The establishment of a variety of theatres is an incident in the history
of the people, as well as of the national genius. The drama at first
existed, it may be said, in privacy. Royalty and nobility maintained
their own companies; the universities acted at their colleges, the
"children" or the singing boys at the public schools, the lawyers at
their halls; and some of the gentry at their seats had servants who were
players. A stage for strollers would occasionally be hastily erected in
the unsheltered yards of inns, and they would ramble into the country
till an Act of Elizabeth in 1572 controlled these erratic bodies,
classing them with "rogues and vagabonds." Throughout the kingdom there
was a growing predilection for theatrical entertainments--it was the
national anticipation of a public theatre.
If Elizabeth, a popular sovereign, in 1572 checked the strollers
assuming the character of players, two years afterwards, in 1574, she
granted a patent to the servants of the Earl of Leicester[1] "to
exercise the faculty of playing stage-plays, as well for the recreation
of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure;" and she added,
"within our city of London, and of any of our cities." This was a boon
royally given, in which her "loving subjects" might gather from the tone
of this dramatic state-paper, that the queen had resolved in council
that the public should not be denied sharing in her own amusements.
The pleasures of the people were not, however, yet those of their grave
seignors. The puritanic spirit of the anti-dramatists, which sometimes
divided the councils of the queen, had lodged among the honest
wardmotes. A protracted contest between the privy-council and the lord
mayor in common council, with protests and petitions, rose up; and long
it seemed hopeless to patronise the players, who were not suffered to
play. The Recorder Fleetwood, of whom we have many curious
police-reports in the style of a _lieutenant de police_--as the chief of
his own spies, and the executioner of his own decrees--had himself a
fertile dramatic invention, which was largely developed in the singular
"orders of the common-council" against the alarming innovation of PUBLIC
PLAYS in the boundaries of the civic jurisdiction.[2] There was not a
calamity, moral and physical, which could happen to any city which the
Recorder has not made concomitant with the opening of playhouses. The
infection of the plague was, however, then an irrefutable argument. In
this contest between the court and the city, the common-council remained
dogged assertors of their privileges; they drove the players from their
sacred precincts to the boundaries and to "the liberties," where,
however, they harassed these children of fancy by a novel claim, that
none were to be free in the "liberties" but themselves, which argument
was submitted to the law officers for their decision. The privy-council
once more interfered, by a declaration that the chief justices had not
yet been able to determine their case, and therefore there was to be no
present "intermeddling." It is evident that the government all along had
resolved that the people should have a theatre. After two years of
opposition to the patent granted to the players in 1574, the first
playhouse was built--a timber house in the suburbs--and received the
appropriate title of "The Theatre;" and about the same time "The
Curtain" rose in its vicinage, a name supposed to have been derived from
that appendage to a stage; for to those who had been accustomed to the
open stage of an inn-yard, the drop or "curtain" separating the actors
from the audience was such a novelty, that it left its name to the
house. The Blackfriars, the Round Globe, the Square Fortune--whence
Edward Alleyn, by his histrionic fame, drew the wealth which endowed
Dulwich College--are names almost consecrated by the eminent geniuses
whose lives were connected with these theatres; and at one time it
appears that seventeen playhouses had been erected; they were, however,
wooden and thatched, till the Fortune was built with brick, and, in the
theatrical phrase, "the heavens," that is, the open top, was tiled.
The popular fervour of the drama had now a centrical attraction; a place
of social resort, with a facility of admission, was now opened;[3] and
when yet there was no reading public, the theatre would be substituted
for the press; and often, wearied of the bearward and coarser sports,
they flocked to the more intellectual entertainment. The playhouse was a
wider sphere for their exertions, and it opened an arduous competition
for the purveyors of these incessant novelties. The managers of theatres
had now to look about for plays and playwrights. A general demand
required, not only an abundant, but, unfortunately, a rapid supply. What
a crisis for genius, for its development and its destruction!
This was an event in the history of our literature which has not
occurred in the literary history of any other European people. It was
about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth that a race of dramatic
writers burst forth on the nation--writers, not easily numbered, of
innumerable dramas.
