Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays”, 1890
Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
PLAYS AND PURITANS {3}
THE British Isles have been ringing for the last few years with the word
‘Art’ in its German sense; with ‘High Art,’ ‘Symbolic Art,’
‘Ecclesiastical Art,’ ‘Dramatic Art,’ ‘Tragic Art,’ and so forth; and
every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about
Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German ‘Æsthetic’ treatises,
and ‘Kunstnovellen,’ the mass of the British people cares very little
about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of ‘bad taste.’
Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; our
music, like our architecture, only reproduces the past; our painting is
only first-rate when it handles landscapes and animals, and seems likely
so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody cares. Some of the deepest and most
earnest minds vote the question, in general, a ‘sham and a snare,’ and
whisper to each other confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be
a ‘bore,’ and that Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all;
while the middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a
pretty toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think,
apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is merely
used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to mention that,
if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand down to posterity
likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family. But when ‘Art’ dares to
be in earnest, and to mean something, much more to connect itself with
religion, Smith’s tone alters. He will teach ‘Art’ to keep in what he
considers its place, and if it refuses, take the law of it, and put it
into the Ecclesiastical Court. So he says, and what is more, he means
what he says; and as all the world, from Hindostan to Canada, knows by
most practical proof, what he means, he sooner or later does, perhaps not
always in the wisest way, but still he does it.
Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward ‘Art’ is simply
that of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and widened, but only
enough so as to permit Art, not to encourage it.
Some men’s thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form of
some æsthetic _à priori_ disquisition, beginning with ‘the tendency of
the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,’ and ending—who can tell
where? But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any skill in the
_scientia scientiarum_, or say, ‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning
of His way, before His works of old. When He prepared the heavens, I was
there, when He set a compass upon the face of the deep;’ we shall leave
æsthetic science to those who think that they comprehend it; we shall, as
simple disciples of Bacon, deal with facts and with history as ‘the will
of God revealed in facts.’ We will leave those who choose to settle what
ought to be, and ourselves look patiently at that which actually was
once, and which may be again; that so out of the conduct of our old
Puritan forefathers (right or wrong), and their long war against ‘Art,’
we may learn a wholesome lesson; as we doubtless shall, if we believe
firmly that our history is neither more nor less than what the old Hebrew
prophets called ‘God’s gracious dealings with his people,’ and not say in
our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings Jacobite ballads
(written forty years ago by men who cared no more for the Stuarts than
for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off George the
Fourth’s feet at his visit to Edinburgh)—‘Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed
victa puellis.’
The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and invidious
task. For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases, arise not merely
from the crimes of a few great men, but from a general viciousness and
decay of the whole, or the majority, of the nation; and that viciousness
is certain to be made up, in great part, of a loosening of domestic ties,
of breaches of the Seventh Commandment, and of sins connected with them,
which a writer is now hardly permitted to mention. An ‘evil and
adulterous generation’ has been in all ages and countries the one marked
out for intestine and internecine strife. That description is always
applicable to a revolutionary generation; whether or not it also comes
under the class of a superstitious one, ‘seeking after a sign from
heaven,’ only half believing its own creed, and, therefore, on tiptoe for
miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely
persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems about
to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from sinking into
the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian lies under this
paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to
state it. If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and respectable
multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these, will either
shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them as
incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find similar horrors and
abominations among people of their own rank, of whom they are naturally
inclined to judge by their own standard of civilisation. Thus if any
one, in justification of the Reformation and the British hatred of Popery
during the sixteenth century, should dare to detail the undoubted facts
of the Inquisition, and to comment on them dramatically enough to make
his readers feel about them what men who witnessed them felt, he would be
accused of a ‘morbid love of horrors.’ If any one, in order to show how
the French Revolution of 1793 was really God’s judgment on the profligacy
of the _ancien régime_, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the
_ancien régime_ unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would
have a right to demand, ‘How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts
from their merited oblivion?’ Those, again, who are really acquainted
with the history of Henry the Eighth’s marriages, are well aware of facts
which prove him to have been, not a man of violent and lawless passions,
but of a cold temperament and a scrupulous conscience; but which cannot
be stated in print, save in the most delicate and passing hints, to be
taken only by those who at once understand such matters, and really wish
to know the truth; while young ladies in general will still look on Henry
as a monster in human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, to
undeceive them by anything beyond bare assertion without proof.
