Of modern romantic drama in France it must suffice to say that it
derives some of its characteristics from the general movement of
romanticism which in various ways and at various points of time
transformed nearly every modern European literature, others from the
rhetorical tendency which is a French national feature. Victor Hugo was
the founder whom it followed in a spirit of high emprise to success upon
success, his own being the most conspicuous of all;[140] A. Dumas the
elder its unshrinking middleman. The marvellous fire and grandeur of
genius of the former, always in extremes but often most sublime at the
height of danger, was nowhere more signally such than in the drama;
Dumas was a Briareus, working, however, with many hands besides his own.
Together with them may, with more or less precision, be classed in the
romantic school of dramatists A. de Vigny[141] and George Sand,[142]
neither of whom, however, attained to the highest rank in the drama, and
Jules Sandeau;[143] A. de Musset, whose originality pervades all his
plays, but whose later works, more especially in his prose "proverbs"
and pieces of a similar kind, have a flavour of a delicacy altogether
indescribable;[144] perhaps also P. Merimee (1803-1870), who invented
not only Spanish dramas but a Spanish dramatist, and who was never more
audacious than when he seemed most _naif_.[145]
Modern schools.
The romantic school was not destined to exercise a permanent control
over French public taste; but it can hardly be said to have been
overthrown by the brief classical revival begun by F. Ponsard, and
continued, though in closer contact with modern ideas, both by him[146]
and by E. Augier, a dramatist who gradually attained to an extraordinary
effectiveness in the self-restrained treatment of social as well as of
historical themes.[147] While the theatrical fecundity and the
remarkable constructive ability of E. Scribe[148] supplied a long series
of productions attesting the rapid growth of the playwright's mastery
over the secrets of his craft the name of his competitors is legion.
Among them may be mentioned, if only as the authors of two of the most
successful plays of the historical species produced in the century, two
writers of great eminence--C. Delavigne[149] and E. Legouve.[150] Later
developments of the drama bore the impress of a period of social decay,
prepared to probe its own sufferings, while glad at times to take refuge
in the gaiety traditional in France in her more light-hearted days, but
which even then had not yet deserted either French social life or the
theatre which reflected it. After a fashion which would have startled
even Diderot, while recalling his efforts in the earnestness of its
endeavour to arouse moral interests to which the theatre had long been a
stranger, A. Dumas the younger set himself to reform society by means of
the stage.[151] But the technical skill which he and contemporary
dramatists displayed in the execution of their self-imposed task was
such as had been undreamt of by Diderot. O. Feuillet, more eminent as a
novelist than on the stage, applied himself, though with the aid of
fewer prefaces, to the solution of the same or similar problems; while
the extraordinary versatility of V. Sardou and his unfailing
constructive skill was applied by him to almost every kind of serious,
or serio-comic, drama--even the most solid of all.[152] In the same
period, while E. Pailleron revived some of the most characteristic
tendencies of the best French satirical comedy in ridiculing the pompous
pretentiousness of learning for its own sake,[153] the light-hearted
gaiety of E. Labiche changed into something not altogether similar in
the productions of the comic muse of L. Halevy and H. Meilhac, ranging
from the licence of the musical burlesque which was the congenial
delight of the later days of the Second Empire to a species of comedy in
which the ingredients of bitterness and even of sadness found a
place.[154]
Tendencies of the drama and of the theatre in France.
Dramatic criticism in France has had a material share in the maintenance
of a deep as well as wide national interest in the preservation of a high
standard of excellence both in the performance of plays and in the plays
themselves. Among its modern representatives the foremost place would
probably be by common consent allowed to F. Sarcey, whose Monday
theatrical _feuilleton_ in the _Temps_ was long awaited week by week as
an oracle of dramaturgy. But he was only the first among equals, and the
successor and the predecessor of writers who have at least sought to be
equal to a function of real public importance. For it seems hardly within
the range of probability to suppose that the theatre will for many a
generation to come lose the hold which it has established over the
intellectual and moral sympathies of nearly the whole of the educated--to
say nothing of a great part of the half-educated--population of France.
This does not, of course, imply that the creative activity of French
dramatic literature is certain to endure. Since the great changes set in
which were consequent upon the disastrous war of 1870, French dramatic
literature has reflected more than one phase of national sentiment and
opinion, and has represented the aspirations, the sympathies and the
philosophy of life of more than one class in the community. Thus it has
had its episodes of reaction in the midst of an onward flow of which it
would be difficult to predict the end. The tendency of what can only
vaguely be described as the naturalistic school of writers has
corresponded to that even more prominent in the dramatic literatures of
certain other European nations; but it must be allowed that a new poetic
will have to be constructed if the freedom of development which the
dramatic, like all other arts, is entitled to claim is to be reconciled
to laws deducible from the whole previous history of the drama. The
reaction towards earlier forms has asserted itself in various
ways--through the poetic plays of the later years of F. Coppee; in the
success (notable for reasons other than artistic) of Vicomte H. de
Bornier's first tragedy; and of late more especially in the
dramas--highly original and truly romantic in both form and treatment--of
E. Rostand.
The art of acting is not altogether dependent upon the measure of
contemporary literary productivity, even in France, where the connexion
between dramatic literature and the stage has perhaps been more
continuously intimate than in many other countries. Talma and Mlle Mars
flourished in one of the most barren ages of the French literary drama;
and though this cannot be asserted of the two most brilliant stars of
the French 19th century tragic stage, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, or of
their comic contemporaries from Frederick-Lemaitre down to types less
unique than the "Talma of the boulevards," the constantly accumulating
experience of the successive schools of acting in France may here ensure
to the art a future not less notable than its past. Moreover, the French
theatre has long been, and is more than ever likely to continue, an
affair of the state as well as of the nation; and the judicious policy
of not leaving the chief theatres at the mercy of shifting fashion and
the base demands of idleness and sensuality will remain the surest
guarantee for the maintenance of a high standard both in principle and
in practice. So long as France continues to maintain her ascendancy over
other nations in matters of taste, and in much else that adorns,
brightens and quickens social life, the predominant influence of the
French theatre over the theatres of other nations is likewise assured.
But dramatic literature is becoming international to a degree hardly
dreamt of half a century ago; and the distinctive development of the
French theatre cannot fail to be affected by the success or failure of
the national drama in retaining and developing its own most
characteristic qualities. Its history shows periods of marvellously
rapid advance, of hardly less swift decline, and of frequent though at
times fitful recovery. Its future may be equally varied; but it will
remain not less dependent on the conditions which in every people,
ancient or modern, have proved to be indispensable to national vigour
and vitality. (A. W. W.)
_Recent French Drama._--The last twenty-five years of the 19th century
witnessed an important change in the constructive methods, as well as in
the moral tendencies, of the French playwrights. Of the two leading
dramatists who reigned supreme over the _haute comedie_ in 1875, one,
Emile Augier, had almost ended his career, but the other, Alexandre
Dumas, was to maintain his ascendancy for many years longer. Sardou's
fertility of invention, and extraordinary cleverness at manipulating a
complicated intrigue, were also greatly admired, and much was expected
from Edouard Pailleron's brilliant and--as it seemed--inexhaustible wit
in satirizing the whims and weaknesses of high-born and highly-cultured
society. Alexandre Dumas had created and still monopolized the problem
play, of which _Le Demi-monde_, _Le Fils naturel_, _La Question
d'argent_, _Les Idees de Madame Aubray_, _La Femme de Claude_, _Monsieur
Alphonse_, _La Visite de noces_, _L'Etrangere_, _Francillon_ and
_Denise_ may be mentioned as the most characteristic specimens. The
problem play is the presentation of a particular case, with a view to a
general conclusion on some important question of human conduct. This
afforded the author, who was, in his way, a moralist and a reformer,
excellent opportunities for humorous discussions and the display of that
familiar eloquence which was his greatest gift and most effective
faculty. Among other subjects, the social position of women had an
all-powerful attraction for his mind, and many of his later plays were
written with the object of placing in strong relief the remarkable
inequality of the sexes, both as regards freedom of action and
responsibility, in modern marriage. Like all the dramatists of his time,
he adhered to Scribe's mode of play-writing--a mixture of the _drame
bourgeois_, as initiated by Diderot, and the comedy of character and
manners, long in vogue--from the days of Moliere, Regnard, Destouches
and Marivaux, down to the beginning of the 19th century. In his prefaces
Dumas often undertook the defence of the system which, in his
estimation, was best calculated to serve the purpose of the artist, the
humorist and the moralist--a dramatist being, as he conceived, a
combination of the three.
Though the majority of French playgoers continued to side with him, and
to cling to the time-honoured theatrical beliefs, a few young men were
beginning to murmur against the too elaborate mechanism and artificial
logic. Scribe and his successors, whose plays were a combination of
comedy and drama, were wont to devote the first act to a brilliant and
witty presentation of personages, then to crowd the following scenes
with incidents, until the action was brought to a climax about the end
of the fourth act, invariably concluding, in the fifth, with an
optimistic _denouement_, just before midnight, the time appointed by
police regulations for the closing of playhouses. At the same time a
more serious and far-reaching criticism was levelled at the very
principles on which the conception of human life was then dependent. A
new philosophy, based on scientific research, had been gradually gaining
ground and penetrating the French mind. A host of bold writers had been
trying, with considerable firmness and continuity of purpose, to start a
new kind of fiction, writing in perfect accordance with the determinist
theories of Auguste Comte, Darwin and Taine. The long-disputed success
of the Naturalistic School carried everything before it during the years
1875-1885, and its triumphant leaders were tempted to make the best of
their advantage by annexing a new province and establishing a footing on
the stage. In this they failed signally, either when they were assisted
by professional dramatists or when left to their own resources. It
became evident that Naturalism, to be made acceptable on the stage,
would have to undergo a special process of transformation and be handled
in a peculiar way. Henry Becque succeeded in embodying the new theories
in two plays, which at first met with very indifferent success, but were
revived at a later period, and finally obtained permanent recognition in
the French theatre--even with the acquiescence of the most learned
critics, when they discovered, or fancied they discovered, that Becque's
comedies agreed, in the main, with Moliere's conception of dramatic art.