Literature now opened a new avenue for a poor scholar, the first step of
advancement in society from a collegiate life for those who found their
future condition but ill provided for. A secretaryship, a chaplainship,
or to be a gentleman's usher--in a word, an humble retainer in great
families--circumscribed the ambition of the meek and the worthy; but
there were others, in "their first gamesome age," whose
----doting sires,
Carked and cared to have them lettered--
But their kind college from the teat did tent,
And forced them walk before they weaned were.[4]
This, however, is but the style of apology which one of them gives to
veil the fact that many were ejected from "the teat." Fiery emanations
these, compelled to leave their cloistered solitudes, restless and
reckless, they rushed to the metropolis, where this new mart of genius
in the rising dramatic age was opened. Play-writing and play-acting, for
they were often combined, were too magical a business to resist its
delusions.
They wrote, with rare exceptions, without revision. An act or two,
composed with some meditation to awaken interest--a few moveable scenes
rapidly put together--and, at some fortunate moment, a burst of
poetry--usually wound up in pell-mell confusion; for how could they
contrive a catastrophe to the chaos? Such writers relied on the passing
curiosity which their story might raise, and more on the play of the
actors, who, in the last bustling scenes, might lend an interest which
the meagre dialogue of the economical poet so rarely afforded. They
never wrote for posterity, and seem never to have pretended to it. They
betrayed no sympathy for their progeny; the manager's stock was the
foundling hospital for this spurious brood; the Muse even often sold her
infant while it still lay on the breast. The huddled act of a play was
despatched to the manager as the lure of a temporary loan, accompanied
by a promissory note of expedition; and assuredly they kept to their
word if ever they concluded the work.
This facility of production may be accounted for, not only from the more
obvious cause which instigated their incessant toil, but from the ready
sources whence they drew their materials. They dramatised evanescent
subjects, in rapid competition, like the ballad-makers of their own day,
or the novelists of ours; they caught "the Cynthia of the minute"--a
domestic incident--a tragic tale engaging the public attention produced
many domestic tragedies founded on actual events; they were certain of
exciting the sympathies of an audience. Two remarkable ones have been
ascribed to Shakespeare by skilful judges: _Arden of Feversham_, where
the repentance of an adulterous wife in the agony of conscience so
powerfully reminds one of the great poet, that the German, Tieck, who
has recently translated it, has not hesitated to subscribe to the
opinion of some of our own critics; and _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, which
was printed with the name of Shakespeare in his own lifetime, and has
been held to be authentic; and surely _The Yorkshire Tragedy_ at least
possessed an equal claim with the monstrous _Titus Andronicus_[5] not to
be ejected from the writings of Shakespeare. It is most probable that
that, among others, was among the old plays which he often took in hand;
and our judicial decisions have not always found "the divinity which
stirs within them." The Italian novelists, which had been recently
translated in PAINTER'S "Palace of Pleasure," these dramatists ransacked
for their plots; this source opened a fresh supply of invention, and a
combination of natural incidents, which varies the dry matter-of-fact
drawn from the "Chronicles," which in their hands too often produced
mere skeletons of poetry. They borrowed from the ancients when they
could. Plautus was a favourite. They wrote for a day, and did not expect
to survive many.
The rapid succession of this multitude of plays is remarkable; many have
wholly perished by casualties and dispersions, and some possibly may
still lie unsunned in their manuscript state.[6] We have only the titles
of many which were popular, while the names of some of these artificers
have come down to us without any of their workmanship. In a private
collection, Langbaine had gathered about a thousand plays, besides
interludes and drolls; and yet these were but a portion of those plays,
for many never passed through the press; the list of anonymous authors
is not only considerable, but some of these are not inferior in
invention and style to the best.[7] We may judge of the prolific
production of these authors by THOMAS HEYWOOD, a fluent and natural
writer, who never allowed himself time to cross out a line, and who has
casually informed us that "he had either an entire hand, or at least a
main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays."
