CHAPTER V

THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE

The difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is a

difficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other great

writers are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the critic

to quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has been

already said, more or less happily. A vast amount has been said which is

not in the least worth saying, which is for the most part demonstrably

foolish or wrong. As Shakespere is by far the greatest of all writers,

ancient or modern, so he has been the subject of commentatorial folly to an

extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject.

It is impossible to notice the results of this folly except at great

length; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there is

always the danger either that some mischievous notions may be left

undisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself may

be presumed to be ignorant of the foolishness of his predecessors. These

inconveniences, however, must here be risked, and it may perhaps be thought

that the necessity of risking them is a salutary one. In no other case is

it so desirable that an author should be approached by students with the

minimum of apparatus.

The scanty facts and the abundant fancies as to Shakespere's life are a

commonplace of literature. He was baptized on the 26th of April 1564 at

Stratford-on-Avon, and must have been born either on the same day, or on

one of those immediately preceding. His father was John Shakespere, his

mother Mary Arden, both belonging to the lower middle class and connected,

personally and by their relations, with yeomanry and small landed gentry on

the one side, and with well-to-do tradesmen on the other. Nothing is known

of his youth and little of his education; but it was a constant tradition

of men of his own and the immediately succeeding generation that he had

little school learning. Before he was nineteen he was married, at the end

of November 1582, to Anne Hathaway, who was seven years his senior. Their

first child, Susannah, was baptized six months later. He is said to have

left Stratford for London in 1585, or thereabouts, and to have connected

himself at once with the theatre, first in humble and then in more

important positions. But all this is mist and myth. He is transparently

referred to by Robert Greene in the summer or autumn of 1592, and the terms

of the reference prove his prosperity. The same passage brought out a

complimentary reference to Shakespere's intellectual and moral character

from Chettle, Greene's editor. He published _Venus and Adonis_ in 1593, and

_Lucrece_ next year. His plays now began to appear rapidly, and brought him

money enough to buy, in 1597, the house of New Place at Stratford, and to

establish himself there after, it is supposed, twelve years' almost

complete absence from his birthplace and his family. Documentary references

to his business matters now become not infrequent, but, except as showing

that he was alive and prosperous, they are quite uninteresting. The same

may be said of the marriages and deaths of his children. In 1609 appeared

the _Sonnets_, some of which had previously been printed in unauthorised

and piratical publications. He died on the 23d of April (supposed generally

to be his birthday) 1616, and was buried at Stratford. His plays had been

only surreptitiously printed, the retention of a play in manuscript being

of great importance to the actors, and the famous first folio did not

appear till seven years after his death.

The canon of Shakespere's plays, like everything else connected with him,

has been the subject of endless discussion. There is no reasonable doubt

that in his earlier days (the first printed play among those ordinarily

assigned to him, _Romeo and Juliet_, dates from 1597) he had taken part in

dramatic work which is now mostly anonymous or assigned to other men, and

there is also no doubt that there may be passages in the accepted plays

which he owed to others. But my own deliberate judgment is that no

important and highly probable ascription of extant work to Shakespere can

be made outside the canon as usually printed, with the doubtful exception

of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_; and I do not believe that in the plays usually

accepted, any very important or characteristic portion is not Shakespere's.

As for Shakespere-Bacon theories, and that kind of folly, they are scarcely

worthy even of mention. Nor among the numerous other controversies and

errors on the subject shall I meddle with more than one--the constantly

repeated assertion that England long misunderstood or neglected Shakespere,

and that foreign aid, chiefly German (though some include Voltaire!), was

required to make her discover him. A very short way is possible with this

absurdity. It would be difficult to name any men more representative of

cultivated literary opinion and accomplishment in the six generations

(taking a generation at the third of a century) which passed between

Shakespere's death and the battle of Waterloo (since when English

admiration of Shakespere will hardly be denied), than Ben Jonson, John

Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge. Their lives overlapped each other considerably, so that no

period is left uncovered. They were all typical men of letters, each of his

own time, and four at least of them were literary dictators. Now, Ben

Jonson's estimate of Shakespere in prose and verse is on record in more

places than one, and is as authentic as the silly stories of his envy are

mythical. If Milton, to his eternal disgrace, flung, for party purposes,

the study of Shakespere as a reproach in his dead king's face, he had

himself long before put on record his admiration for him, and his own

study is patent to every critical reader of his works. Dryden, but a year

or two after the death of Shakespere's daughter, drew up that famous and

memorable eulogy which ought to be familiar to all, and which, long before

any German had spoken of Shakespere, and thirty years before Voltaire had

come into the world, exactly and precisely based the structure of

Shakespere-worship. Pope edited Shakespere. Johnson edited him. Coleridge

is acknowledged as, with his contemporaries Lamb and Hazlitt, the founder

of modern appreciation. It must be a curious reckoning which, in face of

such a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period,

maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writer

whom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even his own

countrymen.

The work of Shakespere falls into three divisions very unequal in bulk.

There is first (speaking both in the order of time and in that of thought,

though not in that of literary importance and interest) the small division

of poems, excluding the _Sonnets_, but including _Venus and Adonis_, _The

Rape of Lucrece_, and the few and uncertain but exquisite scraps, the

_Lover's Complaint_, _The Passionate Pilgrim_, and so forth. All these are

likely to have been the work of early youth, and they are much more like

the work of other men than any other part of Shakespere's work, differing

chiefly in the superior sweetness of those wood-notes wild, which Milton

justly, if not altogether adequately, attributed to the poet, and in the

occasional appearance of the still more peculiar and unique touches of

sympathy with and knowledge of universal nature which supply the main

Shakesperian note. The _Venus_ and the _Lucrece_ form part of a large

collection (see last chapter) of extremely luscious, not to say voluptuous,

poetry which the imitation of Italian models introduced into England, which

has its most perfect examples in the earlier of these two poems, in

numerous passages of Spenser, and in the _Hero and Leander_ of Marlowe, but

which was written, as will have been seen from what has been already said,

with extraordinary sweetness and abundance, by a vast number of

Elizabethan writers. There are extant mere _adespota_, and mere "minor

poems" (such as the pretty "Britain's Ida," which used to be printed as

Spenser's, and which some critics have rather rashly given to Phineas

Fletcher), good enough to have made reputation, if not fortune, at other

times. There is no reason to attribute to Shakespere on the one hand, any

deliberate intention of executing a _tour de force_ in the composition of

these poems or, in his relinquishment of the style, any deliberate

rejection of the kind as unworthy of his powers on the other. He appears to

have been eminently one of those persons who care neither to be in nor out

of the fashion, but follow it as far as suits and amuses them. Yet,

beautiful as these poems are, they so manifestly do not present their

author at the full of his powers, or even preluding in the kind wherein the

best of those powers were to be shown, that they require comparatively

little critical notice. As things delightful to read they can hardly be

placed too high, especially the _Venus_; as evidences of the poet's

many-sided nature, they are interesting. But they are in somewhat other

than the usual sense quite "simple, sensuous, and passionate." The

misplaced ingenuity which, neglecting the _unum necessarium_, will busy

itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather

hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse

on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune

and even more unsubstantial than usual.

It is quite otherwise with the _Sonnets_. In the first place nowhere in

Shakespere's work is it more necessary to brush away the cobwebs of the

commentators. This side of madness, no vainer fancies have ever entered the

mind of man than those which have been inspired by the immaterial part of

the matter. The very initials of the dedicatee "W. H." have had volumes

written about them; the _Sonnets_ themselves have been twisted and

classified in every conceivable shape; the persons to whom they are

addressed, or to whom they refer, have been identified with half the

gentlemen and ladies of Elizabeth's court, and half the men of letters of

the time; and every extremity and eccentricity of non-natural

interpretation has been applied to them. When they are freed from this

torture and studied rationally, there is nothing mysterious about them

except the mystery of their poetical beauty. Some of them are evidently

addressed in the rather hyperbolical language of affection, common at the

time, and derived from the study of Greek and Italian writers, to a man;

others, in language not hyperbolical at all, to a woman. Disdain, rivalry,

suspense, short-lived joy, long sorrow, all the symptoms and concomitants

of the passion of love--which are only commonplaces as death and life are

commonplace--form their motives. For my part I am unable to find the

slightest interest or the most rudimentary importance in the questions

whether the Mr. W. H. of the dedication was the Earl of Pembroke, and if

so, whether he was also the object of the majority of the _Sonnets_;

whether the "dark lady," the "woman coloured ill," was Miss Mary Fitton;

whether the rival poet was Chapman. Very likely all these things are true:

very likely not one of them is true. They are impossible of settlement, and

if they were settled they would not in the slightest degree affect the

poetical beauty and the human interest of the _Sonnets_, which, in a

strange _reductio ad absurdum_ of eighteenth century commonsense criticism,

Hallam thought it impossible not to wish that Shakespere had not written,

and which some critics, not perhaps of the least qualified, have regarded

as the high-water mark of English, if not of all, poetry.

This latter estimate will only be dismissed as exaggerated by those who are

debarred from appreciation by want of sympathy with the subject, or

distracted by want of comprehension of it. A harmony of the two chief

opposing theories of poetry will teach us that we must demand of the very

highest poetry first--the order is not material--a certain quality of

expression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that quality

of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated,

but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticism

of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must

show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are

fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensity

impossible to parallel elsewhere. The merits of the formal and expressive

part hardly any one will now question; the sonnets may be opened almost at

random with the certainty of finding everywhere the phrases, the verses,

the passages which almost mechanically recur to our minds when we are asked

to illustrate the full poetical capacity and beauty of the English tongue,

such as:

"The painful warrior, famoused for fight,

After a thousand victories once foiled,

Is from the book of honour razed quite

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled;"

or

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past;"

or

"Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of all too precious you?"

or

"Then hate me if thou wilt,"

with the whole sonnet which it opens; or

"When in the chronicle of a wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights;"

or that most magnificent quatrain of all,

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove."

Any competent judge of the formal part of poetry must admit that its force

can no farther go. Verse and phrase cannot be better moulded to the

melodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these scraps show, is the

thought below the verse. Even if Hallam's postulate of misplaced and

ill-regulated passion be granted (and I am myself very far from granting

it), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of

self-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the very midst of the

circumstances which might make for unclear vision, is still unmistakable.

