THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD
I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, seven
chief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe of
anonymous plays and of less famous personalities for the fourth and last.
The seven exceptional persons are Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster,
Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, and Day. It would be perhaps lost labour to
attempt to make out a severe definition, shutting these off on the one hand
from their predecessors, on the other from those that followed them. We
must be satisfied in such cases with an approach to exactness, and it is
certain that while most of the men just named had made some appearance in
the latest years of Elizabeth, and while one or two of them lasted into the
earliest years of Charles, they all represent, in their period of
flourishing and in the character of their work, the Jacobean age. In some
of them, as in Middleton and Day, the Elizabethan type prevails; in others,
as in Fletcher, a distinctly new flavour--a flavour not perceptible in
Shakespere, much less in Marlowe--appears. But in none of them is that
other flavour of pronounced decadence, which appears in the work of men so
great as Massinger and Ford, at all perceptible. We are still in the
creative period, and in some of the work to be now noticed we are in a
comparatively unformed stage of it. It has been said, and not unjustly
said, that the work of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs, when looked at on
one side, not to the days of Elizabeth at all, but to the later seventeenth
century; and this is true to the extent that the post-Restoration
dramatists copied Fletcher and followed Fletcher very much more than
Shakespere. But not only dates but other characteristics refer the work of
Beaumont and Fletcher to a distinctly earlier period than the work of
their, in some sense, successors Massinger and Ford.
It will have been observed that I cleave to the old-fashioned nomenclature,
and speak of "Beaumont and Fletcher." Until very recently, when two new
editions have made their appearance, there was for a time a certain
tendency to bring Fletcher into greater prominence than his partner, but at
the same time and on the whole to depreciate both. I am in all things but
ill-disposed to admit innovation without the clearest and most cogent
proofs; and although the comparatively short life of Beaumont makes it
impossible that he should have taken part in some of the fifty-two plays
traditionally assigned to the partnership (we may perhaps add Mr. Bullen's
remarkable discovery of _Sir John Barneveldt_, in which Massinger probably
took Beaumont's place), I see no reason to dispute the well-established
theory that Beaumont contributed at least criticism, and probably original
work, to a large number of these plays; and that his influence probably
survived himself in conditioning his partner's work. And I am also disposed
to think that the plays attributed to the pair have scarcely had fair
measure in comparison with the work of their contemporaries, which was so
long neglected. Beaumont and Fletcher kept the stage--kept it constantly
and triumphantly--till almost, if not quite, within living memory; while
since the seventeenth century, and since its earlier part, I believe that
very few plays of Dekker's or Middleton's, of Webster's or of Ford's, have
been presented to an English audience. This of itself constituted at the
great revival of interest in Elizabethan literature something of a
prejudice in favour of _les oublies et les dedaignes_, and this prejudice
has naturally grown stronger since all alike have been banished from the
stage. The Copper Captain and the Humorous Lieutenant, Bessus and Monsieur
Thomas, are no longer on the boards to plead for their authors. The
comparative depreciation of Lamb and others is still on the shelves to
support their rivals.
Although we still know but little about either Beaumont or Fletcher
personally, they differ from most of their great contemporaries by having
come of "kenned folk," and by having to all appearance, industrious as they
were, had no inducement to write for money. Francis Beaumont was born at
Gracedieu, in Leicestershire in 1584. He was the son of a chief-justice;
his family had for generations been eminent, chiefly in the law; his
brother, Sir John Beaumont, was not only a poet of some merit, but a man of
position, and Francis himself, two years before his death in 1616, married
a Kentish heiress. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke
College), Oxford, and seems to have made acquaintance with John Fletcher
soon after quitting the University. Fletcher was five years older than his
friend, and of a clerical family, his father being Bishop of London, and
his uncle, Giles Fletcher (the author of _Licia_), a dignitary of the
Church. The younger Giles Fletcher and his brother Phineas were thus
cousins of the dramatist. Fletcher was a Cambridge man, having been
educated at Benet College (at present and indeed originally known as Corpus
Christi). Little else is known of him except that he died of the plague in
1625, nine years after Beaumont's death, as he had been born five years
before him. These two men, however, one of whom was but thirty and the
other not fifty when he died, have left by far the largest collection of
printed plays attributed to any English author. A good deal of dispute has
been indulged in as to their probable shares,--the most likely opinion
being that Fletcher was the creator and Beaumont (whose abilities in
criticism were recognised by such a judge as Ben Jonson) the critical and
revising spirit. About a third of the whole number have been supposed to
represent Beaumont's influence more or less directly. These include the two
finest, _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_; while as to the third play,
which may be put on the same level, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, early
assertion, confirmed by a constant catena of the best critical authority,
maintains that Beaumont's place was taken by no less a collaborator than
Shakespere. Fletcher, as has been said, wrote in conjunction with Massinger
(we know this for certain from Sir Aston Cokain), and with Rowley and
others, while Shirley seems to have finished some of his plays. Some modern
criticism has manifested a desire to apply the always uncertain and usually
unprofitable tests of separation to the great mass of his work. With this
we need not busy ourselves. The received collection has quite sufficient
idiosyncrasy of its own as a whole to make it superfluous for any one,
except as a matter of amusement, to try to split it up.
Its characteristics are, as has been said, sufficiently marked, both in
defects and in merits. The comparative depreciation which has come upon
Beaumont and Fletcher naturally fixes on the defects. There is in the work
of the pair, and especially in Fletcher's work when he wrought alone, a
certain loose fluency, an ungirt and relaxed air, which contrasts very
strongly with the strenuous ways of the elder playwrights. This exhibits
itself not in plotting or playwork proper, but in style and in
versification (the redundant syllable predominating, and every now and then
the verse slipping away altogether into the strange medley between verse
and prose, which we shall find so frequent in the next and last period),
and also in the characters. We quit indeed the monstrous types of cruelty,
of lust, of revenge, in which many of the Elizabethans proper and of
Fletcher's own contemporaries delighted. But at the same time we find a
decidedly lowered standard of general morality--a distinct approach towards
the _fay ce que voudras_ of the Restoration. We are also nearer to the
region of the commonplace. Nowhere appears that attempt to grapple with the
impossible, that wrestle with the hardest problems, which Marlowe began,
and which he taught to some at least of his followers. And lastly--despite
innumerable touches of tender and not a few of heroic poetry--the actual
poetical value of the dramas at their best is below that of the best work
of the preceding time, and of such contemporaries as Webster and Dekker.
Beaumont and Fletcher constantly delight, but they do not very often
transport, and even when they do, it is with a less strange rapture than
that which communicates itself to the reader of Shakespere _passim_, and to
the readers of many of Shakespere's fellows here and there.
This, I think, is a fair allowance. But, when it is made, a goodly capital
whereon to draw still remains to our poets. In the first place, no sound
criticism can possibly overlook the astonishing volume and variety of their
work. No doubt they did not often (if they ever did) invent their fables.
But they have never failed to treat them in such a way as to make them
original, and this of itself shows a wonderful faculty of invention and
constitutes an inexhaustible source of pleasure. This pleasure is all the
more pleasurable because the matter is always presented in a thoroughly
workmanlike form. The shapelessness, the incoherence, the necessity for
endless annotation and patching together, which mar so many even of the
finest Elizabethan plays, have no place in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their
dramatic construction is almost narrative in its clear and easy flow, in
its absence of puzzles and piecings. Again, their stories are always
interesting, and their characters (especially the lighter ones) always more
or less attractive. It used to be fashionable to praise their "young men,"
probably because of the agreeable contrast which they present with the
brutality of the Restoration hero; but their girls are more to my fancy.
