found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself. Howsoever pure and lofty
the ideal which he laid down for himself (and no doubt honestly) in the
Preface to ‘Volpone,’ he found it impossible to keep up to it. Nine
years afterwards we find him, in his ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ catering to the
low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at which, if one must needs
laugh—as who that was not more than man could help doing over that scene
between Rabbi Busy and the puppets?—shallow and untrue as the gist of the
humour is, one feels the next moment as if one had been indulging in
unholy mirth at the expense of some grand old Noah who has come to shame
in his cups.
But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the ‘Gipsies
Metamorphosed,’ presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson was
forty-seven; old enough, one would have thought, to know better. It is
not merely the insincere and all but blasphemous adulation which is
shocking,—that was but the fashion of the times: but the treating these
gipsies and beggars, and their ‘thieves’ Latin’ dialect, their filthiness
and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely as themes for immoral and
inhuman laughter. Jonson was by no means the only poet of that day to
whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads which infested England
were only a comical phase of humanity, instead of being, as they would be
now, objects of national shame and sorrow, of pity and love, which would
call out in the attempt to redeem them the talents and energies of good
men. But Jonson certainly sins more in this respect than any of his
contemporaries. He takes a low pleasure in parading his intimate
acquaintance with these poor creatures’ foul slang and barbaric laws; and
is, we should say, the natural father of that lowest form of all
literature, which has since amused the herd, though in a form greatly
purified, in the form of ‘Beggars’ Operas,’ ‘Dick Turpins,’ and ‘Jack
Sheppards.’ Everything which is objectionable in such modern
publications as these was exhibited, in far grosser forms, by one of the
greatest poets who ever lived, for the amusement of a king of England;
and yet the world still is at a loss to know why sober and God-fearing
men detested both the poet and the king.
And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the degradation
of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur passages of the old
sweetness and grandeur; _disjecta membra poetæ_ such as these, which,
even although addressed to James, are perfect:—
‘3_rd_ _Gipsy_.
Look how the winds upon the waves grow tame,
Take up land sounds upon their purple wings,
And, catching each from other, bear the same
To every angle of their sacred springs.
So will we take his praise, and hurl his name
About the globe, in thousand airy rings.’
* * * *
Let us pass on. Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit?
There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here, and
shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible. The
laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy’s expense, in ‘Bartholomew Fair,’
turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women’s parts acted by boys.
Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of puppets
instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked nevertheless.
What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans is hard to
conceive. Prynne, in his ‘Histriomastix,’ may have pushed a little too
far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law: yet one
would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses’ law, not
arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did harm, as every
antiquarian knows that it did; and that, therefore, Prynne was but
reasonable in supposing that in his day a similar practice would produce
a similar evil. Our firm conviction is that it did so, and that as to
the matter of fact, Prynne was perfectly right; and that to make a boy a
stage-player was pretty certainly to send him to the devil. Let any man
of common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young boy’s mind which
would be produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience
not merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in
almost every play. We appeal to common sense—would any father allow his
own children to personate, even in private, the basest of mankind? And
yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be supposed, has
decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons to act yearly at
Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while grave and reverend
prelates and divines look on approving. The Westminster play has had no
very purifying influence on the minds of the young gentlemen who
personate heathen damsels; and we only ask, What must have been the
effect of representing far fouler characters than Terence’s on the minds
of uneducated lads of the lower classes? Prynne and others hint at still
darker abominations than the mere defilement of the conscience: we shall
say nothing of them, but that, from collateral evidence, we believe every
word they say; and that when pretty little Cupid’s mother, in Jonson’s
Christmas masque, tells how ‘She could have had money enough for him, had
she been tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king’s
players,’ and how ‘Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for
him, and old Mr. Hemings too,’ she had better have tied a stone round the
child’s neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him over
to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation more money
to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native town, on the
fruits of others’ sin. Honour to old Prynne, bitter and narrow as he
was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the humanity and
Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor children whom not a
bishop on the bench interfered to save; but, while they were writing and
persecuting in behalf of baptismal regeneration, left those to perish
whom they declared so stoutly to be regenerate in baptism. Prynne used
that argument too, and declared these stage-plays to be among the very
‘pomps and vanities which Christians renounced at baptism.’ He may or
may not have been wrong in identifying them with the old heathen
pantomimes and games of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under
a mountain of quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for
Prynne’s reading seems to have been quite enormous). Those very prelates
could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught in
them which could be made to justify their own system, though perhaps it
had really even less to do therewith than the Roman pantomimes had with
the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had retained in her
Catechism the old Roman word ‘pomps,’ as one of the things which were to
be renounced; and as ‘pomps’ confessedly meant at first those very
spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre, Prynne could not be very
illogical in believing that, as it had been retained, it was retained to
testify against something, and probably against the thing in England most
like the ‘pomps’ of heathen Rome. Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide
whether of the two was the better Churchman—Prynne, who tried to make the
baptismal covenant mean something, or Laud, who allowed such a play as
‘The Ordinary’ to be written by his especial _protégé_, Cartwright, the
Oxford scholar, and acted before him probably by Oxford scholars,
certainly by christened boys. We do not pretend to pry into the counsels
of the Most High; but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when
combined with lofty professions and pretensions, does (as all history
tells us that it does) draw down the vengeance of Almighty God, then we
need look no further than this one neglect of the seventeenth century
prelates (whether its cause was stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the
monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered), to discover full reason why it
pleased God to sweep them out awhile with the besom of destruction.