In _Les Corbeaux_ and _La Parisienne_ the plot is very simple; the
episodes are incidents taken from ordinary life. No extraneous character
is introduced to discuss moral and social theories, or to acquaint us
with the psychology of the real _dramatis personae_, or to suggest
humorous observations about the progress of the dramatic action. The
characters are left to tell their own tale in their own words, which are
sometimes very comical, sometimes very repulsive, but purport to be
always true to nature. Human will, which was the soul and mainspring of
French tragedy in the 17th century, and played such a paramount part in
the _drame bourgeois_ and the _haute comedie_ of the 19th, appears in M.
Becque's plays to have fallen from its former exalted position and to
have ceased to be a free agent. It is a mere passive instrument to our
inner desires and instincts and appetites, which, in their turn, obey
natural laws. Thus, in Becque's comedies, as in the old Greek drama,
destiny, not man, is the chief actor, the real but unseen protagonist.
Becque was not a prolific writer, and when he died, in 1899, it was
remarked that he had spent the last ten years of his life in comparative
inactivity. But during these years his young and ardent disciples had
spared no effort in putting their master's theories to the test. It had
occurred to a gifted and enterprising actor-manager, named Andre
Antoine, that the time had come for trying dramatic experiments in a
continued and methodical manner. For this purpose he gathered around him
a number of young authors, and produced their plays before a select
audience of subscribers, who had paid in advance for their
season-tickets. The entertainment was a strictly private one. In this
way Antoine made himself independent of the censors, and at the same
time was no longer obliged to consider the requirements of the average
playgoer, as is the case with ordinary managers, anxious, above all
things, to secure long runs. At the Theatre Libre the most successful
play was not to be performed for more than three nights.
The reform attempted was to consist in the elimination of what was
contrary to nature in Dumas's and Augier's comedies: of the _intrigue
parallele_ or underplot, of the over-numerous and improbable incidents
which followed the first act and taxed the spectator's memory to the
verge of fatigue; and, lastly, of the conventional _denouement_ for
which there was no justification. A true study of character was to take
the place of Sardou's complicated fabrications and Dumas's problem
plays. The authors would present the spectator with a fragment of life,
but would force no conclusion upon him at the termination of the play.
The reformation in histrionic art was to proceed apace. The actors and
actresses of the preceding period had striven to give full effect to
certain witty utterances of the author, or to preserve and to develop
their own personal peculiarities or oddities. Antoine and his
fellow-artists did their best to make the public realize, in every word
and every gesture, the characteristic features and ruling passions of
the men and women they were supposed to represent.
It was in the early autumn of 1887 that the Theatre Libre opened its
doors for the first time. It struggled on for eight years amidst
unfailing curiosity, but not without encountering some adverse, or even
derisive, criticism from a considerable portion of the public and the
press. The Theatre Libre brought under public notice such men as George
Courteline and George Ancey, who gave respectively, in _Bonbouroche_ and
_La Dupe_, specimens of a comic vein called the "_comique cruel_."
Fabre, in _L'Argent_, approached if not surpassed his master, Henry
Becque. Brieux, in _Blanchette_, gave promise of talent, which he has
since in a great measure justified. In _Les Fossiles_ and _L'Envers
d'une sainte_, by Francois de Curel, were found evidences of dramatic
vigour and concentrated energy, allied with a remarkable gift for the
minute analysis of feeling. Antoine's activity was not exclusively
confined to the efforts of the French Naturalistic School; he included
the Norwegian drama in his programme, and successively produced several
of Ibsen's plays. They received a large amount of attention from the
critics, the views then expressed ranging from the wildest enthusiasm to
the bitterest irony. Francisque Sarcey was decidedly hostile, and Jules
Lemaitre, who ranked next to him in authority, ventured to suggest that
Ibsen's ideas were nothing better than long-discarded social and
literary paradoxes, borrowed from Pierre Leroux through George Sand, and
returned to the French market as novelties. Ibsen was not understood by
the French public at large, though his influence could be clearly traced
on thoughtful men like Paul Hervieu and Francois de Curel.
The authors of the Theatre Libre were sadly wanting in tact and
patience. They went at once to extremes, and, while trying to free
themselves from an obsolete form of drama, fell into a state of anarchy.
If a too elaborate plot is a fault, no plot at all is an absurdity. The
old school had been severely taken to task for devoting the first act to
the delineation of character, and the delineation of character was now
found to have extended over the whole play; and worse still, most of
these young men seemed to find pleasure in importing a low vocabulary on
to the stage; they made it their special object to place before the
spectator revolting pictures of the grossest immorality. In this they
were supported by a knot of noisy and unwise admirers, whose misplaced
approval largely contributed towards bringing an otherwise useful and
interesting undertaking into disrepute. The result was that after the
lapse of eight years the little group collected round Antoine had lost
in cohesion and spirit, that it was both less hopeful and less compact
than it had been at the outset of the campaign. But some authors who had
kept aloof from the movement were not slow in reaping the moral and
intellectual profit of these tentative experiments. Among them must be
cited George de Porto-Riche, Henri Lavedan, Paul Hervieu, Maurice Donnay
and Jules Lemaitre. Alone among the authors of the Theatre Libre, E.
Brieux secured an assured position on the regular stage. Instead of
attacking the vices and follies of his times, he has made a name by
satirizing the weak points or the wrong application of certain
fundamental principles by which modern institutions are supported. He
mocked at universal suffrage in _L'Engrenage_, at art in _Menages
d'artistes_, at popular instruction in _Blanchette_, at charity in _Les
Bienfaiteurs_, at science in _L'Evasion_, and then at law in _La Robe
rouge_. Of _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_, one is an old maid with a
strong bent towards mysticism, another is a star in the demi-monde, and
the third is married. Neither religion, nor free love, nor marriage has
made one of the three happy. The strange fact about Brieux is that he
propounds his uncomfortable ideas with an incredible amount of dash and
spirit.
All the plays written by the above-mentioned authors, and by those who
follow in their steps, have been said to constitute the "new comedy."
But one may question the advisability of applying the same name to
literary works which present so little, if any, family likeness. It was
tacitly agreed to remove the intricacies of the plot and the forced
_denouement_. But no one will trace in those plays the uniformity of
moral purpose which would justify us in comprising them under the same
head, as products of the same school. Then, before the Naturalistic, or
half-Naturalistic, School had attained to a practical result or taken a
definite shape, a wave of Romanticism swept over the French public, and
in a measure brought back the old artistic and literary dogmas
propounded by Victor Hugo and the generation of 1830. Signs of a revival
in French dramatic poetry were not lacking. The success of _La Fille de
Roland_, by the Vicomte de Bornier, was restricted to the more
cultivated classes, but the vogue of Jean Richepin's _Chemineau_ was at
once general and lasting. _Cyrano de Bergerac_, produced in the last
days of 1897, brought a world-wide reputation to its young author,
Edmond Rostand. This play combines sparkling wit and brilliancy of
imagination with delightful touches of pathos and delicate tenderness.
It was assumed that Rostand was endowed to an extraordinary degree both
with theatrical genius and the poetic faculty. _L'Aiglon_ fell short of
this too favourable judgment. It is more a dramatic poem than a real
drama, and the author handles history with the same childish
incompetence and inaccuracy as Hugo did in _Cromwell_, in _Ruy Blas_ and
_Hernani_. The persistent approbation of the public seemed, however, to
indicate a growing taste for poetry, even when unsupported by dramatic
interest--a curious symptom among the least poetical of modern European
races.
To sum up, the French, as regards the present condition of their drama,
were confronted with two alternative movements. Naturalism, furthered by
science and philosophy, was contending against traditions three
centuries old, and seemed unable to crystallize into masterly works;
while romantic drama, founded on vague and exploded theories, had become
embodied in productions of real artistic beauty, which have been warmly
welcomed by the general playgoer. It should nevertheless be noted that
in _Cyrano_ and _L'Aiglon_ human will, which was the main-spring of
Corneille's tragedy and Hugo's drama, tried to reassert itself, but was
baffled by circumstance, and had to submit to inexorable laws. This
showed that the victorious school would have to reckon with the
doctrines of the defeated party, and suggested that a determinist
theatre might be the ultimate outcome of a compromise. (A. FI.)
(f) _English Drama._
Among the nations of Germanic descent the English alone succeeded,
mainly through the influence of the Renaissance movement, in
transforming the later growths of the medieval drama into the beginnings
of a great and enduring national dramatic literature, second neither in
volume nor in splendour to any other in the records of the world. And,
although in England, as elsewhere, the preparatory process had been
continuing for some generations, its consummation coincided with one of
the greatest epochs of English national history, and indeed forms one of
the chief glories of that epoch itself; so that, in thinking or speaking
of the Elizabethan age and the Elizabethan drama, the one can scarcely
be thought or spoken of without the other.
