subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest and the
basest passions. But the play is not a study of those passions from
which we may gain a great insight into human nature. There is no
trace—nor is there, again, in the ‘Duchess of Malfi’—of that development
of human souls for good or evil which is Shakspeare’s especial power—the
power which, far more than any accidental ‘beauties,’ makes his plays, to
this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, while his
contemporaries are all but forgotten. The highest aim of dramatic art is
to exhibit the development of the human soul; to construct dramas in
which the conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the
characters; and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of
a certain passion, or a certain ‘humour’: but persons, each unlike all
others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own
peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that
destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding his
own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and that in
such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be able (in
proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct
under those circumstances. This is indeed ‘high art’: but we find no
more of it in Webster than in the rest. His characters, be they old or
young, come on the stage ready-made, full grown, and stereotyped; and
therefore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions
or humours in human form. Now and then he essays to draw a character:
but it is analytically, by description, not synthetically and
dramatically, by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the
‘Duchess of Mall’ he falls into the great mistake of telling, by
Antonio’s mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than he afterwards
makes them act. Very different is Shakspeare’s method of giving, at the
outset, some single delicate hint about his personages which will serve
as a clue to their whole future conduct; thus ‘showing the whole in each
part,’ and stamping each man with a personality, to a degree which no
other dramatist has ever approached.
But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster’s aim. He has
to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by
blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power.
There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria’s trial, which
have been praised for their delineation of character: but it is one thing
to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so handled in ‘Lear,’
‘Othello,’ and ‘Richard the Third,’—‘Given a mixed character, to show how
he may become criminal,’ and to solve Webster’s ‘Given a ready-made
criminal, to show how he commits his crimes.’ To us the knowledge of
character shown in Vittoria’s trial scene is not an insight into
Vittoria’s essential heart and brain, but a general acquaintance with the
conduct of all bold bad women when brought to bay. Poor Elia, who knew
the world from books, and human nature principally from his own loving
and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria’s ‘innocence—resembling boldness’
{53}—and ‘seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which
inspires such gay confidence in her,’ and so forth.
Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of
bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet amounting in
all merely to this, that the strength of Webster’s confest master-scene
lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general. We
will say no more on this matter, save to ask, _Cui bono_? Was the art of
which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to
mankind, much less able to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious
accompaniments?
The ‘Duchess of Malfi’ is certainly in a purer and loftier strain: but in
spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the
liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a ‘person’ at all. General
goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in
rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough
to distinguish her from thousands of other women: but Webster has no such
purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect;
not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not
Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and
thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural,
and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward.
That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him
and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself
seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too
far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break
down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten
to explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would
probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel,
and therefore excuse, his mistress’s affection. He has plenty of time to
do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter;
and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and
thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly
disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess
tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio
of the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive. He hears his
mistress’s declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is
exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out
of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part
into something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good
opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is
Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves
Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only
from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that
a man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day
before the wedding, is not of much importance.
Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the least
struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress’s affection. He is very
resigned and loving, and so forth. To win renown by great deeds, and so
prove his wife in the right to her brothers and all the world, never
crosses his imagination. His highest aim (and that only at last) is
slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence
of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same
pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—‘_ne valant pas la
peine qui se donne pour lui_.’ The prison-scenes between the Duchess and
her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue;
and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared far more
so, had Webster taken half as much pains with her as he has with the
madmen, ruffians, ghosts, and screech-owls in which his heart really
delights. The only character really worked out so as to live and grow
under his hand is Bosola, who, of course, is the villain of the piece,
and being a rough fabric, is easily manufactured with rough tools.
Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and there—
‘_Cariola_. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas
What will you do with my lady? Call for help!
_Duchess_. To whom? to our next neighbours? they are mad folk.
Farewell, Cariola.
I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.—Now, what you please;
What death?’
And so the play ends, as does ‘Vittoria Corrombona,’ with half a dozen
murders _coram populo_, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting
the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same
era, ‘Reynolds’s God’s Revenge,’ in which, with all due pious horror and
bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed
with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian
histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to
have furnished subjects for the playwrights of the day.