There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century, new, as
far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and that is, the
apotheosis of Rakes. Let the faults of the Middle Age, or of the Tudors,
have been what they may, that class of person was in their time simply an
object of disgust. The word which then signified a Rake is, in the
‘Morte d’Arthur’ (temp. Ed. IV.), the foulest term of disgrace which can
be cast upon a knight; whilst even up to the latter years of Elizabeth
the contempt of parents and elders seems to have been thought a grievous
sin. In Italy, even, fountain of all the abominations of the age,
respect for the fifth commandment seems to have lingered after all the
other nine had been forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his ‘Corteggiano’
(about 1520), regretting the modest and respectful training of the
generation which had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan
method of education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the
method which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to
Protestant, Puritan and Churchman.
But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth’s reign) fathers
became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked of their
money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the young
gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and Charles,
with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and roystering,
beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking, duelling, and
profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of gentle birth), set
forth not merely as harmless amusements for young gentlemen, but (as in
Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of ‘Monsieur Thomas’) virtues without which
a man is despicable. On this point, as on many others, those who have,
for ecclesiastical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the
seventeenth century as a golden age have been altogether unfair. There
is no immorality of the court plays of Charles II.’s time which may not
be found in those of Charles I.’s. Sedley and Etherege are not a whit
worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur
Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades,
Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken
clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master’s till to pay his
losses at a betting-office. True; we of this generation can hardly
afford to throw stones. The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed
high patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas
seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and
Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England.
Better days, however, have dawned; ‘Tom and Jerry,’ instead of running
three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as
‘Monsieur Thomas’ would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are
now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while
if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they would,
instead of winning a good wife, be ‘cut’ by braver and finer gentlemen
than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact prove save that
England has at last discovered that the Puritan opinion of this matter
(as of some others) was the right one?
There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage of
profligate scapegraces on the stage. They would not have been endured on
the stage had they not been very common off it; and if there had not
been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking excuse for them: it
requires no great penetration to see what that excuse must have been. If
the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy
them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and inexcusable,
probably impossible. But if it was (as it may be proved to have been) an
utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot
but look on Monsieur Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity.
Take him as he stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit,
spirit, and courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers.
He would have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age
as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a
man-of-war—anything where he could find a purpose and a work. Doubt it
not. How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years ago
one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses and
cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not only
fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing homeward like
a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches at Sevastopol; and
has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful fire of God, which could
burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the crust of cold frivolity into
warm and earnest life. And even at such a youth’s worst, reason and
conscience alike forbid us to deal out to him the same measure as we do
to the offences of the cool and hoary profligate, or to the darker and
subtler spiritual sins of the false professor. But if the wrath of God
be not unmistakably and practically revealed from heaven against youthful
profligacy and disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or
other, against what sin is it revealed? It was not left for our age to
discover that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his
courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had to
be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal lesson; and
what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them, sharp shot and
cold steel did.
‘But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.’ The
fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that this was
low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse. If it be said that
Shakspeare’s is the very highest art, the answer is, that what they hated
in him was not his high art, but his low art, the foul and horrible
elements which he had in common with his brother play-writers. True,
there is far less of these elements in Shakspeare than in any of his
compeers: but they are there. And what the Puritans hated in him was
exactly what we have to expunge before we can now represent his plays.
If it be said that they ought to have discerned and appreciated the
higher elements in him, so ought the rest of their generation. The
Puritans were surely not bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and
brother poets did not see. And it is surely a matter of fact that the
deep spiritual knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare’s plays
(and them alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all
men and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who
probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612, has
assigned to him.
‘I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men’s witty labours,
especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the
laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty
composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr.
Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right
happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr.
Heywood.’