They were not straightlaced, and have left some sufficiently ugly and (let
it be added) not too natural types of sheer impudence, such as the Megra of
_Philaster_. Nor could they ever attain to the romantic perfection of
Imogen in one kind, of Rosalind in another, of Juliet in a third. But for
portraits of pleasant English girls not too squeamish, not at all afraid of
love-making, quite convinced of the hackneyed assertion of the mythologists
that jests and jokes go in the train of Venus, but true-hearted,
affectionate, and of a sound, if not a very nice morality, commend me to
Fletcher's Dorotheas, and Marys, and Celias. Add to this the excellence of
their comedy (there is little better comedy of its kind anywhere than that
of _A King and no King_, of the _Humorous Lieutenant_, of _Rule a Wife and
have a Wife_), their generally high standard of dialogue verse, their
charming songs, and it will be seen that if they have not the daemonic
virtue of a few great dramatic poets, they have at any rate very good,
solid, pleasant, and plentiful substitutes for it.
It is no light matter to criticise more than fifty plays in not many times
fifty lines; yet something must be said about some of them at any rate. The
play which usually opens the series, _The Maid's Tragedy_, is perhaps the
finest of all on the purely tragic side, though its plot is a little
improbable, and to modern notions not very agreeable. Hazlitt disliked it
much; and though this is chiefly to be accounted for by the monarchical
tone of it, it is certainly faulty in parts. It shows, in the first place,
the authors' greatest dramatic weakness--a weakness common indeed to all
their tribe except Shakespere--the representation of sudden and quite
insufficiently motived moral revolutions; and, secondly, another fault of
theirs in the representation of helpless and rather nerveless virtue
punished without fault of its own indeed, but also without any effort. The
Aspatia of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and the Bellario of _Philaster_, pathetic
as they are, are also slightly irritating. Still the pathos is great, and
the quarrel or threatened quarrel of the friends Amintor and Melantius, the
horrible trial put upon Amintor by his sovereign and the abandoned Evadne,
as well as the whole part of Evadne herself when she has once been (rather
improbably) converted, are excellent. A passage of some length from the
latter part of the play may supply as well as another the sufficient
requirement of an illustrative extract:--
_Evad._ "O my lord!
_Amin._ How now?
_Evad._ My much abused Lord! (_Kneels._)
_Amin._ This cannot be.
_Evad._ I do not kneel to live, I dare not hope it;
The wrongs I did are greater: look upon me
Though I appear with all my faults.
_Amin._ Stand up.
This is a new way to beget more sorrow.
Heav'n knows, I have too many; do not mock me;
Though I am tame and bred up with my wrongs
Which are my foster-brothers, I may leap
Like a hand-wolf into my natural wildness
And do an outrage: pray thee, do not mock me.
_Evad._ My whole life is so leprous, it infects
All my repentance: I would buy your pardon
Though at the highest set, even with my life:
That slight contrition, that's no sacrifice
For what I have committed.
_Amin._ Sure I dazzle.
There cannot be a Faith in that foul woman
That knows no God more mighty than her mischiefs:
Thou dost still worse, still number on thy faults
To press my poor heart thus. Can I believe
There's any seed of virtue in that woman
Left to shoot up, that dares go on in sin
Known, and so known as thine is? O Evadne!
'Would, there were any safety in thy sex,
That I might put a thousand sorrows off,
And credit thy repentance! But I must not;
Thou'st brought me to that dull calamity,
To that strange misbelief of all the world
And all things that are in it; that, I fear
I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,
Only remembering that I grieve.
_Evad._ My lord,
Give me your griefs: you are an innocent,
A soul as white as Heav'n. Let not my sins
Perish your noble youth: I do not fall here
To shadows by dissembling with my tears
(As, all say, women can) or to make less
What my hot will hath done, which Heav'n and you
Knows to be tougher than the hand of time
Can cut from man's remembrance; no, I do not;
I do appear the same, the same Evadne
Drest in the shames I liv'd in; the same monster:
But these are names of honour, to what I am;
I do present myself the foulest creature
Most pois'nous, dang'rous, and despis'd of men,
Lerna e'er bred, or Nilus: I am hell,
Till you, my dear lord, shoot your light into me
The beams of your forgiveness: I am soul-sick;
And wither with the fear of one condemn'd,
Till I have got your pardon.
_Amin._ Rise, Evadne.
Those heavenly Powers, that put this good into thee,
Grant a continuance of it: I forgive thee;
Make thyself worthy of it, and take heed,
Take heed, Evadne, this be serious;
Mock not the Pow'rs above, that can and dare
Give thee a great example of their justice
To all ensuing eyes, if that thou playest
With thy repentance, the best sacrifice.
_Evad._ I have done nothing good to win belief,
My life hath been so faithless; all the creatures
Made for Heav'n's honours, have their ends, and good ones,
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women;
They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,
Men pray against; and when they die, like tales
Ill told, and unbeliev'd they pass away
And go to dust forgotten: But, my lord,
Those short days I shall number to my rest,
(As many must not see me) shall, though late
(Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,)
Since I can do no good, because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it;
I will redeem one minute of my age,
Or, like another Niobe, I'll weep
Till I am water.
_Amin._ I am now dissolv'd.
My frozen soul melts: may each sin thou hast
Find a new mercy! rise, I am at peace:
Hadst thou been thus, thus excellently good,
Before that devil king tempted thy frailty,
Sure, thou hadst made a star. Give me thy hand;
From this time I will know thee, and as far
As honour gives me leave, be thy Amintor.
When we meet next, I will salute thee fairly
And pray the gods to give thee happy days.
My charity shall go along with thee
Though my embraces must be far from thee.
I should ha' kill'd thee, but this sweet repentance
Locks up my vengeance, for which thus I kiss thee,
The last kiss we must take."
The beautiful play of _Philaster_ has already been glanced at; it is
sufficient to add that its detached passages are deservedly the most famous
of all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may be
considered by different persons as affecting to a different extent the
merit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy,
has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for the
chronological order of these plays is hitherto unsolved) that Fletcher's
singular _vis comica_ appears. _A King and no King_ has a very serious
plot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea are most lofty, insolent, and
passionate. But the comedy of Bessus and his two swordsmen, which is fresh
and vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because I
hold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), is
perhaps more generally interesting. As for _The Scornful Lady_ it is comedy
pure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of the
younger Loveless--an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners--injures it a
little, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of the
usurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a most
Molieresque personage), and those of Roger and Abigail, with many minor
touches, more than redeem it. The plays which follow [49] are all comical
and mostly farcical. The situations, rather than the expressions of _The
Custom of the Country_, bring it under the ban of a rather unfair
condemnation of Dryden's, pronounced when he was quite unsuccessfully
trying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier's
damning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. _The Elder
Brother_ is one of those many variations on _cedant arma togae_ which men of
letters have always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellent
comedy of _The Spanish Curate_ is not impaired by the fact that Dryden
chose to adapt it after his own fashion in The _Spanish Friar_. In _Wit
Without Money_, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference for a
"roaring boy," a senseless crack-brained spendthrift, appears perhaps a
little too strongly. _The Beggar's Bush_ is interesting because of its
early indications of cant language, connecting it with Brome's _Jovial
Crew_, and with Dekker's thieves' Latin pamphlets. But the faults and the
merits of Fletcher have scarcely found better expression anywhere than in
_The Humorous Lieutenant_. Celia is his masterpiece in the delineation of
the type of girl outlined above, and awkward as her double courtship by
Demetrius and his father Antigonus is, one somehow forgives it, despite the
nauseous crew of go-betweens of both sexes whom Fletcher here as elsewhere
seems to take a pleasure in introducing. As for the Lieutenant he is quite
charming; and even the ultra-farcical episode of his falling in love with
the king owing to a philtre is well carried off. Then follows the
delightful pastoral of _The Faithful Shepherdess_, which ranks with
Jonson's _Sad Shepherd_ and with _Comus_, as the three chiefs of its style
in English. _The Loyal Subject_ falls a little behind, as also does _The
Mad Lover_; but _Rule a Wife and have a Wife_ again rises to the first
class. Inferior to Shakespere in the power of transcending without
travestying human affairs, to Jonson in sharply presented humours, to
Congreve and Sheridan in rattling fire of dialogue, our authors have no
superior in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy of a certain kind, and they
have perhaps nowhere shown their power better than in the picture of the
Copper Captain and his Wife. The flagrant absurdity of _The Laws of Candy_
(which put the penalty of death on ingratitude, and apparently fix no
criterion of what ingratitude is, except the decision of the person who
thinks himself ungratefully treated), spoils a play which is not worse
written than the rest. But in _The False One_, based on Egyptian history
just after Pompey's death, and _Valentinian_, which follows with a little
poetical license the crimes and punishment of that Emperor, a return is
made to pure tragedy--in both cases with great success. The magnificent
passage which Hazlitt singled out from _The False One_ is perhaps the
author's or authors' highest attempt in tragic declamation, and may be
considered to have stopped not far short of the highest tragic poetry.