‘But what does it matter,’ some one may say, ‘what young ladies think
about history?’ This it matters; that these young ladies will some day
be mothers, and as such will teach their children their own notions of
modern history; and that, as long as men confine themselves to the
teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the history of their own
country to be handled exclusively by their unmarried sisters, so long
will slanders, superstitions, and false political principles be
perpetuated in the minds of our boys and girls.
But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the historian’s case is
often too strong to be stated. There is always a reactionary party, or
one at least which lingers sentimentally over the dream of past golden
ages, such as that of which Cowley says, with a sort of naïve blasphemy,
at which one knows not whether to smile or sigh—
‘When God, the cause to me and men unknown,
Forsook the royal houses, and his own.’
These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the defeated
system; but the historian has no such liberty to state the case against
it. If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare not state
them, he is at once met with a _præjudicium_. The mere fact of his
having ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of
prudish cant. ‘What a very improper person he must be to like to dabble
in such improper books that they must not even be quoted.’ If in
self-defence he desperately gives his facts, he only increases the
feeling against him, whilst the reactionists, hiding their blushing
faces, find in their modesty an excuse for avoiding the truth; if, on the
other hand, he content himself with bare assertion, and with indicating
the sources from whence his conclusions are drawn, what care the
reactionists? They know well that the public will not take the trouble
to consult manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but
will content themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on
unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after she
has been painfully haled up to the well’s mouth, to tumble miserably to
the bottom of it again.
* * * * *
In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of the
great cause, Puritans _v._ Players, before our readers, trusting to find
some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common notions
on the point to form a fair decision.
* * * * *
What those notions are is well known. Very many of her Majesty’s
subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth century
(if the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the most
beautiful period of the English nation’s life; that in it the chivalry
and ardent piety of the Middle Age were happily combined with modern art
and civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the Court, of stage-plays,
of the fashions of the time, was only ‘a scrupulous and fantastical
niceness’; barbaric and tasteless, if sincere; if insincere, the basest
hypocrisy; that the stage-plays, though coarse, were no worse than
Shakspeare, whom everybody reads; and that if the Stuarts patronised the
stage they also raised it, and exercised a purifying censorship. And
many more who do not go all these lengths with the reactionists, and
cannot make up their mind to look to the Stuart reigns either for model
churchmen or model courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan
‘preciseness,’ and to say lazily, that though, of course, something may
have been wrong, yet there was no need to make such a fuss about the
matter; and that at all events the Puritans were men of very bad taste.
Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger’s plays (1813), was
probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a great part
of this generation also, when he informs us, that ‘with Massinger
terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry; indeed, the stage itself
survived him but a short time. The nation was convulsed to its centre by
contending factions, and a set of austere and gloomy fanatics, enemies to
every elegant amusement and every social relaxation, rose upon the ruins
of the State. Exasperated by the ridicule with which they had long been
covered by the stage, they persecuted the actors with unrelenting
severity, and consigned them, together with the writers, to hopeless
obscurity and wretchedness. Taylor died in the extreme of poverty,
Shirley opened a little school at Brentford, and Downe, the boast of the
stage, kept an ale-house at Brentford. Others, and those the far greater
number, joined the royal standard, and exerted themselves with more
gallantry than good fortune in the service of their old and indulgent
master.’
‘We have not yet, perhaps, fully estimated, and certainly not yet fully
recovered, what was lost in that unfortunate struggle. The arts were
rapidly advancing to perfection under the fostering wing of a monarch who
united in himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake, and munificence to
reward. Architecture, painting, and poetry were by turns the objects of
his paternal care. Shakspeare was his “closet companion,” Jonson his
poet, and in conjunction with Inigo Jones, his favoured architect,
produced those magnificent entertainments,’ etc.
* * *
He then goes on to account for the supposed sudden fall of dramatic art
at the Restoration, by the somewhat far-fetched theory that—
‘Such was the horror created in the general mind by the perverse and
unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, that
the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and, with
Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and “his
fellows.” Instead, therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it
abruptly ceased in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it
were, a manner of their own, or fetched it from the heavy monotony of
their continental neighbours.’
