaygoers, who, he says, " resemble those ignorant asses, w?)o, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books." " To those who report I was a long time finishing this tragedy," he continues, in the preface to The White Devil, " I confess, I do not write with a goose quill winged with two feathers ; and if they will needs make it my fault, I must answer them with that of Euripides to Alcestides, a tragic writer. Alcestides objecting that Euripides had only, in three days, composed three verses, whereas himself had written three hundred, 'Thou tellest truth,' quoth he, ' but here's the difference, — thine shall only be read for three days, whereas mine shall continue three ages.' Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance : for mine own part, I have ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men's worthy labors ; especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman ; the labored and understanding works of Master Jonson ; the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong, last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood ; wishing what I write may be read by their light ; protesting that, in the strength of mine own judgment, I know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my own work, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of Martial, Non norimt haec monumenta mori.'" Generous to his fellow- craftsmen, not fawning to the '' groundlings " nor servile to his patrons, that is all that, from too scanty evidence, we can infer about Webster, the man ; of the dramatist, we have at least two works which reveal his astonishing genius. As long as The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are read, so long will John Webster's title to rank among the four or five supreme tragic writers of the world be open to the scrutiny of all.

It has been the fashion of some critics to speak of Webster as a strange and terrible genius, a sort of ogre who dehghted in bloody scenes by day, and supped nightly with horrors ; or as a fellow of morbid imagination, whose favorite haunts were church-yards and dark charnel-houses, who gloated over chronicles of crime, and had no other purpose in writing, save that of causing a vulgar shudder to ripple over the shoulders of his hearers. If these views were correct, we might dismiss him and his plays as summarily as we dismiss the latest melodrama with its sheet-iron thunder and promiscuous slaughters. But these views are not correct, and to understand such a play as The Duchess of Malfi we must recall the state of society throughout a large portion of Europe during the sixteenth century. Webster needed not to appeal to his imagination for materials so terrible ; the history of almost any Italian city, in any decade of that century, could supply them. From the court of the Vatican down to that of a princehng in Perugia or Mantua, abominable vices, refined cruelty, atrocious crimes, were common : ties of kindred were no restraint upon the cravings of lust or of ambition ; pledges sealed by oath, promises bound by honor, melted as the snow melts in April, for there was no sanctity in religion, no self-respect in men ; selfishness, insatiate and unscrupulous, directed the policy of states and the actions of individuals. Personal courage, which gives to the bloody deeds of a less enlightened time some show of fairness, had withered ; this was the age when treachery was reduced to a fine art, — when poison was sprinkled on a rose and smeared on the door-latch or the missal, — when the sword was exchanged for the dagger, which never struck in front, — when reputations could be done to death by lago-insinuations as surely as the body by subtle, invisible poisons. The glorious seeds of the Renaissance had produced in Italy this upas-forest, covered with splendid but deadly blossoms. The current religion did not supply moral leaven adequate to so rapid an intellectual growth, and there was no sentiment of nationality to counteract the tendency towards individuaHsm. What thoughtful man, be he a rationalist or a dogmatist, can behold such periods without amazement, and without realizing that the problem of human destiny is infinitely complex and unspeakably tragic ? And John Webster sought, merely by presenting an episode typical of hundreds, — nay, of an epoch, — to show the actual terror and tragedy of life, that must be reckoned with by every one who would estimate its possibilities and its purpose.

Unlike Dante, his Duchess needed to be transported to hell by no vision : her very surroundings were hell, as they must have been to any pure and noble man or woman. In the contrast between her character and her conditions lies the real tragedy ; the terrific ordeals which test but do not pvercome her fortitude — scenes which only Webster could depict — are but accessory and external. It may be urged, indeed, that her sufferings were unwarranted, because she was innocent : to this it is sufficient to reply : " Such is the fact ; if only the wicked suffered, there would be no problem of evil ; neither art nor ethics can be true, if they garble facts." And because Webster recognized this spiritual truth, he is profoundly moral ; and because he was able to embody it in the concrete, he is among the few supreme tragic poets of the world. In his play, as often happens in real Hfe, the virtuous seem to be defeated, the wicked to be victorious, but the triumph and the defeat are only apparent : virtue remains uncontaminated, — there is its reward ; sin remains unregenerate, — there is its punishment. " Merely to live," said Socrates, " is nothing ; a good life is everything." And Webster, after painting with inexorable fidelity and supreme power the tragic career of his heroine, concludes, —

" I have ever thought Nature doth nothing so great for great men As when she's pleased to make them lords of truth: Integrity of life is fame's best friend, Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end."

It is necessary to make this brief analysis in order to prepare readers for a right understanding of Webster; they will need no guide to show them his more patent merits. His detached thoughts, clear and compressed as diamonds ; his revelations of a character in a Hne ; his sombre sublimity ; his naturalness amid almost preternatural circumstances, — these characteristics of his genius need no elucidation. He had not Shakespeare's skill in dramatic construction ; nor Shakespeare's complete mastery of verse, but he had, within a narrower range, an imagination as penetrating and as vivifying as Shakespeare's, and a moral sense akin to that which expresses itself in Macbeth and in Lear.

From Marlowe to Webster is less than thirty^years, less than an average lifetime ; yet within that brief period the EHzabethan Drama blossomed and withered. After Webster's, there is no great name in the Drama. English Poetry, indeed, did not die, but its subsequent glories have been epic, lyric, and descriptive ; it has become introspective and personal, and has left the more diffuse and less permanent art of fiction to incarnate in objective creations the passions and vicissitudes of human hfe.

A word should be added concerning the rule which I have followed in editing these five plays. I have made the notes as brief as possible, keeping in mind that this volume is to be read as literature, and not as a text-book to furnish puzzles in antiquarian difficulties nor in philological niceties. I have compared the explanations of the best editors, and adopted the best, supplementing them from my own researches where it seemed necessary. I have set the notes at the bottom of each page, rather than at the end of the book, so that the reader can see at a glance whether the information he seeks is there, or not : those who, like myself, have often wasted time by turning to the back of a volume only to find that the editor has passed over without comment the word they wished him to explain, will, I trust, approve of this arrangement.