The intercourse of the proprietors or managers of the theatres and these
writers has been only incidentally, and indeed accidentally, revealed to
us.[8] It was justly observed by Gifford, that these dramatic poets,
either from mortification or humility, abstained from dwelling, or even
entering upon their personal history. Though frequent in dedications,
they are seldom explicit; and even their prefaces fail to convey any
information, except of their wants or their grievances, from evils which
are rarely specified. The truth is, that this whole poetical race, which
suddenly broke out together, a sort of wild insurrection of genius,
early found that they were nothing more than the hirelings of some
crafty manager, at whose beck and mercy they lived. Writing plays was
soon held to be as discreditable an occupation as that of the players
themselves; indeed, not seldom the poets themselves were actors--these
departments were so frequently combined, that the term player is
sometimes used equally for a performer on the stage, and a writer of
plays.
This fraternity, children of ill-fortune and of passion, were scarce
distinguishable from each other; and if the fortunes, and the fate of
some, are more known, it is but by the recklessness of their days--their
criminal impetuosity. Several perished in their immaturity, torches
blazing, while they were consuming themselves. The chance-record of the
violent end of one; a cry of desperation still more horrible of another;
the death-bed repentance of a third; the dishonourable life of dupery
probably practised by a fourth;[9] are adapted to enter into moral, if
not into literary history.
The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of
genius--for such were many among them--feels how precious are the
slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence.
However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some
looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached
themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of
their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in
the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity.
An ungenial critic has morosely censured Robert Greene, who, harboured
in an obscure lodging, which a poor man's charity had yielded, when
lying on his death-bed, prayed for the last favour that poor man's
charity could bestow on a miserable, but a conscious poet--that his
coffin might be covered with bays. In the shadow of death, the poet and
the romancer dwelt on the fame which he cherished as life.
Even their small theatres appeared to the poet "thronged," and the heart
of the dramatist would swell at "the shouts and claps." Drayton, who, at
a later day, joined in several dramas, has perpetuated this rejoicing of
the poet, which he himself had experienced in that small world "the
proud round" of the Globe Theatre. It is a sonnet in the collection
which he has entitled "Idea," and which no successful dramatist will
read without some happy emotion.
In pride of wit, when _high desire of fame
Gave life and courage to my labouring pen_,
And first the sound and vertue of my name
Were grace and credit in the ears of men;
With those the _thronged theaters_ that presse,
I in _the circuit_ for the Lawrell strove,
Where the _full praise_, I freely must confesse,
In heate of blood and modest minde might move;
_With_ SHOWTS _and_ CLAPS _at every little_ PAWSE
When the _prowd_ ROUND _on everie side hath rung_.
The ample roll might not be tedious, though it were long, had we aught
to record of this brotherhood of genius--but nothing we know of the
much-applauded, and much-ridiculed, and most ingenious JOHN LYLY;
nothing of the searching and cynical MARSTON; nothing of the inventive
and flowing DEKKER; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertile
HEYWOOD; nor of the pathetic WEBSTER; nor of MIDDLETON, from whose
"Witch" Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor of ROWLEY, whom
Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and grave MASSINGER; nor of the
lonely and melancholy FORD.
Among these poets stood He, in whose fire the Greek of Homer burned
clear in his Homeric English. Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer,
and went on writing Homerically; at once the translator and the
original. One may read in that "most reverend aspect" of his, the lofty
spirit that told how, above all living, was to him the poet's life--when
he exclaimed--
The work that I was born to do is done!
The conclusion
Makes the beginning of my life; for never
Let me be said to live, till I live ever![10]
The plays were bought by a manager for his company, and each company was
jealously alive that no other should perform their purchased copies.
These monopolists were therefore anxious to suppress the publication of
plays, and to smother the fame of their dramatist on their own boards.
The players, who were usually copartners, at the sovereign pleasure of
their proprietorship, unmercifully mutilated the tender limbs of their
poet,[11] or what was not less usual, made him for ever ridiculous by
foisting in whole scenes of the basest humour, as clap-traps for "the
groundlings," and which sometimes were perpetuated in the prompter's
copy. Such scenes of ribaldry have tainted even immortal pages, and
have provoked much idle criticism either to censure or to palliate.
