In the transition from the simpler interlude to the aggrandizement of a
more complicate scene and more numerous personages, so indistinct were
the notions of tragedy and comedy, that the writer of a morality in
1578, declaring that his purpose was to represent "the manners of men,
and fashion of the world now-a-days," distinguishes his drama both as "a
Pleasant Tragedy" and "a Pitiful Comedy."[1] This play, indeed, may be
placed among the last of the ancient dramas; and it is probable that the
author considered that these vague expressions might serve to designate
a superior order of dramatic productions.
The term Comedy was as indefinite in France as with ourselves. Margaret
of Valois, in 1544, gave the title of comedy to such scriptural pieces
as _The Nativity_, _The Adoration of the Kings_, and _The Massacre of
the Innocents_; and in Spain, at the same period, they also called their
moral pieces comedies. The title of one of these indicates their matter,
_La Doleria del Sueno del Mundo; Comedia tratada por via de Philosophia
Moral_,--"The Anguish of the Sleep of the World; a Comedy treated in the
style of Philosophic Morality." Comedy was the general appellative for a
play. Shakspeare himself calls the play of the players in _Hamlet_ both
a tragedy and a comedy. It is quite evident that at this period they had
no distinct conception of comedy merely as a pleasant exhibition of
society. Aristotle had not afforded them a correct description in our
sense, drawing his notions from the old comedy, those personal satires
or farcical lampoons acted on the Athenian stage.
To this day we remain still unsatisfied what Dante meant by calling his
great poem a "Commedia." Dante throws the same sort of mystery over the
species of his poem as he has done over the creation of a classical
diction for his own Italy. According to his interpretation, the lofty
style was denominated tragic, and in opposition to it he has called his
work "Commedia," as of a more humble style; and on another occasion he
describes comedy as something that begins sadly and ends happily, as we
find it in his great poem. We must, however, accept the definition as
very obscure, when we consider that both his subject and his diction so
often led him to sublimity of conception and expression; but the style
of criticism was yet unformed in the days of the Italian Homer.
It is remarkable that Boccaccio has entitled his pastoral of "Ameto" a
"Commedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine." It is difficult to imagine that the
almost contemporaneous commentator would have misused the word; we might
presume he attached the idea of a drama to this disputed term.
While these indistinct notions of tragedy and comedy were prevalent with
us, even long after we had a public theatre, we really possessed tragedy
and comedy in their more classical form; Tragedy, which soared to the
sententiousness of Seneca; and Comedy, which sported with Plautus and
Terence.
We owe this first TRAGEDY in our language, represented before the Queen
in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who
planned _The Mirror for Magistrates_, and left as its model _The
Induction_. SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst, the first Earl of Dorset, in that
national poem had struck with the nerve of Chaucer while he anticipated
the grave melodious stanza and the picturing invention of Spenser. But
called away from the land of the muses to the political cabinet, this
fine genius seems repeatedly to have consigned his works to the hands of
others; even his lighter productions are still concealed from us in
their anonymous condition. As in _The Mirror for Magistrates_ Sackville
had resigned that noble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy of
_Ferrex and Porrex_, or, as it was sometimes entitled, _The Tragedy of
Gorboduc_, while his genius struck out the same originality of plan, yet
the titlepage informs us that he accepted a coadjutor in THOMAS NORTON,
who, as much as we know of him in other things, was a worthy partner of
Sternhold and Hopkins.
In this first tragedy in our language, cast in the mould of classical
antiquity, we find a division of scenes and a progressive plot carried
on, though somewhat heavily, through five acts; the ancient ethical
choruses are preserved, changing their metres with rhyme. And here, for
the first time, blank verse was recited on the stage. Notwithstanding
these novel refinements, our first tragedy bears a strong impress of
ancient simplicity. Every act was preceded by "a dumb show," prefiguring
the incidents of the opening act; these scenical displays of something
considered to be analogous to the matter were remains of the pageants.
Blank verse, which the Earl of Surrey had first invented for his version
of Virgil, the Earl of Dorset now happily applied to the dramatic
dialogue. To both these noblemen our poets owe their emancipation from
rhyme; but the rhythmical artifices of blank verse were not discovered
in the monotonous, uncadenced lines of its inventors. The happiest
inventor does not overcome all difficulties.