The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley, one of
the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He appears, up to
the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the Queen’s favourite
poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was ‘one of such incomparable parts
that he was the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been
thought even equal to Fletcher himself.’
We must entreat the reader’s attention while we examine Shirley’s
‘Gamester.’ Whether the examination be a pleasant business or not, it is
somewhat important; ‘for,’ says Mr. Dyce, ‘the following memorandum
respecting it occurs in the office-book of the Master of the Records:—“On
Thursday night, 6th of February, 1633, ‘The Gamester’ was acted at Court,
made by Sherley out of a plot of the king’s, given him by mee, and well
likte. The king sayd it was the best play he had seen for seven years.”’
This is indeed important. We shall now have an opportunity of fairly
testing at the same time the taste of the Royal Martyr and the average
merit, at least in the opinion of the Caroline court, of the dramatists
of that day.
The plot which Charles sent to Shirley as a fit subject for his muse is
taken from one of those collections of Italian novels of which we have
already had occasion to speak, and occurs in the second part of the
‘Ducento Novelle’ of Celio Malespini; and what it is we shall see
forthwith.
The play opens with a scene between one Wilding and his ward Penelope, in
which he attempts to seduce the young lady, in language which has
certainly the merit of honesty. She refuses him, but civilly enough; and
on her departure Mrs. Wilding enters, who, it seems, is the object of her
husband’s loathing, though young, handsome, and in all respects charming
enough. After a scene of stupid and brutal insults, he actually asks her
to bring Penelope to him, at which she naturally goes out in anger; and
Hazard, the gamester, enters,—a personage without a character, in any
sense of the word. There is next some talk against duelling, sensible
enough, which arises out of a bye-plot,—one Delamere having been wounded
in a duel by one Beaumont, mortally as is supposed. This bye-plot runs
through the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of the
usual play-house type,—a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, as stupid,
covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play-house fathers were
then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most commonplace form, turning
on the stale trick of a man expecting to be hanged for killing some one
who turns out after all to have recovered, and having no bearing
whatsoever on the real plot, which is this,—Mrs. Wilding, in order to win
back her husband’s affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant his
suit; while Mrs. Wilding herself is in reality to supply her niece’s
place, and shame her husband into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the
good fortune which he fancies is coming, in scenes of which one can only
say, that if they are not written for the purpose of exciting the
passions, it is hard to see why they were written at all. But, being
with Hazard in a gambling-house at the very hour at which he is to meet
Penelope, and having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a hundred pounds
of Hazard, stays at the table to recover his losses, and sends Hazard to
supply his place with the supposed Penelope. A few hours before Penelope
and Hazard have met for the first time, and Penelope considers him, as
she says to herself aside, ‘a handsome gentleman.’ He begins, of course,
talking foully to her; and the lady, so far from being shocked at the
freedom of her new acquaintance, pays him back in his own coin in such
good earnest that she soon silences him in the battle of dirt-throwing.
Of this sad scene it is difficult to say whether it indicates a lower
standard of purity and courtesy in the poet, in the audience who endured
it, or in the society of which it was, of course, intended to be a
brilliant picture. If the cavaliers and damsels of Charles the First’s
day were in the habit of talking in that way to each other (and if they
had not been, Shirley would not have dared to represent them as doing
so), one cannot much wonder that the fire of God was needed to burn up
(though, alas! only for a while) such a state of society; and that when
needed the fire fell.
The rest of the story is equally bad. Hazard next day gives Wilding
descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding is in the height of
self-reproach at having handed over his victim to another, his wife meets
him and informs him that she herself and not Penelope has been the
victim. Now comes the crisis of the plot, the conception which so
delighted the taste of the Royal Martyr. Wilding finds himself, as he
expresses it, ‘fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;’ and his
rage, shame, and base attempts to patch up his own dishonour by marrying
Penelope to Hazard (even at the cost of disgorging the half of her
portion, which he had intended to embezzle) furnish amusement to the
audience to the end of the play; at last, on Hazard and Penelope coming
in married, Wilding is informed that he has been deceived, and that his
wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard to keep up the delusion in
order to frighten him into good behaviour; whereupon Mr. Wilding promises
to be a good husband henceforth, and the play ends.