While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing in
Shakspeare beyond the same ‘happy and copious industry’ which he sees in
Dekker and Heywood,—while Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real
genius in Charles the First’s reign, places Fletcher’s name ‘’Twixt
Jonson’s grave and Shakspeare’s lighter sound,’ and tells him that
‘Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fool’s replies.
* * * * *
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.
* * * * *
Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility;’ {46}
while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul,
only remarks on Shakspeare’s marvellous lyrical sweetness, ‘his native
wood-notes wild’; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not
discover the stork among the cranes?
An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves
a few moments’ consideration. It is said, ‘the grossness of the old
play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was the fashion
of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by
it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.’
Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster’s plays, seems inclined to exalt
this habit into a virtue. After saying that the licentious and debauched
are made ‘as odious in representation as they would be if they were
actually present’—an assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the
case of Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to
forget that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be,
keeps stoutly on the side of virtue—Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that
‘perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our
morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we
are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a
less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless
of words, and only considerate of actions.’
To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer that the fact
is directly contrary; that there is a mass of unanimous evidence which
cannot be controverted to prove that England, in the first half of the
seventeenth century was far more immoral than in the nineteenth; that the
proofs lie patent to any dispassionate reader: but that these pages will
not be defiled by the details of them.
Let it be said that coarseness was ‘the fashion of the age.’ The simple
question is, was it a good fashion or a bad? It is said—with little or
no proof—that in simple states of society much manly virtue and much
female purity have often consisted with very broad language and very
coarse manners. But what of that? Drunkards may very often be very
honest and brave men. Does that make drunkenness no sin? Or will
honesty and courage prevent a man’s being the worse for hard drinking?
If so, why have we given up coarseness of language? And why has it been
the better rather than the worse part of the nation, the educated and
religious rather than the ignorant and wicked, who have given it up?
Why? Simply because this nation, and all other nations on the Continent,
in proportion to their morality, have found out that coarseness of
language is, to say the least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong
to do certain things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of
them; that even certain things which are right and blessed and holy lose
their sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of
being left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them. On the
whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as insincere.
Certainly, in our day, it will not hold. If any one wishes to hear
coarse language in ‘good society’ he can hear it, I am told, in Paris:
but one questions whether Parisian society be now ‘under the sway of a
more energetic principle of virtue’ than our own. The sum total of the
matter seems to be, that England has found out that on this point again
the old Puritans were right. And quaintly enough, the party in the
English Church who hold the Puritans most in abhorrence are the most
scrupulous now upon this very point; and, in their dread of contaminating
the minds of youth, are carrying education, at school and college, to
such a more than Puritan precision that with the most virtuous and
benevolent intentions they are in danger of giving lads merely a
conventional education,—a hot-house training which will render them
incapable hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the
world. They themselves republished Massinger’s ‘Virgin Martyr,’ because
it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist—for there is
every reason to believe that Massinger was one—setting forth how the
heroine was attended all through by an angel in the form of a page, and
how—not to mention the really beautiful ancient fiction about the fruits
which Dorothea sends back from Paradise—Theophilus overcomes the devil by
means of a cross composed of flowers. Massinger’s account of Theophilus’
conversation will, we fear, make those who know anything of that great
crisis of the human spirit suspect that Massinger’s experience thereof
was but small: but the fact which is most noteworthy is this—that the
‘Virgin Martyr’ is actually one of the foulest plays known. Every pains
has been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in the play were not
written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what grounds we know not. If
Dekker assisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we are
aware of no canons of internal criticism which will enable us to decide,
as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is Dekker’s, and
all the poetry Massinger’s. He confesses—as indeed he is forced to
do—that ‘Massinger himself is not free from dialogues of low wit and
buffoonery’; and then, after calling the scenes in question ‘detestable
ribaldry, ‘a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of filth and dulness,’
recommends them to the reader’s supreme scorn and contempt,—with which
feelings the reader will doubtless regard them: but he will also, if he
be a thinking man, draw from them the following conclusions: that even if
they be Dekker’s—of which there is no proof—Massinger was forced, in
order to the success of his play, to pander to the public taste by
allowing Dekker to interpolate these villanies; that the play which,
above all others of the seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar
rosepink of piety, devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest
abominations of any extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it
as a sample of the Christianity of that past golden age of
High-churchmanship, had to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of
becoming amenable to the laws against abominable publications.
No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have quoted,
in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly a play
(perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we complain
do not exist,—few of which they do not form an integral part; and now, if
this is the judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater
poets, what must the lesser ones be like?
Look, then, at Webster’s two masterpieces, ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ and the
‘Duchess of Malfi.’ A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted;
for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written
since Shakspeare’s time.