Beginnings of the regular drama.
It is of course conceivable that the regular drama, or drama proper,
might in England have been called into life without the direct influence
of classical examples. Already in the reign of Edward VI. the spirit of
the Reformation had (with the aid of a newly awakened desire for the
study of history, which was no doubt largely due to Italian examples)
quickened the relatively inanimate species of the morality into the
beginning of a new development.[155] But though the _Kyng Johan_ of Bale
(much as this author abhorred the chronicles as written by
ecclesiastics) came very near to the chronicle histories, there is no
proof whatever that the work, long hidden away for very good reasons,
actually served as a transition to the new species; and Bale's
production was entirely unknown to the particular chronicle history
which treated the same subject. Before the earliest example of this
transitional species was produced, English tragedy had directly
connected its beginnings with classical models.
Imitation of classical examples.
Much in the same way, nothing could have been more natural and in
accordance with the previous sluggish evolution of the English drama
than that a gradual transition, however complete in the end, should have
been effected from the moralities to comedy. It was not, however, John
Heywood himself who was to accomplish any such transition; possibly, he
was himself the author of the morality _Genus humanum_ performed at the
coronation feast of Queen Mary, whose council speedily forbade the
performance of interludes without the queen's licence. Nor are we able
to conjecture the nature of the pieces bearing this name composed by
Richard Farrant, afterwards the master of the Children of St George's at
Windsor, or of William Hunnis, master under Queen Elizabeth of the
Children of the Chapel Royal. But the process of transition is visible
in productions, also called interludes, but charged with serious
purpose, such as T. Ingeland's noteworthy _Disobedient Child_ (before
1560), and plays in which the element of abstractions is perceptibly
yielding to that of real personages, or in which the characters are for
the most part historical or the main element in the action belongs to
the sphere of romantic narrative.[156] The demonstration would, however,
be alien to the purpose of indicating the main conditions of the growth
of the English drama. The immediate origin of the earliest extant
English comedy must, like that of the first English tragedy, be sought,
not in the development of any popular literary or theatrical
antecedents, but in the imitation, more or less direct, of classical
models. This cardinal fact, unmistakable though it is, has frequently
been ignored or obscured by writers intent upon investigating the
_origines_ of our drama, and to this day remains without adequate
acknowledgment in most of the literary histories accessible to the great
body of students.
It is true that in tracing the entrance of the drama into the national
literature there is no reason for seeking to distinguish very narrowly
between the several tributaries to the main stream which fertilized this
as well as other fields under Renaissance culture. The universities then
still remained, and for a time became more prominently than ever, the
leading agents of education in all its existent stages; and it is a
patent fact that no influence could have been so strong upon the
Elizabethan dramatists as that to which they had been subjected during
the university life through which the large majority of them had passed.
The corporate life of the universities, and the enthusiasms (habitually
unanimous) of their undergraduates and younger graduates, communicated
this influence, as it were automatically, to the students, and to the
learned societies themselves, of the Inns of Court. In the Tudor, as
afterwards in the early Stuart, times, these Inns were at once the
seminaries of loyalty, and the obvious resort for the supply of young
men of spirit desirous of honouring a learned court by contributing to
its choicer amusements. Thus, whether we trace them in the universities,
in the "bowers" or halls of the lawyers, or in the palaces of the
sovereign, the beginnings of the English academical drama, which in
later Elizabethan and Jacobean literature cannot claim to be more than a
subordinate species of the national drama, in an earlier period served
as the actual link between classical tragedy and comedy and the
surviving native growths, and supplied the actual impulse towards the
beginnings of English tragedy and comedy.
The earlier academical drama.
The academical drama of the early years of Elizabeth's reign and of the
preceding part of the Tudor period--including the school-drama in the
narrower sense of the term and other performances of academical
origin--consisted, apart from actual reproductions of classical plays in
original Latin or in Latin versions of the Greek, in adaptations of
Latin originals, or of Latin or English plays directly modelled on
classical examples. A notable series of plays of this kind was performed
in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, from the first year of Edward VI.
onward, when N. Grimald's _Archipropheta_, treating in classic form the
story of St John the Baptist, but introducing the Vice and comic scenes,
was brought out.[157] Others were J. Calfhill's _Progne_ and R.
Edwardes' _Palaemon and Arcyte_ (both 1566), and, from about 1580
onwards, a succession of Latin plays by William Gager, beginning with
the tragedy _Meleager_, and including, with other tragedies,[158] a
comedy _Rivales_. Yet another comedy, acted at Christ Church, and
extolled in 1591 by Harington for "harmless mirth," was the _Bellum
grammaticale_, or Civil War between Nouns and Verbs, which may have been
a revision of a comedy written by Bale's friend, R. Radcliff, in 1538,
but of which in any case the ultimate origin was a celebrated Italian
allegorical treatise.[159] In Cambridge, as is not surprising, the
activity of the early academical friends and favourers of the drama was
even more marked. At St John's College, where Bishop Watson's Latin
tragedy called _Absolom_ was produced within the years 1534 and 1544,
plays were, according to Ascham, repeatedly performed about the middle
of the century; at Christ's a controversial drama in the Lutheran
interest called _Pammachius_, of which Gardiner complained to the privy
council, and which seems afterwards to have been translated by Bale, was
acted in 1544; and at Trinity there was a long series of performances
which began with Christopherson's _Jephtha_ about 1546, and consisted
partly of reproductions of classical works,[160] partly of plays and
"shows" unnamed; while on one occasion at all events, in 1559, "two
English plays" were produced. In 1560 was acted, doubtless in the
original Latin, and not in Palsgrave's English translation (1540) for
schoolboys, the celebrated "comedy" of _Acolastus_, by W. Gnaphaeus, on
the story of the Prodigal Son. The long series of Trinity plays
interspersed with occasional plays at King's (where Udall's _Ezechias_
was produced in English in 1564), at St John's (where T. Legge's
_Richardus III._ was first acted in 1573), and, as will be seen below,
at Christ's, continued, with few noticeable breaks, up to the time when
the Elizabethan drama was in full activity.[161] Among the "academical"
plays not traceable to any particular university source may be
mentioned, as acted at court so early as the end of 1565 or the
beginning of 1566, the Latin _Sapientia Solomonis_, which generally
follows the biblical narrative, but introduces a comic element in the
sayings of the popular Marcolph, who here appears as a court fool.
Influence of Seneca.
It was under the direct influence of the Renaissance, viewed primarily,
in England as elsewhere, as a revival of classical studies, and in
connexion with the growing taste in university and cognate circles of
society, and at a court which prided itself on its love and patronage of
learning, that English tragedy and comedy took their actual beginnings.
Those of comedy, as it would seem, preceded those of tragedy by a few
years. Already in Queen Mary's reign, translation was found the readiest
form of expression offering itself to literary scholarship; and Italian
examples helped to commend Seneca, the most modern of the ancient
tragedians, and the imitator of the most human among the masters of
Attic tragedy, as a favourite subject for such exercises. In the very
year of Elizabeth's accession--seven years after Jodelle had brought out
the earliest French tragedy--a group of English university scholars
began to put forth a series of translations of the ten tragedies of
Seneca, which one of them, T. Newton, in 1581 collected into a single
volume. The earliest of these versions was that of the _Troades_ (1559)
by Jasper Heywood, a son of the author of the _Interludes_. He also
published the _Thyestes_ (1560) and the _Hercules Furens_ (1561); the
names of his fellow-translators were A. Neville, T. Nuce, J. Studley and
the T. Newton aforesaid. These translations, which occasionally include
original interpolations ("additions," a term which was to become a
technical one in English dramaturgy), are in no instance in blank verse,
the favourite metre of the dialogue being the couplets of
fourteen-syllable lines best known through Chapman's _Homer_.
Earliest English tragedies.
The authority of Seneca, once established in the English literary world,
maintained itself there long after English drama had emancipated itself
from the task of imitating this pallid model, and, occasionally,
Seneca's own prototype, Euripides.[162] Nor can it be doubted that some
translation of the Latin tragic poet had at one time or another passed
through Shakespeare's own hands. But what is of present importance is
that to the direct influence of Seneca is to be ascribed the composition
of the first English tragedy which we possess. Of _Gorboduc_ (afterwards
re-named _Ferrex and Porrex_), first acted on the 18th of January 1562
by the members of the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth, the first
three acts are stated to have been written by T. Norton; the rest of the
play (if not more) was the work of T. Sackville, afterwards Lord
Buckhurst and earl of Dorset, whom Jasper Heywood praised for his
sonnets, but who is better known for his leading share in The _Mirror
for Magistrates_. Though the subject of _Gorboduc_ is a British legend,
and though the action is neither copied nor adapted from any treated by
Seneca, yet the resemblance between this tragedy and the _Thebais_ is
too strong to be fortuitous. In all formal matters--chorus, messengers,
&c.--_Gorboduc_ adheres to the usage of classical tragedy; but the
authors show no respect for the unities of time or place. Strong in
construction, the tragedy is--like its model, Seneca--weak in
characterization. The dialogue, it should be noticed, is in blank verse;
and the device of the _dumb-show_, in which the contents of each act are
in succession set forth in pantomime only, is employed at once to
instruct and to stimulate the spectator.