Throughout the whole of this farrago of improbable iniquity not a single
personage has any mark of personal character, or even of any moral
quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding’s case) that of patience under injury.
Hazard ‘The Gamester’ is chosen as the hero, for what reason it is
impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which may
distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that he is,
as we are told,
‘A man careless
Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck
To kill so many as another, dares
Fight with all them that have.’
He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred pounds from a
foolish old city merchant (city merchants are always fools in the
seventeenth century) to let his nephew, young Barnacle, give him a box on
the ear in a tavern, and (after the young cit has been transformed into
an intolerable bully by the fame so acquired) takes another hundred
pounds from the repentant uncle for kicking the youth back into his
native state of peaceful cowardice. With the exception of some little
humour in these scenes with young Barnacle, the whole play is thoroughly
stupid. We look in vain for anything like a reflection, a sentiment,
even a novel image. Its language, like its morality, is all but on a
level with the laboured vulgarities of the ‘Relapse’ or the ‘Provoked
Wife,’ save that (Shirley being a confessed copier of the great
dramatists of the generation before him) there is enough of the manner of
Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up to hide, at first sight, the utter want
of anything like their matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger
and the artificial smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and
unaffected blackguardism of the earlier poets’ men.
This, forsooth, is the best comedy which Charles had heard for seven
years, and the plot, which he himself furnished for the occasion, fitted
to an English audience by a Romish convert.
And yet there is one dramatist of that fallen generation over whose
memory one cannot but linger, fancying what he would have become, and
wondering why so great a spirit was checked suddenly ere half developed
by a fever which carried him off, with several other Oxford worthies, in
1643, when he was at most thirty-two (and according to one account only
twenty-eight) years old. Let which of the two dates be the true one,
Cartwright must always rank among our wondrous youths by the side of
Prince Henry, the Admirable Crichton, and others, of whom one’s only
doubt is, whether they were not too wondrous, too precociously complete
for future development. We find Dr. Fell, some time Bishop of Oxford,
saying that ‘Cartwright was the utmost man could come to’; we read how
his body was as handsome as his soul; how he was an expert linguist, not
only in Greek and Latin, but in French and Italian, an excellent orator,
admirable poet; how Aristotle was no less known to him than Cicero and
Virgil, and his metaphysical lectures preferred to those of all his
predecessors, the Bishop of Lincoln only excepted; and his sermons as
much admired as his other composures; and how one fitly applied to him
that saying of Aristotle concerning Œschron the poet, that ‘he could not
tell what Œschron could not do.’ We find pages on pages of high-flown
epitaphs and sonnets on him, in which the exceeding bad taste of his
admirers makes one inclined to doubt the taste of him whom they so bedaub
with praise; and certainly, in spite of all due admiration for the
Crichton of Oxford, one is unable to endorse Mr. Jasper Mayne’s opinion,
that
‘In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare’s style’;
or that he possest
‘Lucan’s bold heights match’d to staid Virgil’s care,
Martial’s quick salt, joined to Musæus’ tongue.’
This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and the age from
which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of Cartwright as,
indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651) gives us; the
offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly stored with
everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom genius has been
rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed: but genius was present,
without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings; and Ben Jonson
spoke but truth when he said, ‘My son Cartwright writes all like a man.’
It is impossible to open a page of ‘The Lady Errant,’ ‘The Royal Slave,’
‘The Ordinary,’ or ‘Love’s Convert,’ without feeling at once that we have
to do with a man of a very different stamp from any (Massinger perhaps
alone excepted) who was writing between 1630 and 1640. The specific
gravity of the poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his
contemporaries; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learning. He
is never weak or dull; though he fails often enough, is often enough
wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never laid bare the deeper
arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. Neither is he altogether an
original thinker; as one would expect, he has over-read himself: but then
he has done so to good purpose. If he imitates, he generally equals.
The table of fare in ‘The Ordinary’ smacks of Rabelais or Aristophanes:
but then it is worthy of either; and if one cannot help suspecting that
‘The Ordinary’ never would have been written had not Ben Jonson written
‘The Alchemist,’ one confesses that Ben Jonson need not have been ashamed
to have written the play himself: although the plot, as all Cartwright’s
are, is somewhat confused and inconsequent. If he be Platonically
sentimental in ‘Love’s Convert,’ his sentiment is of the noblest and the
purest; and the confest moral of the play is one which that age needed,
if ever age on earth did.
