redbreast" in _The White Devil_, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it
tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls
it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any
language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's
Fourth Song,--"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw in Ariel the imaginative
genius of English poetry, recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glance
at Dry den's recension of _The Tempest_ we may be inclined to think that
the "wicked dam" soon won back her mastery. With all respect to Dryden,
what are we to think of his discretion in eking out Shakespeare's
insufficiencies with such staves as this:--
"Upon the floods we'll sing and play
And celebrate a halcyon day;
Great Nephew Aeolus make no noise,
Muzzle your roaring boys."
and so forth? What had happened to the ear of England in seventy years?
As a matter of fact the perfection of dramatic song scarcely survived
Shakespeare himself. The early Jacobeans, Heywood, Ford, and Dekker in
particular, broke out occasionally in delicate ditties. But most
playwrights, like Massinger, were persistently pedestrian. The only man
who came at all close to Shakespeare as a lyrist was John Fletcher,
whose "Lay a garland on my hearse" nobody could challenge if it were
found printed first in a Shakespeare quarto. The three great songs in
"Valentinian" have almost more splendour than any of Shakespeare's,
though never quite the intimate beauty, the singing spontaneity of
"Under the greenwood tree" or "Hark, hark, the lark." It has grown to be
the habit of anthologists to assert Shakespeare's right to "Roses, their
sharp spikes being gone." The mere fact of its loveliness and perfection
gives them no authority to do so; and to my ear the rather stately
procession of syllables is reminiscent of Fletcher. We shall never be
certain; and who would not swear that "Hear, ye ladies that are coy" was
by the same hand that wrote "Sigh no more, ladies," if we were not sure
of the contrary? But the most effective test, even in the case of
Fletcher, is to see whether the trill of song is, or is not, an inherent
portion of the dramatic structure of the play. This is the hall-mark of
Shakespeare, and perhaps of him alone.
CATHARINE TROTTER,
THE PRECURSOR OF THE BLUESTOCKINGS
The practically complete absence of the Woman of Letters from our
tropical and profuse literature of the early and middle seventeenth
century has often been observed with wonder. While France had her
Madeleine de Scudery and her Mlle. de Gournay and her Mere Angelique
Arnauld, Englishwomen of the Stuart age ventured upon no incursions into
philosophy, fiction, or theology. More and more eagerly, however, they
read books; and as a consequence of reading, they began at last to
write. The precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed with
every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the earliest professional
woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, to whose
genius justice has only quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers.
Mrs. Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left no
heritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set of female
writers, who enlivened the last years of the century, but who were soon
eclipsed by the wits of the age of Anne, and who have been entirely
forgotten. It is to the most interesting of these "transient phantoms"
that I wish to draw attention.
The extreme precocity of Catharine Trotter makes her seem to belong to
the age of Dryden, but she was in reality younger than Addison and most
of the other contemporaries of Pope. She was born on August 16th, 1679,
the younger daughter of a naval officer, Captain David Trotter, R.N.;
her mother's maiden name had been Sarah Ballenden, probably of the
well-known Catholic family of that ilk. She "had the honour of being
nearly related to the illustrious families of Maitland, Duke of
Lauderdale and Drummond, Earl of Perth." The Jacobite fourth Earl of
Perth seems to have been the patron of Captain Trotter, of whom he wrote
in 1684 that he was "an ornament to his country." Apparently the gallant
captain was attached to Trinity House, where his probity and integrity
earned him the epithet of "honest David," and where he attracted the
notice of George, first Lord Dartmouth, when that rising statesman was
appointed Master. Captain Trotter had served the Crown from his youth,
"with great gallantry and fidelity, both by land and sea," and had been
very successful in the Dutch wars. He had a brother who was a commander
in the Navy. We get an impression of high respectability in the outer,
but not outermost, circles of influential Scottish society. Doubtless
the infancy of Catharine was spent in conditions of dependent
prosperity. These conditions were not to last. When she was four years
old Lord Dartmouth started on the famous expedition to demolish Tangier,
and he took Captain Trotter with him as his commodore. In this affair,
as before, the captain distinguished himself by his ability, and instead
of returning to London after Tangier he was recommended to King Charles
II. as the proper person to convoy the fleet of the Turkey Company to
its destination. Apparently it was understood that this would be the
final reward of his services and that he was to "make his fortune" out
of the Turks. Unhappily, after convoying his charge safely to
Scanderoon, he fell sick of the plague that was raging there, and died,
in the course of January 1684, in company with all the other officers of
his ship. Every misfortune now ensued; the purser, who was thus left to
his own devices, helped himself to the money destined for the expenses
of the voyage, while, to crown all, the London goldsmith in whose hands
the captain had left his private fortune took this occasion to go
bankrupt. The King, in these melancholy circumstances, granted an
Admiralty pension to the widow, but when he died early in the following
year this was no longer paid, and the unfortunate ladies of the Trotter
family might well murmur:--
"One mischief brings another on his neck,
As mighty billows tumble in the seas."
