John Webster and the Elizabethan drama

Front matter

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JOHN WEBSTER and the ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

The

Preface

I HAVE tried to write a small book about John Webster. That is to say, I have tried to say the truth about him, as much of it as is necessary to enable anyone who reads him to understand him. I have not tried to explain him entirely to anyone who has not read him, though I hope that any person in that condition may get a rough idea of him from this book.

I have tried to explain Webster for a reader, but not to explain him away. So I have endeavoured to keep to my own province, and not to trespass on ground reserved for worthier feet — Webster's. I conceive that there is much that he can explain better than I. So I have, at least, abstained from paraphrasing.

To explain Webster's writings it is first necessary to determine what he wrote, and also such smaller questions as when he wrote it, and how he came to write it. Such questions, the questions of "scientific" literary criticism, I deal with in the Appendices. I have taken some care to get the most probable answers in each case; for there is such a lot of bad logic and fudging on

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such points in modern literary science, that one always has to go over the whole ground completely for oneself.

When these points are settled, with as much certitude as possible, there are still other points on which it is necessary to have right opinions in order to understand Webster. One must know what a play is; one must know how the Elizabethan drama arose; and one must know what the Elizabethan drama was. I have given a chapter to each of these points; not pretending to cover the whole ground, or to do the work of a whole book; but endeavouring to correct some of the more misleading wrong ideas, and to hint at some of the more important right ones. These chapters, of course, though nominally not about Webster, should be even more important to any understanding of him than the Appendices. And I have given two long chapters to the more direct consideration of what Webster wrote, and what its more usual characteristics are.

The Bibliography is, I think, fairly complete with regard to Webster. I did not think it necessary to make a bibliography of books on the wider subjects.

It may seem, in some cases, as if I contradicted myself in different parts of the book; as, for instance, when I say that it is impossible to

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understand a play wholly from the text, and later seem to believe that I do understand plays wholly from the text. I think I have not really contradicted myself. Part of the business of the earlier chapters is to prevent the necessity of continually repeated qualifications throughout the work. To express my exact meaning on each occasion would have meant covering the page with "in so far as it is possible's," and "I think's," and "possibly's," and "perhaps's"; which makes the style feeble and muffles the idea. I have, perhaps, gone too far in this direction already.

Contents

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CHAPTER

I. The Theatre ....

Chapter I

Anyone who has read, with any alertness, more than a little of the mass of critical and editorial comments, whether of the last three or of the last three hundred years, upon Elizabethan plays, must often have felt a helpless and bewildered irritation at the absence of any standard or uniform grounds of judgment; both in the critics, and, on inspection, in himself. This is not the place to attempt to lay a deep aesthetic foundation; but, I think, it will be useful to try to fix the meanings of certain words and phrases, and to give a provisional answer to some of the more important questions.

"What is Art?" is a question which most writers on subjects connected with literature, painting, plays, music, society, or life, are ready with an equal cheerfulness to ask or to answer. They may be right ; but to me they seem to make a gigantic, unconscious, and probably unjustifiable assumption. It is quite doubtful, and it is nowadays continually more doubted, whether the word "Art" has properly any meaning at all. But it has so obsessed men's minds, that they start with an inevitable tendency to believe that it has a meaning. In the same way, those who believe in Art are generally inclined to believe in a single object at which all Art, that is to say all the arts, aim: Beauty. It may turn out to be true that both Art and Beauty are real and useful names; but the attitude of mind that assumes that they are is deplorable. The most honest and most hopeful course to pursue, is to say that there are certain kinds of human activity which seem to hang together in classes, such as reading books, hearing music, seeing pictures; and to examine our states of mind while we follow these pursuits, to see how far they are of one kind in each "art," and in all, and whether all successful works of art do seem to us to have some quality in common which can be called Beauty.

The situation seems to me as if men had agreed to say "The emotions caused in human beings by pins, walking-sticks, feathers, and crowbars, acting through the tactile sense, are all of one unique kind. It is called Grumph. Pins, etc..

are called the grumphs. Grumph is one of the holiest things in this melancholy world," and so forth. And soon they'd say, "But, philosophically, what is Grumph?" Then they'd argue. They would come to some conclusion which, as you cannot tickle with a crowbar, would preclude tickling with feathers; and they would excommunicate all those who used feathers for tickling with the formula, "That is not Grumph!" They would write Treatises on any one grumph, on the "Pin-grumph," say, carefully keeping in mind all the time that what they said would have to be more or less true of the other grumphs too. Some would lay great importance on the fact that, as you were tickled with feathers, you were, in a way, also tickled by being beaten with a walking-stick. Others would discover the ferule of the pin, and the quill, shaft, and two vanes of barbs of the crowbar. An Oxford don would arise to declare that all grumph continually approximated to the condition of pins. . . .