The nearly contemporary _Apius and Virginia_ (c. 1563), though it takes
its subject--destined to become a perennial one on the modern
stage--from Roman story; the _Historie of Horestes_ (pr. 1567); and T.
Preston's _Cambises King of Percia_ (1569-1570), are somewhat rougher in
form, and, the first and last of them at all events, more violent in
diction, than _Gorboduc_. They still contain elements of the moralities
(above all the Vice) and none of the formal features of classical
tragedy. But a _Julyus Sesyar_ seems to have been performed, in
precisely the same circumstances as _Gorboduc_, so early as 1562; and,
four years later, G. Gascoigne, the author of the satire _The Steele
Glass_, produced with the aid of two associates (F. Kinwelmersh and Sir
Christopher Yelverton, who wrote an epilogue), _Jocasta_, a virtual
translation of L. Dolce's _Giocasta_, which was an adaptation, probably,
of R. Winter's Latin translation of the _Phoenissae_ of Euripides.[163]
Between the years 1567 and 1580 a large proportion of the plays
presented at court by choir- or school-boys, and by various companies of
actors, were taken from Greek legend or Roman history; as was R.
Edwardes' _Damon and Pithias_ (perhaps as early as 1564-1565), which
already shades off from tragedy into what soon came to be called
tragi-comedy.[164] Simultaneously with the influence, exercised directly
or indirectly, of classical literature, that of Italian, both dramatic
and narrative, with its marked tendency to treat native themes, asserted
itself, and, while diversifying the current of early English tragedy,
infused into it a long-abiding element of passion. There are sufficient
grounds for concluding that a play on the subject of _Romeo and Juliet_,
which L. da Porto and M. Bandello had treated in prose narrative--that
of the latter having through a French version formed itself into an
English poem--was seen on an English stage in or before 1562. _Gismonde
of Salerne_, a play founded on Boccaccio, was acted before Queen
Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1568, nearly a generation before it was
published, rewritten in blank verse by R. Wilmot, one of the performers,
then in holy orders; G. Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_, founded on
G. Cinthio (from which came the plot of _Measure for Measure_),
followed, printed in 1578; and there were other "casts of Italian
devices" belonging to this age, in which the choice of a striking theme
still seemed the chief preoccupation of English tragic poets.
From the double danger which threatened English tragedy in the days of
its infancy--that it would congeal on the wintry heights of classical
themes, or dissolve its vigour in the glowing heat of a passion fiercer
than that of the Italians--_Ingleso Italianato e un diavolo
incarnato_--it was preserved more than by any other cause by its happy
association with the traditions of the national history. An exceptional
position might seem to be in this respect occupied by T. Hughes'
interesting tragedy _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ (1587). But the author
of this play--in certain portions of whose framework there were
associated with him seven other members of Gray's Inn, including Francis
Bacon, and which was presented before Queen Elizabeth like
_Gorboduc_--in truth followed the example of the authors of that work
both in choice of theme, in details of form, and in a general though far
from servile imitation of the manner of Seneca; nor does he represent
any very material advance upon the first English tragedy.
Chronicle histories.
Fortunately, at the very time when from such beginnings as those just
described the English tragic drama was to set forth upon a course in
which it was to achieve so much, a new sphere of activity suggested
itself. And in this, after a few more or less tentative efforts, English
dramatists very speedily came to feel at home. In their direct
dramatization of passages or portions of English history (in which the
doings and sufferings of King Arthur could only by courtesy or poetic
licence be included) classical models would be of scant service, while
Italian examples of the treatment of national historical subjects,
having to deal with material so wholly different, could not be followed
with advantage. The native species of the _chronicle history_, which
designedly assumed this name in order to make clear its origin and
purpose, essayed nothing more or less than a dramatic version of an
existing chronicle. Obviously, while the transition from half
historical, half epical narrative often implied carrying over into the
new form some of the features of the old, it was only when the subject
matter had been remoulded and recast that a true dramatic action could
result. But the _histories_ to be found among the plays of Shakespeare
and one or two other Elizabethans are true dramas, and it would be
inconvenient to include these in the transitional species of those known
as _chronicle histories_. Among these ruder compositions, which
intermixed the blank verse introduced on the Stage by _Gorboduc_ with
prose, and freely combined or placed side by side tragic and comic
ingredients, we have but few distinct examples. One of these is _The
Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth_, known to have been acted before
1588; in which both the verse and the prose are frequently of a very
rude sort, while it is neither divided into acts or scenes nor, in
general, constructed with any measure of dramatic skill. But its vigour
and freshness are considerable, and in many passages we recognize
familiar situations and favourite figures in later masterpieces of the
English historical drama. The second is _The Troublesome Raigne of King
John_, in two parts (printed in 1591), an epical narrative transferred
to the stage, neither a didactic effort like Bale's, nor a living drama
like Shakespeare's, but a far from contemptible treatment of its
historical theme. _The True Chronicle History of King Leir_ (acted in
1593) in form resembles the above, though it is not properly on a
national subject (its story is taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth); but,
with all its defects, it seems only to await the touch of the master's
hand to become a tragedy of supreme effectiveness. A yet further step
was taken in the _Tragedy of Sir Thomas More_ (c. 1590)--in which
Shakespeare's hand has been thought traceable, and which deserves its
designation of "tragedy" not so much on account of the relative nearness
of the historical subject to the date of its dramatic treatment, as
because of the tragic responsibility of character here already clearly
worked out.
Earliest comedies.
Such had been the beginnings of tragedy in England up to the time when
the genius of English dramatists was impelled by the spirit that
dominates a great creative epoch of literature to seize the form ready
to their hands. The birth of English comedy, at all times a process of
less labour and eased by an always ready popular responsiveness to the
most tentative efforts of art, had slightly preceded that of her serious
sister. As has been seen from the brief review given above of the early
history of the English academical drama, isolated Latin comedies had
been performed in the original or in English versions as early as the
reign of Henry VIII.--perhaps even earlier; while the morality and its
direct descendant, the interlude, pointed the way towards popular
treatment in the vernacular of actions and characters equally well
suited for the diversion of Roman, Italian and English audiences. Thus
there was no innovation in the adaptation by N. Udal (q.v.) of the
_Miles Gloriosus_ of Plautus under the title of _Ralph Roister Doister_,
which may claim to be the earliest extant English comedy. It has a
genuinely popular vein of humour, and the names fit the characters after
a fashion familiar to the moralities. The second English comedy--in the
opinion of at least one high authority our first--is _Misogonus_, which
was certainly written as early as 1560. Its scene is laid in Italy; but
the Vice, commonly called "Cacurgus," is both by himself and others
frequently designated as "Will Summer," in allusion to Henry VIII.'s
celebrated jester. _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, long regarded as the
earliest of all _English_ comedies, was printed in 1575, as acted "not
long ago in Christ's College, Cambridge." Its authorship was till
recently attributed to John Still (afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells),
who was a resident M.A. at Christ's, when a play was performed there in
1566. But the evidence of his authorship is inconclusive, and the play
"made by Mr. S., Master of Arts," may be by William Stevenson, or by
some other contemporary. This comedy is slighter in plot and coarser in
diction than _Ralph Roister Doister_, but by no means unamusing.
In the main, however, early English comedy, while occasionally
introducing characters and scenes of thoroughly native origin and
complexion (e.g. Grim, the Collier of Croydon),[165] was content to
borrow its themes from classical or Italian sources.[166] G. Gascoigne's
_Supposes_ (acted at Gray's Inn in 1566) is a translation of _I
Suppositi_ of Ariosto, remarkable for the flowing facility of its
prose. While, on the one hand, the mixture of tragic with comic motives,
which was to become so distinctive a feature of the Elizabethan drama,
was already leading in the direction of tragi-comedy, the precedent of
the Italian pastoral drama encouraged the introduction of figures and
stories derived from classical mythology; and the rapid and diversified
influence of Italian comedy, in close touch with Italian prose fiction,
seemed likely to affect and quicken continuously the growth of the
lighter branch of the English drama.
Conditions of the early Elizabethan drama.
Out of such promises as these the glories of English drama were ripened
by the warmth and light of the great Elizabethan age--of which the
beginnings may fairly be reckoned from the third decennium of the reign
to which it owes its name. The queen's steady love of dramatic
entertainments could not of itself have led, though it undoubtedly
contributed, to such a result. Against the attacks which a nascent
puritanism was already directing against the stage by the hands of J.
Northbrooke,[167] the repentant playwright S. Gosson,[168] P.
Stubbes,[169] and others,[170] were to be set not only the frugal favour
of royalty and the more liberal patronage of great nobles,[171] but the
fact that literary authorities were already weighing the endeavours of
the English drama in the balance of respectful criticism, and that in
the abstract at least the claims of both tragedy and comedy were upheld
by those who shrank from the desipience of idle pastimes. It is
noticeable that this period in the history of the English theatre
coincides with the beginning of the remarkable series of visits made to
Germany by companies of English comedians, which did not come to an end
till the period immediately before the Thirty Years' War, and were
occasionally resumed after its close. As at home the popularity of the
stage increased, the functions of playwright and actor, whether combined
or not, began to hold out a reasonable promise of personal gain. Nor,
above all, was that higher impulse which leads men of talent and genius
to attempt forms of art in harmony with the tastes and tendencies of
their times wanting to the group of writers who can be remembered by no
nobler name than that of Shakespeare's predecessors.