SACKVILLE, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his
_Induction_; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on
with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have
settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He
is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no
distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the
purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable;
his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by
those not versed in ancient lore. The political part of the tragedy is
not destitute of interest; developing the misery of fraternal wars, the
division of sovereign power, each contending for dominion, and closing
in the dissolution of all government, by the despair of a people. We
have ourselves witnessed in these times a similar scene of the enmity of
brothers and monarchs.
A political anecdote confining this tragedy is worth recording. In the
discussions of the dangers and mischiefs of such a state of
insubordination, the poet, adopting the prevalent notions of the divine
right and the authority of "the absolute king," inculcates the doctrine
of passive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition,
were silently removed from the later ones.[2] It is an evidence that
these dreary principles, which in the following reigns of James and
Charles produced such fatal misunderstandings, even at this time began
to be questioned. Our poet, however, under the reckless councils of a
court minion, had covered the severest satire on those monarchs who rage
with "the lust of kingdoms," and "subject to no law," and who hold their
enormous will to be the privilege of regal power. Sackville seems to
have adopted the principle which Machiavel had artfully managed in his
"Prince," in the spirit of damning irony.
There is such a level equality throughout the whole style of this
drama,[3] that it has given rise to a suspicion that the work could only
be the composition of one mind and one ear. It is not in the
constitution of the human intellect that Norton could emulate Sackville,
or that Sackville could bring himself down to Norton. This internal
evidence struck Warton; and tracing it by _The Mirror for Magistrates_,
the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes of _Gorboduc_ are visibly marked
with the greater poet's characteristics, "in a perspicuity of style and
a command of numbers superior to the tone of his times." The name of
Norton affixed to the titlepage might only indicate his management of
the pageants! and possibly, being a licenser of books and a puritan,
even his name might be a recommendation of this drama, for certain
persons. Few things in those days were more loosely conducted than the
business and the artifices of printers, who generally procured their
copies surreptitiously, or were permitted to accommodate them to their
own free management and deceptive titlepages.
We must not decide on _the first tragedy_ by a comparison with the more
attractive and impassioned ones which soon afterwards inundated our
theatres. The court-circle had never before listened to such an amazing
novelty; and the poetic critic of that day pronounced that "those
stately speeches and well-sounding phrases were full of notable
morality, which it doth most delightfully teach." Sir Philip Sidney only
grieved that this tragedy might not remain as an exact model of all
tragedies, being "faulty both in place and time, the two necessary
companions of all corporal actions." Sidney did not live to witness the
code of Aristotle impugned, and his unities set at defiance, by a swarm
of dramatic bees, whose wild music and native sweetness were in their
own humming and their own honey.
This our first tragedy attracted by its classical form the approval of
some great moderns. RYMER, a stout Aristotelian, who has written on
tragedy, was astonished to find "such a classical fable on this side the
Alps," which, he plainly tells us, "might have been a better direction
to Shakspeare and Jonson than any which they had the luck to follow."
And Pope was not the less struck by the chaste style and the decorum of
Sackville, who having several murders in his tragedy, veiled them from
the public eye; conforming to the great Horatian canon, they are told,
and not viewed in the representation. Pope in conversation declared,
too, that Sackville wrote in a much purer style than Shakspeare in his
first plays, without affectation and bombast! and he has delivered a
more formal decision in print. "The writers of the succeeding age might
have improved as much in other respects by copying from Sackville, from
a propriety in the sentiments and dignity in the sentences, and an
unaffected perspicuity of style, which all the succeeding poets, not
excepting Shakspeare himself, either little understood or perpetually
neglected."
These are edicts from the school of classical antiquity. It was on the
earnest recommendation of Pope that Spence published an edition of this
tragedy, which had accidentally been put into the hands of Pope by the
father of the Wartons. Our vernacular writers, even the greatest, were
almost unknown in that day, and they only accidentally occurred.[4]
Spence, a feeble classical critic, was so overcome by the notion that "a
privy-counsellor" must be more versant in the language and the feelings
of royalty than a plebeian poet, that in his preface pointing out "the
stately speeches," he exclaimed in ecstasy--"'Tis no wonder if the
language of _kings_ and _statesmen_ should be less happily imitated by a
_poet_ than a _privy-counsellor_." To vindicate Shakspeare, at whom this
unguarded blow seemed levelled, the historian of our poetry, seated in
his professorial chair, flung his lightning on the impious critic.
"Whatever merit there is in this play, and particularly in the speeches,
it is more owing to the poet than the privy-counsellor. If a first
minister was to write a tragedy, I believe the piece will be the better
the less it has of the first minister. When a statesman turns poet, I
should not wish him to fetch his ideas or his language from the cabinet.