[49] It may perhaps be well to mention that the references to "volumes" are
to the ten-volume edition of 1750, by Theobald, Seward, and others.
"'Oh thou conqueror,
Thou glory of the world once, now the pity:
Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus?
What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee on
To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian?
The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger,
That honourable war ne'er taught a nobleness
Nor worthy circumstance show'd what a man was?
That never heard thy name sung but in banquets
And loose lascivious pleasures? to a boy
That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness
No study of thy life to know thy goodness?...
Egyptians, dare you think your high pyramides
Built to out-dure the sun, as you suppose,
Where your unworthy kings lie rak'd in ashes,
Are monuments fit for him! No, brood of Nilus,
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven;
No pyramid set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness,
To which I leave him.'"
The chief fault of _Valentinian_ is that the character of Maximus is very
indistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These two
pure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, _The Little French Lawyer_
and _Monsieur Thomas_, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of the
first is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friendship
of Clerimont and Dinant; while no play has so many of Fletcher's agreeable
young women as _Monsieur Thomas_. _The Bloody Brother_, which its title
speaks as sufficiently tragical, comes between two excellent comedies, _The
Chances_ and _The Wild Goose Chase_, which might serve as well as any
others for samples of the whole work on its comic side. In _The Chances_
the portrait of the hare-brained Don John is the chief thing; in _The Wild
Goose Chase_, as in _Monsieur Thomas_, a whole bevy of lively characters,
male and female, dispute the reader's attention and divide his preference.
_A Wife for a Month_ sounds comic, but is not a little alloyed with
tragedy; and despite the pathos of its central situation, is marred by some
of Fletcher's ugliest characters--the characters which Shakespere in
Pandarus and the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ took care to touch with his
lightest finger. _The Lover's Progress_, a doubtful tragedy, and _The
Pilgrim_, a good comedy (revived at the end of the century, as was _The
Prophetess_ with certain help from Dryden), do not require any special
notice. Between these two last comes _The Captain_, a comedy neither of the
best nor yet of the worst. The tragi-comic _Queen of Corinth_ is a little
heavy; but in _Bonduca_ we have one of the very best of the author's
tragedies, the scenes with Caratach and his nephew, the boy Hengo, being
full of touches not wholly unworthy of Shakespere. _The Knight of the
Burning Pestle_ (where Fletcher, forsaking his usual fantastic grounds of a
France that is scarcely French, and an Italy that is extremely un-Italian,
comes to simple pictures of London middle-class life, such as those of
Jonson or Middleton) is a very happy piece of work indeed, despite the
difficulty of working out its double presentment of burlesque
knight-errantry and straightforward comedy of manners. In _Love's
Pilgrimage_, with a Spanish subject and something of a Spanish style, there
is not enough central interest, and the fortunes by land and sea of _The
Double Marriage_ do not make it one of Fletcher's most interesting plays.
But _The Maid in the Mill_ and _The Martial Maid_ are good farce, which
almost deserves the name of comedy; and _The Knight of Malta_ is a romantic
drama of merit. In _Women Pleased_ the humours of avarice and hungry
servility are ingeniously treated, and one of the starveling Penurio's
speeches is among the best-known passages of all the plays, while the
anti-Puritan satire of Hope-on-High Bomby is also noteworthy. The next four
plays are less noticeable, and indeed for two volumes, of the edition
referred to, we come to fewer plays that are specially good. _The Night
Walker_; or, _The Little Thief_, though not very probable in its incidents,
has a great deal of lively business, and is particularly noteworthy as
supplying proof of the singular popularity of bell-ringing with all classes
of the population in the seventeenth century,--a popularity which probably
protected many old bells in the mania for church desecration. Not much can
be said for _The Woman's Prize_, or, _The Tamer Tamed_, an avowed sequel,
and so to speak, antidote to _The Taming of the Shrew_, which chiefly
proves that it is wise to let Shakespere alone. The authors have drawn to
some extent on the _Lysistrata_ to aid them, but have fallen as far short
of the fun as of the indecency of that memorable play. With _The Island
Princess_ we return to a fair, though not more than a fair level of
romantic tragi-comedy, but _The Noble Gentleman_ is the worst play ever
attributed (even falsely) to authors of genius. The subject is perfectly
uninteresting, the characters are all fools or knaves, and the means
adopted to gull the hero through successive promotions to rank, and
successive deprivations of them (the genuineness of neither of which he
takes the least trouble to ascertain), are preposterous. _The Coronation_
is much better, and _The Sea Voyage_, with a kind of Amazon story grafted
upon a hint of _The Tempest_, is a capital play of its kind. Better still,
despite a certain looseness both of plot and moral, is _The Coxcomb_, where
the heroine Viola is a very touching figure. The extravagant absurdity of
the traveller Antonio is made more probable than is sometimes the case with
our authors, and the situations of the whole join neatly, and pass
trippingly. _Wit at Several Weapons_ deserves a somewhat similar
description, and so does _The Fair Maid of the Inn_; while _Cupid's
Revenge_, though it shocked the editors of 1750 as a pagan kind of play,
has a fine tragical zest, and is quite true to classical belief in its
delineation of the ruthlessness of the offended Deity. Undoubtedly,
however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interesting
material of any except the first. Here is _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a play
founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I think
irrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I am
unable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character.
Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_, in
which the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are neither
squeamish nor feeble. The beautiful part of Ordella in this play, though
somewhat sentimental and improbable (as is always the case with Fletcher's
very virtuous characters) ranks at the head of its kind, and is much
superior to that of Aspatia in _The Maid's Tragedy_. _The Woman Hater_,
said to be Fletcher's earliest play, has a character of rare comic, or at
least farcical virtue in the smell-feast Lazarillo with his Odyssey in
chase of the Umbrana's head (a delicacy which is perpetually escaping him);
and _The Nice Valour_ contains, in Chamont and his brother, the most
successful attempts of the English stage at the delineation of the point of
honour gone mad. Not so much, perhaps, can be said for _An Honest Man's
Fortune_, which, with a mask and a clumsy, though in part beautiful, piece
entitled _Four Plays in One_, makes up the tale. But whosoever has gone
through that tale will, if he has any taste for the subject, admit that
such a total of work, so varied in character, and so full of excellences in
all its variety, has not been set to the credit of any name or names in
English literature, if we except only Shakespere. Of the highest and most
terrible graces, as of the sweetest and most poetical, Beaumont and
Fletcher may have little to set beside the masterpieces of some other men;
for accomplished, varied, and fertile production, they need not fear any
competition.