And if the poet's object was to catch up the sum of love and utter it with

or even without any special relation to his own actual feelings for any

actual person (a hypothesis which human nature in general, and the nature

of poets in particular, makes not improbable), then it can only be said

that he has succeeded. From Sappho and Solomon to Shelley and Mr.

Swinburne, many bards have spoken excellently of love: but what they have

said could be cut out of Shakespere's sonnets better said than they have

said it, and yet enough remain to furnish forth the greatest of poets.

With the third and in every sense chief division of the work, the

necessities for explanation and allowance cease altogether. The

thirty-seven plays of the ordinary Shakesperian canon comprise the

greatest, the most varied, the most perfect work yet done by any man in

literature; and what is more, the work of which they consist is on the

whole the most homogeneous and the least unequal ever so done. The latter

statement is likely to be more questioned than the former; but I have no

fear of failing to make it out. In one sense, no doubt, Shakespere is

unequal--as life is. He is not always at the tragic heights of Othello and

Hamlet, at the comic raptures of Falstaff and Sir Toby, at the romantic

ecstasies of Romeo and Titania. Neither is life. But he is always--and this

is the extraordinary and almost inexplicable difference, not merely between

him and all his contemporaries, but between him and all other writers--at

the height of the particular situation. This unique quality is uniquely

illustrated in his plays. The exact order of their composition is entirely

unknown, and the attempts which have been made to arrange it into periods,

much more to rank play after play in regular sequence, are obvious

failures, and are discredited not merely by the inadequate means--such as

counting syllables and attempting to classify the cadence of

lines--resorted to in order to effect them, but by the hopeless discrepancy

between the results of different investigators and of the same investigator

at different times. We know indeed pretty certainly that _Romeo and Juliet_

was an early play, and _Cymbeline_ a late one, with other general facts of

the same kind. We know pretty certainly that the _Henry the Sixth_ series

was based on a previous series on the same subject in which Shakespere not

improbably had a hand; that _King John_ and _The Taming of the Shrew_ had

in the same way first draughts from the same or other hands, and so forth.

But all attempts to arrange and elucidate a chronological development of

Shakespere's mind and art have been futile. Practically the Shakesperian

gifts are to be found _passim_ in the Shakesperian canon--even in the

dullest of all the plays, as a whole, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, even

in work so alien from his general practice, and so probably mixed with

other men's work, as _Titus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_. There are rarely

elsewhere--in _The Maid's Tragedy_ of Fletcher, in _The Duchess of Malfi_

of Webster, in _The Changeling_ of Middleton--passages or even scenes which

might conceivably have been Shakespere's. But there is, with the doubtful

exception of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, no play in any other man's work which

as a whole or in very great part is Shakesperian, and there is no play

usually recognised as Shakespere's which would not seem out of place and

startling in the work of any contemporary.

This intense, or rather (for intense is not the right word) this

extraordinarily diffused character, is often supposed to be a mere fancy of

Shakespere-worshippers. It is not so. There is something, not so much in

the individual flashes of poetry, though it is there too, as in the entire

scope and management of Shakespere's plays, histories, tragedies, and

comedies alike, which distinguishes them, and it is exactly the

characteristic noted above, and well put by Dryden in his famous

definition of Shakespere. Perhaps the first branch or phase of this

distinction is that Shakespere is never, in the vulgar sense of the word,

unnatural. He has not the slightest objection to horrors; the alarmed

foreign critics who described his theatre as a "shambles" need not have

gone farther than his greatest plays to justify themselves literally. But

with barely even the exception which has so often to be made of _Titus

Andronicus_, his horrors are never sought beyond a certain usual and

probable round of circumstance, and are almost always tempered and

humanised by touches of humour or pathos, or both. The cool sarcastic

villany of Aaron (a mood hit off nowhere out of Shakespere, except in

Middleton's De Flores, and not fully there) is the point on which I should

chiefly put the finger to justify at least a partial Shakesperian

authorship. Contrast the character with the nightmare ghastlinesses and

extravagances not merely of Tourneur and Webster, but even of Marlowe in

Barabas, and the difference of Shakespere's handling will be felt at once.

Another point which has been often, yet perhaps not quite fully, noticed is

the distinct and peculiar attitude of Shakespere towards what is in the

common sense called morality. Nobody can possibly call him squeamish: I do

not know that even any French naturalist of the latest school has charged

the author of _Pericles_, and _Love's Labour Lost_, and _Henry IV._, with

that _pruderie bete_ of which they accuse Scott. But he never makes those

forms of vice which most trouble and corrupt society triumphant; he never

diverges into the morbid pathology of the amatory passion, and above all,

and most remarkably of all, though I think least remarked, he never makes

his personages show the singular toleration of the most despicable

immorality which almost all his dramatic contemporaries exhibit. One is

constantly astonished at the end of an Elizabethan play, when, after vice

has been duly baffled or punished, and virtue rewarded (for they all more

or less follow that rule), reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries

follow, to observe the complacency with which husbands who have sold their

wives' favours, wives who have been at the command of the first comer or

the highest bidder, mix cheek by jowl, and apparently unrebuked, with the

modest maidens, the virtuous matrons, the faithful lovers of the piece.

Shakespere never does this. Mrs. Quickly is indeed at one time the

confidante of Anne Fenton, and at another the complaisant hostess of Doll

Tear-sheet, but not in the same play. We do not find Marina's master and

mistress rewarded, as they would very likely have been by Fletcher or

Middleton, with comfortable if not prominent posts at the court of

Pericles, or the Government-house of Mytilene. The ugly and artistically

unmanageable situation of the husband who trades in his wife's honour

simply does not occur in all the wide license and variety of Shakespere's

forty plays. He is in his own sense liberal as the most easy going can

demand, but he never mixes vice and virtue. Yet again, while practising

this singular moderation in the main element, in the most fertile motives,

of tragedy and comedy respectively, he is equally alone in his use in both

of the element of humour. And here we are on dangerous ground. To many

excellent persons of all times since his own, as well as in it,

Shakespere's humour and his use of it have been stumbling-blocks. Some of

them have been less able to away with the use, some with the thing.

Shakesperian clowns are believed to be red rags to some experienced

playwrights and accomplished wits of our own days: the porter in _Macbeth_,

the gravediggers in _Hamlet_, the fool in _Lear_, even the humours in

_Love's Labour Lost_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ have offended. I avow

myself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant or

almost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcastic

quintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through the

fantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which not

unfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as I

have hinted already, one of the chief of those spells by which Shakespere

has differentiated his work in the sense of universality from that of all

other dramatists. I have used the word nonsense, and I may be thought to

have partly given up my case by it. But nonsense, as hardly any critic but

Hazlitt has had the courage to avow openly, is no small part of life, and

it is a part the relish of which Englishmen, as the same great but unequal

critic justly maintains, are almost alone in enjoying and recognising. It

is because Shakespere dares, and dares very frequently, simply _desipere_,

simply to be foolish, that he is so pre-eminently wise. The others try to

be always wise, and, alas! it is not necessary to complete the antithesis.

These three things--restraint in the use of sympathy with suffering,

restraint in the use of interest in voluptuous excess, and humour--are, as

it seems to me, the three chief distinguishing points in Shakespere's

handling which are not found in any of his contemporaries, for though there

is humour in not a few of these, none of them is a perfect humorist in the

same sense. Here, as well as in that general range or width of subject and

thought which attracted Dryden's eulogium, he stands alone. In other

respects he shares the qualities which are perceptible almost throughout

this wonderfully fertile department of literature; but he shares them as

infinitely the largest shareholder. It is difficult to think of any other

poet (for with Homer we are deprived of the opportunity of comparison) who

was so completely able to meet any one of his contemporaries on that

contemporary's own terms in natural gift. I say natural gift because,

though it is quite evident that Shakespere was a man of no small reading,

his deficiencies in general education are too constantly recorded by

tradition, and rendered too probable by internal evidence, to be ignored or

denied by any impartial critic. But it is difficult to mention a quality

possessed by any of the school (as it is loosely called), from Marlowe to

Shirley, which he had not in greater measure; while the infinite qualities

which he had, and the others each in one way or another lacked, are

evident. On only one subject--religion--is his mouth almost closed;

certainly, as the few utterances that touch it show, from no incapacity of

dealing with it, and apparently from no other dislike than a dislike to

meddle with anything outside of the purely human province of which he felt

that he was universal master--in short from an infinite reverence.

It will not be expected that in a book like the present--the whole space of

which might very well be occupied, without any of the undue dilation which

has been more than once rebuked, in dealing with Shakespere alone--any

attempt should be made to criticise single plays, passages, and characters.

It is the less of a loss that in reality, as the wisest commentators have

always either begun or ended by acknowledging, Shakespere is your only

commentator on Shakespere. Even the passages which corrupt printing, or the

involved fashion of speaking peculiar to the time, make somewhat obscure at

first, will in almost every case yield to the unassisted cogitation of any

ordinarily intelligent person; and the results so reached are far more

likely to be the true results than the elaborate emendations which delight

a certain class of editors. A certain amount of mere glossary is of course

necessary, but otherwise the fewer corks and bladders the swimmer takes

with him when he ventures into "the ocean which is Shakespere," the better.

There are, however, certain common errors, some of which have survived even

the last century of Shakespere-study and Shakespere-worship, which must

perhaps be discussed. For in the case of the greatest writers, the business

of the critic is much more to shovel away the rubbish of his predecessors

than to attempt any accumulation of his own. The chief of these errors--or

rather that error which practically swallows up all the others and can

produce them again at any time--is that Shakespere was, if not exactly an

inspired idiot, at any rate a mainly tentative if not purely unconscious

artist, much of whose work is only not bad as art, while most, if not all

of it, was originally produced with a minimum of artistic consciousness and

design. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturally

induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness

and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this

art have been framed--theories involving the construction of perhaps as

much baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which is

saying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable that

Shakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but these

three I think that he constantly had, and that he was completely successful

in achieving them. The first was to tell in every play a dramatically

complete story; the second was to work that story out by the means of

purely human and probable characters; and the third was to give such form

and ornaments to the working out as might please the playgoers of his day.