So is history written, and, what is more, believed. The amount of
misrepresentation in this passage (which would probably pass current with
most readers in the present day) is quite ludicrous. In the first place,
it will hardly be believed that these words occur in an essay which,
after extolling Massinger as one of the greatest poets of his age,
second, indeed, only to Shakspeare, also informs us (and, it seems, quite
truly) that, so far from having been really appreciated or patronised, he
maintained a constant struggle with adversity,—‘that even the bounty of
his particular friends, on which he chiefly relied, left him in a state
of absolute dependence,’—that while ‘other writers for the stage had
their periods of good fortune, Massinger seems to have enjoyed no gleam
of sunshine; his life was all one misty day, and “shadows, clouds, and
darkness rested on it.”’
So much for Charles’s patronage of a really great poet. What sort of men
he did patronise, practically and in earnest, we shall see hereafter,
when we come to speak of Mr. Shirley.
But Mr. Gifford must needs give an instance to prove that Charles was
‘not inattentive to the success of Massinger,’ and a curious one it is;
of the same class, unfortunately, as that with the man in the old story,
who recorded with pride that the King had spoken to him, and—had told him
to get out of the way.
Massinger in his ‘King and the Subject’ had introduced Don Pedro of Spain
thus speaking—
‘Monies! We’ll raise supplies which way we please,
And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which
We’ll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Cæsars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no law
But what their swords did ratify, the wives
And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their will, as deities,’ etc.
Against which passage Charles, reading over the play before he allowed of
it, had written, ‘This is too insolent, and not to be printed.’ Too
insolent it certainly was, considering the state of public matters in the
year 1638. It would be interesting enough to analyse the reasons which
made Charles dislike in the mouth of Pedro sentiments so very like his
own; but we must proceed, only pointing out the way in which men,
determined to repeat the traditional clap-trap about the Stuarts, are
actually blind to the meaning of the very facts which they themselves
quote.
Where, then, do the facts of history contradict Mr. Gifford?
We believe that, so far from the triumph of dramatic poetry terminating
with Massinger, dramatic art had been steadily growing worse from the
first years of James; that instead of the arts advancing to perfection
under Charles the First, they steadily deteriorated in quality, though
the supply became more abundant; that so far from there having been a
sudden change for the worse in the drama after the Restoration, the taste
of the courts of Charles the First and of Charles the Second are
indistinguishable; that the court poets, and probably the actors also, of
the early part of Charles the Second’s reign had many of them belonged to
the court of Charles the First, as did Davenant, the Duke and Duchess of
Newcastle, Fanshaw, and Shirley himself; that the common notion of a ‘new
manner’ having been introduced from France after the Restoration, or
indeed having come in at all, is not founded on fact, the only change
being that the plays of Charles the Second’s time were somewhat more
stupid, and that while five of the seven deadly sins had always had free
licence on the stage, blasphemy and profane swearing were now
enfranchised to fill up the seven. As for the assertion that the new
manner (supposing it to have existed) was imported from France, there is
far more reason to believe that the French copied us than we them, and
that if they did not learn from Charles the First’s poets the
superstition of ‘the three unities,’ they at least learnt to make ancient
kings and heroes talk and act like seventeenth century courtiers, and to
exchange their old clumsy masques and translations of Italian and Spanish
farces for a comedy depicting native scoundrelism. Probably enough,
indeed, the great and sudden development of the French stage, which took
place in the middle of the seventeenth century under Corneille and
Molière, was excited by the English cavalier playwrights who took refuge
in France.
No doubt, as Mr. Gifford says, the Puritans were exasperated against the
stage-players by the insults heaped on them; but the cause of quarrel lay
far deeper than any such personal soreness. The Puritans had attacked
the players before the players meddled with them, and that on principle;
with what justification must be considered hereafter. But the fact is
(and this seems to have been, like many other facts, conveniently
forgotten), that the Puritans were by no means alone in their protest
against the stage, and that the war was not begun exclusively by them.