From the beginning of her fifth year, then, Catharine experienced the
precarious lot of those who depend for a livelihood on the charity of
more or less distant relatives. We dimly see a presentable mother
piteously gathering up such crumbs as fell from the tables of the
illustrious families with whom she was remotely connected. But the Duke
of Lauderdale himself was now dead, and the Earl of Perth had passed the
zenith of his power. No doubt in the seventeenth century the protection
of poor relations was carried on more systematically than it is to-day,
and certainly Mrs. Trotter contrived to live and to bring up her two
daughters genteelly. The first years were the worst; the accession of
William III. brought back to England and to favour Gilbert Burnet, who
became Bishop of Salisbury in 1688, when Catharine was nine years old.
Mrs. Trotter found a patron and perhaps an employer in the Bishop, and
when Queen Anne came to the throne her little pension was renewed.
There is frequent reference to money in Catharine Trotter's writings,
and the lack of it was the rock upon which her gifts were finally
wrecked. With a competency she might have achieved a much more prominent
place in English literature than she could ever afford to reach. She
offers a curious instance of the depressing effect of poverty, and we
get the impression that she was never, during her long and virtuous
career, lifted above the carking anxiety which deadens the imagination.
As a child, however, she seems to have awakened hopes of a high order.
She was a prodigy, and while little more than an infant she displayed an
illumination in literature which was looked upon, in that age of female
darkness, as quite a portent. She taught herself French, "by her own
application without any instructor," but was obliged to accept some
assistance in acquiring Latin and logic. The last-mentioned subject
became her particular delight, and at a very tender age she drew up "an
abstract" of that science "for her own use." Thus she prepared for her
future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. When she was very small,
in spite of frequent conferences with learned members of the Church of
England, she became persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the
Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coincided with the
conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor Perth, but as events turned
out it cannot but have added to the sorrows of that much-tried woman,
her mother. (It should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglican
faith when she was twenty-eight years of age.)
She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of James II. came to a
close. Mrs. Trotter's connections were now in a poor plight. The new
Earl of Lauderdale was in great distress for money; Lord Dartmouth,
abandoned by the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where he
died on October 25th, 1691, in which year the estates of the Earl of
Perth were sequestered and he himself hunted out of the country. Ruin
simultaneously fell on all the fine friends of our infant prodigy, and
we can but guess how it affected her. Yet there were plenty of other
Jacobites left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance shows
that she cultivated their friendship. She published in 1693 a copy of
verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery
from the smallpox; she was then fourteen years of age. Higgons was a
young man of twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled court
in France, where he had distinguished himself by his agreeable manners,
and who had just made a name for himself by poems addressed to Dryden
and by a prologue to Congreve's _Old Batchelor_. He was afterwards to
become famous for a little while as a political historian. Catharine
Trotter's verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as "lovely youth,"
and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms which are almost
boisterous. This poem was not only her introduction to the public, but,
through Bevil Higgons, was probably the channel of her acquaintance with
Congreve and Dryden.
Throughout her life she was fond of writing letters to celebrated
people; she now certainly wrote to Congreve and doubtless to Dryden. A
freedom in correspondence ran in the family. Her poor mother is revealed
to us as always "renewing her application" to somebody or other. We next
find the youthful poet in relation with the Earl of Dorset, from whom
she must have concealed her Jacobite propensities. Dorset was the great
public patron of poetry under William III., and Catharine Trotter, aged
sixteen, having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It was
very graciously granted, and _Agnes de Castro_, in five acts and in
blank verse, "written by a young lady," was produced at the Theatre
Royal in 1695, under the "protection" of Charles Earl of Dorset and
Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event caused
a considerable commotion. No woman had written for the English stage
since the death of Mrs. Behn, and curiosity was much excited. Mrs.