It has not been usual to put Thomas Middleton in the front rank among the
dramatists immediately second to Shakespere; but I have myself no
hesitation in doing so. If he is not such a poet as Webster, he is even a
better, and certainly a more versatile, dramatist; and if his plays are
inferior as plays to those of Fletcher and Massinger, he has a mastery of
the very highest tragedy, which neither of them could attain. Except the
best scenes of _The White Devil_, and _The Duchess of Malfi_, there is
nothing out of Shakespere that can match the best scenes of _The
Changeling_; while Middleton had a comic faculty, in which, to all
appearance, Webster was entirely lacking. A little more is known about
Middleton than about most of his fellows. He was the son of a gentleman,
and was pretty certainly born in London about 1570. It does not appear that
he was a university man, but he seems to have been at Gray's Inn. His
earliest known work was not dramatic, and was exceedingly bad. In 1597 he
published a verse paraphrase of the _Wisdom of Solomon_, which makes even
that admirable book unreadable; and if, as seems pretty certain, the
_Microcynicon_ of two years later is his, he is responsible for one of the
worst and feeblest exercises in the school--never a very strong one--of
Hall and Marston. Some prose tracts of the usual kind are not better; but
either at the extreme end of the sixteenth century, or in the very earliest
years of the next, Middleton turned his attention to the then all absorbing
drama, and for many years was (chiefly in collaboration) a busy playwright.
We have some score of plays which are either his alone, or in greatest part
his. The order of their composition is very uncertain, and as with most of
the dramatists of the period, not a few of them never appeared in print
till long after the author's death. He was frequently employed in composing
pageants for the City of London, and in 1620 was appointed city
chronologer. In 1624 Middleton got into trouble. His play, _The Game of
Chess_, which was a direct attack on Spain and Rome, and a personal satire
on Gondomar, was immensely popular, but its nine days' run was abruptly
stopped on the complaint of the Spanish ambassador; the poet's son, it
would seem, had to appear before the Council, and Middleton himself was
(according to tradition) imprisoned for some time. In this same year he was
living at Newington Butts. He died there in the summer of 1627, and was
succeeded as chronologer by Ben Jonson. His widow, Magdalen, received a
gratuity from the Common Council, but seems to have followed her husband in
a little over a year.
Middleton's acknowledged, or at least accepted, habit of collaboration in
most of the work usually attributed to him, and the strong suspicion, if
not more than suspicion, that he collaborated in other plays, afford
endless opportunity for the exercise of a certain kind of criticism. By
employing another kind we can discern quite sufficiently a strong
individuality in the work that is certainly, in part or in whole, his; and
we need not go farther. He seems to have had three different kinds of
dramatic aptitude, in all of which he excelled. The larger number of his
plays consist of examples of the rattling comedy of intrigue and manners,
often openly representing London life as it was, sometimes transplanting
what is an evident picture of home manners to some foreign scene apparently
for no other object than to make it more attractive to the spectators. To
any one at all acquainted with the Elizabethan drama their very titles
speak them. These titles are _Blurt Master Constable_, _Michaelmas Term_,
_A Trick to Catch the Old One_, _The Family of Love_ [a sharp satire on the
Puritans], _A Mad World, my Masters_, _No Wit no Help Like a Woman's_, _A
Chaste Maid in Cheapside_, _Anything for a Quiet Life_, _More Dissemblers
besides Women_. As with all the humour-comedies of the time, the incidents
are not unfrequently very improbable, and the action is conducted with such
intricacy and want of clearly indicated lines, that it is sometimes very
difficult to follow. At the same time, Middleton has a faculty almost
peculiar to himself of carrying, it might almost be said of hustling, the
reader or spectator along, so that he has no time to stop and consider
defects. His characters are extremely human and lively, his dialogue seldom
lags, his catastrophes, if not his plots, are often ingenious, and he is
never heavy. The moral atmosphere of his plays is not very refined,--by
which I do not at all mean merely that he indulges in loose situations and
loose language. All the dramatists from Shakespere downwards do that; and
Middleton is neither better nor worse than the average. But in striking
contrast to Shakespere and to others, Middleton has no kind of poetical
morality in the sense in which the term poetical justice is better known.
He is not too careful that the rogues shall not have the best of it; he
makes his most virtuous and his vilest characters hobnob together very
contentedly; and he is, in short, though never brutal, like the
post-Restoration school, never very delicate. The style, however, of these
works of his did not easily admit of such delicacy, except in the infusion
of a strong romantic element such as that which Shakespere almost always
infuses. Middleton has hardly done it more than once--in the charming
comedy of _The Spanish Gipsy_,--and the result there is so agreeable that
the reader only wishes he had done it oftener.
Usually, however, when his thoughts took a turn of less levity than in
these careless humorous studies of contemporary life, he devoted himself
not to the higher comedy, but to tragedy of a very serious class, and when
he did this an odd phenomenon generally manifested itself. In Middleton's
idea of tragedy, as in that of most of the playwrights, and probably all
the playgoers of his day, a comic underplot was a necessity; and, as we
have seen, he was himself undoubtedly able enough to furnish such a plot.
But either because he disliked mixing his tragic and comic veins, or for
some unknown reason, he seems usually to have called in on such occasions
the aid of Rowley, a vigorous writer of farce, who had sometimes been
joined with him even in his comic work. Now, not only was Rowley little
more than a farce writer, but he seems to have been either unable to make,
or quite careless of making, his farce connect itself in any tolerable
fashion with the tragedy of which it formed a nominal part. The result is
seen in its most perfect imperfection in the two plays of _The Mayor of
Queenborough_ and _The Changeling_, both named from their comic features,
and yet containing tragic scenes, the first of a very high order, the
second of an order only overtopped by Shakespere at his best. The humours
of the cobbler Mayor of Queenborough in the one case, of the lunatic asylum
and the courting of its keeper's wife in the other, are such very mean
things that they can scarcely be criticised. But the desperate love of
Vortiger for Rowena in _The Mayor_, and the villainous plots against his
chaste wife, Castiza, are real tragedy. Even these, however, fall far below
the terrible loves, if loves they are to be called, of Beatrice-Joanna, the
heroine of _The Changeling_, and her servant, instrument, and murderer, De
Flores. The plot of the tragic part of this play is intricate and not
wholly savoury. It is sufficient to say that Beatrice having enticed De
Flores to murder a lover whom she does not love, that so she may marry a
lover whom she does love, is suddenly met by the murderer's demand of her
honour as the price of his services. She submits, and afterwards has to
purchase fresh aid of murder from him by a continuance of her favours that
she may escape detection by her husband. Thus, roughly described, the theme
may look like the undigested horrors of _Lust's Dominion_, of _The
Insatiate Countess_, and of _The Revenger's Tragedy_. It is, however, poles
asunder from them. The girl, with her southern recklessness of anything but
her immediate desires, and her southern indifference to deceiving the very
man she loves, is sufficiently remarkable, as she stands out of the canvas.
But De Flores,--the broken gentleman, reduced to the position of a mere
dependant, the libertine whose want of personal comeliness increases his
mistress's contempt for him, the murderer double and treble dyed, as
audacious as he is treacherous, and as cool and ready as he is fiery in
passion,--is a study worthy to be classed at once with Iago, and inferior
only to Iago in their class. The several touches with which these two
characters and their situations are brought out are as Shakesperian as
their conception, and the whole of that part of the play in which they
figure is one of the most wonderful triumphs of English or of any drama.
Even the change of manners and a bold word or two here and there, may not
prevent me from giving the latter part of the central scene:--
_Beat._ "Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
Thy language is so bold and vicious,
I cannot see which way I can forgive it
With any modesty.