The predecessors of Shakespeare.
The lives of all of these are, of course, in part contemporary with the
life of Shakespeare himself; nor was there any substantial difference in
the circumstances under which most of them, and he, led their lives as
dramatic authors. A distinction was manifestly kept up between poets and
playwrights. Of the contempt entertained for the actor's profession some
fell to the share of the dramatist; "even Lodge," says C. M. Ingleby,
"who had indeed never trod the stage, but had written several plays, and
had no reason to be ashamed of his antecedents, speaks of the vocation
of the play-maker as sharing the odium attaching to the actor." Among
the dramatists themselves good fellowship and literary partnership only
at times asserted themselves as stronger than the tendency to mutual
jealousy and abuse; of all chapters of dramatic history, the annals of
the early Elizabethan stage perhaps least resemble those of Arcadia.
History of the Elizabethan stage.
Moreover, the theatre had hardly found its strength as a powerful
element in the national life, when it was involved in a bitter
controversy, with which it had originally no connexion, on behalf of an
ally whose sympathy with it can only have been of a very limited kind.
The Marprelate controversy, into which, among leading playwrights, Lyly
and Nashe were drawn, in 1589 led to a stoppage of stage-plays which
proved only temporary; but the general result of the attempt to make the
stage a vehicle of political abuse and invective was beyond a doubt to
coarsen and degrade both plays and players. Scurrilous attempts and
rough repression continued during the years 1590-1593; and the true
remedy was at last applied, when from about 1594, the chief London
actors became divided into two great rival companies--the lord
chamberlain's and the lord admiral's--which alone received licences.
Instead of half a dozen or more companies whose jealousies communicated
themselves to the playwrights belonging to them, there were now, besides
the Children of the Chapel, two established bodies of actors, directed
by steady and, in the full sense of the word, respectable men. To the
lord chamberlain's company, which, after being settled at "the Theater"
(opened as early as 1576 or 1577), moved to Blackfriars, purchased by
James Burbage, in 1596, and to the Globe on the Bankside in 1599,
Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, the greatest of the Elizabethan actors,
belonged; the lord admiral's was managed by Philip Henslowe, the author
of the _Diary_, and Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, and
was ultimately, in 1600, settled at the Fortune. In these and other
houses were performed the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, with few
adventitious aids, the performance being crowded into a brief afternoon,
when it is obvious that only the idler sections of the population could
attend. No woman might appear at a playhouse, unless masked; on the
stage, down to the Restoration, women's parts continued to be acted by
boys.
It is futile to take no account of such outward circumstances as these
and many which cannot here be noted in surveying the progress of the
literature of the Elizabethan drama. Like that of the Restoration--and
like that of the present day--it was necessarily influenced in its
method and spirit of treatment by the conditions and restrictions which
governed the place and circumstances of the performance of plays,
including the construction of theatre and stage, as well as by the
social composition of its audiences, which the local accommodation, not
less than the entertainment, provided for them had to take into account.
But to these things a mere allusion must suffice. It may safely be said,
at the same time, that no dramatic literature which has any claim to
rank beside the Elizabethan--not that of Athens nor those of modern
Italy and Spain, nor those of France and Germany in their classic
periods--had to contend against such odds; a mighty inherent strength
alone ensured to it the vitality which it so triumphantly asserted, and
which enabled it to run so unequalled a course.
Lyly.
Kyd.
Marlowe.
Peele.
Greene.
Among Shakespeare's predecessors, John Lyly, whose plays were all
written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul's,
holds a position apart in English dramatic literature. The euphuism, to
which his famous romance gave its name, likewise distinguishes his
mythological,[172] quasi-historical,[173] allegorical,[174] and
satirical[175] comedies. But his real service to the progress of English
drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his
imagery--though to his fondness for fairylore and for the whole
phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his
contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a
stimulative precedent, and though in his _Endimion_ at all events he
excites curiosity by an allegorical treatment of contemporary characters
and events. It does not even lie in the songs interspersed in his plays,
though none of his predecessors had in the slightest degree anticipated
the lyric grace which distinguishes some of these incidental efforts. It
consists in his adoption of Gascoigne's innovation of writing plays in
prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and
pretentious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious
dialogue--an example to which even such successors as Shakespeare and
Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd, the author of the _Spanish Tragedy_
(preceded or followed by the first part of _Jeronimo_), and probably of
several plays whose author was unnamed, possesses some of the
characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic
dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is
assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe, whose violent end prematurely
closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play,
_Tamburlaine the Great_, in which the use of blank verse was introduced
upon the English public stage, while full of the "high astounding terms"
of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the
passion which was the poet's most characteristic feature, and which was
to find expression so luxuriantly beautiful in his _Doctor Faustus,_ and
so surpassingly violent in his _Jew of Malta_. His masterpiece, _Edward
II._, is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power
unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele was a far more
versatile writer even as a dramatist; but, though his plays contain
passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by
the side of Marlowe's _Edward II._, compared with which, if indeed not
absolutely, Peele's _Chronicle of Edward I._ still stands on the level
of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His
finest play is undoubtedly _David and Bethsabe_, which resembles _Edward
I._ in construction, but far surpasses it in beauty of language and
versification, besides treating its subject with greatly superior
dignity. If the difference between Peele and Shakespeare is still, in
many respects besides that of genius, an immeasurable one, we seem to
come into something like a Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one
passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene--unfortunate
perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in the proof which he left
behind him of his supercilious jealousy of Shakespeare. Greene's genius,
most conspicuous in plays treating English life and scenes, could,
notwithstanding his academic self-sufficiency, at times free itself from
the pedantry apt to beset the flight of Peele's and at times even of
Marlowe's muse; and his most delightful work[176] seems to breathe
something of the air, sweet and fresh like no other, which blows over an
English countryside. Thomas Lodge, whose dramatic, and much less of
course his literary activity, is measured by the only play that we know
to have been wholly his;[177] Thomas Nashe, the redoubtable pamphleteer
and the father of the English picaresque novel;[178] Henry Chettle, who
worked the chords of both pity[179] and terror[180] with equal vigour,
and Anthony Munday, better remembered for his city pageants than for his
plays, are among the other more important writers of the early
Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be
called predecessors of Shakespeare. It is not possible here to enumerate
the more interesting of the anonymous plays which belong to this
"pre-Shakespearian" period of the Elizabethan drama; but many of them
are by intrinsic merit as well as for special causes deserving of the
attention of the student.
Common characteristics of the early Elizabethans.
The common characteristics of nearly all these dramatists and plays were
in accordance with those of the great age to which they belonged.
Stirring times called for stirring themes, such as those of "Mahomet,
Scipio and Tamerlane"; and these again for a corresponding vigour of
treatment. Neatness and symmetry of construction were neglected for
fulness and variety of matter. Novelty and grandeur of subject seemed
well matched by a swelling amplitude and often reckless extravagance of
diction. As if from an inner necessity, the balance of rhymed couplets
gave way to the impetuous march of blank verse; "strong lines" were as
inevitably called for as strong situations and strong characters.
Although the chief of these poets are marked off from one another by the
individual genius which impressed itself upon both the form and the
matter of their works, yet the stamp of the age is upon them all.
Writing for the stage only, of which some of them possessed a personal
experience and from which none of them held aloof, they acquired an
instinctive insight into the laws of dramatic cause and effect, and
infused a warm vitality into the dramatic literature which they
produced, so to speak, for immediate consumption. On the other hand, the
same cause made rapidity of workmanship indispensable to a successful
playwright. _How_ a play was produced, how many hands had been at work
upon it, what loans and what spoliations had been made in the process,
were considerations of less moment than the question _whether_ it was
produced, and whether it succeeded. His harness--frequently double or
triple--was inseparable from the lusty Pegasus of the early English
drama, and its genius toiled, to borrow the phrase of the Attic
comedian, "like an Arcadian mercenary."
Progress of tragedy and comedy before Shakespeare.
This period of the English drama, though it is far from being one of
crude effort, could not therefore yet be one of full consummation. In
tragedy the advance which had been made in the choice of great themes,
in knitting closer the connection between the theatre and the national
history, in vindicating to passion its right to adequate expression, was
already enormous. In comedy the advance had been less decisive and less
independent; much had been gained in reaching greater freedom of form
and something in enlarging the range of subjects; but artificiality had
proved a snare in the one direction, while the licence of the comic
stage, upheld by favourite "clowns," such as Kemp or Tarlton, had not
succumbed before less elastic demands. The way of escaping from the
dilemma had, however, been already recognized to lie in the construction
of suitable plots, for which a full storehouse was open in the popular
traditions preserved in national ballads, and in the growing literature
of translated foreign fiction, or of native imitations of it. Meanwhile,
the aberration of the comic stage to political and religious
controversy, which it could never hope to treat with Attic freedom in a
country provided with a strong monarchy and a dogmatic religion, seemed
likely to extinguish the promise of the beginnings of English romantic
comedy.
Shakespeare.