‘’Tis the good man’s office
To serve and reverence woman, as it is
The fire’s to burn; for as our souls consist
Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble,
Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm
All your desires, as reason quiets ours. . . .
Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth
In us; here only lies the difference,—
Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time;
But the woman’s soul is ripe when it is young;
So that in us what we call learning, is
Divinity in you, whose operations,
Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.’
For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous
generation, we will love young Cartwright, in spite of the suspicion
that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before his
queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat, and
racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a virtue
that very uxoriousness of the poor king which at last cost him his head.
The ‘Royal Slave,’ too, is a gallant play, right-hearted and lofty from
beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible court-cloud-world, akin
to that in which the classic heroes and heroines of Corneille and Racine
call each other Monsieur and Madame.
As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when necessary:
but humour he has of the highest quality. ‘The Ordinary’ is full of it;
and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay figure, and depending
for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated language, is such a sketch
as Mr. Dickens need not have been ashamed to draw.
The ‘Royal Slave’ seems to have been considered, both by the Court and by
his contemporaries, his masterpiece. And justly so; yet our pleasure at
Charles’s having shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat marred by
Langbaine’s story, that the good acting of the Oxford scholars, ‘stately
scenes, and richness of the Persian habits,’ had as much to do with the
success of the play as its ‘stately style,’ and ‘the excellency of the
songs, which were set by that admirable composer, Mr. Henry James.’ True
it is, that the songs are excellent, as are all Cartwright’s; for grace,
simplicity, and sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare’s) which the
seventeenth century produced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculty
seems to have exhausted itself in these half-dozen songs. His minor
poems are utterly worthless, out Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic
conceits; and his varied addresses to the king and queen are as bombastic
and stupid and artificial as anything which bedizened the reigns of
Charles II. or his brother.
Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really an
original genius, but only a magnificent imitator; that he could write
plays well, because others had written them well already, but only for
that reason; and that for the same reason, when he attempted detached
lyrics and addresses, he could only follow the abominable models which he
saw around him? We know not; for surely in Jonson and Shakspeare’s minor
poems he might have found simpler and sweeter types; and even in those of
Fletcher, who appears, from his own account, to have been his especial
pattern. Shakspeare however, as we have seen, he looked down on; as did
the rest of his generation.
Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles,
and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so
young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject,
rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from
Scotland, on the queen’s delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and
so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious
prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses
are sometimes) to prophecy; and two of his prophecies, at least, have
hardly been fulfilled. He was somewhat mistaken when, on the birth of
the Duke of York, he informed the world that
‘The state is now past fear; and all that we
Need wish besides is perpetuity’;
and after indulging in various explanations of the reason why ‘Nature’
showed no prodigies at the birth of the future patron of Judge Jeffreys,
which, if he did not believe them, are lies, and if he did, are very like
blasphemies, declares that the infant is
‘A son of Mirth,
Of Peace and Friendship; ’tis a quiet birth.’
Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of human
affairs, can Mr. Cartwright be now altogether satisfied with his rogue’s
augury as to the capacities of the New England Puritans, when he intends
to pick pockets in the New World, having made the Old too hot to hold
him—
‘They are good silly people; souls that will
Be cheated without trouble: one eye is
Put out with zeal, th’ other with ignorance,
And yet they think they’re eagles.’
Whatsoever were the faults of the Pilgrim Fathers (and they were many),
silliness was certainly not among them. But such was the court fashion.
Any insult, however shallow, ribald, and doggrel (and all these terms are
just of the mock-Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher sings in ‘The
Ordinary,’ just after an epithalamium so graceful and melodious, though a
little warm in tone, as to be really out of place in such a fellow’s
mouth), passes current against men who were abroad the founders of the
United States, and the forefathers of the acutest and most enterprising
nation on earth; and who at home proved themselves, by terrible fact, not
only the physically stronger party, but the more cunning. But so it was
fated to be. A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of
parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy court in blind
security, till ‘the breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall,
which cometh suddenly in an instant.’
* * * * *
But, after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, good or bad,
all belonged to the Royalists.