_De F._ Pish![50] you forget yourself:
A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty!
_Beat._ O misery of sin! would I'd been bound
Perpetually unto my living hate
In that Pisacquo, than to hear[51] these words.
Think but upon the distance that creation
Set 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there.
_De F._ Look but unto your conscience, read me _there_;
'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal:
Pish! fly not to your birth, but settle you
In what the act has made you; you're no more now.
You must forget your parentage to me;
You are the deed's creature;[52] by that name
You lost your first condition, and I shall urge[53] you
As peace and innocency has turn'd you out,
And made you one with me.
_Beat._ With thee, foul villain!
_De F._ Yes, my fair murderess: do _you_ urge _me_?
Though thou writ'st maid, thou whore in thine affection!
'Twas changed from thy first love, and that's a kind
Of whoredom in thy heart: and he's changed now
To bring thy second on, thy Alsemero,
Whom by all sweets that ever darkness tasted
If I enjoy thee not, thou ne'er enjoyest!
I'll blast the hopes and joys of marriage,
I'll confess all; my life I rate at nothing.
_Beat._ De Flores!
_De F._ I shall rest from all (lover's)[54] plagues then,
I live in pain now; that [love] shooting eye
Will burn my heart to cinders.
_Beat._ O sir, hear me!
_De F._ She that in life and love refuses me,
In death and shame my partner she shall be.
_Beat._ (_kneeling_). Stay, hear me once for all: I make thee master
Of all the wealth I have in gold and jewels;
Let me go poor unto my bed with honour
And I am rich in all things.
_De F._ Let this silence thee;
The wealth of all Valencia shall not buy
My pleasure from me.
Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose?
So soon may you weep me.
_Beat._ Vengeance begins;
Murder, I see, is followed by more sins:
Was my creation in the womb so curst
It must engender with a viper first?
_De F._ (_raising her_). Come, rise and shroud your blushes in my
bosom,
Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts.
Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yielding.
'Las, how the turtle pants! thou'lt love anon
What thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on."
[50] In orig. "Push," cf. "Tush."
[51] Rather than hear.
[52] A trisyllable, as in strictness it ought to be.
[53] = "claim."
[54] This omission and the substitution in the next line are due to Dyce,
and may be called _certissima emendatio_.
Two other remarkable plays of Middleton's fall with some differences under
the same second division of his works. These are _The Witch_ and _Women
Beware Women_. Except for the inevitable and rather attractive comparison
with _Macbeth_, _The Witch_ is hardly interesting. It consists of three
different sets of scenes most inartistically blended,--an awkward and
ineffective variation on the story of Alboin, Rosmunda and the skull for a
serious main plot, some clumsy and rather unsavoury comic or tragi-comic
interludes, and the witch scenes. The two first are very nearly worthless;
the third is intrinsically, though far below _Macbeth_, interesting enough
and indirectly more interesting because of the questions which have been
started, as to the indebtedness of the two poets to each other. The best
opinion seems to be that Shakespere most certainly did not copy Middleton,
nor (a strange fancy of some) did he collaborate with Middleton, and that
the most probable thing is that both borrowed their names, and some details
from Reginald Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_. _Women Beware Women_ on the
other hand is one of Middleton's finest works, inferior only to _The
Changeling_ in parts, and far superior to it as a whole. The temptation of
Bianca, the newly-married wife, by the duke's instrument, a cunning and
shameless woman, is the title-theme, and in this part again Middleton's
Shakesperian verisimilitude and certainty of touch appear. The end of the
play is something marred by a slaughter more wholesale even than that of
_Hamlet_, and by no means so well justified. Lastly, _A Fair Quarrel_ must
be mentioned, because of the very high praise which it has received from
Lamb and others. This praise has been directed chiefly to the situation of
the quarrel between Captain Ager and his friend, turning on a question (the
point of family honour), finely but perhaps a little tediously argued. The
comic scenes, however, which are probably Rowley's, are in his best vein of
bustling swagger.
I have said that Middleton, as it seems to me, has not been fully
estimated. It is fortunately impossible to say the same of Webster, and the
reasons of the difference are instructive. Middleton's great fault is that
he never took trouble enough about his work. A little trouble would have
made _The Changeling_ or _Women Beware Women_, or even _The Spanish Gipsy_,
worthy to rank with all but Shakespere's very masterpieces. Webster also
was a collaborator, apparently an industrious one; but he never seems to
have taken his work lightly. He had, moreover, that incommunicable gift of
the highest poetry in scattered phrases which, as far as we can see,
Middleton had not. Next to nothing is known of him. He may have been parish
clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn; but the authority is very late, and the
commentators seemed to have jumped at it to explain Webster's fancy for
details of death and burial--a cause and effect not sufficiently
proportioned. Mr. Dyce has spent much trouble in proving that he could not
have been the author of some Puritan tracts published a full generation
after the date of his masterpieces. Heywood tells us that he was generally
called "Jack," a not uncommon thing when men are christened John. He
himself has left us a few very sententiously worded prefaces which do not
argue great critical taste. We know from the usual sources (Henslowe's
Diaries) that he was a working furnisher of plays, and from many rather
dubious title-pages we suppose or know some of the plays he worked at.
_Northward Ho! Westward Ho!_ and _Sir John Wyatt_ are pieces of dramatic
journalism in which he seems to have helped Dekker. He adapted, with
additions, Marston's _Malcontent_, which is, in a crude way, very much in
his own vein: he contributed (according to rather late authority) some
charming scenes (elegantly extracted, on a hint of Mr. Gosse's, by a recent
editor) to _A Cure for a Cuckold_, one of Rowley's characteristic and not
ungenial botches of humour-comedy; he wrote a bad pageant or two, and some
miscellaneous verses. But we know nothing of his life or death, and his
fame rests on four plays, in which no other writer is either known or even
hinted to have had a hand, and which are in different ways of the first
order of interest, if not invariably of the first order of merit. These are
_The Duchess of Malfi_, _The White Devil_, _The Devil's Law Case_, and
_Appius and Virginia_.
Of _Appius and Virginia_ the best thing to be said is to borrow
Sainte-Beuve's happy description of Moliere's _Don Garcie de Navarre_, and
to call it an _essai pale et noble_. Webster is sometimes very close to
Shakespere; but to read _Appius and Virginia_, and then to read _Julius
Caesar_ or _Coriolanus_, is to appreciate, in perhaps the most striking way
possible, the universality which all good judges from Dryden downwards have
recognised in the prince of literature. Webster, though he was evidently a
good scholar, and even makes some parade of scholarship, was a Romantic to
the core, and was all abroad in these classical measures. _The Devil's Law
Case_ sins in the opposite way, being hopelessly undigested, destitute of
any central interest, and, despite fine passages, a mere "salmagundi."
There remain the two famous plays of _The White Devil_ or _Vittoria
Corombona_ and _The Duchess of Malfi_--plays which were rarely, if ever,
acted after their author's days, and of which the earlier and, to my
judgment, better was not a success even then, but which the judgment of
three generations has placed at the very head of all their class, and which
contain magnificent poetry.