I have put the affair, as I see it, in a figure, and with other names, in order to show its unreason more clearly, and far more shortly, than is possible if the prejudice-clad and elusive word "Art" is used. In either case, the sensible reply to it all is, "We have sticks and pins, plays and poems. These we know. These are, as certainly as anything is, real classes of things. Begin from them, and from the emotions they move. And see if thence you climb upwards to Grumph, to Art."

This attitude does, directly or indirectly, shut out various bands of ideas and thinkers ; my objections to each of which I could state at length. A short enumeration of these tendencies of mind in viewing questions of "Art" may hint why, psychologically at any rate, they seem to me nonstarters. In the first place, I do not admit the claims of anyone who says, "There is such a thing as Beauty, because when a man says, 'This is beautiful,' he does not mean, 'This is lovely,' or, 'This provokes the cosmic emotion.' There is such a thing as Art; because the sentence: 'Pictures, Poetry, Music, etc., are Art,' is not the same as 'Pictures, Poetry, JVIusic, etc., are Music, Poetry, Pictures k. t. x'" I am not concerned with what men may mean. They frequently mean and have meant the most astounding things. It is, possibly, true that when men say, "This is beautiful," they do not mean "This is lovely." They may mean that the assthetic emotion exists. My only comments are that it does not follow that the aesthetic emotion does exist, and that, as a matter of fact, they are wrong.

But the only way to prove them right or wrong is by introspection into our states of mind when we hear music or see pictures.

It has been acutely said that, in philosophy, it is important to give the right answers, but even more important to ask the right questions. So here. Better than to ask "What is Art?" is it to ask "What do you feel before this picture?" "Before that picture?" "Is there anything common between your feelings in these two cases?" "What do you feel in hearing this, and that, piece of music?" "Is there anything common?" and then, "Is there anything common between what you feel before all these pictures and what you feel in hearing all this music?" "And if so, what is it?" "Is it important?" One of the perils attending on those who ask the first question is that they tend, as all men do, to find what they are looking for: a common quality in Art. And also that they tend to exalt what they discover for this quality, above the others that are to be found in any of the arts. People who start in this way are apt to be, practically, a most intolerable nuisance both to critics and to artists; whether it is Art or any one art that they would tie to their rule. Art is Pattern; and a novel that lacks "pattern" is not Art, and therefore bad. Art is the perception of the individual case; so morality plays are illegitimate. Art is the emphasising of the generality; so Hamlet j, except in so far as the hero represents all neuropaths, is a perverse and dovi^nward path from the moralities. Art must be moral; so Shakespeare's sonnets are what Hallam thought them. Art has no connection with morality ; so Paradise Lost and PilgriTris Progress are, artistically, worthless. A play must display a "development," a tragedy must involve a conflict; music must have a tune ; a picture may not tell a story. . . . The list of these perilous and presumptuous a priori limitations could go on for ever. Of the wrong ways of approaching the subject of "Art," or even of any one art, this is the worst because it is the most harmful.

But there are other ways in which preconceptions and assumptions about the thing to be looked for mislead, in the consideration of Art. Croce rather naively begins by noting that "aesthetic" has been used both for questions of Art and, in general and in accordance with its derivation, for perception. So he sets out to discover what meaning it can really have, to apply to both. He takes it for the one necessary condition a true answer about "Esthetics" must satisfy, that it shall explain how Art and Perception are both included. Having found such an explanation, he is satisfied.

To take a different side, most of the upholders of the Einfilhlungsdsthetik seem to have founded their view on the experiences of the spectator of certain visual arts, especially painting or architecture. In so far, it is valuable. But when it is contorted to cover the other arts, the result is ludicrous. So those who accept the Nacherleben theory, would appear to be extending what is probably true about drama to spheres where it is desperately irrelevant.