I know not why a king should be better qualified than a private man to
make kings talk in blank verse."
Literary history would have supplied the positive fact. Cardinal
Richelieu, that great minister, wrote a memorable tragedy; and, in
accordance with his own familiar notions, the minister called it
_Europe_. It was written in the style of "a privy-counsellor," and it
was hissed! while Corneille, who wrote as a poet, for the national
theatre, composed sentiments which statesmen got by heart.
Our literary antiquaries long doted on the first English comedy--_Gammer
Gurton's Needle_--being a regular comedy in five acts in rhyme. The
rusticity of the materials is remarkable. A diligent crone, darning the
lower habiliments of Hodge, loses her needle--
A little thing, with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller (silver),
Small, long, sharp at the point, and straight as any piller.
Had a needle not been a domestic implement of more rarity than it is
since Birmingham flourished, we had not had such a pointed and polished
description. In fact, the loss of the Gammer's needle sets the whole
village in flames; the spark falling from the mischievous waggery of a
Tom o' Bedlam in an artful insinuation against a certain gossip notable
for the luxuriance of her grotesque invectives. Dame Chat is a scold,
whose curses and oaths neither the fish-market nor Shakspeare himself
could have gone beyond. Brawls and battles involve the justice, the
curate, and the devil himself, in their agency. The prime author of all
the mischief produces the catastrophe; for he contrives to make Hodge
extract from a part more tender than his heart the cause of so much
discord, with great risk to its point and straightness; and the parties
conclude--
For Gammer Gurton's needle's sake let us have a PLAUDITE!
The writer of this extraordinary, and long supposed to be the earliest
comedy in our language, the titlepage informs us was Mr. S----, Master
of Arts; and, moreover, that it was acted at the University of
Cambridge. When afterwards it was ascertained that Mr. S---- was no less
a person than JOHN STILL, subsequently Bishop of Bath and Wells, it did
not diminish the number of its admirers. The black-letter brotherhood
were long enamoured of this most ancient comedy, as a genuine beauty of
the infancy of the drama. Dodsley and Hawkins enshrined _Gammer Gurton's
Needle_ in their "Reliquary;" and literary superstition
Swore it was the relick of a saint.
The mere lovers of antiquity endured the raillery of the wits for the
puerility of the plot, the vulgar humour, and the homeliness of the
style. One had asserted that "STILL had displayed the true genius of
comedy, and the choice of his _subject_ only was to be regretted;"
another declared that "the vein of familiar humour and a kind of
grotesque imagery are not unlike some parts of Aristophanes, but without
the graces of _language_." Thus one admirer gives up the subject, and
another the style! Even Warton fondly lingered in an apology for the
grossness of the "Gammer."--"In a polished age that writer would have
chosen, nor would he perhaps have disgraced, a better subject. It has
been thought surprising that a learned audience could have endured some
of the indelicate scenes. But the established festivities of scholars
were gross, and agreeable to their general habits." This apology has
turned out to be more plausible than true.
This ancient comedy is the work of a truly comic genius, who knew not
how to choose his subject, and indulged a taste repulsive to those who
only admit of delicate, and not familiar humour. Its grossness, however,
did not necessarily result from the prevalent grossness of the times;
since a recent discovery, with which Warton was unacquainted, has shown
the world that an English comedy which preceded the hitherto supposed
first comedy in our language, is remarkable for its chasteness--the
propriety of its great variety of characters, the truth of the manners
in a wide circle of society, and the uninterrupted gaiety pervading the
whole airy composition.
So recently as in 1818 an ancient printed drama, styled _Ralph Roister
Doister_, was discovered;[5] a legitimate comedy of five acts in rhyme,
and, as the writer himself professes, modelled on the dramas of Plautus
and Terence. He claims for it the honour of the highest class--that of
"Comedy," but this term was then so indistinct that the poet adds the
more usual one of "Enterlude."
GAMMER GURTON is a representation of sordid rusticity. ROISTER DOISTER
opens the moveable scenery of domestic life in the metropolis--touched
with care, and warm with reality. The plot, without involution,
progresses through the acts. An egotistical and affectedly amorous
hair-brain, ever lamenting the dangerous beauty of his ridiculous self,
fancies to marry a fair dame. He is hit off as
So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving,
I trow, never was any creature living.