In pursuing the first two he was the poet or dramatist of all time. In

pursuing the third he was the intelligent playwright. But (and here is the

source of the common error) it by no means follows that his attention, and

his successful attention, to his third purpose in any way interferes with,

or degrades, his excellence as a pursuer of the first two. In the first

place, it can escape no careful student that the merely playwright part of

Shakespere's work is (as is the case with no other dramatic author

whatever) singularly separable. No generation since his death has had the

slightest difficulty in adapting by far the greater part of his plays to

use and popularity in its own day, though the adaptation may have varied in

liberty and in good taste with the standards of the time. At the present

day, while almost all other old dramatists have ceased to be acted at all,

or are acted merely as curiosities, the adaptation of Shakespere has become

more and more a process of simple omission (without the addition or

alteration of anything) of parts which are either unsuited to modern

manners or too long for modern patience. With the two usual exceptions,

_Pericles_ and _Titus Andronicus_ (which, despite the great beauty of

parts, are evidently less Shakesperian as wholes than any others), there is

not a single play of the whole number that could not be--there are not many

that have not been--acted with success in our time. It would be difficult

to find a stronger differentia from the work of the mere playwright, who

invariably thinks first of the temporary conditions of success, and

accordingly loses the success which is not temporary. But the second great

difference of Shakespere is, that even what may be in comparison called

the ephemeral and perishable parts of him have an extraordinary vitality,

if not theatrical yet literary, of their own. The coarser scenes of

_Measure for Measure_ and _The Comedy of Errors_, the satire on fleeting

follies in _Love's Labour Lost_, the uncomelier parts of _All's Well that

Ends Well_, the Doll Tear-sheet business of _Henry IV._, the comic by-play

of _Troilus and Cressida_, may seem mere wood, hay, and stubble in

comparison with the nobler portions. Yet the fire of time has not consumed

them: they are as delightful as ever in the library if not on the stage.

Little or nothing need be said in defence of Shakespere as an artist from

the attacks of the older or Unity criticism. That maleficent giant can now

hardly grin at the pilgrims whom he once harassed. But there are many

persons who, not dreaming of the Unities, still object in language less

extravagant than Voltaire's or George the Third's, but with hardly less

decision, to the "sad stuff," the _fumier_ of Shakespere's admixture of

comedy with tragedy, of his digressions and episodes, of his multifarious

underplots and minor groups, and ramifications of interest or intrigue. The

reply to this is not (as it might be, if any reply were not superfluous, in

the case of the Unity objection) a reply of demonstration. If any person

experienced in literature, and with an interest in it, experienced in life

and with an interest in that, asserts that Caliban and Trinculo interfere

with his enjoyment of Ferdinand and Miranda; that the almost tragedy of

Hero is marred for him by the comedy of Beatrice and the farce of Dogberry;

that he would have preferred _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ without the

tedious brief effort of Quince and his companions; that the solemnity and

passion of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ cause in him a revulsion against the

porter and the gravedigger; that the Fool and Edgar are out of place in

_Lear_,--it is impossible to prove to him by the methods of any Euclid or

of any Aldrich that he is wrong. The thing is essentially, if not wholly, a

matter of taste. It is possible, indeed, to point out, as in the case of

the Unities, that the objectors, if they will maintain their objection,

must deny the position that the dramatic art holds up the mirror to Nature,

and that if they deny it, the burden--a burden never yet successfully taken

up by any one--of framing a new definition rests upon them. But this is

only a partial and somewhat inconclusive argument, and the person who

genuinely dislikes these peculiarities of Shakespere is like a man who

genuinely dislikes wine or pictures or human faces, that seem delightful

and beautiful to others. I am not aware of any method whereby I can prove

that the most perfect claret is better than zoedone in flavour, or that the

most exquisite creation of Botticelli or Leonardo is more beautiful than

the cuts on the sides of railway novels. Again, it is matter of taste.

It will be seen that I am not for my part afraid to avow myself a

thoroughgoing Shakesperian, who accepts the weak points of his master as

well as the strong. It is often forgotten (indeed I do not know where I

have seen it urged) that there is in Shakespere's case an excuse for the

thousand lines that good Ben Jonson would have liked him to blot,--an

excuse which avails for no one else. No one else has his excuse of

universality; no one else has attempted to paint, much less has painted,

the whole of life. It is because Shakespere has attempted this, and, in the

judgment of at least some, has succeeded in it, that the spots in his sun

are so different from the spots in all other suns. I do not know an

unnatural character or an unnatural scene in Shakespere, even among those

which have most evidently been written to the gallery. Everything in him

passes, in some mysterious way, under and into that "species of eternity"

which transforms all the great works of art, which at once prevents them

from being mere copies of Nature, and excuses whatever there is of Nature

in them that is not beautiful or noble. If this touch is wanting anywhere

(and it is wanting very seldom), that, I take it, is the best, indeed the

only, sign that that passage is not Shakespere's,--that he had either made

use of some other man's work, or that some other man had made use of his.

If such passages were of more frequent occurrence, this argument might be

called a circular one. But the proportion of such passages as I at least

should exclude is so small, and the difference between them and the rest is

so marked, that no improper begging of the question can be justly charged.

The plays in the _Globe_ edition contain just a thousand closely-printed

pages. I do not think that there are fifty in all, perhaps not

twenty--putting scraps and patches together--in which the Shakesperian

touch is wanting, and I do not think that that touch appears outside the

covers of the volume once in a thousand pages of all the rest of English

literature. The finest things of other men,--of Marlowe, of Fletcher, of

Webster (who no doubt comes nearest to the Shakesperian touch, infinitely

as he falls short of the Shakesperian range),--might conceivably be the

work of others. But the famous passages of Shakespere, too numerous and too

well known to quote, could be no one else's. It is to this point that

aesthetic criticism of Shakespere is constantly coming round with an almost

monotonous repetition. As great as all others in their own points of

greatness; holding points of greatness which no others even approach; such

is Shakespere.

There is a certain difficulty--most easily to be appreciated by those who

have most carefully studied the literature of the period in question, and

have most fully perceived the mistakes which confusion of exact date has

induced in the consideration of the very complex subject before us--in

selecting dramatists to group with Shakespere. The obvious resource of

taking him by himself would frustrate the main purpose of this volume,

which is to show the general movement at the same time as the individual

developments of the literature of 1560-1660. In one sense Shakespere might

be included in any one of three out of the four chapters which we have here

devoted to the Elizabethan dramatists. His earliest known, and probably

much of his unknown work coincides with the period of tentative; and his

latest work overlaps very much of that period of ripe and somewhat

over-ripe performance, at the head of which it has here been thought good

to set Beaumont and Fletcher. But there is a group of four notable persons

who appear to have especial rights to be classed with him, if not in

greatness, yet in character of work, and in the influences which played on

that work. They all, like him, took an independent part in the marvellous

wit-combat of the last decade of Elizabeth, and they all like him survived,

though for different lengths of time, to set an example to the third

generation. They are all, even the meanest of them, distinctly great men,

and free alike from the immaturity, visible even in Lyly and Marlowe, which

marked some of their older contemporaries, and from the decadence, visible

even in Fletcher and Massinger, which marred their younger followers.

Furthermore, they were mixed up, as regards one another, in an inextricable

but not uninteresting series of broils and friendships, to some part of

which Shakespere himself may have been by no means a stranger. These

reasons have seemed sufficient for separating them from the rest, and

grouping them round the captain. They are Benjamin Jonson, George Chapman,

John Marston, and Thomas Dekker.

The history of Ben Jonson (the literary history that is to say, for the

known facts of his life are simple enough) is curious and perhaps unique.

Nothing is really known of his family; but as, at a time when Scotchmen

were not loved in England, he maintained his Annandale origin, there should

be, especially after Mr. Symonds's investigations as to his career, no

doubt that he at least believed himself to be of Border extraction, as was

also, it may be remembered, his great disciple, panegyrist, slanderer, and

(with the substitution of an easy for a rugged temper), analogue, John

Dryden. The fact of these two typical Englishmen being of half or whole

Scotch descent will not surprise any one who does not still ignore the

proper limits of England. Nobody doubts that his father (or rather

stepfather, for he was a posthumous child, born 1573, and his mother

married again) was a bricklayer, or that he went to Westminster School; it

seems much more dubious whether he had any claim to anything but an

honorary degree from either university, though he received that from both.

Probably he worked at bricklaying, though the taunts of his rivals would,

in face of the undoubted fact of his stepfather's profession, by no means

suffice to prove it. Certainly he went through the chequered existence of

so many Elizabethan men of letters; was a soldier in Flanders, an actor, a

duellist (killing his man, and escaping consequences only by benefit of

clergy), a convert to Romanism, a "revert" to the Anglican Church, a

married man, a dramatist. The great play of _Every Man in his Humour_,

afterwards very much altered, was perhaps acted first at the Rose Theatre

in 1596, and it established Jonson's reputation, though there is no

reasonable doubt that he had written other things. His complicated

associations and quarrels with Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and others, have

occupied the time of a considerable number of persons; they lie quite

beyond our subject, and it may be observed without presumption that their

direct connection, even with the literary work (_The Poetaster_,

_Satiromastix_, and the rest) which is usually linked to them, will be

better established when critics have left off being uncertain whether _A_

was _B_, or _B_, _C_. Even the most famous story of all (the disgrace of

Jonson with others for _Eastward Ho!_ as a libel against the Scots, for

which he was imprisoned, and, being threatened with mutilation, was by his

Roman mother supplied with poison), though told by himself, does not rest

on any external evidence. What is certain is that Jonson was in great and

greater request, both as a writer of masks and other _divertissements_ for

the Court, and as a head and chief of literary conviviality at the

"Mermaid," and other famous taverns. Here, as he grew older, there grew up

round him that "Tribe of Ben," or admiring clique of young literary men,

which included almost all the most remarkable poets, except Milton, of the

late Jacobean and early Caroline period, and which helped to spread his

fame for at least two generations, and (by Waller's influence on

Saint-Evremond) to make him the first English man of letters who was

introduced by a great critic of the Continent to continental attention as a

worker in the English vernacular. At last he was made Poet Laureate, and

in 1618 he took a journey to Scotland, and stayed there for some time with

Drummond of Hawthornden. The celebrated conversations noted by the host

have been the very centre battle-ground of all fights about Ben Jonson's

character. It is sufficient here to say that though Ben's chief defender,

Gifford, may have been too hard on Drummond, it is difficult, if not

impossible, to think that the "Notes of Conversations" were made in a

friendly spirit. They contain for their bulk an extraordinary amount of

interesting matter, and much sound criticism; but which of us in modern

days would care to have such "notes" taken? A man thinks that there are

faults in a friend's work, and in the usual exaggeration of conversation he

says that it is "rubbish." The Drummonds of this world note it down and it

passes as a deliberate judgment. He must be a fortunate man, or an

exceptional recluse, who has not found some good-natured friend anticipate

Drummond, and convey the crude expression (probably heightened in

conveyance) direct to the person concerned. After this visit (which must

have been at the end of 1618) Jonson suffered the calamity of having his

study destroyed by fire, and lost much MS. work. He lived many years longer

and retained his literary primacy, but was unfortunate in money matters,

and even in reception of his work by the public, though the literary men of

his day made no mistake about him. He died in 1637, and the last of the

many stories clustering round his name is the famous one of the

inscription, "O rare Ben Jonson!" A year later, a _tombeau_, or collection

of funeral poems, entitled _Jonsonus Virbius_, showed the estimate

entertained of him by the best and brightest wits of the time.