I have said that in my judgment _The White Devil_ is the better of the two;
I shall add that it seems to me very far the better. Webster's plays are
comparatively well known, and there is no space here to tell their rather
intricate arguments. It need only be said that the contrast of the two is
striking and unmistakable; and that Webster evidently meant in the one to
indicate the punishment of female vice, in the other to draw pity and
terror by the exhibition of the unprevented but not unavenged sufferings of
female virtue. Certainly both are excellent subjects, and if the latter
seem the harder, we have Imogen and Bellafront to show, in the most diverse
material, and with the most diverse setting possible, how genius can manage
it. With regard to _The White Devil_, it has been suggested with some
plausibility that it wants expansion. Certainly the action is rather
crowded, and the recourse to dumb show (which, however, Webster again
permitted himself in _The Duchess_) looks like a kind of shorthand
indication of scenes that might have been worked out. Even as it is,
however, the sequence of events is intelligible, and the presentation of
character is complete. Indeed, if there is any fault to find with it, it
seems to me that Webster has sinned rather by too much detail than by too
little. We could spare several of the minor characters, though none are
perhaps quite so otiose as Delio, Julio, and others in _The Duchess of
Malfi_. We feel (or at least I feel) that Vittoria's villainous brother
Flamineo is not as Iago and Aaron and De Flores are each in his way, a
thoroughly live creature. We ask ourselves (or I ask myself) what is the
good of the repulsive and not in the least effective presentment of the
Moor Zanche. Cardinal Monticelso is incontinent of tongue and singularly
feeble in deed,--for no rational man would, after describing Vittoria as a
kind of pest to mankind, have condemned her to a punishment which was
apparently little more than residence in a rather disreputable but by no
means constrained boarding-house, and no omnipotent pope would have let
Ludivico loose with a clear inkling of his murderous designs. But when
these criticisms and others are made, _The White Devil_ remains one of the
most glorious works of the period. Vittoria is perfect throughout; and in
the justly-lauded trial scene she has no superior on any stage. Brachiano
is a thoroughly lifelike portrait of the man who is completely besotted
with an evil woman. Flamineo I have spoken of, and not favourably; yet in
literature, if not in life, he is a triumph; and above all the absorbing
tragic interest of the play, which it is impossible to take up without
finishing, has to be counted in. But the real charm of _The White Devil_ is
the wholly miraculous poetry in phrases and short passages which it
contains. Vittoria's dream of the yew-tree, almost all the speeches of the
unfortunate Isabella, and most of her rival's, have this merit. But the
most wonderful flashes of poetry are put in the mouth of the scoundrel
Flamineo, where they have a singular effect. The famous dirge which
Cornelia sings can hardly be spoken of now, except in Lamb's artfully
simple phrase "I never saw anything like it," and the final speeches of
Flamineo and his sister deserve the same endorsement. Nor is even the proud
farewell of the Moor Zanche unworthy. It is impossible to describe the
"whirl of spirits" (as the good old-fashioned phrase has it) into which the
reading of this play sets the reader, except by saying that the cause of
that whirl is the secret of the best Elizabethan writers, and that it is
nowhere, out of Shakespere, better exemplified than in the scene partly
extracted from Middleton, and in such passages of _Vittoria Corombona_ as
the following:--
_Cor._ "Will you make me such a fool? here's a white hand:
Can blood so soon be wash'd out? let me see;
When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops
And the strange cricket i' the oven sings and hops,
When yellow spots do on your hands appear,
Be certain then you of a corse shall hear.
Out upon 't, how 'tis speckled! 'h'as handled a toad, sure.
Cowslip-water is good for the memory:
Pray, buy me three ounces of 't.
_Flam._ I would I were from hence.
_Cor._ Do you hear, sir?
I'll give you a saying which my grand-mother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute.
_Flam._ Do, an' you will, do.
_Cor._ 'Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,
[_Cornelia doth this in several forms of distraction._
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'
They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel;
But I have an answer for them:
'Let holy Church receive him duly
Since he paid the church-tithes truly.'
His wealth is summ'd, and this is all his store.
This poor men get, and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you, all good people.
[_Exeunt_ CORNELIA, ZANCHE, _and_ LADIES.
_Flam._ I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray, leave me.
[_Exit_ FRANCISCO DE MEDICIS.
This night I'll know the utmost of my fate;
I'll be resolved what my rich sister means
To assign me for my service. I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court,
And sometimes when my face was full of smiles
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try:
We think cag'd birds sing when indeed they cry.
[_Enter Brachiano's ghost, in his leather cassock and_
_breeches, and boots; with a cowl; in his hand a pot_
_of lily flowers, with a skull in't._
Ha! I can stand thee: nearer, nearer it.
What a mockery hath death made thee! thou look'st sad.
In what place art thou? in yon starry gallery?
Or in the cursed dungeon?--No? not speak?
Pray, sir, resolve me, what religion's best
For a man to die in? or is it in your knowledge
To answer me how long I have to live?
That's the most necessary question.
Not answer? are you still like some great men
That only walk like shadows up and down,
And to no purpose? Say:--
[_The Ghost throws earth upon him and shows him the skull._
What's that? O, fatal! he throws earth upon me!
A dead man's skull beneath the roots of flowers!--
I pray [you], speak, sir: our Italian Church-men
Make us believe dead men hold conference
With their familiars, and many times
Will come to bed to them, and eat with them.
[_Exit_ GHOST.
He's gone; and see, the skull and earth are vanished.
This is beyond melancholy. I do dare my fate
To do its worst. Now to my sister's lodging
And sum up all these horrors: the disgrace
The prince threw on me; next the piteous sight
Of my dead brother; and my mother's dotage;
And last this terrible vision: all these
Shall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good,
Or I will drown this weapon in her blood."
[_Exit._
_The Duchess of Malfi_ is to my thinking very inferior--full of beauties as
it is. In the first place, we cannot sympathise with the duchess, despite
her misfortunes, as we do with the "White Devil." She is neither quite a
virtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so much
concealment) nor a frank professor of "All for Love." Antonio, her
so-called husband, is an unromantic and even questionable figure. Many of
the minor characters, as already hinted, would be much better away. Of the
two brothers the Cardinal is a cold-blooded and uninteresting debauchee and
murderer, who sacrifices sisters and mistresses without any reasonable
excuse. Ferdinand, the other, is no doubt mad enough, but not interestingly
mad, and no attempt is made to account in any way satisfactorily for the
delay of his vengeance. By common consent, even of the greatest admirers of
the play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck
on without art or reason. But the extraordinary force and beauty of the
scene where the duchess is murdered; the touches of poetry, pure and
simple, which, as in the _The White Devil_, are scattered all over the
play; the fantastic accumulation of terrors before the climax; and the
remarkable character of Bosola,--justify the high place generally assigned
to the work. True, Bosola wants the last touches, the touches which
Shakespere would have given. He is not wholly conceivable as he is. But as
a "Plain Dealer" gone wrong, a "Malcontent" (Webster's work on that play
very likely suggested him), turned villain, a man whom ill-luck and
fruitless following of courts have changed from a cynic to a scoundrel, he
is a strangely original and successful study. The dramatic flashes in the
play would of themselves save it. "I am Duchess of Malfi still," and the
other famous one "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," often
as they have been quoted, can only be quoted again. They are of the first
order of their kind, and, except the "already _my_ De Flores!" of _The
Changeling_, there is nothing in the Elizabethan drama out of Shakespere to
match them.
There is no doubt that some harm has been done to Thomas Heywood by the
enthusiastic phrase in which Lamb described him as "a prose Shakespere."