He is the whetstone of a sharp parasite, whose opening monologue
exhibits his full portrait--
But, know ye, that for all this merry note of mine,
He might oppose me now that should ask where I dine.
He runs over a nomenclature of a most variegated acquaintance, with some
fugitive strictures exquisitely personal. We find ourselves in a more
advanced stage in society than we expected in the reigns of our last
Henry or Edward. Such personages abounded in the twenty years of peace
and luxury under James the First, when the obsequious hanger-on
flourished among the town-heroes of "The Gull's Horn-book." This
parasite is also one of those domestic dependents whose shrewdness and
artifices supply a perpetual source of comic invention; such as those
found among the Latin dramatists, whose scenes and incidents are
Grecian, and from whom this "Matthew Merry-greek" by his name seems
happily transplanted. This poet delights by scenes coloured with the
truth of nature, and by the clear conception of his domestic personages.
There is a group of domestics--the ancient housekeeper spinning on her
distaff amidst her maidens, some sowing, some knitting, all in free
chat; these might have formed a study for the vivid Teniers, and even
for Shakspeare in his happiest vein. They are not the domestics of Swift
and of Mandeville--the spoilers of the establishment; not that they are
without the common feelings of the servants' hall, for they have at
heart the merry prosperity of their commonwealth. After their
"drudgerie," to dissipate their "weariness" was the fundamental
principle of the freedom of servitude. Their chorus is "lovingly to
agree." A pleasant song, on occasion of the reception of "a new-come
man" in the family, reveals the "mystery" of their ancient craft.[6]
These early dramatists describe their characters by their names; an
artless mode, which, however, long continued to be the practice of our
comic writers, and we may still trace it in modern comedies. Steele, in
his periodical paper, "The Lover," condemned it as no better a device
than of underwriting the name of an animal; it is remarkable, that in
this identical paper an old bachelor is called "Wildgoose," and the
presumed author of "The Lover" is Marmaduke "Myrtle." Anstey has made
the most happy use of characteristic names in the "Bath Guide," which is
an evidence that they may still be successfully appropriated, whenever
an author's judgment equals the felicity of his invention.
Of a comedy, conjectured to have been written at the close of the reign
of Henry the Eighth, we may be surprised that the language hardly
retains a vestige of the rust of antiquity:--so true it is that the
familiar language of the people has been preserved with rare
innovations. Its Alexandrine measure properly read or chanted is a metre
which runs on with facility; the versification has even happily imitated
the sounds of the different instruments played on in one of the
serenades; a refinement which we could not have imagined to have been
within the reach of an artificer of verse in those days. All this would
look suspicious, if for an instant we could imagine that this admirable
drama was the contrivance of some Chatterton or Ireland. In style and
versification the writer far distanced those of his contemporaries,
whose affectation of phrases rendered them harsh and obscure; he has,
therefore, approached us. It is remarkable also that the very measure of
this ancient dramatist, though those whose ear is only used to the
decasyllabic measure have called it "a long hobbling metre," has been
actually chosen by a modern poet, when writing familiar dialogue with
the design of reviving rhymed comedy.[7]
The fate of some books is as remarkable as the histories of some men.
This lorn and lost drama, deprived even of its title and the printer's
name, offered no clue to the discovery of the fine genius who composed
it; and the possessor, who deposited it in the library of Eton College,
was not at all aware of its claim to be there preserved. It was to
subsequent research, after the reprint had been made, that both the
writer and the celebrity of his comedy were indisputably ascertained. We
owe the discovery to a comic incident in the drama: an amatory epistle
prepared by a scrivener's hand, for our gay amourists then could not
always compose, if they could write their billets-doux, being
maliciously read to the lady, by purposely neglecting the punctuation,
turned out to be a severe satire. The discomfited lover hastens to wreak
his vengeance on the hapless scribe, who, however, reading it with the
due punctuation, proves it to be a genuine love-letter. Wilson, in his
"Art of Logic," gave this letter as an example of the use of punctuation
in settling the sense; and without which, as in the present instance, we
may have "a double sense and contrary meaning." He fortunately added
that his example was "taken out of an interlude made by NICHOLAS UDALL."
This was the learned UDALL, the Master of Eton School; and this very
comedy had been so universally admired, that "Roister-Doister" became a
proverbial phrase to designate a hair-brained coxcomb. We now possess
two pictures of the habits, the minds, and the dialogue of the English
people in rural and in city life by two contemporaries, who wanted not
the art of "holding the mirror up to nature."