His life was thus a life of struggle, for he was never rich, and lived for

the most part on the most unsatisfactory of all sources of income--casual

bounties from the king and others. It is not improbable that his favour

with the Court and with Templar society (which was then very unpopular with

the middle classes), had something to do with the ill-reception of his

later plays. But his literary influence was very great, and with Donne he

determined much of the course of English poetry for many years, and

retained a great name even in the comparative eclipse of the "Giant Race"

after the Restoration. It was only when the study of Shakespere became a

favourite subject with persons of more industry than intelligence in the

early eighteenth century, that a singular fabric of myth grew up round Ben

Jonson. He was pictured as an incarnation of envy, hatred, malice, and all

uncharitableness, directed in the first place towards Shakespere, and then

towards all other literary craftsmen. William Gifford, his first competent

editor, set himself to work to destroy this, and undoubtedly succeeded. But

the acrimony with which Gifford tinctured all his literary polemic perhaps

rather injured his treatment of the case; even yet it may be doubted

whether Ben Jonson has attained anything like his proper place in English

literary history.

Putting aside the abiding influence of a good long-continued course of

misrepresentation, it is still not difficult to discover the source of this

under-estimate, without admitting the worst view or even any very bad view

of Ben Jonson's character, literary and personal. It may be granted that he

was rough and arrogant, a scholar who pushed scholarship to the verge of

pedantry, a critic who sometimes forgot that though a schoolmaster may be a

critic, a critic should not be merely a schoolmaster. His work is saturated

with that contempt of the _profanum vulgus_ which the _profanum vulgus_

(humanly enough) seldom fails to return. Moreover, it is extremely

voluminous, and it is by no means equal. Of his eighteen plays, three

only--_Every Man in his Humour_, _The Alchemist_, and the charming fragment

of _The Sad Shepherd_--can be praised as wholes. His lovely _Masques_ are

probably unread by all but a few scores, if so many, in each generation.

His noble sinewy prose is, for the most part, unattractive in subject. His

minor poems, though not a few of them are known even to smatterers in

literature, are as a whole (or at least it would seem so) unknown. Yet his

merits are extraordinary. "Never" in his plays (save _The Sad Shepherd_)

"tender," and still more rarely "sublime," he yet, in words much better

applied to him than to his pupil Dryden, "wrestles with and conquers time."

Even his enemies admit his learning, his vigour, his astonishing power of

work. What is less generally admitted, despite in one case at least the

celebrity of the facts that prove it, is his observation, his invention,

and at times his anomalous and seemingly contradictory power of grace and

sweetness. There is no more singular example of the proverb, "Out of the

eater came forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness," which has been

happily applied to Victor Hugo, than the composition, by the rugged author

of _Sejanus_ and _Catiline_, of _The Devil is an Ass_ and _Bartholomew

Fair_, of such things as

"Here lies to each her parents ruth;"

or the magnificent song,

"Drink to me only with thine eyes;"

or the crown and flower of all epitaphs,

"Underneath this sable herse."[33]

[33] Ben is sometimes deprived of this, _me judice_, most irreligiously.

But these three universally-known poems only express in quintessence a

quality of Jonson's which is spread all about his minor pieces, which

appears again perfectly in _The Sad Shepherd_, and which he seems to have

kept out of his plays proper rather from bravado than for any other reason.

His prose will be noticed separately in the next chapter, but it may be

observed here that it is saturated with the same literary flavour which

pervades all his work. None of his dramatic fellows wrote anything that can

compare to it, just as none of them wrote anything that surpasses the songs

and snatches in his plays, and the best things in his miscellaneous works.

The one title which no competent criticism has ever grudged him is that of

best epitaph-writer in the English language, and only those who have failed

to consider the difficulties and the charm of that class of composition

will consider this faint praise. Nevertheless, it was no doubt upon drama

that Jonson concentrated his powers, and the unfavourable judgments which

have been delivered on him chiefly refer to this.

A good deal of controversy has arisen out of the attribution to him, which

is at least as old as _The Return from Parnassus_, of being minded to

classicise the English drama. It is certain that he set a value on the

Unities which no other English dramatist has set, and that in _The

Alchemist_ at least he has given something like a perfect example of them,

which is at the same time an admirable play. Whether this attention is at

all responsible for the defects which are certainly found in his work is a

very large question. It cannot be denied that in that work, with perhaps

the single exception just mentioned, the reader (it is, except in the case

of _Every Man in his Humour_, generations since the playgoer had any

opportunity of judging) finds a certain absence of sympathetic attraction,

as well as, for all the formal unity of the pieces, a lack of that fusing

poetic force which makes detail into a whole. The amazing strength of

Jonson's genius, the power with which he has compelled all manner of

unlikely elements into his service, is evident enough, but the result

usually wants charm. The drawbacks are (always excepting _The Alchemist_)

least perceptible in _Every Man in his Humour_, the first sprightly

runnings (unless _The Case is Altered_ is older) of Jonson's fancy, the

freshest example of his sharp observation of "humours." Later he sometimes

overdid this observation, or rather he failed to bring its results

sufficiently into poetic or dramatic form, and, therefore, is too much for

an age and too little for all time. But _Every Man in his Humour_ is really

charming. Bobadil, Master Stephen, and Kitely attain to the first rank of

dramatic characters, and others are not far behind them in this respect.

The next play, _Every Man out of his Humour_, is a great contrast, being,

as even the doughty Gifford admits, distinctly uninteresting as a whole,

despite numerous fine passages. Perhaps a little of its want of attraction

must be set down to a pestilent habit of Jonson's, which he had at one

time thought of applying to _Every Man in his Humour_, the habit of giving

foreign, chiefly Italian, appellations to his characters, describing, and

as it were labelling them--Deliro, Macilente, and the like. This gives an

air of unreality, a figurehead and type character. _Cynthia's Revels_ has

the same defects, but is to some extent saved by its sharp raillery of

euphuism. With _The Poetaster_ Jonson began to rise again. I think myself

that the personages and machinery of the Augustan Court would be much

better away, and that the implied satire on contemporaries would be tedious

if it could not, as it fortunately can, be altogether neglected. But in

spite of these drawbacks, the piece is good. Of _Sejanus_ and Jonson's

later Roman play _Catiline_ I think, I confess, better than the majority of

critics appear to think. That they have any very intense tragic interest

will, indeed, hardly be pretended, and the unfortunate but inevitable

comparison with _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_ has done them great and

very unjust harm. Less human than Shakespere's "godlike Romans" (who are as

human as they are godlike), Jonson's are undoubtedly more Roman, and this,

if it is not entirely an attraction, is in its way a merit. But it was not

till after _Sejanus_ that the full power of Jonson appeared. His three next

plays, _Volpone_, _Epicene_, and _The Alchemist_, could not have been

written by any one but himself, and, had they not been written, would have

left a gap in English which nothing from any other literature could supply.

If his attitude had been a little less virtuous and a little more

sarcastic, Jonson would in these three plays have anticipated Swift. Of the

three, I prefer the first and the last--the last being the best of all.

_Epicene_ or the _Silent Woman_ was specially liked by the next generation

because of its regularity, and of the skill with which the various humours

are all wrought into the main plot. Both these things are undeniable, and

many of the humours are in themselves amusing enough. But still there is

something wanting, which is supplied in _Volpone_ and _The Alchemist_. It

has been asked whether that disregard of probability, which is one of

Jonson's greatest faults, does not appear in the recklessness with which

"The Fox" exposes himself to utter ruin, not so much to gratify any sensual

desire or obtain any material advantage, as simply to indulge his combined

hypocrisy and cynicism to the very utmost. The answer to this question will

very much depend on each reader's taste and experience. It is undeniable

that there have been examples of perverse indulgence in wickedness for

wickedness' sake, which, rare as they are, go far to justify the creation

of Volpone. But the unredeemed villany of the hero, with whom it is

impossible in any way to sympathise, and the sheer brutality of the

fortune-hunting dupes who surround him, make it easier to admire than to

like the play. I have little doubt that Jonson was to some extent sensible

of this, for the comic episode or underplot of Sir Politick and Lady

Would-be is very much more loosely connected with the centre interest (it

is only by courtesy that it can be said to be connected at all), than is

usual with him, and this is an argument in favour of its having been

introduced as a makeweight.

From the drawbacks of both these pieces _The Alchemist_ is wholly free.

Jonson here escaped his usual pitfall of the unsympathetic, for the vices

and follies he satirises are not loathsome, only contemptible at worst, and

not always that. He found an opportunity of exercising his extraordinary

faculty of concentration as he nowhere else did, and has given us in Sir

Epicure Mammon a really magnificent picture of concupiscence, of sensual

appetite generally, sublimed by heat of imagination into something really

poetic. The triumvirate of adventurers, Subtle, Dol and Face (for Dol has

virile qualities), are not respectable, but one does not hate them; and the

gulls are perfection. If any character could be spared it is the "Angry

Boy," a young person whose humours, as Jonson himself admits of another

character elsewhere, are "more tedious than diverting." _The Alchemist_ was

followed by _Catiline_, and _Catiline_ by _Bartholomew Fair_, a play in

which singularly vivid and minute pictures of manners, very amusing

sketches of character, and some capital satire on the Puritans, do not

entirely redeem a profusion of the coarsest possible language and incident.