Verbruggen, that enchanting actress, but in male attire, recited a
clever, ranting epilogue at the close of the performance, in which she
said:--
"'tis whispered here
Our Poetess is virtuous, young and fair,"
but the secret was an open one. Wycherley, who contributed verses, knew
all about it, and so did Mrs. Manley, while Powell and Colley Cibber
were among the actors. We may be sure that little Mistress Trotter's
surprising talents were the subjects of much discussion at Will's Coffee
House, and that the question of securing her for the rival theatre was
anxiously debated at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her success in Agnes de
Castro was the principal asset which Drury Lane had to set that season
against Congreve's splendid adventure with Love for Love.
Agnes de Castro is an immature production, and shows a juvenile
insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and treatment are
borrowed implicitly from a French novel by Mlle. de Brillac, published
in Paris and London a few years before.[2] The conception of court life
at Coimbra in the fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and is
innocent of Portuguese local colour. But, as the dramatic work of a girl
of sixteen, the play is rather extraordinary for nimble movement and
adroit theatrical arrangements. It is evident that Catharine Trotter was
well versed in the stage traditions of her own day, and we may wonder
how a highly respectable girl of sixteen found her opportunity. The
English playhouse under William III. was no place for a very young lady,
even if she wore a mask. There is a good deal of meritorious
character-drawing in Agnes de Castro. The conception of a benevolent and
tenderly forgiving Princess is well contrasted with the fierce purity of
Agnes and the infatuation of the Prince. Towards the close of the first
act there is a capital scene of exquisite confusion between this
generous and distracted trio. The opening of the third act, between
Elvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has some
strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of the
Princess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but was
doubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not
at all an unpromising one.
Early in 1696 _Agnes de Castro_, still anonymous, was published as a
book, and for the next five or six years we find Catharine Trotter
habitually occupied in writing for the stage. Without question she did
so professionally, though in what way dramatists at the close of the
seventeenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture. A
very rare play, _The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets_, the
authorship of which has hitherto defied conjecture, was acted at Drury
Lane after Catharine Trotter had been tempted across to Lincoln's Inn
Fields, and is evidently inspired by the intense jealousy which
smouldered between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotter
incited two older ladies to compete with her; these were Mrs.
Delariviere Manley, who was a discarded favourite of Barbara Villiers,
and fat Mrs. Mary Pix, the stage-struck consort of a tailor. These
rather ridiculous women professed themselves followers of Catharine, and
they produced plays of their own not without some success. With her they
formed the trio of Female Wits who were mocked in the lively but, on the
whole, rather disappointing play I have just mentioned, in the course of
which it is spitefully remarked of Calista--who is Miss Trotter--that
she has "made no small struggle in the world to get into print," and is
"now in such a state of wedlock to pen and ink that it will be very
difficult" for her "to get out of it."
In acting _The Female Wits_ Mrs. Temple, who had played the Princess in
_Agnes de Castro_, took the part of Calista, and doubtless, in the
coarse fashion of those days, made up exactly like poor Catharine
Trotter, who was described as "a Lady who pretends to the learned
Languages, and assumes to herself the name of a Critic." This was a
character, however, which she would not have protested against with much
vigour, for she had now quite definitely taken up the position of a
reformer and a pioneer. She posed as the champion of women's
intellectual rights, and she was accepted as representing in active
literary work the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowed
in her remarkable _Serious Proposal to Ladies_ of 1694. We turn again to
_The Female Wits_, and we find Marsilia (Mrs. Manley) describing Calista
to Mrs. Wellfed (Mrs. Fix) as "the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing!
She pretends to grammar! writes in mood and figure! does everything
methodically!" Yet when Calista appears on the stage, Mrs. Manley rushes
across to fling her arms around her and to murmur: "O charmingest Nymph
of all Apollo's Train, let me embrace thee!" Later on Calista says to
Mrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, "I cannot but remind you, Madam ... I read
Aristotle in his own language"; and of a certain tirade in a play of Ben
Jonson she insists: "I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into
Latin." Mrs. Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she "can
go no further than the eight parts of speech." This brings down upon her
an icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say
... you impose upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness of
manner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air of
priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in that
loose theatre of William III.
Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to the
Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of ill
Nature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think their
peculiar Prerogative"--that is, intellectual distinction. Catharine
Trotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced her
tragedy of _Fatal Friendship_, the published copy of which (1698) is all
begarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a
succession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told that
she had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched the
stage." This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raised
by Jeremy Collier in his famous _Short View of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the Stage_, in which all the dramatists of the day were
violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the
courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling
with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women.
"You as your Sex's champion art come forth
To fight their quarrel and assert their worth,"
one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:--
"You stand the first of stage-reformers too."
The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and at
vindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel."