As early as the latter half of the sixteenth century, not merely
Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and Reynolds had lifted up their voices
against them, but Archbishop Parker, Bishop Babington, Bishop Hall, and
the author of the _Mirror for Magistrates_. The University of Oxford, in
1584, had passed a statute forbidding common plays and players in the
university, on the very same moral grounds on which the Puritans objected
to them. The city of London, in 1580, had obtained from the Queen the
suppression of plays on Sundays; and not long after, ‘considering that
play-houses and dicing-houses were traps for young gentlemen and others,’
obtained leave from the Queen and Privy Council to thrust the players out
of the city, and to pull down the play-houses, five in number; and,
paradoxical as it may seem, there is little doubt that, by the letter of
the law, ‘stage plays and enterludes’ were, even to the end of Charles
the First’s reign, ‘unlawful pastime,’ being forbidden by 14 Eliz., 39
Eliz., 1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1 Caroli, and the players subject to
severe punishment as ‘rogues and vagabonds.’ The Act of 1 Jacobi seems
even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which, in Elizabeth’s
reign, had allowed companies of players the protection of a ‘baron or
honourable person of greater degree,’ who might ‘authorise them to play
under his hand and seal of arms.’ So that the Puritans were only
demanding of the sovereigns that they should enforce the very laws which
they themselves had made, and which they and their nobles were setting at
defiance. Whether the plays ought to have been put down, and whether the
laws were necessary, is a different question; but certainly the court and
the aristocracy stood in the questionable, though too common, position of
men who made laws which prohibited to the poor amusements in which they
themselves indulged without restraint.
But were these plays objectionable? As far as the comedies are
concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays
objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery? Now, we cannot
but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject for comedy at
all. It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never. It is a sin; not
merely theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the
parent of seven other sins,—of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a
whole bevy of devils. The prevalence of adultery in any country has
always been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and
revolution; where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to
treat it as a light thing, that people has been always careless, base,
selfish, cowardly,—ripe for slavery. And we must say that either the
courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles the First were in that
state, or that the poets were doing their best to make them so.
We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall
only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century, with
the exception of Shakspeare’s, in which adultery is not introduced as a
subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the whole plot. The
seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a ‘handsome
gentleman’; the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of
which we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn and
ridicule. In this latter habit (common to most European nations) there
is a sort of justice. A man can generally retain his wife’s affections
if he will behave himself like a man; and ‘injured husbands’ have for the
most part no one to blame but themselves. But the matter is not a
subject for comedy; not even in that case which has been always too
common in France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to
have been painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when,
by a _mariage de convenance_, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot
or a decrepit old man. Such things are not comedies, but tragedies;
subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry. Therefore
the men who look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked
are not good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when
they erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure
in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and
consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity, pointing
‘Eastward Ho!’ _i.e._ to the city of London, as the quarter where court
gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions amid the fair
wives of dull and cowardly citizens. If the citizens drove the players
out of London, the playwrights took good care to have their revenge. The
citizen is their standard butt. These shallow parasites, and their
shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened,
a fatal pleasure in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley’s
‘Gamester,’ Charles the First’s favourite play, a passage like that in
Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame
and that of his fellow-merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have
repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a
humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of having given
those base words his royal warrant and approbation.
The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as
questionable as the comedies. That there are noble plays among them here
and there, no one denies—any more than that there are exquisitely amusing
plays among the comedies; but as the staple interest of the comedies is
dirt, so the staple interest of the tragedies is crime. Revenge, hatred,
villany, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant themes, and
(with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and
perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors with little or no moral
purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience, and of
displaying their own power of delineation in a way which makes one but
too ready to believe the accusations of the Puritans (supported as they
are by many ugly anecdotes) that the play-writers and actors were mostly
men of fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an
acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch. This is
notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern
‘Literature of Horror,’ and the two literatures are morally identical.
We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought against the
School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply to the average
tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars.
This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so greedily,
tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon them (and not
undeservedly) heavy odium.
One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as against
Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from Italy. We must fairly
put ourselves into the position of an honest Englishman of the
seventeenth century before we can appreciate the huge _præjudicium_ which
must needs have arisen in his mind against anything which could claim a
Transalpine parentage. Italy was then not merely the stronghold of
Popery. That in itself would have been a fair reason for others beside
Puritans saying, ‘If the root be corrupt, the fruit will be also: any
expression of Italian thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome
while her vitals are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only
half believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher
classes, even those of the priesthood; but only kept up for their private
aggrandisement.’ But there was more than hypothesis in favour of the men
who might say this; there was universal, notorious, shocking fact. It
was a fact that Italy was the centre where sins were invented worthy of
the doom of the Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all
nations who had connection with her. We dare give no proof of this
assertion. The Italian morals and the Italian lighter literature of the
sixteenth and of the beginning of the seventeenth century were such, that
one is almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them, although
the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes to understand
either the European society of the time or the Puritan hatred of the
drama. _Non ragionam di lor: ma guarda è passa_.