_The Devil is an Ass_ comes next in time, and though no single character is

the equal of Zeal-of-the-land Busy in _Bartholomew Fair_, the play is even

more amusing. The four last plays, _The Staple of News_, _The Magnetic

Lady_, _The New Inn_, and _The Tale of a Tub_, which Jonson produced after

long absence from the stage, were not successful, and were both unkindly

and unjustly called by Dryden "Ben's dotages." As for the charming _Sad

Shepherd_, it was never acted, and is now unfinished, though it is believed

that the poet completed it. It stands midway as a pastoral _Feerie_ between

his regular plays and the great collection of ingenious and graceful

masques and entertainments, which are at the top of all such things in

England (unless _Comus_ be called a masque), and which are worth comparing

with the ballets and spectacle pieces of Moliere. Perhaps a complete survey

of Jonson's work indicates, as his greatest defect, the want of passion. He

could be vigorous, he could be dignified, he could be broadly humorous,

and, as has been said, he could combine with these the apparently

incompatible, or, at least, not closely-connected faculty of grace. Of

passion, of rapture, there is no trace in him, except in the single

instance--in fire mingled with earth--of Sir Epicure Mammon. But the two

following passages--one from _Sejanus_, one from _The Sad Shepherd_--will

show his dignity and his pathos. No extract in brief could show his

humour:--

_Arr._ "I would begin to study 'em,[34] if I thought

They would secure me. May I pray to Jove

In secret and be safe? ay, or aloud,

With open wishes, so I do not mention

Tiberius or Sejanus? Yes I must,

If I speak out. 'Tis hard that. May I think

And not be racked? What danger is't to dream,

Talk in one's sleep or cough? Who knows the laws?

May I shake my head without a comment? Say

It rains, or it holds up, and not be thrown

Upon the Gemonies? These now are things,

Whereon men's fortune, yea, their fate depends.

Nothing hath privilege 'gainst the violent ear.

No place, no day, no hour, we see, is free,

Not our religious and most sacred times

From some one kind of cruelty: all matter,

Nay, all occasion pleaseth. Madmen's rage,

The idleness of drunkards, women's nothing,

Jester's simplicity, all, all is good

That can be catcht at. Nor is now the event

Of any person, or for any crime

To be expected; for 'tis always one:

Death, with some little difference of place

Or time. What's this? Prince Nero, guarded!"

[34] To wit the "arts" of suffering and being silent, by which his

interlocutor Lepidus has explained his own safety from delation.

* * * * *

_AEg._ "A spring, now she is dead! of what? of thorns,

Briars and brambles? thistles, burs and docks?

Cold hemlock, yews? the mandrake, or the box?

These may grow still: but what can spring beside?

Did not the whole earth sicken when she died

As if there since did fall one drop of dew,

But what was wept for her! or any stalk

Did bear a flower, or any branch a bloom,

After her wreath was made! In faith, in faith,

You do not fair to put these things upon me,

Which can in no sort be: Earine

Who had her very being and her name

With the first knots or buddings of the spring,

Born with the primrose and the violet

Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smiled

And Venus led the Graces out to dance,

And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap

Leaped out and made their solemn conjuration

To last but while she lived! Do not I know

How the vale withered the same day? how Dove,

Dean, Eye, and Erwash, Idel, Snite and Soare

Each broke his urn, and twenty waters more

That swelled proud Trent, shrunk themselves dry, that since

No sun or moon, or other cheerful star,

Looked out of heaven, but all the cope was dark

As it were hung so for her exequies!

And not a voice or sound to ring her knell

But of that dismal pair, the screeching owl

And buzzing hornet! Hark! hark! hark! the foul

Bird! how she flutters with her wicker wings!

Peace! you shall hear her screech.

_Cla._ Good Karolin, sing,

Help to divert this phant'sy.

_Kar._ All I can:

_Sings while AEg. reads the song._

'Though I am young and cannot tell

Either what Death or Love is well,

Yet I have heard they both bear darts

And both do aim at human hearts:

And then again, I have been told,

Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold;

So that I fear they do but bring

Extremes to touch and mean one thing.

'As in a ruin we it call

One thing to be blown up, or fall;

Or to our end, like way may have,

By a flash of lightning or a wave:

So Love's inflamed shaft or brand

May kill as soon as Death's cold hand,

Except Love's fires the virtue have

To fright the frost out of the grave.'"

Of no two contemporary men of letters in England can it be said that they

were, intellectually speaking, so near akin as Ben Jonson and George

Chapman. The translator of Homer was a good deal older than Jonson, and

exceedingly little is known of his life. He was pretty certainly born near

Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the striking situation of which points his

reference to it even in these railroad days. The date is uncertain--it may

have been 1557, and was certainly not later than 1559--so that he was the

oldest of the later Elizabethan school who survived into the Caroline

period. He perhaps entered the University of Oxford in 1574. His first

known work, _The Shadow of Night_, dates from 1594; and a reference of

Meres's shows that he was known for tragedy four years later. In 1613 he,

Jonson (a constant friend of his whose mutual fidelity refutes of itself

the silly calumnies as to Jonson's enviousness, for of Chapman only, among

his colleagues, was he likely to be jealous), and Marston were partners in

the venture of _Eastward Ho!_ which, for some real or fancied slight on

Scotland, exposed the authors to danger of the law. He was certainly a

_protege_ of Prince Henry, the English Marcellus, and he seems to have

received patronage from a much less blameless patron, Carr, Earl of

Somerset. His literary activity was continuous and equal, but it was in his

later days that he attempted and won the crown of the greatest of English

translators. "Georgius Chapmannus, Homeri metaphrastes" the posy of his

portrait runs, and he himself seems to have quite sunk any expectation of

fame from his original work in the expectation of remembrance as a

translator of the Prince of Poets. Many other interesting traits suggest,

rather than ascertain, themselves in reference to him, such as his possible

connection with the early despatch of English troupes of players to

Germany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for English

tragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What is

certain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to have

lived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of his

time; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of English

Fontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of English

poets; and that absolutely no base personal gossip tarnishes his poetical

fame. The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his

work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the

original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne's has done, for the first time,

justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, among

such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto's

identifies him with the "rival poet" of Shakespere's _Sonnets_. But these

are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction is

the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifying

the traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence,

and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack of

scholarship, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, was

entirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in

other matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a

lover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous and

peculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary man

of his country. It may be that his memory has gained by escaping the danger

of such revelations or scandals as the Jonson confessions to Drummond, and

that the lack of attraction to the ordinary reader in his work has saved

him from that comparison which (it has perhaps been urged _ad nauseam_) is

the bane of just literary judgment. To those who always strive to waive all

such considerations, these things will make but little difference.

The only complete edition of Chapman's works dates from our own days, and

its three volumes correspond to a real division of subject. Although, in

common with all these writers, Chapman has had much uncertain and some

improbable work fathered on him, his certain dramas supply one of the most

interesting studies in our period. As usual with everyone except Shakespere

and (it is a fair reason for the relatively disproportionate estimate of

these so long held) Beaumont and Fletcher, they are extremely unequal. Not

a certain work of Chapman is void of interest. The famous _Eastward Ho!_

(one of the liveliest comedies of the period dealing with London life) was

the work of three great writers, and it is not easy to distribute its

collaboration. That it is not swamped with "humours" may prove that

Jonson's learned sock was put on by others. That it is neither grossly

indecent nor extravagantly sanguinary, shows that Marston had not the chief

hand in it, and so we are left to Chapman. What he could do is not shown in

the list of his own certain plays till _All Fools_. _The Blind Beggar of

Alexandria_ (1596?) and _An Humorous Day's Mirth_ show that singular

promiscuousness--that heaping together of scenes without order or

connection--which we have noticed in the first dramatic period, not to

mention that the way in which the characters speak of themselves, not as

"I" but by their names in the third person, is also unmistakable. But _All

Fools_ is a much more noteworthy piece, and though Mr. Swinburne may have

praised it rather highly, it would certainly take place in a collection of

the score best comedies of the time not written by Shakespere. _The

Gentleman Usher_ and _Monsieur d'Olive_ belong to the same school of

humorous, not too pedantic comedy, and then we come to the strange series

of Chapman's French tragedies, _Bussy d'Ambois_, _The Revenge of Bussy

d'Ambois_, _Byron's Conspiracy_, _The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron_,

and _The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France_. These singular plays

stand by themselves. Whether the strong influence which Marlowe exercised

on Chapman led the later poet (who it must be remembered was not the

younger) to continue _The Massacre of Paris_, or what other cause begat

them, cannot now be asserted or even guessed without lost labour. A famous

criticism of Dryden's attests his attention to them, but does not, perhaps,

to those who have studied Dryden deeply, quite express the influence which

Chapman had on the leader of post-Restoration tragedy. As plays, the whole

five are models of what plays should not be; in parts, they are models of

what plays should be. Then Chapman returned to the humour-comedy and

produced two capital specimens of it in _May-Day_ and _The Widow's Tears_.

_Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany_, which contains long passages of German,

and _Revenge for Honour_, two tragedies which were not published till long

after Chapman's death, are to my mind very dubiously his. Mr. Swinburne, in

dealing with them, availed himself of the hypothesis of a mellowing, but at

the same time weakening of power by age. It may be so, and I have not the

slightest intention of pronouncing decidedly on the subject. They bear to

my mind much more mark of the decadent period of Charles I., when the

secret of blank verse was for a time lost, and when even men who had lived

in personal friendship with their great predecessors lapsed into the

slipshod stuff that we find in Davenant, in his followers, and among them

even in the earlier plays of Dryden. It is, of course, true that this

loosening and slackening of the standard betrays itself even before the

death of Chapman, which happened in 1634. But I cannot believe that the

author of _Bussy d'Ambois_ (where the verse is rude enough but never lax)

and the contemporary or elder of Shakespere, Marlowe, and all the great

race, could ever have been guilty of the slovenliness which, throughout,

marks _Revenge for Honour_.