These were the circumstances under which the greatest of dramatists
began to devote his genius to the theatre. Shakespeare's career as a
writer of plays can have differed little in its beginnings from those of
his contemporaries and rivals. Before or while he was proceeding from
the re-touching and re-writing of the plays of others to original
dramatic composition, the most gifted of those whom we have termed his
predecessors had passed away. He had been decried as an actor before he
was known as an author; and after living through days of darkness for
the theatre, if not for himself, attained, before the close of the
century, to the beginnings of his prosperity and the beginnings of his
fame. But if we call him fortunate, it is not because of such rewards as
these. As a poet, Shakespeare was no doubt happy in his times, which
intensified the strength of the national character, expanded the
activities of the national mind, and were able to add their stimulus
even to such a creative power as his. He was happy in the antecedents of
the form of literature which commended itself to his choice, and in the
opportunities which it offered in so many directions for an advance to
heights yet undiscovered and unknown. What he actually accomplished was
due to his genius, whose achievements are immeasurable like itself. His
influence upon the progress of English drama divides itself in very
unequal proportions into a direct and an indirect influence. To the
former alone reference can here be made.
Shakespeare and the national historical drama.
Already the first editors of Shakespeare's works in a collected form
recognized so marked a distinction between his plays taken from English
history and those treating other historical subjects (whether ancient or
modern) that, while they included the latter among the tragedies at
large, they grouped the former as _histories_ by themselves. These
_histories_ are in their literary genesis a development of the
_chronicle histories_ of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries,
the taste for which had greatly increased towards the beginning of his
own career as a dramatist, in accordance with the general progress of
national life and sentiment in this epoch. Though it cannot be assumed
that Shakespeare composed his several dramas from English history in the
sequence of the chronology of their themes, his genius gave to the
entire series an inner harmony, and a continuity corresponding to that
which is distinctive of the national life, such as not unnaturally
inspired certain commentators with the wish to prove it a symmetrically
constructed whole. He thus brought this peculiarly national species to a
perfection which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his later
contemporaries and successors to make more than an occasional addition
to his series. None of them was, however, found able or ready to take up
the thread where Shakespeare had left it, after perfunctorily attaching
the present to the past by a work (probably not all his own) which must
be regarded as the end rather than the crown of the series of his
_histories_.[181] But to furnish such supplements accorded little with
the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans; and with the
exception of an isolated work,[182] the national historical drama in
Shakespeare reached at once its perfection and its close. The ruder form
of the old chronicle history for a time survived the advance made upon
it; but the efforts in this field of T. Heywood,[183] S. Rowley,[184]
and others are, from a literary point of view, anachronisms.
Of Shakespeare's other plays the several groups exercised a more direct
influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His
Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same
fidelity as that of the English _histories_, even more effectively
taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes,
and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern
historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily
admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves
as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else
is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and
obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power
and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over
man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his
predecessors, as well as with his successors, "_is_ that nature which
they paint and draw." He threw open to modern tragedy a range of
hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the
national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never
again restrict itself without a consciousness of having renounced its
enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the
English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and
the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he
himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive. The
comedies of Shakespeare accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference
to any method of classification deserving to be called precise; and
several of them are comedies only according to a purely technical use of
the term. In those in which the instinct of reader or spectator
recognizes the comic interest to be supreme, it is still of its nature
incidental to the progress of the action; for the criticism seems just,
as well as in agreement with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare's
process of construction, that among all his comedies not more than a
single one[185] is in both design and effect a comedy of character
proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled wealth of his
invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, he left much to
be done by his successors; while the truest secrets of his comic art,
which interweaves fancy with observation, draws wisdom from the lips of
fools, and imbues with character what all other hands would have left
shadowy, monstrous or trivial, are among the things inimitable belonging
to the individuality of his poetic genius.
His style and its influence.
The influences of Shakespeare's diction and versification upon those of
the English drama in general can hardly be overrated, though it would be
next to impossible to state them definitely. In these points,
Shakespeare's manner as a writer was progressive; and this progress has
been deemed sufficiently well traceable in his plays to be used as an
aid in seeking to determine their chronological sequence. The general
laws of this progress accord with those of the natural advance of
creative genius; artificiality gives way to freedom, and freedom in its
turn submits to a greater degree of regularity and care. In
versification as in diction the earliest and the latest period of
Shakespeare's dramatic writing are more easily recognizable than what
lies between and may be called the _normal_ period, the plays belonging
to which in form most resemble one another, and are least affected by
distinguishable peculiarities--such as the rhymes and intentionally
euphuistic colouring of style which characterize the earliest, or the
feminine endings of the lines and the more condensed manner of
expression common to the latest of his plays. But, such distinctions
apart, there can be no doubt but that in verse and in prose alike,
Shakespeare's style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to
be regarded as the _norm_ of that of the Elizabethan drama; that in it
the prose form of English comedy possesses its first accepted model; and
that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama established
itself as irremovable unless at the risk of an artificial experiment.
Influence of his method of construction.
The assertion may seem paradoxical, that it is by their construction
that Shakespeare's plays exerted the most palpable influence upon the
English drama, as well as upon the modern drama of the Germanic nations
in general, and upon such forms of the Romance drama as have been in
more recent times based upon it. For it was not in construction that his
greatest strength lay, or that the individuality of his genius could
raise him above the conditions under which he worked in common with his
immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Yet the fact that he accepted
these conditions, while producing works of matchless strength and of
unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them
as inseparable from the Shakespearian drama--to use a term which is
perhaps unavoidable but has been often misapplied. The great and
irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare's public was for
_incident_--a demand which of itself necessitated a method of
construction different from that of the Greek drama, or of those
modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other reason is to be
ascribed the circumstance that Shakespeare so constantly combined two
actions in the course of a single play, not merely supplementing the one
by means of the other as a bye- or under-plot. In no respect is the
progress of his technical skill as a dramatist more apparent,--a
proposition which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive
periods of his life must be left to prove.
His characters.
Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of
the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which
expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in _characterization_--in
the drawing of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity
which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art--that he
remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he
pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert
without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of
judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in
particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as
supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a
sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him
in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in
self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he
had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like
a flower of spring, and where Othello's noble nature had suffered and
sinned.
Forms of the later Elizabethan drama.
The pastoral drama.
By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakespeare or in
the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the national drama,
every form commending itself to the tastes and sympathies of the
national genius was essayed. None were neglected except those from which
the spirit of English literature had been estranged by the Reformation,
and those which had from the first been artificial importations of the
Renaissance. The mystery could not in England, as in Spain, produce such
an aftergrowth as the _auto_, and the confines of the religious drama
were only now and then tentatively touched.[186] The direct imitations
of classical examples were, except perhaps in the continued efforts of
the academical drama, few and feeble. Chapman, while resorting to use of
narrative in tragedy and perhaps otherwise indebted to ancient models,
was no follower of them in essentials. S. Daniel (1562-1619) may be
regarded as a belated disciple of Seneca,[187] while experiments like W.
Alexander's (afterwards earl of Stirling) _Monarchicke Tragedies_[188]
(1603-1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, and more
exclusively so than Milton's imposing _Samson Agonistes_, which belongs
to a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the
light gaiety of the Italian and French farce could not establish itself
on the English popular stage without more substantial adjuncts; the
Englishman's festive digestion long continued robust, and he liked his
amusements solid. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many
English dramatists found special opportunities for the exercise of their
lyrical gifts and of their inventive powers. The former could never
become other than an exotic, so long as it retained the artificial
character of its origin. Shakespeare had accordingly only blended
elements derived from it into the action of his romantic comedies. In
more or less isolated works Jonson, Fletcher, Daniel, Randolph, and
others sought to rival Tasso and Guarini--Jonson[189] coming nearest to
nationalizing an essentially foreign growth by the fresh simplicity of
his treatment, Fletcher[190] bearing away the palm for beauty of poetic
execution; Daniel being distinguished by simpler beauties of style in
both verse and prose.[191]
The mask.
The mask (or masque) was a more elastic kind of composition, mixing in
varying proportions its constituent elements of declamation and
dialogue, music and dancing, decoration and scenery. In its least
elaborate literary form--which, of course, externally was the most
elaborate--it closely approached the pageant; in other instances the
distinctness of its characters or the fulness of the action introduced
into its scheme, brought it nearer to the regular drama. A frequent
ornament of Queen Elizabeth's progresses, it was cultivated with
increased assiduity in the reign of James I., and in that of his
successor outshone, by the favour it enjoyed with court and nobility,
the attractions of the regular drama itself. Most of the later
Elizabethan dramatists contributed to this species, upon which
Shakespeare expended the resources of his fancy only incidentally in the
course of his dramas; but by far the most successful writer of masks was
Ben Jonson, of whose numerous compositions of this kind many hold a
permanent place in English poetic literature, and "next" whom, in his
own judgment, "only Fletcher and Chapman could write a mask." From a
poetic point of view, however, they were at least rivalled by Dekker and
Ford; in productivity and favour T. Campion, who was equally eminent as
poet and as musician, seems for a time to have excelled. Inasmuch,
however, as the history of the mask in England is to a great extent that
of "painting and carpentry" and of Inigo Jones, and as, moreover, this
kind of piece, while admitting dramatic elements, is of its nature
occasional, it need not further be pursued here. The _Microcosmus_ of T.