It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into England by the
young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish, travelled
to Italy. From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the
middle of Elizabeth’s reign, this foul tide had begun to set toward
England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in passing
through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its course
hitherward; till, to judge by Marston’s ‘Satires,’ certain members of the
higher classes had, by the beginning of James’s reign, learnt nearly all
which the Italians had to teach them. Marston writes in a rage, it is
true; foaming, stamping, and vapouring too much to escape the suspicion
of exaggeration; yet he dared not have published the things which he
does, had he not fair ground for some at least of his assertions. And
Marston, be it remembered, was no Puritan, but a playwright, and Ben
Jonson’s friend.
Bishop Hall, in his ‘Satires,’ describes things bad enough, though not so
bad as Marston does; but what is even more to the purpose, he wrote, and
dedicated to James, a long dissuasive against the fashion of running
abroad. Whatever may be thought of the arguments of ‘Quo vadis?—a
Censure of Travel,’ its main drift is clear enough. Young gentlemen, by
going to Italy, learnt to be fops and profligates, and probably Papists
into the bargain. These assertions there is no denying. Since the days
of Lord Oxford, most of the ridiculous and expensive fashions in dress
had come from Italy, as well as the newest modes of sin; and the
playwrights themselves make no secret of the fact. There is no need to
quote instances; they are innumerable; and the most serious are not fit
to be quoted, scarcely the titles of the plays in which they occur; but
they justify almost every line of Bishop Hall’s questions (of which some
of the strongest expressions have necessarily been omitted):—
‘What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed?
‘To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had the variety of our
vain disguises? As if we had not wit enough to be foolish unless we
were taught it. These dresses, being constant in their mutability,
show us our masters. What is it that we have not learned of our
neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap? whom would it not vex
to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks and
monsters of themselves? Whence come their (absurd fashions); but the
one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the
worse-minded courtesans of Italy? Whence else learned they to daub
these mud-walls with apothecaries’ mortar; and those high washes,
which are so cunningly licked on that the wet napkin of Phryne should
he deceived? Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their
borrowed hair? As if they were ashamed of the head of God’s making,
and proud of the tire-woman’s. Where learned we that devilish art
and practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are
taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men? Where had we
that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the nose is no less
pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than either? wherein the
piles of dishes make barricadoes against the appetite, and with a
pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry guest. Where those forms of
ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make gods of
others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason while they
pretend to do reason? Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a
wild tongue, that runs, with reins on the neck, through the
bedchambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and
spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred
out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness? Where the
change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some
few butterflies? Where the art of dishonesty in practical
Machiavelism, in false equivocations? Where the slight account of
that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as
not unnecessary? Where the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy
in those formal compliments which do neither expect belief from
others nor carry any from ourselves? Where’ (and here Bishop Hall
begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of
matters notorious and undeniable.) ‘Where that close Atheism, which
secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe,
wisdom to profess any religion? Where the bloody and tragical
science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and
rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation
hath endangered the infection of our peace?’—Bishop Hall’s ‘Quo
Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,’ vol xii. sect. 22.
Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of the
drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since the
beginning of the sixteenth century. However much truth there may be in
the common assertion that the old ‘miracle plays’ and ‘mysteries’ were
the parents of the English drama (as they certainly were of the Spanish
and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much our stage owed, from its
first rise under Elizabeth, to direct importations from Italy. This is
merely thrown out as a suggestion; to establish the fact would require a
wide acquaintance with the early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent
facts have their due weight. The names of the characters in most of our
early regular comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes,
are the manners, at least they profess to be so. Next, the plots of many
of the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if
Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where
others found poison) went to Cinthio for ‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for
Measure,’ to Bandello for ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and to Boccaccio for
‘Cymbeline,’ there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to the
same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these profligate
writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts adultery into a
virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a duty; which revels
in the horrible as freely as any French novelist of the romantic school;
and whose only value is its pitiless exposure of the profligacy of the
Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be valuable which makes a mock
equally of things truly and falsely sacred, and leaves on the reader’s
mind the fear that the writer saw nothing in heaven or earth worthy of
belief, respect, or self-sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.
Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to judge from
their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to assert, were drawn
from life, and for which they give names, places, and all details which
might amuse the noble gentlemen and ladies to whom these stories are
dedicated), this had been the morality of Italy for some centuries past.