This was the most brilliant moment in the public career of our
bluestocking. _Fatal Friendship_ enjoyed a success which Catharine
Trotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only one
which has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremely
sentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries
said that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in
company with Congreve and Granville "the polite," who had written a
_She-Gallants_, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish her
plays to be. _Fatal Friendship_ has an ingenious plot, in which the
question of money takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost
every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. Felicia,
sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain her), is wooed by the
wealthy Roquelaure, although she is secretly married to Gramont, who is
also too poor to support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will make
love to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades him--in
order that his best friend, Castalio, may be released from a debtor's
prison--bigamously to many Lamira, a wealthy widow. But Castalio is in
love with Lamira, and is driven to frenzy by Gramont's illegal marriage.
It all depends upon income in a manner comically untragical. The quarrel
between the friends in the fifth act is an effective piece of
stage-craft, but the action is spoiled by a ridiculous general butchery
at the close of all. However, the audience was charmed, and even "the
stubbornest could scarce deny their Tears."
_Fatal Friendship_ was played at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre, and no doubt
it was Congreve who brought Miss Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warm
friendship for her had unquestionably a great deal to do with her
success and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in which
the great dramatist acknowledges, in 1697, the congratulations of his
young admirer, and it breathes an eager cordiality. Congreve requested
Betterton to present him to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality for
her company is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of _The
Female Wits_ insinuates that Congreve made the looking-over of
Catharine's scenes "his pretence for daily visits." Another satirist, in
1698, describes Congreve sitting very gravely with his hat over his
eyes, "together with the two she-things called Poetesses which write for
his house," half-hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar,
too, seeing the celebrated writer of _Fatal Friendship_ in the theatre
on the third night of the performance of his _Love and a Bottle_, had
"his passions wrought so high" by a sight of the beautiful author that
he wrote her a letter in which he called her "one of the fairest of the
sex, and the best judge." If Catharine Trotter, as the cynosure of
delicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through _Love and a Bottle_
without a blush, even _her_ standard of decency was not very exacting.
But in all this rough, coarse world of wit her reputation never suffered
a rebuff.
Encouraged by so much public and private attention, our young dramatist
continued to work with energy and conscientiousness. But her efforts
were forestalled by an event, or rather a condition of the national
temper, of which too little notice has been taken by literary
historians. The attacks on the stage for its indecency and blasphemy had
been flippantly met by the theatrical agents, but they had sunk deeply
into the conscience of the people. There followed with alarming
abruptness a general public repulsion against the playhouses, and to
this, early in 1699, a roughly worded Royal Proclamation gave voice.
During the whole of that year the stage was almost in abeyance, and even
Congreve, with _The Way of the World_, was unable to woo his audience
back to Lincoln's Inn. During this time of depression Catharine Trotter
composed at least two tragedies, which she was unable to get performed,
while the retirement of Congreve in a paroxysm of annoyance must have
been a very serious disadvantage to her.
On May 1st, 1700, Dryden died, and with him a dramatic age passed away.
What Miss Trotter's exact relations with the great poet had been is
uncertain; she not only celebrated his death in a long elegy, in which
she speaks on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more important
poem, in which she gives very sound advice to the poetical beginner, who
is to take Dryden as a model, and to be particularly careful to disdain
Settle, Durfey, and Blackmore, typical poetasters of the period. She
recommends social satire to the playwright:--
"Let the nice well-bred beau himself perceive
The most accomplished, useless thing alive;
Expose the bottle-sparks that range the town,--
Shaming themselves with follies not their own,--
But chief these foes to virgin innocence,
Who, while they make to honour vain pretence,
With all that's base and impious can dispense."
Honour to those who aim high and execute boldly!
"If Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire,
The animated scene throughout inspire;
If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest,
Each sees his darling folly made a jest;
If Garth's and Dryden's genius, through each line,
In artful praise and well-turn'd satire shine,--
To us ascribe the immortal sacred flame."
In this dead period of the stage Catharine Trotter found a warm friend
and doubtless an efficient patron in a Lady Piers, of whom we should be
glad to know more. Sir George Piers, the husband of this lady, was an
officer of rank under the Duke of Marlborough, later to become useful to
Catharine Trotter. Meanwhile the latter returned to the Theatre Royal in
Drury Lane, where, in 1701, under the patronage of Lord Halifax--Pope's
"Bufo"--she produced her third tragedy, _The Unhappy Penitent_. The
dedication of this play to Halifax is a long and interesting essay on
the poetry of the age. The author passes Dryden, Otway, Congreve, and
Lee under examination, and finds technical blemishes in them all:--