The phrase itself is in the original quite carefully and sufficiently
explained and qualified. But unluckily a telling description of the kind is
sure to go far, while its qualifications remain behind; and (especially
since a reprint by Pearson in the year 1874 made the plays of Heywood, to
which one or two have since been added more or less conjecturally by the
industry of Mr. Bullen, accessible as a whole) a certain revolt has been
manifested against the encomium. This revolt is the effect of haste. "A
prose Shakespere" suggests to incautious readers something like Swift, like
Taylor, like Carlyle,--something approaching in prose the supremacy of
Shakespere in verse. But obviously that is not what Lamb meant. Indeed when
one remembers that if Shakespere is anything, he is a poet, the phrase may
run the risk of receiving an under--not an over--valuation. It is evident,
however, to any one who reads Lamb's remarks in full and carefully--it is
still more evident to any one who without much caring what Lamb or any one
else has said, reads Heywood for himself--what he did mean. He was looking
only at one or two sides of the myriad-sided one, and he justly saw that
Heywood touched Shakespere on these sides, if only in an incomplete and
unpoetic manner. What Heywood has in common with Shakespere, though his
prosaic rather than poetic treatment brings it out in a much less brilliant
way, is his sympathy with ordinary and domestic character, his aversion
from the fantastic vices which many of his fellows were prone to attribute
to their characters, his humanity, his kindness. The reckless tragedy of
blood and massacre, the reckless comedy of revelry and intrigue, were
always repulsive to him, as far as we can judge from the comparatively
scanty remnant of the hundreds of plays in which he boasted that he had had
a hand, if not a chief hand. Besides these plays (he confesses to
authorship or collaboration in two hundred and twenty) he was a voluminous
writer in prose and verse, though I do not myself pretend to much knowledge
of his non-dramatic work. Its most interesting part would have been a
_Lives of the Poets_, which we know that he intended, and which could
hardly have failed to give much information about his famous
contemporaries. As it is, his most remarkable and best-known work, not
contained in one of his dramas, is the curious and constantly quoted
passage half complaining that all the chief dramatists of his day were
known by abbreviations of their names, but characteristically and
good-humouredly ending with the license--
"I hold he loves me best who calls me Tom."
We have unfortunately no knowledge which enables us to call him many names
except such as are derived from critical examination of his works. Little,
except that he is said to have been a Lincolnshire man and a Fellow of
Peterhouse, is known of his history. His masterpiece, _The Woman killed
with Kindness_ (in which a deceived husband, coming to the knowledge of his
shame, drives his rival to repentance, and his wife to repentance and
death, by his charity), is not wholly admirable. Shakespere would have
felt, more fully than Heywood, the danger of presenting his hero something
of a wittol without sufficient passion of religion or affection to justify
his tolerance. But the pathos is so great, the sense of "the pity of it" is
so simply and unaffectedly rendered, that it is impossible not to rank
Heywood very high. The most famous "beauties" are in the following
passage:--
_Anne._ "O with what face of brass, what brow of steel,
Can you unblushing speak this to the face
Of the espoused wife of so dear a friend?
It is my husband that maintains your state,
Will you dishonour him that in your power
Hath left his whole affairs? I am his wife,
Is it to _me_ you speak?
_Wendoll._ "O speak no more:
For more than this I know and have recorded
Within the red-leaved table of my heart.
Fair and of all beloved, I was not fearful
Bluntly to give my life unto your hand,
And at one hazard all my worldly means.
Go, tell your husband; he will turn me off
And I am then undone: I care not, I,
'Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he'll kill me;
I care not, 'twas for you. Say I incur
The general name of villain through the world,
Of traitor to my friend. I care not, I.
Beggary, shame, death, scandal and reproach
For you I'll hazard all--why, what care I?
For you I'll live and in your love I'll die."
Anne capitulates with a suddenness which has been generally and rightly
pronounced a blot on the play; but her husband is informed by a servant and
resolves to discover the pair. The action is prolonged somewhat too much,
and the somewhat unmanly strain of weakness in Frankford is too
perceptible; but these scenes are full of fine passages, as this:--
_Fr._ "A general silence hath surprised the house,
And this is the last door. Astonishment,
Fear and amazement beat[55] upon my heart
Even as a madman beats upon a drum.
O keep my eyes, you heavens, before I enter,
From any sight that may transfix my soul:
Or if there be so black a spectacle,
O strike mine eyes stark blind! Or if not so,
Lend me such patience to digest my grief
That I may keep this white and virgin hand
From any violent outrage, or red murder,
And with that prayer I enter."
[55] First ed. "Play," which I am half inclined to prefer.
A subsequent speech of his--
"O God, O God that it were possible
To undo things done,"
hardly comes short of the touch which would have given us instead of a
prose Shakespere a Shakespere indeed; and all the rest of the play, as far
as the main plot is concerned, is full of pathos.
In the great number of other pieces attributed to him, written in all the
popular styles, except the two above referred to, merits and defects are
mixed up in a very curious fashion. Never sinking to the lowest depth of
the Elizabethan playwright, including some great ones, Heywood never rises
to anything like the highest height. His chronicle plays are very weak,
showing no grasp of heroic character, and a most lamentable slovenliness of
rhythm. Few things are more curious than to contrast with _Henry VI._ (to
which some critics will allow little of Shakespere's work) and _Richard
III._ the two parts of _Edward IV._, in which Heywood, after a manner,
fills the gap. There are good lines here and there, and touching traits;
but the whole, as a whole, is quite ludicrously bad, and "written to the
gallery," the City gallery, in the most innocent fashion. _If You Know Not
Me You Know Nobody_, or _The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth_, also in two
parts, has the same curious innocence, the same prosaic character, but
hardly as many redeeming flashes. Its first part deals with Elizabeth's
real "troubles," in her sister's days; its second with the Armada period
and the founding of the Royal Exchange. For Heywood, unlike most of the
dramatists, was always true to the City, even to the eccentric extent of
making, in _The Four Prentices of London_, Godfrey of Bouillon and his
brethren members of the prentice-brotherhood. His classical and allegorical
pieces, such as _The Golden Age_ and its fellows, are most tedious and not
at all brief. The four of them (_The Iron Age_ has two parts) occupy a
whole volume of the reprint, or more than four hundred closely printed
pages; and their clumsy dramatisation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, with any
other classical learning that Heywood could think of thrust in, presents
(together with various minor pieces of a somewhat similar kind) as striking
a contrast with _Troilus and Cressida_, as _Edward IV._ does with _Henry
VI._ His spectacles and pageants, chiefly in honour of London (_London's
Jus Honorarium_, with other metaphorical Latin titles of the same
description) are heavy, the weakness of his versification being especially
felt in such pieces. His strength lies in the domestic and contemporary
drama, where his pathos had free play, unrestrained by the necessity of
trying to make it rise to chivalrous or heroic height, and where his keen
observation of his fellow-men made him true to mankind in general, at the
same time that he gave a vivid picture of contemporary manners. Of this
class of his plays _A Woman killed with Kindness_ is undoubtedly the chief,
but it has not a few companions, and those in a sufficiently wide and
varied class of subject. _The Fair Maid of the Exchange_ is, perhaps, not
now found to be so very delectable and full of mirth as it is asserted to
be on its title-page, because it is full of that improbability and neglect
of verisimilitude which has been noted as the curse of the minor
Elizabethan drama. The "Cripple of Fenchurch," the real hero of the piece,
is a very unlikely cripple; the heroines chop and change their affections
in the most surprising manner; and the characters generally indulge in that
curious self-description and soliloquising in dialogue which is never
found in Shakespere, and is found everywhere else. But it is still a lively
picture of contemporary manners. We should be sorry to lose _The Fair Maid
of the West_ with its picture of Devonshire sailors, foreign merchants,
kings of Fez, Bashaws of various parts, Italian dukes, and what not. The
two parts make anything but a good play, but they are decidedly
interesting, and their tone supports Mr. Bullen's conjecture that we owe to
Heywood the, in parts, admirable play of _Dick of Devonshire_, a
dramatisation of the quarter-staff feats in Spain of Richard Peake of
Tavistock. _The English Traveller_ may rank with _A Woman killed with
Kindness_ as Heywood's best plays (there is, indeed, a certain community of
subject between them), but _A Maidenhead well Lost_, and _The Witches of
Lancashire_, are not far behind it; nor is _A Challenge for Beauty_. We can
hardly say so much for _Love's Mistress_, which dramatises the story of
_Cupid and Psyche_, or for _The Wise Woman of Hogsdon_ (Hoxton), a play
rather of Middleton's type. But in _The Royal King and Loyal Subject_, and
in _Fortune by Land and Sea_, the author shows again the sympathy with
chivalrous character and adventure which (if he never can be said to be
fully up to its level in the matter of poetic expression) was evidently a
favourite and constant motive with him. In short, Heywood, even at his
worst, is a writer whom it is impossible not to like. His very considerable
talent, though it stopped short of genius, was united with a pleasant and
genial temper, and little as we know of his life, his dedications and
prefaces make us better acquainted with his personality than we are with
that of much more famous men.