It is said that the figure of Helen, whom men have so eagerly followed and sought, was a phantasm, covered by which there lurked, in fact, a knot of mercantile interests of Greece and the Hellespont and the Black Sea; even as, some claim, men who have died for the love of England, or Germany, or Italy, have, in reality, only given themselves for a few rich people. Art and Beauty have proved such delusive Helens. It is an extraordinary crowd, pouring along diverse roads, that has followed them. The onlooker is moved to amazement and derision. Rossetti's *'View Halloo!" was less lonely than he dreamt. More than all illusory goddesses has My Lady Beauty been chased or stalked, as a rule passionately, often irretrievably, "in what fond flight, how many ways and days!" The ingenuity of the chase has been stupendous.

"They sought her with thimbles, they sought her with care; They pursued her with forks and hope/'

The thimble of an a priori generalisation has not closed down on My Lady, nor the fork of Dialectic impaled her. For the quest was vain from the beginning. It is that conviction that enables me so cursorily to leave such knight-errants to their task — of "bounding along on the tip of their tail" or "still clutching the inviolable shade," according to the way you regard them. We had best cultivate our gardens of the arts. Then we may turn round one day to discover Beauty at our elbow — if she exists at all. If she doesn't, we shall at least have learnt horticulture.

I can descend, then, with a clear conscience to occupy myself with the single plots of ground called Drama and Tragedy. But first I must deal with two other ways of approaching the question of the arts — for the arts, as human activities, can be classed together, even though there be no such obvious similarity discernible in the states of mind they produce, no "aesthetic emotion." There are some who would view it all from the point of view of the artist. "Art," they say, "is primarily a creative function of the artist; other people may profit, afterwards, if it so happens. Cricket is a game played by twenty-two men, under certain rules: which may or may not be watched by a crowd. This is true, even though the game would not have been played but for the crowd. Art is no more to be explained in terms of the chance result on the spectators than cricket is to be explained in terms of the feelings of the crowd. Art is an amazing creative experience of the artist: what happens to the result of his travail is neither here nor there. A good picture is one in the creating of which the artist had a good state of mind. And the utmost a spectator can hope for is to approximate, in beholding a work of art, to the state of mind the artist had in creating it."

The last sentence, perhaps, expresses a view that need not logically go with the foregoing belief. For the whole position, I do not think it can, ultimately, be refuted. It becomes a question of words, or of the point of view. From where I stand, I seem to see certain activities, and I consider them according to the aspect that seems to me most important. If another man views and describes them from behind, I can only lament it. There are things to be said against him. Certainly, if importance is to weigh in the matter, the effects on the audience are more important than the state of the artist. He could, cogently, answer that corn is corn, though the most important thing about it is that it goes to make bread. A greater difficulty is the extraordinary variety of experience of the creative artist. Blake thought he was taking down his writings from the dictation of an angel. Some writers solemnly think their things out. Others are "inspired"; or proceed almost by automatic writing. Some are highly excited and irresponsible; others detached, cynical, and calculating. Many artists, it would seem, are never aware of their work of art as a whole, but build it up, patching and revising in little pieces. A play by Beaumont and Fletcher, with the scenes apportioned out, would be difficult to judge by this creative theory. Certainly, if you take the case of a dancer, who can never quite see herself dancing, it seems clear that the important whole connected with this activity is in the state of mind of the spectator.

Another common tendency, a fatal and ridiculous one, is that of the historical school. Both the psychology of the artist and the history of the arts are interesting, and may be valuable, topics of investigation. But it should be clearly recognised that the history of the forms of the arts has no direct connection with the arts as they are. Football originated in a religious ritual; but it is not, necessarily, religious. The cooking of roast pork arose from the burning of a house ; but he would be a foolish gastronomist who, in considering cooking, laid great emphasis on the fundamental element of arson in that art. So there are some who say that the arts originated in a need to let off the superfluous energies of man, not needed to further or secure his livelihood; and therefore are essentially of the nature of play. Others declare that the sexual instinct was at the bottom of the beginnings of the arts, and that all Art is, fundamentally, sexuality. Others again would, for similar reasons, find it a religious activity. To all such we can only reply, "If your historical analysis is true, it is indeed a wonderful world in which we live; but now, in 1912, poetry and football are not sex or religion; they are poetry and football."