This, also, is the general morality of the English stage in the
seventeenth century. Can we wonder that thinking men should have seen a
connection between Italy and the stage? Certainly the playwrights put
themselves between the horns of an ugly dilemma. Either the vices which
they depicted were those of general English society, and of themselves
also (for they lived in the very heart of town and court foppery); or
else they were the vices of a foreign country, with which the English
were comparatively unacquainted. In the first case, we can only say that
the Stuart age in England was one which deserved purgation of the most
terrible kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal
measures would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the
experience of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never
have been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines.
In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds of
the people, and, instead of ‘holding up a mirror to vice,’ instructing
frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and fully justifying old
Prynne’s indignant complaint—
‘The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies
on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the
spectators’ minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them,
till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed
no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill
spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce
them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious
ill-serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic
interlude.’
That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police reports
will sufficiently prove. It is notorious that the representation in our
own days of ‘Tom and Jerry’ and of ‘Jack Sheppard’ did excite dozens of
young lads to imitate the heroes of those dramas; and such must have been
the effect of similar and worse representations in the Stuart age. No
rational man will need the authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor
Leighton, Archbishop Parker, Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any
one else, Churchman or Puritan, prelate or ‘penitent reclaimed
play-poet,’ like Stephen Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert,
citizens’ wives (who are generally represented as the proper subjects for
seduction) ‘have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they
have received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned
their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women,
light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt, their
children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault of a
dangerous state;’ or that ‘The devices of carrying and re-carrying
letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport their tokens
by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other kinds of
policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of their wives,
guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants, were aptly
taught in these schools of abuse.’ {27a}
The matter is simple enough. We should not allow these plays to be acted
in our own day, because we know that they would produce their effects.
We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to
see such representations. {27b} Why, in all fairness, were the Puritans
wrong in condemning that which we now have absolutely forbidden?
We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the old
play-houses. Gosson and his colleague the anonymous Penitent assert
them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but antechambers to
houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned in the pit were only
not practised also in the pit. What reason have we to doubt it, who know
that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical reformation of this abuse,
for which his name will be ever respected, our own comparatively purified
stage was just the same? Let any one who remembers the saloons of Drury
Lane and Covent Garden thirty years ago judge for himself what the
accessories of the Globe or the Fortune must have been, in days when
players were allowed to talk inside as freely as the public behaved
outside.
Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of
demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting them.
We will lay on them the blame of no special _malus animus_: but, at the
same time, we must treat their fine words about ‘holding a mirror up to
vice,’ and ‘showing the age its own deformity,’ as mere cant, which the
men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an
insincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later,
Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth of Congreve. If the
poets had really intended to show vice its own deformity, they would have
represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not as
triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in works in which
there is no moral justice. The only condition which can excuse the
representation of evil is omitted. The simple fact is that the poets
wanted to draw a house; that this could most easily be done by the
coarsest and most violent means; and that not being often able to find
stories exciting enough in the past records of sober English society,
they went to Italy and Spain for the violent passions and wild crimes of
southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition
believed in enough to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control,
its victims. Those were the countries which just then furnished that
strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is
the immoral playwright’s fittest material; because, while the inward
savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation
brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of
themselves in their worst moments, such as no ‘Mystery of Cain’ or
‘Tragedy of Prometheus’ can give.
Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama for
its lessons in human nature? On that special point something must be
said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one
who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as
high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled
those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let
Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to ‘Volpone’ tell us in his
own noble prose what he thought of the average morality of his
contemporary playwrights:—
‘For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices
and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the
impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a
good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good
discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in
their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood,
recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the
interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less
than human, a master in manners and can alone (or with a few) effect
the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride
and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But it will
here be hastily answered that the writers of these days are other
things, that not only their manners but their natures are inverted,
and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of poet but the abused
name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick,
or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation,
blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised.
I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not),
because in some men’s abortive features (and would God they had never
seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold
adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a
more malicious slander. For every particular I can (and from a most
clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward
the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of such foul and
unwashed . . . [his expression is too strong for quotation] as is now
made the food of the scene.’
It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty ideal
of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints against
the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger sentence occurs:—
‘The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present
trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal
soul doth not abhor? Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered,
and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms,
such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with
(indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn
the blood of a Christian to water.’