Nabbes (printed 1637), which is very like a morality, seems to have been
the first mask brought upon the public stage. It was the performance of
a mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies at Whitehall which had
some years previously (1632) been thought to have supplied to the
invective of _Histrio-Mastix_ against the stage the occasion for
disloyal innuendo; and it was for the performance of a mask in a great
nobleman's castle that Milton--a Puritan of a very different cast--not
long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of
English poems. _Comus_ has been judged and condemned as a
drama--unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential
to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably
connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask
merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from
contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English
poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to
invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development
as the poetic mask.
The later Elizabethan drama.
The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the
closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution
include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many
illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare's
contemporaries and successors there is, however, but one who by the
energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary
career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson, to
whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did filial
homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of
a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever
he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the
regular drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success; the
weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from
deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as
they are, his tragic works[192] stand almost, though not quite, alone in
this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper.
G. Chapman treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French
history,[193] always with vigour, and at times with genuine
effectiveness; but, though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this
branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the
supreme art of fully developing a character by means of the action.
Mention has been made above of Ford's isolated effort in the direction
of historic tragedy, as well as of excursions into the still popular
domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker and others, which
cannot be regarded as anything more than retrogressions. With the great
body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy
had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and
incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which crowd English
literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight
astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme--ranging as these
plays do from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of
ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance--of equally astonishing
variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been
perennially augmenting. Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction,
original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and
English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial
forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered
opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian
drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists
clustering round Lope de Vega and Calderon, and the native or
naturalized fictions from which they drew their materials supplied a
whole arsenal of plots, incidents and situations--among others to
Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And,
in addition to these resources, a new field of supply was at hand since
English dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of domestic
life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this
description was indeed no novelty on the English stage; Shakespeare
himself may have retouched with his master-hand more than one effort of
this kind;[194] but T. Heywood may be set down as the first who achieved
any work of considerable literary value of this class,[195] to which
some of the plays of T. Dekker, T. Middleton, and others likewise more
or less belong. Yet, in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and
consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of _motives_
employed--at least as a rule--in the tragic drama of this period was
comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the
diversity of subjects among the tragic dramas of such writers as
Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness
is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Scheming
ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled
masculine passion--such are the motives which constantly recur in the
Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is
heightened by the want of moderation, by the extravagance of passion,
which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their
favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally
amenable to this charge; in J. Webster,[196] master as he is of the
effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford,[197] surpassingly seductive in
his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those
marvellously sudden and subtle touches through which their tragic genius
creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of
passion which F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher undoubtedly exhibit be
confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic
characters and irresistibly moving situations in a degree unequalled by
any of their contemporaries--a power seconded by a beauty of diction and
softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest
pinnacle of popular esteem, and which entitles them in their
conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent worker, to an enduring
pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher
are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment and
occasionally greater width of outlook which ennoble the rhetorical
genius of P. Massinger, and the gift of poetic illustration which
entitles J. Shirley to be remembered not merely as the latest and the
most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon
the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common
features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked;
but they leave unobscured the distinctive features in its individual
writers of which a discerning criticism has been able to take note.
In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson
pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of
"humours" (which found the most palpable expression in two of his
earliest plays[198]), if translated into the ordinary language of
dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of
the presentation of distinctive human types. As such it survived by name
into the Restoration age[199] and cannot be said to have ever died out.
In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his
hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be
excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized
and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist's labours, he
rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left
unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some
of whom, such as R. Brome, were content avowedly to follow in his
footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual instances
of comic creations; in the entirety of its achievements his genius as a
comic dramatist remained unapproached. The favourite types of Jonsonian
comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston and Chapman had, though to no large
extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal
and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was
after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians
reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the
inexhaustible _verve_ of T. Middleton, the buoyant productivity of
Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field, and the artistic
versatility of Shirley--not to mention many later and not necessarily
minor names[200]--mirrored in innumerable pictures of contemporary life
the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As comedians of manners more
than one of these surpassed the old master, not indeed in distinctness
and correctness--the fruits of the most painstaking genius that ever
fitted a learned sock to the representation of the living realities of
life--but in a lightness not incompatible with sureness of touch; while
in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and
the greater elasticity in treatment resulting from accumulated
experience, enabled them to advance from success to success. Thus the
comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a
comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies
comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or
contemporaneous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W.
Cartwright may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or
force to its predecessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of
the species, that its traditions survived the _interregnum_ of the
Revolution, and connected themselves more closely than is sometimes
assumed with later growths of English comedy.
The later academical drama.
Such was also the case with a special growth which had continued side by
side, but in growing frequency of contact, with the progress of the
national drama. The academical drama of the later Elizabethan period and
of the first two Stuart reigns by no means fell off either in activity
or in variety from that of the preceding generations. At Oxford, after
an apparent break of several years--though in the course of these one or
two new plays, including a _Tancred_ by Sir Henry Wotton at Queen's,
seem to have been produced--a long succession of English plays, some in
Latin doubtless from time to time intervening, were performed, from the
early years of the 17th century onwards to the dark days of the national
theatre and beyond. The production of these plays was distributed among
several colleges, among which the most conspicuously active were Christ
Church and St John's, where a whole series of festal performances took
place under the collective title of _The Christmas Prince_ (i.e. master
of the Christmas revels). They included a wide variety of pieces, from
the treatment by an author unnamed of the story of "Ovid's owne
Narcissus" (1602) and S. Daniel's _Queen's Arcadia_ (1606) to Barten
Holiday's _Technogamia_ (1618), a complicated allegory on the relations
between the arts and sciences quite in the manner of the moralities;
interspersed by romantic dramas of the ordinary contemporary type by T.
Goffe (1591-1629), W. Cartwright, J. Maine (1604-1672) and others. At
Cambridge the list of Latin and English academical plays, performed in
the latter half of Elizabeth's reign at Trinity, St John's, Queen's and
a few other colleges, contains several examples in each language which
for one reason or another possess a special interest. Thus E. Forsett's
_Pedantius_, probably acted at Trinity in 1581, ridicules a personage
who lived very near the rose--the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey;[201] a
_Laelia_, acted at Queen's in 1590 and again in 1598, resembles _Twelfth
Night_ in part of its plot; while in _Silvanus_, performed in 1596,
probably at St John's, there are certain striking similarities to _As
You Like It_. These are in Latin, as are the comedies _Hispanus_
(containing some curious allusions to the Armada, Drake and Dr Lopez)
and _Machiavellus_, acted at St John's in 1597.[202] By far the most
interesting of the English plays of the later Cambridge series, and, it
may be averred, of the remains of the English academical drama as a
whole, are the Parnassus Plays (q.v.), successively produced at St
John's in 1598-1602, which illustrate with much truthfulness as well as
fancy the relations between university life and the outside world,
including the world of letters and of the stage. Upon a different, but
also a very notable, aspect of English university life--the relations
between town and gown--a partisan light is thrown by _Club-Law_, acted
at Clare in 1599--and in G. Ruggle's celebrated Latin comedy of
_Ignoramus_, twice acted by members of Clare at Trinity in 1615 before
King James I. On one of these occasions were also produced in English T.
Tomkis' comedy _Albumazar_ (a play absurdly attributed to Shakespeare),
and Phineas Fletcher's _Sicelides_, a "piscatory" (i.e. a pastoral drama
in which the place of the shepherds is taken by fishermen). Latin and
English plays continued to be brought out in Cambridge till the year of
the outbreak of the Civil War, T. Randolph and A. Cowley[203] being
among the authors of some of the latest so produced; and with the
Restoration the usage recommenced, the _Adelphi_ of Terence and other
Latin comedies being performed as they had been a century earlier. A
complete survey and classification of the English academical drama, for
which the materials are at last being collected and compared, will prove
of an importance which is only beginning to be recognized to the future
historian of the English drama.
The stage.
To return to the general current of that drama. The rivals against which
it had to contend in the times with which its greatest epoch came to an
end have in their turn been noticed. From the masks and triumphs at
court and at the houses of the nobility, with their Olympuses and
Parnassuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled with goddesses and nymphs
clad in the gorgeous costumes designed by his inventive hand, to the
city pageants and shows by land and water--from the tilts and
tournaments at Whitehall to the more philosophical devices at the Inns
of Court and the academical plays at the universities--down even to the
brief but thrilling theatrical excitements of Bartholomew Fair and the
"Ninevitical motions" of the puppets--in all these ways the various
sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. Foreign
performers--French and Spanish actors, and even French actresses--paid
visits to London. But the national drama held its ground. The art of
acting maintained itself at least on the level to which it had been
brought by Shakespeare's associates and contemporaries, Burbage and
Heminge, Alleyn, Lewin, Taylor, and others "of the older sort." The
profession of actor came to be more generally than of old separated from
that of playwright, though they were still (as in the case of Field)
occasionally combined. But this rather led to an increased appreciation
of the artistic merit of actors who valued the dignity of their own
profession and whose co-operation the authors learnt to esteem as of
independent significance. The stage was purged from the barbarism of the
old school of clowns. Women's parts were still acted by boys, many of
whom attained to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus
continued which must assuredly have placed the English theatre at a
considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never
obtained), and which may, while it has been held to have facilitated
freedom of fancy, more certainly encouraged the extreme licence of
expression cherished by the dramatists. The arrangement of the stage,
which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for
their being organically connected with one another, remained essentially
what it had been in Shakespeare's days; though the primitive expedients
for indicating locality had begun to be occasionally exchanged for
scenery more or less appropriate to the place of action. Costume was
apparently cultivated with much greater care; and the English stage of
this period had probably gone a not inconsiderable way in a direction to
which it is obviously in the interests of the dramatic art to set some
bounds, if it is to depend for its popular success upon its qualities as
such, and upon the interpretation of its agents upon the stage. At the
same time, the drama had begun largely to avail itself of adventitious
aids to favour. The system of prologues and epilogues, and of
dedications to published plays, was more uniformly employed than it had
been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors
and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their
chief patron, the public.