No greater contrast is possible than that between our last two names--Day
and Tourneur. Little is known of them: Day was at Cambridge in 1592-3;
Tourneur shared in the Cadiz voyage of 1625 and died on its return. Both,
it is pretty certain, were young men at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and
were influenced strongly by the literary fashions set by greater men than
themselves. But whereas Day took to the graceful fantasticalities of Lyly
and to the not very savage social satire of Greene, Tourneur (or Turner)
addressed himself to the most ferocious school of sub-Marlovian tragedy,
and to the rugged and almost unintelligible satire of Marston. Something
has been said of his effort in the latter vein, the _Transformed
Metamorphosis_. His two tragedies, _The Atheist's Tragedy_ and _The
Revenger's Tragedy_, have been rather variously judged. The concentration
of gloomy and almost insane vigour in _The Revenger's Tragedy_, the
splendid poetry of a few passages which have long ago found a home in the
extract books, and the less separable but equally distinct poetic value of
scattered lines and phrases, cannot escape any competent reader. But, at
the same time, I find it almost impossible to say anything for either play
as a whole, and here only I come a long way behind Mr. Swinburne in his
admiration of our dramatists. The _Atheist's Tragedy_ is an inextricable
imbroglio of tragic and comic scenes and characters, in which it is hardly
possible to see or follow any clue; while the low extravagance of all the
comedy and the frantic rant of not a little of the tragedy combine to
stifle the real pathos of some of the characters. _The Revenger's Tragedy_
is on a distinctly higher level; the determination of Vindice to revenge
his wrongs, and the noble and hapless figure of Castiza, could not have
been presented as they are presented except by a man with a distinct strain
of genius, both in conception and execution. But the effect, as a whole, is
marred by a profusion of almost all the worst faults of the drama of the
whole period from Peele to Davenant. The incoherence and improbability of
the action, the reckless, inartistic, butcherly prodigality of blood and
horrors, and the absence of any kind of redeeming interest of contrasting
light to all the shade, though very characteristic of a class, and that no
small one, of Elizabethan drama, cannot be said to be otherwise than
characteristic of its faults. As the best example (others are _The
Insatiate Countess_, Chettle's _Hoffmann_, _Lust's Dominion_, and the
singular production which Mr. Bullen has printed as _The Distracted
Emperor_) it is very well worth reading, and contrasting with the really
great plays of the same class, such as _The Jew of Malta_ and _Titus
Andronicus_, where, though the horrors are still overdone, yet genius has
given them a kind of passport. But intrinsically it is mere nightmare.
Of a very different temper and complexion is the work of John Day, who may
have been a Cambridge graduate, and was certainly a student of Gonville and
Caius, as he describes himself on the title-page of some of his plays and
of a prose tract printed by Mr. Bullen. He appears to have been dead in
1640, and the chief thing positively known about him is that between the
beginning of 1598 and 1608 he collaborated in the surprising number of
twenty-one plays (all but _The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ unprinted)
with Haughton, Chettle, Dekker, and others. _The Parliament of Bees_, his
most famous and last printed work, is of a very uncommon kind in
English--being a sort of dramatic allegory, touched with a singularly
graceful and fanciful spirit. It is indeed rather a masque than a play, and
consists, after the opening Parliament held by the Master, or Viceroy Bee
(quaintly appearing in the original, which may have been printed in 1607,
though no copy seems now discoverable earlier than 1641, as "Mr. Bee"), of
a series of characters or sketches of Bee-vices and virtues, which are very
human. The termination, which contains much the best poetry in the piece,
and much the best that Day ever wrote, introduces King Oberon giving
judgment on the Bees from "Mr. Bee" downwards and banishing offenders. Here
occurs the often-quoted passage, beginning--
"And whither must these flies be sent?"
and including the fine speech of Oberon--
"You should have cried so in your youth."
It should be observed that both in this play and elsewhere passages occur
in Day which seem to have been borrowed or stolen from or by other writers,
such as Dekker and Samuel Rowley; but a charitable and not improbable
explanation of this has been found in the known fact of his extensive and
intricate collaboration. _The Isle of Gulls_, suggested in a way by the
_Arcadia_, though in general plan also fantastic and, to use a much abused
but decidedly convenient word, pastoral, has a certain flavour of the
comedy of manners and of contemporary satire. Then we have the quaint piece
of _Humour out of Breath_, a kind of study in the for once conjoined
schools of Shakespere and Jonson--an attempt at a combination of humorous
and romantic comedy with some pathetic writing, as here:--
"[O] Early sorrow art got up so soon?
What, ere the sun ascendeth in the east?
O what an early waker art thou grown!
But cease discourse and close unto thy work.
Under this drooping myrtle will I sit,
And work awhile upon my corded net;
And as I work, record my sorrows past,
Asking old Time how long my woes shall last.
And first--but stay! alas! what do I see?
Moist gum-like tears drop from this mournful tree;
And see, it sticks like birdlime; 'twill not part,
Sorrow is even such birdlime at my heart.
Alas! poor tree, dost thou want company?
Thou dost, I see't, and I will weep with thee;
Thy sorrows make me dumb, and so shall mine,
It shall be tongueless, and so seem like thine.
Thus will I rest my head unto thy bark,
Whilst my sighs ease my sorrows."
Something the same may be said of _Law Tricks_, or _Who would have Thought
it?_ which has, however, in the character of the Count Horatio, a touch of
tragedy. Another piece of Day's is in quite a different vein, being an
account in dramatised form of the adventures of the three brothers
Shirley--a kind of play which, from _Sir Thomas Stukeley_ downwards,
appears to have been a very favourite one with Elizabethan audiences,
though (as might indeed be expected) it was seldom executed in a very
successful manner. Lastly, or first, if chronological order is taken, comes
_The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_, written by Day in conjunction with
Chettle, and ranging itself with the half historical, half romantic plays
which were, as has been pointed out above, favourites with the first school
of dramatists. It seems to have been very popular, and had a second and
third part, not now extant, but is by no means as much to modern taste as
some of the others. Indeed both Day and Tourneur, despite the dates of
their pieces, which, as far as known, are later, belong in more ways than
one to the early school, and show how its traditions survived alongside of
the more perfect work of the greater masters. Day himself is certainly not
a great master--indeed masterpieces would have been impossible, if they
would not have been superfluous, in the brisk purveying of theatrical
matter which, from Henslowe's accounts, we see that he kept up. He had
fancy, a good deal of wit, considerable versatility, and something of the
same sunshiny temper, with less of the pathos, that has been noticed in
Heywood. If he wrote _The Maid's Metamorphosis_ (also ascribed
conjecturally to Lyly), he did something less dramatically good, but
perhaps poetically better, than his other work; and if, as has sometimes
been thought,[56] _The Return from Parnassus_ is his, he is richer still.
But even without these, his existing poetical baggage (the least part of
the work which we know he accomplished) is more than respectable, and shows
more perhaps than that of any other distinctly minor writer the vast amount
of loose talent--of miscellaneous inspiration--which was afloat in the air
of his time.
[56] I agree with Professor Hales in thinking it very improbable.