The second part of Chapman's work, his original verse, is much inferior in

bulk and in interest of matter to the first and third. Yet, is it not

perhaps inferior to either in giving evidence of the author's

peculiarities; while the very best thing he ever wrote (a magnificent

passage in _The Tears of Peace_) is contained in it. Its component parts

are, however, sufficiently odd. It opens with a strange poem called _The

Shadow of Night_, which Mr. Swinburne is not wrong in classing among the

obscurest works in English. The mischievous fashion of enigmatic writing,

already glanced at in the section on satire, was perhaps an offshoot of

euphuism; and certainly Chapman, who never exhibits much taint of euphuism

proper, here out-Herods Herod and out-Tourneurs Tourneur. It was followed

by an equally singular attempt at the luscious school of which _Venus and

Adonis_ is the most famous. _Ovid's Banquet of Sense_ has received high

praise from critics whom I esteem. For my own part I should say that it is

the most curious instance of a radically unpassionate nature, trying to

lash itself into passion, that our language contains. Then Chapman tried an

even bolder flight in the same dialect--the continuation of Marlowe's

unfinished _Hero and Leander_. In this attempt, either by sheer force of

his sinewy athletics, or by some inspiration derived from the "Dead

Shepherd," his predecessor, he did not fail, curious as is the contrast of

the two parts. _The Tears of Peace_, which contains his finest work, is in

honour of Prince Henry--a worthy work on a worthy subject, which was

followed up later by an epicedium on the prince's lamented death. Besides

some epigrams and sonnets, the chief other piece of this division is the

disastrous _Andromeda Liberata_, which unluckily celebrates the

nuptials--stained with murder, adultery, and crime of all sorts--of Frances

Howard and Robert Carr. It is in Chapman's most allusive and thorniest

style, but is less interesting intrinsically than as having given occasion

to an indignant prose vindication by the poet, which, considering his

self-evident honesty, is the most valuable document in existence for

explaining the apparently grovelling panegyric of the sixteenth and

seventeenth century. It makes clear (what indeed an intelligent reader

might gather for himself) that the traditional respect for rank and

station, uniting with the tendency to look for patterns and precedents in

the classics for almost everything, made of these panegyrics a kind of

school exercise, in which the excellence of the subject was taken for

granted, and the utmost hyperbole of praise was only a "common form" of

composition, to which the poet imparted or added what grace of style or

fancy he could, with hardly a notion of his ascriptions being taken

literally.

But if Chapman's dramas have been greatly undervalued, and if his original

poems are an invaluable help to the study of the time, there is no doubt

that it is as a translator that he made and kept the strongest hold on the

English mind. He himself spoke of his Homeric translations (which he began

as early as 1598, doing also Hesiod, some Juvenal, and some minor

fragments, Pseudo-Virgilian, Petrarchian and others) as "the work that he

was born to do." His version, with all its faults, outlived the popularity

even of Pope, was for more than two centuries the resort of all who, unable

to read Greek, wished to know what the Greek was, and, despite the finical

scholarship of the present day, is likely to survive all the attempts made

with us. I speak with all humility, but as having learnt Homer from Homer

himself, and not from any translation, prose or verse. I am perfectly aware

of Chapman's outrageous liberties, of his occasional unfaithfulness (for a

libertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of the

condescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscures

not more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporary

influences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original.

But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been

reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer

Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in

the Iliad than in the Odyssey--an advantage resulting from his choice of

vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give

the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation

between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener,

which, at its best, is the hexameter's nearest substitute. With Chapman it

is not always at its best--very far from it. If he never quite relapses

into the sheer doggerel of the First Period, he sometimes comes perilously

near to it. But he constantly lifts his wings and soars in a quite

different measure which, when he keeps it up for a little, gives a

narrative vehicle unsurpassed, and hardly equalled, in English poetry for

variation of movement and steady forward flow combined. The one point in

which the Homeric hexameter is unmatched among metres is its combination of

steady advance with innumerable ripples and eddies in its course, and it is

here that Chapman (though of course not fully) can partly match it. It is,

however, one of the testimonies to the supreme merit of the Homeric poems

that every age seems to try to imitate them in its own special mannerisms,

and that, consequently, no age is satisfied with the attempts of another.

It is a second, that those who know the original demur at all.

The characteristics of Chapman, then, are very much those of Jonson with a

difference. Both had the same incapacity of unlaboured and forceless art,

the same insensibility to passion, the same inability to rise above mere

humours and contemporary oddities into the region of universal poetry. Both

had the same extensive learning, the same immense energy, the same (if it

must be said) arrogance and contempt of the vulgar. In casual strokes,

though not in sustained grasp, Chapman was Jonson's superior; but unlike

Jonson he had no lyric gift, and unlike Jonson he let his learning and his

ambitious thought clog and obscure the flow of his English. Nor does he

show in any of his original work the creative force of his younger friend.

With the highest opinion reasonably possible of Chapman's dramas, we cannot

imagine him for a moment composing a _Volpone_ or an _Alchemist_--even a

_Bartholomew Fair_; while he was equally, or still more, incapable of

Jonson's triumphs in epigram and epitaph, in song and ode. A certain

shapelessness is characteristic of everything that Chapman did--an

inability, as Mr. Swinburne (to whom every one who now writes on Chapman

must acknowledge indebtedness), has said, "to clear his mouth of pebbles,

and his brow of fog." His long literary life, which must have exceeded half

a century, and his great learning, forbid our setting this down as it may

be set in the case of many of his contemporaries, and especially in the

case of those two to whom we are now coming, as due to youth, to the

imperfect state of surrounding culture, to want of time for perfecting his

work, and so forth. He is the "Begue de Vilaines," the heroic Stammerer of

English literature--a man who evidently had some congenital defect which

all his fire and force, all his care and curiosity, could not overcome. Yet

are his doings great, and it is at least probable that if he had felt less

difficulty in original work, he would not have been prompted to set about

and finish the noble work of translation which is among the best products

of an unsatisfactory kind, and which will outlive the cavils of generations

of etymologists and aorist-grinders. He has been so little read that four

specimens of his different manners--the early "tenebrous" style of _The

Shadow of Night_, the famous passage from _Bussy d'Ambois_ which excited

Lamb's enthusiasm, and a sample from both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--may be

given:

"In this vast thicket (whose description's task

The pens of fairies and of fiends would ask:

So more than human-thoughted horrible)

The souls of such as lived implausible,

In happy empire of this goddess' glories,

And scorned to crown her fanes with sacrifice,[35]

Did ceaseless walk; exspiring fearful groans,

Curses and threats for their confusions.

Her darts, and arrows, some of them had slain:

Others her dogs eat, painting her disdain,

After she had transformed them into beasts:

Others her monsters carried to their nests,

Rent them in pieces, and their spirits sent

To this blind shade, to wail their banishment.

The huntsmen hearing (since they could not hear)

Their hounds at fault, in eager chase drew near,

Mounted on lions, unicorns, and boars,

And saw their hounds lie licking of their sores

Some yearning at the shroud, as if they chid

Her stinging tongues, that did their chase forbid:

By which they knew the game was that way gone.

Then each man forced the beast he rode upon,

T' assault the thicket; whose repulsive thorns

So gall'd the lions, boars, and unicorns,

Dragons and wolves, that half their courages

Were spent in roars, and sounds of heaviness:

Yet being the princeliest, and hardiest beasts,

That gave chief fame to those Ortygian forests,

And all their riders furious of their sport,

A fresh assault they gave, in desperate sort:

And with their falchions made their way in wounds,

The thicket open'd, and let in the hounds."

[35] The rhyme, bad as it is, is not unprecedented.

* * * * *

_Bu._ "What dismal change is here; the good old Friar

Is murther'd, being made known to serve my love;

And now his restless spirit would forewarn me

Of some plot dangerous and imminent.

Note what he wants? He wants his upper weed,

He wants his life and body; which of these

Should be the want he means, and may supply me

With any fit forewarning? This strange vision

(Together with the dark prediction

Used by the Prince of Darkness that was raised

By this embodied shadow) stir my thoughts

With reminiscion of the spirit's promise,

Who told me, that by any invocation

I should have power to raise him, though it wanted

The powerful words and decent rites of art;

Never had my set brain such need of spirit

T' instruct and cheer it; now, then, I will claim

Performance of his free and gentle vow

T' appear in greater light and make more plain

His rugged oracle. I long to know

How my dear mistress fares, and be inform'd

What hand she now holds on the troubled blood

Of her incensed lord. Methought the spirit

(When he had utter'd his perplex'd presage)

Threw his changed countenance headlong into clouds,

His forehead bent, as it would hide his face,

He knock'd his chin against his darken'd breast,

And struck a churlish silence through his powers.

Terror of darkness! O, thou king of flames!

That with thy music-footed horse dost strike

The clear light out of crystal on dark earth,

And hurl'st instructive fire about the world,

Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night

That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle;

Or thou great prince of shades where never sun

Sticks his far darted beams, whose eyes are made

To shine in darkness, and see ever best

Where sense is blindest: open now the heart

Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear

Of some ill it includes, would fain lie hid,

And rise thou with it in thy greater light."

* * * * *

"For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about

To make him cast the fleet such fire, as never should go out;

Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise

The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.[36]

From him yet the repulse was then to be on Troy conferred,

The honour of it given the Greeks; which thinking on, he stirr'd

With such addition of his spirit, the spirit Hector bore

To burn the fleet, that of itself was hot enough before.

But now he fared like Mars himself, so brandishing his lance

As, through the deep shades of a wood, a raging fire should glance,

Held up to all eyes by a hill; about his lips a foam

Stood as when th' ocean is enraged; his eyes were overcome

With fervour and resembled flames, set off by his dark brows,

And from his temples his bright helm abhorred lightnings throws;

For Jove, from forth the sphere of stars, to his state put his own

And all the blaze of both the hosts confined in him alone.

And all this was, since after this he had not long to live,

This lightning flew before his death, which Pallas was to give

(A small time thence, and now prepared) beneath the violence

Of great Pelides. In meantime, his present eminence

Thought all things under it; and he, still where he saw the stands

Of greatest strength and bravest arm'd, there he would prove his hands,

Or no where; offering to break through, but that passed all his power

Although his will were past all theirs, they stood him like a tower

Conjoined so firm, that as a rock, exceeding high and great,

And standing near the hoary sea, bears many a boisterous threat

Of high-voiced winds and billows huge, belched on it by the storms;

So stood the Greeks great Hector's charge, nor stirred their battellous

forms."