There are theatres; places where you see things. The things you see there generally try to represent or imitate reality, and are frequently accompanied by words, in which cases they are called "plays." One of the first and most important distinctions between plays, music, and poetry on the one hand, and pictures and sculpture on the other, is that the element of duration enters into the first group. There is no especial point in a picture at which you begin or end looking at it; no fixed order of sensations. There is just the picture. But the order of sensations which a play should arouse in you is fixed beforehand, and essential. This fact of duration gives theatrical art two features. It can arouse all the emotions that can be got through the consecution of events; and it can employ the succession of emotions in the mind. Both these are important. Take the latter first. It is obvious that, though he may demand certain knowledge in the spectator before the beginning of the play, the artist cannot demand any definite state of mind. He can only claim to be presented with an expectant and fairly blank normal mind. After that he is responsible. And at any moment during the play, his choice of the emotions to arouse is conditioned by the emotions already aroused. Each situation must be planned, each line written, with regard to the effect of what has gone before, not only logically, but psychologically, on the audience. The continuity of the play must be an emotional continuity, even more than a rational one: not necessarily, of course, the same emotion continuously, but necessarily harmonious ones. I do not mean to suggest that the spectator of a play experiences a number of definite emotions, one at a time, each lasting three seconds, consecutive. His state of mind is complex; and while some perceptions or emotions flash with infinite swiftness through it, others last and colour the contents of subsequent states of mind for some time. It is these last that are most important, but the whole mental and emotional experience has a cumulative effect. It is as if a stream of water of various heat was trickling through a basin. The heat of the water in the basin at any moment would be affected by the heat of the basin, which in turn would be a result of the past heats of all the water that had gone through before. Only, heat is simple, and the succession of emotions and sensations is manifold and complex. The merit and kind of the play, in a sense the play itself, lie in the whole curve of these states of mind. That is the most important thing about plays, to w^hich everything, ultimately, must be referred. I can more easily imagine a play good in which all the characters of the first four acts vanished, and entirely new ones came on in the fifth, with an entirely new plot, so long as the emotions aroused were harmonious, than one in which the successive states of mind clashed.

What a man generally refers to when he speaks of a play, and of the goodness and qualities of it, is a memory of this succession of states of mind, a kind of foreshortened view of it, an emotional precis or summary. A good critic is he who can both feel a play perfectly at the time, and sum up its particular taste and intensity perfectly, for his own reference, in this retrospective summary. The process of summarising a play thus involves the abstraction of various, more or less common elements of the successive states of mind the play produces, and the concocting them into one imagined taste or state of mind, "the play." All these summaries are of something the same kind; so the habit of thinking of plays thus leads men to think that there is some common quality in all of them — at least, in all serious ones — "beauty" and a common "gesthetic emotion" always in the mind of all spectators of plays. I believe that honest introspection of one's states of mind during a play, will show that there is no one quality one can call "beauty" in all successful serious plays. If there is any meaning at all in the word "beauty," my emotion at lago's temptation of Othello, or Lear's "Prithee, undo this button," is in no way a consciousness of beauty; and though there is, perhaps, something in my state of mind — the shape of it, so to speak — which is the same when

I watch any tragedy, it is only due, I think, to the fact that all tragedies I know have a certain common quality of being partly like life; I do not find this something in my mind when I am watching pure dancing.

A play is good in proportion as the states of mind during the witnessing of it are, in sum, good. The good of these states of mind is, in practice, very much dependent on the pleasurableness of them, and proportionate to it. Much more so than in real life, where the consciousness of virtue makes some unpleasant states good. But pleasure is not a perfect criterion of good, even in the theatre. For a performance that provokes lust would move pleasant states of mind, but not good ones.

If this is granted, the difficulty is: in whom is a play to move good states of mind, in order to be called good? Obviously, not only in me. A play in Russian might be very good, and yet only bore me, because I couldn't understand it. On the other hand, I do not think it fair to call a play good which can be understood by nobody but the author. Everybody is familiar, in the realm of literature, with the writer who is immensely pleased with his own poem because of the emotions it evokes in him. The phrase "the sun is setting" recalls to him the purple and green glory that moved him to this inadequate expression. But it will not affect anyone else in the same way, so we rightly refuse to call the poem good. Obscurity in an author isi, ultimately, a fault. A family of my acquaintance uses a private and peculiar synonym of their own childish invention for "hand," the word "nopen." ^ If one of them wrote a poem containing this word, it would affect him very much, because of the aura of associations around it. But the rest of the world would find it meaningless. It would not be a good poem. One is reduced to saying that a good play means a play that would be likely to stir good states of mind in an intelligent man of the same nation, class, and century as the author. It follows that a good Elizabethan play is a play that would have been good in Elizabethan times; and not a play that is good to us, with our different ideas. The two categories coincide to a great extent. But their differences are important.