The drama and Puritanism.
Closing of the theatres.
Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its forms continued
to enjoy the favour or good-will of the court, although a close
supervision was exercised over all attempts to make the stage the
vehicle of political references or allusions. The regular official agent
of this supervision was the master of the revels; but under James I. a
special ordinance, in harmony with the king's ideas concerning the
dignity of the throne, was passed "against representing any modern
Christian king in plays on the stage." The theatre could hardly expect
to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state
denied to the public at large; and occasional attempts to indulge in the
freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less
decisive repression and punishment.[204] But the sympathies of the
dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court that the real
difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a
directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of
hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the population, well
represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility
found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the
Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the
representation of stage-plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and
during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily
suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced
type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war
between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and-death
kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest
attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts,
caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up
a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and
of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling
of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,[205] though he
cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and
coarsest expressions,[206] rose into a spirit of open defiance in some
of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;[207] and the comedies of his
contemporaries and successors[208] abound in caricatured reproductions
of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the
other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of
ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, the tendency to
treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the diversions of the
upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the
age, intensified the Puritan opposition to all and any stage plays. A
patient endeavour to reform instead of suppressing the drama was not to
be looked for from such adversaries, should they ever possess the means
of carrying out their views; and whenever Puritanism should victoriously
assert itself in the state, the stage was doomed. Among the attacks
directed against it in its careless heyday of prosperity Prynne's
_Histrio-Mastix_ (1632), while it involved its author in shamefully
cruel persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone of
the dramatic literature of the subsequent period; but the quarrel
between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep to end in
any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of its protectors.
The Civil War began in August 1642; and early in the following month was
published the ordinance of the Lords and Commons, which, after a brief
and solemn preamble, commanded "that while these sad causes and
set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and
be forborne." Many actors and playwrights followed the fortunes of the
royal cause in the field; some may have gone into a more or less
voluntary exile; upon those who lingered on in the familiar haunts the
hand of power lay heavy; and, though there seems reason to believe that
dramatic entertainments of one kind or another continued to be
occasionally presented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to
magistrates against any players found engaged in such proceedings
(1647), and bade them treat all stage-players as rogues, and pull down
all stage galleries, seats and boxes (1648). A few dramatic works were
published in this period;[209] while at fairs about the country were
acted farces called "drolls," consisting of the most vulgar scenes to be
found in popular plays. Thus, the life of the drama was not absolutely
extinguished; and its darkest day proved briefer than perhaps either its
friends or its foes could have supposed.
Revival of the drama.
Already "in Oliver's time" private performances took place from time to
time at noblemen's houses and (though not undisturbed) in the old haunt
of the drama, the Red Bull. In 1656 the ingenuity of Sir William
Davenant whose name (though not really so significant in the dramatic as
in another field of English literature) is memorable as connecting
together two distinct periods in it, ventured on a bolder step in the
production of a quasi-dramatic entertainment "of declamation and music";
and in the following year he brought out with scenery and music a piece
which was afterwards in an enlarged form acted and printed as the first
part of his opera, _The Siege of Rhodes_. This entertainment he
afterwards removed from the private house where it had been produced to
the Cockpit, where he soon ventured upon the performance of regular
plays written by himself. Thus, under the cover of two sister arts,
whose aid was in the sequel to prove by no means altogether beneficial
to its progress, the English drama had boldly anticipated the
Restoration, and was no longer hiding its head when that much-desired
event was actually brought about. Soon after Charles II.'s entry into
London, two theatrical companies are known to have been acting in the
capital. For these companies patents were soon granted, under the names
of "the Duke (of York)'s" and "the King's Servants," to Davenant and one
of the brothers Killigrew respectively--the former from 1662 acting at
Lincoln's Inn Fields, then at Dorset Garden in Salisbury Court, the
latter from 1663 at the Theatre Royal near Drury Lane. These companies
were united from 1682, a royal licence being granted in 1695 to a rival
company which performed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and which migrated to
Covent Garden in 1733. Meanwhile, Vanbrugh had in 1705 built the theatre
in the Haymarket; and a theatre in Goodman's Fields--afterwards rendered
famous by the first appearance of Garrick--led a fitful existence from
1729 to 1733. The act of 1737 deprived the crown of the power of
licensing any more theatres; so that the history of the English stage
for a long period was confined to a restricted area. The rule which
prevailed after the Restoration, that neither of the rival companies
should ever attempt a play produced by the other, operated beneficially
both upon the activity of dramatic authorship and upon the progress of
the art of acting, which was not exposed to the full effects of that
deplorable spirit of personal rivalry which too often leads even most
intelligent actors to attempt parts for which they have no special
qualification. There can be little doubt that the actor's art has rarely
flourished more in England than in the days of T. Betterton and his
contemporaries, among whose names those of Hart, Mohun, Kynaston, Nokes,
Mrs Barry, Mrs Betterton, Mrs Bracegirdle and Mrs Eleanor Gwyn have,
together with many others, survived in various connexions among the
memories of the Restoration age. No higher praise has ever been given to
an actor than that which Addison bestowed upon Betterton, in describing
his performance of _Othello_ as a proof that Shakespeare could not have
written the most striking passages of the character otherwise than he
has done.
The Irish stage.
It may here be noticed that the fortunes of the Irish theatre in general
followed those of the English, of which of course it was merely a
branch. Of native dramatic compositions in earlier times not a trace
remains in Ireland; and the drama was introduced into that country as an
English exotic--apparently already in the reign of Henry VIII., and more
largely in that of Elizabeth. The first theatre in Dublin was built in
1635; but in 1641 it was closed, and even after the Restoration the
Irish stage continued in a precarious condition till near the end of the
century. About that time an extraordinarily strong taste for the theatre
took possession of Irish society, and during the greater part of the
18th century the Dublin stage rivalled the English in the brilliancy of
its stars. Betterton's rival, R. Wilks, Garrick's predecessor in the
homage paid to Shakespeare, Macklin, and his competitor for favour, the
"silver-tongued" Barry, were alike products of the Irish stage, as were
Mrs Woffington and other well-known actresses. Nor should it be
forgotten that three of the foremost English writers of comedy in its
later days, Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, were Irish, the first by
education, and the latter two by birth also.
The later Stuart drama.
Already in the period preceding the outbreak of the Civil War the
English drama had perceptibly sunk from the height to which it had been
raised by the great Elizabethans. When it had once more recovered
possession of that arena with which no living drama can dispense, it
would have been futile to demand that the dramatists should return
altogether into the ancient paths, unaffected by the influences, native
or foreign, in operation around them. But there was no reason why the
new drama should not, like the Elizabethan, have been true in spirit to
the higher purposes of the dramatic art, to the nobler tendencies of the
national life, and to the demands of moral law. Because the later Stuart
drama as a whole proved untrue to these, and, while following its own
courses, never more than partially returned from the aberrations to
which it condemned itself, its history is that of a decay which the
indisputable brilliancy, borrowed or original, of many of its
productions is incapable of concealing.
Tragedy.
Owing in part to the influence of the French theatre, which by this time
had taken the place of the Spanish as the ruling drama of Europe, the
separation between tragedy and comedy is clearly marked in
post-Restoration plays. Comic scenes are still occasionally introduced
into tragedies by some dramatists who adhered more closely to the
Elizabethan models (such as Otway and Crowne), but the practice fell
into disuse; while the endeavour to elevate comedy by pathetic scenes
and motives is one of the characteristic marks of the beginning of
another period in English dramatic literature. The successive phases
through which English tragedy passed in the later Stuart times cannot be
always kept distinct from one another; and the guidance offered by the
theories put forth by some of the dramatists in support of their
practice is often delusive. Following the example of Corneille, Dryden
and his contemporaries and successors were fond of proclaiming their
adherence to this or that principle of dramatic construction or form,
and of upholding, with much show of dialectical acumen, maxims derived
by them from French or other sources, or elaborated with modifications
and variations of their own, but usually amounting to little more than
what Scott calls "certain romantic whimsical imitations of the dramatic
art." Students of the drama will find much entertainment and much
instruction in these prefaces, apologies, dialogues and treatises. They
will acknowledge that Dryden's incomparable vigour does not desert him
either in the exposing or in the upholding of fallacies, while _le bon
sens_, which he hardly ever fails to exhibit, and which is a more
eclectic gift than common-sense, serves as a sure guide to the best
intelligence of his age. Even Rymer,[210] usually regarded as having
touched the nadir of dramatic criticism, will be found to be not wholly
without grains of salt. But Restoration tragedy itself must not be
studied by the light of Restoration criticism. So long as any dramatic
power remained in the tragic poets--and it is absent from none of the
chief among them from Dryden to Rowe--the struggle between fashion
(disguised as theory) and instinct (tending in the direction of the
Elizabethan traditions) could never wholly determine itself in favour of
the former.