[36] This line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour at

his best.

* * * * *

"This the Goddess told,

And then the morning in her throne of gold

Surveyed the vast world; by whose orient light

The nymph adorn'd me with attires as bright,

Her own hands putting on both shirt and weed

Robes fine, and curious, and upon my head

An ornament that glittered like a flame;

Girt me in gold; and forth betimes I came

Amongst my soldiers, roused them all from sleep,

And bade them now no more observance keep

Of ease, and feast, but straight a shipboard fall,

For now the Goddess had inform'd me all.

Their noble spirits agreed; nor yet so clear

Could I bring all off, but Elpenor there

His heedless life left. He was youngest man

Of all my company, and one that wan

Least fame for arms, as little for his brain;

Who (too much steep'd in wine and so made fain

To get refreshing by the cool of sleep,

Apart his fellows plung'd in vapours deep,

And they as high in tumult of their way)

Suddenly waked and (quite out of the stay

A sober mind had given him) would descend

A huge long ladder, forward, and an end

Fell from the very roof, full pitching on

The dearest joint his head was placed upon,

Which quite dissolved, let loose his soul to hell."

With regard to Marston (of whose little-known personality something has

been said in connection with his satires) I find myself somewhat unable to

agree with the generality of critics, who seem to me to have been rather

taken in by his blood-and-thunder work, his transpontine declamation

against tyrants, and his affectation of a gloomy or furious scorn against

mankind. The uncouthness, as well as the suspicion of insincerity, which we

noted in his satirical work, extend, as it seems to me, also to his dramas;

and if we class him as a worker in horrors with Marlowe earlier, and with

Webster and Ford later, the chief result will be to show his extreme

inferiority to them. He is even below Tourneur in this respect, while, like

Tourneur, he is exposed to the charge of utterly neglecting congruity and

proportion. With him we relapse not merely from the luminous perfection of

Shakespere, from the sane order of work which was continued through

Fletcher, and the best of Fletcher's followers, but from the more

artificial unity of Jonson, back into the chaotic extravagances of the

First Period. Marston, like the rest, is fond of laughing at _Jeronimo_,

but his own tragic construction and some of his own tragic scenes are

hardly less bombastic, and scarcely at all less promiscuous than the

tangled horrors of that famous melodrama. Marston, it is true, has lucid

intervals--even many of them. Hazlitt has succeeded in quoting many

beautiful passages, one of which was curiously echoed in the next age by

Nat. Lee, in whom, indeed, there was a strong vein of Elizabethan

melodrama. The sarcasm on philosophical study in _What You Will_ is one of

the very best things of its own kind in the range of English drama,--light,

sustained, not too long nor too short, in fact, thoroughly "hit off."

"_Delight_ my spaniel slept, whilst I baused[37] leaves,

Tossed o'er the dunces, pored on the old print

Of titled words, and still my spaniel slept.

Whilst I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh,

Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept,

And still I held converse with Zabarell,

Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws

Of antique Donate: still my spaniel slept.

Still on went I: first _an sit anima_,

Then, an' 'twere mortal. O hold, hold!

At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears,

Amain [pell-mell] together--still my spaniel slept.

Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, fixed,

_Ex traduce_; but whether 't had free will

Or no, hot philosophers

Stood banding factions all so strongly propped,

I staggered, knew not which was firmer part;

But thought, quoted, read, observed and pried,

Stuffed noting-books, and still my spaniel slept.

At length he waked and yawned, and by yon sky

For aught I know, he knew as much as I."

[37] Kissed.

There is real pathos in _Antonio and Mellida_, and real satire in

_Parasitaster_ and _The Malcontent_. Hazlitt (who had a very high opinion

of Marston) admits that the remarkable inequalities of this last piece

"seem to show want of interest in the subject." This is an odd explanation,

but I suspect it is really only an anticipation in more favourable words of

my own theory, that Marston's tragic and satiric moods were not really

sincere; that he was a clever man who found a fashion of satire and a

fashion of blood-and-thunder tragedy prevailing, and threw himself into

both without much or any heart in the matter. This is supported by the

curious fact that almost all his plays (at least those extant) were

produced within a very few years, 1602-1607, though he lived some thirty

years after the latter date, and quite twenty after his last dated

appearances in literature, _The Insatiate Countess_, and _Eastward Ho!_

That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who

succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for _saeva

indignatio_, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a

description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the

time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the

late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy,"

mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics of

his personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-moved

marionettes), and discovers "amiable and admirable characters" among them,

I am compelled not, of course, to be positive that my own very different

estimate is right, but to wonder at the singularly different way in which

the same things strike different persons, who are not as a rule likely to

look at them from very different points of view.

Marston's plays, however, are both powerful enough and famous enough to

call for a somewhat more detailed notice. _Antonio and Mellida_, the

earliest and if not the best as a whole, that which contains the finest

scenes and fragments, is in two parts--the second being more properly

called _The Revenge of Antonio_. The revenge itself is of the exaggerated

character which was so popular with the Elizabethan dramatists, but in

which (except in the famous Cornwall and Gloucester scene in _Lear_)

Shakespere never indulged after his earliest days. The wicked tyrant's

tongue is torn out, his murdered son's body is thrown down before him, and

then the conspirators, standing round, gibe, curse, and rant at him for a

couple of pages before they plunge their swords into his body. This goodly

conclusion is led up to by a sufficient quantity of antecedent and casual

crimes, together with much not very excellent fooling by a court gull,

Balurdo, who might be compared with Shakespere's fools of the same kind, to

the very great advantage of those who do not appreciate the latter. The

beautiful descriptive and reflective passages which, in Lamb's _Extracts_,

gave the play its reputation, chiefly occur towards the beginning, and this

is the best of them:--

_And._ "Why man, I never was a Prince till now.

'Tis not the bared pate, the bended knees,

Gilt tipstaves, Tyrian purple, chairs of state,

Troops of pied butterflies, that flutter still

In greatness summer, that confirm a prince:

'Tis not the unsavoury breath of multitudes,

Shouting and clapping, with confused din;

That makes a prince. No, Lucio, he's a king,

A true right king, that dares do aught save wrong,

Fears nothing mortal, but to be unjust,

Who is not blown up with the flattering puffs

Of spungy sycophants: who stands unmov'd

Despite the jostling of opinion:

Who can enjoy himself, maugre the throng

That strive to press his quiet out of him:

Who sits upon Jove's footstool as I do

Adoring, not affecting majesty:

Whose brow is wreathed with the silver crown

Of clear content: this, Lucio, is a king,

And of this empire, every man's possessed

That's worth his soul."

_Sophonisba_, which followed, is much less rambling, but as bloody and

extravagant. The scene where the witch Erichtho plays Succubus to Syphax,

instead of the heroine, and in her form, has touches which partly, but not

wholly, redeem its extravagance, and the end is dignified and good. _What

You Will_, a comedy of intrigue, is necessarily free from Marston's worst

faults, and here the admirable passage quoted above occurs. But the main

plot--which turns not only on the courtship, by a mere fribble, of a lady

whose husband is supposed to be dead, and who has very complacently

forgotten all about him, but on a ridiculous plot to foist a pretender off

as the dead husband itself--is simply absurd. The lack of probability,

which is the curse of the minor Elizabethan drama, hardly anywhere appears

more glaringly. _Parasitaster_, or _The Fawn_, a satirical comedy, is much

better, but the jealous hatred of _The Dutch Courtesan_ is again not made

probable. Then came Marston's completest work in drama, _The Malcontent_,

an anticipation, after Elizabethan fashion, of _Le Misanthrope_ and _The

Plain Dealer_. Though not free from Marston's two chief vices of coarseness

and exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the best

thing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such a

husband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasm

of adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude. It is to be observed

that both in _The Fawn_ and _The Malcontent_ there are disguised dukes--a

fact not testifying any very great originality, even in borrowing. Of

_Eastward Ho!_ we have already spoken, and it is by no means certain that

_The Insatiate Countess_ is Marston's. His reputation would not lose much

were it not. A _fabliau_-like underplot of the machinations of two

light-o'-love citizens' wives against their husbands is not unamusing, but

the main story of the Countess Isabella, a modern Messalina (except that

she adds cruelty to the vices of Messalina) who alternately courts lovers

and induces their successors to assassinate them, is in the worst style of

the whole time--the tragedy of lust that is not dignified by the slightest

passion, and of murder that is not excused by the slightest poetry of

motive or treatment. Though the writing is not of the lowest order, it

might have been composed by any one of some thirty or forty writers. It was

actually attributed at the time to William Barksted, a minor poet of some

power, and I am inclined to think it not Marston's, though my own estimate

of him is, as will have been seen, not so high as some other estimates. It

is because those estimates appear to me unduly high that I have rather

accentuated the expression of my own lower one. For the last century, and

perhaps longer, the language of hyperbole has been but too common about our

dramatists, and I have known more than one case in which the extravagant

praise bestowed upon them has, when students have come to the works

themselves, had a very disastrous effect of disappointment. It is,

therefore, all the more necessary to be candid in criticism where criticism

seems to be required.

As to the last of our good company, there is fortunately very little risk

of difference of opinion. A hundred years ago Thomas Dekker was probably

little more than a name to all but professed students of Elizabethan

literature, and he waited longer than any of his fellows for due

recognition by presentation of his work in a complete form. It was not

until the year 1873 that his plays were collected; it was not till eleven

years later that his prose works had the same honour. Yet, since attention

was directed to Dekker in any way, the best authorities have been unanimous

in his praise. Lamb's famous outburst of enthusiasm, that he had "poetry

enough for anything," has been soberly endorsed by two full generations of

the best judges, and whatever differences of detail there may be as to his

work, it is becoming more and more the received, and correctly-received

opinion, that, as his collaborator Webster came nearest to Shakespere in

universalising certain types in the severer tragedy, so Dekker has the same

honour on the gently pathetic side. Yet this great honour is done to one of

the most shadowy personalities in literature. We have four goodly volumes

of his plays and five of his other works; yet of Thomas Dekker, the man, we

know absolutely less than of any one of his shadowy fellows. We do not know

when he was born, when he died, what he did other than writing in the

certainly long space between the two unknown dates. In 1637 he was by his

own words a man of threescore, which, as it has been justly remarked, may

mean anything between fifty-five and seventy. He was in circumstances a

complete contrast to his fellow-victim in Jonson's satire, Marston. Marston

was apparently a gentleman born and bred, well connected, well educated,

possessed of some property, able to make testamentary dispositions, and

probably in the latter part of his life, when Dekker was still toiling at

journalism of various kinds, a beneficed clergyman in country retirement.