And it follows that all those literary qualities that answer to patine in works of art — quaintness, old-fashionedness, interest as illustrating a bygone age — are irrelevant. I had rather read an interesting book originally worthless, than a fine poem in a language I cannot understand.

* Because it opens.

But it would be misleading to call the former a better book.

Whether the states of mind produced by a play were good or not, must be decided by introspection. The object of most critical enquiries is to discover what sort of effect different things in the theatre have on these states of mind. It is obvious if one examines one's consciousness during a play, that several different classes of object fill and move it. There is sound. Music, or the mere melody of words, impresses and pleases. There is the further literary pleasure of the language, apart from the mere sense; and sometimes there is metre. There is movement, varying from absolute dancing to mere imitation of life. There is, in most theatrical performances, the story. And there is the realism of the piece ; i.e, its value as impressing us with the sense of its reality.

If we exclude pure dancing, all performances in theatres have some value as connected with reality. To discover what it is, one has to consider one of the widest and most important psychological questions connected with the theatre, the question of convention.

To say that one feels the reality of an ordinary play without believing it, is a fairly accurate description of one's attitude. It would be better to put it in this way: the feeling of reality, the emotion of conviction, of faith, is a purely psychological one. It is this that plays aim at producing. It is not the same emotion we have in real life. In real life one does not feel "He is really there, talking to me!" One takes it for granted. He is there. This is also present to some degree when one is witnessing a play, but it is the negative and less valuable side of the emotion. The former, the positive feeling of reality, does not tend to result in action. The latter does permit of various emotions resulting in action. So there has to be a permanent inhibition of such action ; or, to put it in another way, you accept the convention of the actors, the absent fourth wall (on the modern stage), and so on. It was in the want of this inhibition that the wrongness of that Italian's attitude lay, who, at a performance of Hamlet^ was so wrought upon that he rose from his place in the pit, and shot Claudius. Many find it difficult to understand the attitude of the human mind about such convention. They either say, "Absence of scenery destroys the illusion," or "You must know it isn't true." The accepting of a convention means that one says, "Suppose Romans talked

English blank verse, then " and gives oneself

to the play; or, to put it another way, one puts a lid on one's knowledge that Romans didn't talk English blank verse. Ignorant of that, one can believe the rest.

This is one of the most natural and deeprooted instincts in men. We do not want illusion; we only ask that conventions should be made and kept. But it is important that they should be kept. The artist can make any amount of conventions; but, once made, he must not break them. It is obvious in children. A grown-up can say, "Suppose you are a hen, and she is a steam-roller, and I am the King of Portugal," and they will carry the play out with entire acceptance of this, absolute appreciation of the drama ensuing. But if the grown-up breaks from his regal speech and behaviour a moment to address a remark, in his own person, to some outsider or to the steam-roller in its private existence, the grief and dismay of the children is prodigious and unexpected. Observation or memory will assure one that their pain is purely aesthetic. It is what we feel when a dramatist breaks or misuses one of the conventions.

The artist's business, then, is to make these various conventions, and, within them, to impress the spectator as much as possible with the sense of reality. There are many ways of doing this; realism in any one one branch — in the chain of events, in the gestures of the actors, in the style of speech, in the truth to life of the characters, or in the scenery — ^will do to start the feeling of reality, and it will then gather force from the general power of the play. Or there are unrealistic ways of impressing the spectator with reality, through mere literary or theatrical power. It is to be noticed that in some of these things, realism means breaking a convention and setting up a more realistic one, and is consequently comparative. With speech, for example, realism means more realistic speech than one is accustomed to. Robertson's Caste was realistic in this direction, in its day. When we had got used to that, Mr. Shaw's plays, with their more naturalistic speech, appeared, and seemed to us more realistic. They, in their turn, ring now old-fashioned by the side of more modern plays, the dialogue of which seems to us, for a time, startlingly and triumphantly like real life.