So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a
peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company. After
him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to
be necessary. He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative; but his
bitter words suggest at least this dilemma. Either they are true, and
the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says it was) that of Gehenna: or
they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against more
successful poets. And what does that latter prove, but that the greatest
poet of his age (after Shakspeare has gone) was not as much esteemed as
some poets whom we know to have been more filthy and more horrible than
he? which, indeed, is the main complaint of Jonson himself. It will be
rejoined, of course, that he was an altogether envious man; that he
envied Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at ‘The
Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest,’ in the prologue to ‘Every Man in his
Humour’; and, indeed, Jonson’s writings, and those of many other
playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry called out the
bitterest hatred and the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare’s
great soul was giving way to the pettiest passions, when in ‘Hamlet’ he
had his fling at the ‘aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on
the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t.’ It may
be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that
‘their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own
succession,’ _i.e._ against themselves, when ‘grown to common players.’
Be that as it may. Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only less
great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly is not so
in all his charges. Some of the faults which he attributes to Shakspeare
are really faults.
At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his
contemporaries, by the evidence of the men’s own plays. We know that the
decadence of the stage of which he complains went on uninterruptedly
after his time, and in the very direction which he pointed out.
On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of poetry ‘made a
wall in our father’s house, and the bricks are alive to testify unto this
day.’ So that we cannot do better than give a few samples thereof, at
least samples decent enough for modern readers, and let us begin, not
with a hodman, but with Jonson himself.
Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was a very
great genius, immaculate or not; ‘Rare Ben,’ with all his faults. One
can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of that rich
free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance and pride
which brood upon the lip and eyebrow,
‘Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.’
A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one fancies,
never could. One ought to have, too, a sort of delicacy about saying
much against him; for he is dead, and can make, for the time being at
least, no rejoinder. There are dead men whom one is not much ashamed to
‘upset’ after their death, because one would not have been much afraid of
doing so when they were alive. But ‘Rare Ben’ had terrible teeth, and
used them too. A man would have thought twice ere he snapt at him
living, and therefore it seems somewhat a cowardly trick to bark securely
at his ghost. Nevertheless it is no unfair question to ask—Do not his
own words justify the Puritan complaints? But if so, why does he rail at
the Puritans for making their complaints? His answer would have been
that they railed in ignorance, not merely at low art, as we call it now,
but at high art and all art. Be it so. Here was their fault, if fault
it was in those days. For to discriminate between high art and low art
they must have seen both. And for Jonson’s wrath to be fair and just he
must have shown them both. Let us see what the pure drama is like which
he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his contemporaries; and, to
bring the matter nearer home, let us take one of the plays in which he
hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely the ‘Alchemist,’ said to have
been first acted in 1610 ‘by the king’s majesty’s servants.’ Look, then,
at this well-known play, and take Jonson at his word. Allow that Ananias
and Tribulation Wholesome are, as they very probably are, fair portraits
of a class among the sectaries of the day: but bear in mind, too, that if
this be allowed, the other characters shall be held as fair portraits
also. Otherwise, all must he held to be caricature; and then the
onslaught on the Puritans vanishes into nothing, or worse. Now in either
case, Ananias and Tribulation are the best men in the play. They palter
with their consciences, no doubt: but they have consciences, which no one
else in the play has, except poor Surly; and he, be it remembered, comes
to shame, is made a laughing-stock, and ‘cheats himself,’ as he complains
at last, ‘by that same foolish vice of honesty’: while in all the rest
what have we but every form of human baseness? Lovell, the master, if he
is to be considered a negative character as doing no wrong, has, at all
events, no more recorded of him than the noble act of marrying by deceit
a young widow for the sake of her money, the philosopher’s stone, by the
bye, and highest object of most of the seventeenth century dramatists.
If most of the rascals meet with due disgrace, none of them is punished;
and the greatest rascal of all, who, when escape is impossible, turns
traitor, and after deserving the cart and pillory a dozen times for his
last and most utter baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the honour
of addressing the audience at the play’s end in the most smug and
self-satisfied tone, and of ‘putting himself on you that are my country,’
not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair majority who
would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of all imitation.
Now is this play a moral or an immoral one? Of its coarseness we say
nothing. We should not endure it, of course, nowadays; and on that point
something must be said hereafter: but if we were to endure plain speaking
as the only method of properly exposing vice, should we endure the moral
which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it?
And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among the
Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch? What but a background of
profligacy and frivolity?