Dekker was, it is to be feared, what the arrogance of certain members of

the literary profession has called, and calls, a gutter-journalist--a man

who had no regular preparation for the literary career, and who never

produced anything but hand-to-mouth work. Jonson went so far as to say that

he was a "rogue;" but Ben, though certainly not a rogue, was himself not to

be trusted when he spoke of people that he did not like; and if there was

any but innocent roguery in Dekker he has contrived to leave exactly the

opposite impression stamped on every piece of his work. And it is

particularly interesting to note, that constantly as he wrote in

collaboration, one invariable tone, and that the same as is to be found in

his undoubtedly independent work, appears alike in plays signed with him by

persons so different as Middleton and Webster, as Chettle and Ford. When

this is the case, the inference is certain, according to the strictest

rules of logic. We can define Dekker's idiosyncrasy almost more certainly

than if he had never written a line except under his own name. That

idiosyncrasy consists, first, of an exquisite lyrical faculty, which, in

the songs given in all collections of extracts, equals, or almost equals,

that of Shakespere; secondly, of a faculty for poetical comedy, for the

comedy which transcends and plays with, rather than grasps and exposes, the

vices and follies of men; thirdly, for a touch of pathos again to be evened

only to Shakespere's; and lastly, for a knack of representing women's

nature, for which, except in the master of all, we may look in vain

throughout the plentiful dramatic literature of the period, though touches

of it appear in Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield, in Heywood, in

Middleton, and in some of the anonymous plays which have been fathered

indifferently, and with indifferent hopelessness of identification, on some

of the greatest of names of the period, on some of the meanest, and on an

equal number of those that are neither great nor mean.

Dekker's very interesting prose works we shall treat in the next chapter,

together with the other tracts into whose class they fall, and some of his

plays may either go unnoticed, or, with those of the dramatists who

collaborated with him, and whose (notably in the case of _The Roaring

Girl_) they pretty evidently were more than his. His own characteristic

pieces, or those in which his touch shows most clearly, though they may not

be his entirely, are _The Shoemaker's Holiday_, _Old Fortunatus_,

_Satiromastix_, _Patient Grissil_, _The Honest Whore_, _The Whore of

Babylon_, _If it be not Good the Devil is in it_, _The Virgin Martyr_,

_Match me in London_, _The Son's Darling_, and _The Witch of Edmonton_. In

everyone of these the same characteristics appear, but the strangely

composite fashion of writing of the time makes them appear in differing

measures. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ is one of those innumerable and yet

singular pieces in which the taste of the time seems to have so much

delighted, and which seem so odd to modern taste,--pieces in which a plot

or underplot, as the case may be, of the purest comedy of manners, a mere

picture of the life, generally the lower middle-class life of the time, is

united with hardly a thought of real dramatic conjunction to another plot

of a romantic kind, in which noble and royal personages, with, it may be, a

dash of history, play their parts. The crowning instance of this is

Middleton's _Mayor of Queenborough_; but there are scores and hundreds of

others, and Dekker specially affects it. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ is

principally distinguished by the directness and raciness of its citizen

sketches. _Satiromastix_ (the second title of which is "The Untrussing of

the Humorous Poet") is Dekker's reply to _The Poetaster_, in which he

endeavours to retort Jonson's own machinery upon him. With his customary

disregard of congruity, however, he has mixed up the personages of Horace,

Crispinus, Demetrius, and Tucca, not with a Roman setting, but with a

purely romantic story of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, and the

king's attempt upon the fidelity of Tyrrel's bride. This incongruous

mixture gives one of the most charming scenes of his pen, the apparent

poisoning of Celestina by her father to save her honour. But as Lamb

himself candidly confessed, the effect of this in the original is marred,

if not ruined, by the farcical surroundings, and the more farcical upshot

of the scene itself,--the poisoning being, like Juliet's, a mere trick,

though very differently fortuned. In _Patient Grissil_ the two exquisite

songs, "Art thou poor" and "Golden slumbers kiss thine eyes," and the

sympathetic handling of Griselda's character (the one of all others to

appeal to Dekker) mark his work. In all the other plays the same notes

appear, and there is no doubt that Mr. Swinburne is wholly right in

singling out from _The Witch of Edmonton_ the feminine characters of Susan,

Winifred, and the witch herself, as showing Dekker's unmatched command of

the colours in which to paint womanhood. In the great debate as to the

authorship of _The Virgin Martyr_, everything is so much conjecture that it

is hard to pronounce authoritatively. Gifford's cool assumption that

everything bad in the play is Dekker's, and everything good Massinger's,

will not hold for a moment; but, on the other side, it must be remembered

that since Lamb there has been a distinct tendency to depreciate Massinger.

All that can be said is, that the grace and tenderness of the Virgin's part

are much more in accordance with what is certainly Dekker's than with what

is certainly Massinger's, and that either was quite capable of the Hircius

and Spungius passages which have excited so much disgust and

indignation--disgust and indignation which perhaps overlook the fact that

they were no doubt inserted with the express purpose of heightening, by

however clumsily designed a contrast, the virgin purity of Dorothea the

saint.

It will be seen that I have reserved _Old Fortunatus_ and _The Honest

Whore_ for separate notice. They illustrate, respectively, the power which

Dekker has in romantic poetry, and his command of vivid, tender, and subtle

portraiture in the characters, especially, of women. Both, and especially

the earlier play, exhibit also his rapid careless writing, and his

ignorance of, or indifference to, the construction of a clear and

distinctly outlined plot. _Old Fortunatus_ tells the well-known story of

the wishing cap and purse, with a kind of addition showing how these fare

in the hands of _Fortunatus's_ sons, and with a wild intermixture

(according to the luckless habit above noted) of kings and lords, and

pseudo-historical incidents. No example of the kind is more chaotic in

movement and action. But the interlude of Fortune with which it is ushered

in is conceived in the highest romantic spirit, and told in verse of

wonderful effectiveness, not to mention two beautiful songs; and throughout

the play the allegorical or supernatural passages show the same character.

Nor are the more prosaic parts inferior, as, for instance, the pretty

dialogue of Orleans and Galloway, cited by Lamb, and the fine passage where

Andelocia says what he will do "to-morrow."

_Fort._ "No more: curse on: your cries to me are music,

And fill the sacred roundure of mine ears

With tunes more sweet than moving of the spheres.

Curse on: on our celestial brows do sit

Unnumbered smiles, which then leap from their throne

When they see peasants dance and monarchs groan.

Behold you not this Globe, this golden bowl,

This toy call'd world at our Imperial feet?

This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports.

Sometimes I strike it up into the air,

And then create I Emperors and Kings.

Sometimes I spurn it: at which spurn crawls out

That wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools.

'Tis I that tumble Princes from their thrones,

And gild false brows with glittering diadems.

'Tis I that tread on necks of conquerors,

And when like semi-gods they have been drawn,

In ivory chariots to the capitol,

Circled about with wonder of all eyes

The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts

Being swoll'n with their own greatness, I have prick'd

The bladder of their pride, and made them die,

As water bubbles, without memory.

I thrust base cowards into honour's chair,

Whilst the true spirited soldier stands by

Bare headed, and all bare, whilst at his scars

They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars.

I set an Idiot's cap on virtue's head,

Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags

And paint ten thousand images of loam

In gaudy silken colours: on the backs

Of mules and asses I make asses ride

Only for sport, to see the apish world

Worship such beasts with sound idolatry.

This Fortune does, and when this is done,

She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name,

And some with adoration crown her fame.

* * * * *

_And._ "To-morrow? ay to-morrow thou shalt buy them.

To-morrow tell the Princess I will love her,

To-morrow tell the King I'll banquet him,

To-morrow, Shadow, will I give thee gold,

To-morrow pride goes bare, and lust a-cold.

To-morrow will the rich man feed the poor,

And vice to-morrow virtue will adore.

To-morrow beggars shall be crowned kings.

This no-time, morrow's time, no sweetness sings.

I pray thee hence: bear that to Agripyne."

The whole is, as a whole, to the last degree crude and undigested, but the

ill-matured power of the writer is almost the more apparent.

_The Honest Whore_, in two parts, is, as far as general character goes, a

mixed comedy of intrigue and manners combining, or rather uniting (for

there is little combination of them), four themes--first, the love of

Hippolito for the Princess Infelice, and his virtuous motions followed by

relapse; secondly, the conversion by him of the courtesan Bellafront, a

damsel of good family, from her evil ways, and her marriage to her first

gallant, a hairbrained courtier named Matheo; thirdly, Matheo's

ill-treatment of Bellafront, her constancy and her rejection of the

temptations of Hippolito, who from apostle has turned seducer, with the

humours of Orlando Friscobaldo, Bellafront's father, who, feigning never to

forgive her, watches over her in disguise, and acts as guardian angel to

her reckless and sometimes brutal husband; and lastly, the other humours of

a certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him,

his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and

unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb,

while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather

oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it,

admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reason

for preferring it to almost all the non-tragical work of the time out of

Shakespere, is the wonderful character of Bellafront, both in her

unreclaimed and her reclaimed condition. In both she is a very woman--not

as conventional satirists and conventional encomiasts praise or rail at

women, but as women are. If her language in her unregenerate days is

sometimes coarser than is altogether pleasant, it does not disguise her

nature,--the very nature of such a woman misled by giddiness, by

curiosity, by love of pleasure, by love of admiration, but in no thorough

sense depraved. Her selection of Matheo not as the instrument of her being

"made an honest woman," not apparently because she had any love for him

left, or had ever had much, but because he was her first seducer, is

exactly what, after a sudden convincing of sin, such a woman would have

done; and if her patience under the long trial of her husband's

thoughtlessness and occasional brutality seem excessive, it will only seem

so to one who has been unlucky in his experience. Matheo indeed is a

thorough good-for-nothing, and the natural man longs that Bellafront might

have been better parted; but Dekker was a very moral person in his own way,

and apparently he would not entirely let her--Imogen gone astray as she

is--off her penance.