As the stock-copies increased and lost their novelty, they required some
new-fashioning. The tarnished piece was drawn out of the theatrical
wardrobe; once in vogue, and now neglected, the body, not yet
moth-eaten, might be flounced with new scenes. To this humiliated state
of jobbers of old plays, were reduced the most glorious names in our
drama's roll. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger sate down to this
obscure drudgery. Our earlier commentators on Shakespeare had no
suspicion that even his plays were often _rifacimentos_ of neglected
stock-copies. When the account-books of Henslow, the manager, were
discovered at Dulwich College, they supplied some strange literary
anecdotes. This entry appears, "lent to Bengemen Jonson, forty shillings
for his adycions to Jeronymo," which was an old favourite play of Kyd's.
Again, more lent for "new adycions." When Hawkins republished "Jeronymo"
in his collection, he triumphantly rejected these "adycions," as being
"foisted in by the players." This he had detected by collation with the
first edition; further his critical decision could not advance. The
Diary of Henslow was fatal to the matter-of-fact critic--the passages he
had ejected relate to the madness of Hieronymo for the murder of his
son; the learned poet never wrote with such a Shakespearian force.
Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but
established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find
sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share
alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their
mutual celebrities.[12] Could we penetrate into the recesses of the
theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the
commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous.
Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated,
subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was
incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so,
till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy of
_Dido_, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an
"invective" against proud "Ben," and when Anthony Munday, a copious
playwright, was hailed by a critic as "the best plotter," Jonson, in his
next _play_, ridiculed "the best plotter." Can we forget that in
_Eastward Hoe_, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence
Hogarth borrowed the hint of his "Idle and Industrious Apprentices," by
Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed?
It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.
Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for
both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that
the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention
were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were
skilful Greek scholars.[13] How then did it happen, that not one of
these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the
conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a
sudden revolution in the dramatic art.
Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has
delivered himself,--
--------They would have GOOD PLAYS, and not produce
Such musty fopperies of antiquity;
Which do not suit the humorous age's back,
With clothes in fashion.
It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could
win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung
to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the
passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, they struck out a new
course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors,
for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original, _more suo_,
mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had
opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to
find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the
excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless
prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of
its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its
imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass
away!
Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir Thomas
Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, "to avoid
stuffing it with baggage-books;" but more particularly objected to
"ENGLISH PLAYS, _as unlike those of other nations_, which are esteemed
for learning the languages; and many of them," he adds, "are compiled by
men of great wisdom and learning."
The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were
occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and we
were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every kind
startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of authority. On
the principle Bodley rejected our _English plays_ he also condemned our
_English philosophy_; and Lord Bacon rallied him on that occasion by a
good-humoured menace of "a cogitation against Libraries," which must
have made the cheeks of the great collector of books tingle. Bodley with
excellent truth described himself as "the carrier's horse which cannot
blench the beaten way in which I was trained."
In banishing the productions of the national genius from that national
library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley able to
conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those very "English
plays," would appeal to them as the depositaries of our language, and as
the secret history of the people, a history which no historian writes,
their modes of thinking in the transition of their manners, in the
vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of their politics and
their religion; and what most would have astonished our great
_bibliophile_, that collectors like himself, presuming on "their wisdom
and learning," would devote their vigils to collate, to comment, and to
edit "these baggage-books of English plays," and above all, that
foreigners, after a century or two, should enrich their own literature
by the translations, or enlarge their own genius by the imitations of
these bold originals.
By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the servility
of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to separate our own
from the classical drama of antiquity. They are placed in "the Romantic"
school; a novel technical term, not individually appropriate, and which
would be less ambiguous if considered as "the Gothic."[14] At the time
when Italy and France had cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to
the contracted models of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe,
without any intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a
medium, were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the
experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The
theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of
themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The dramatic
history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly tallies with
our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and translations of
the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas were so coldly
received, that they fell into desuetude, and were succeeded by those
whose native luxuriant genius reached to the secret hearts of their
audience; and it was this second race, not, indeed, so numerous as our
own, who closed with the Spanish Shakespeare.[15] This literary
phenomenon, though now apparent, was not perceived when it was
occurring.
Every taste has delivered its variable decision on these our old plays,
each deciding by its own standard; and the variance is occasioned not
always by deficiency in critical judgment, but in the very nature of the
object of criticism, in the inherent defect of our ancient drama itself.
These old plays will not endure criticism. They were not written for
critics, and they now exist even in spite of criticism. They were all
experiments of the freest genius, rarely placed under favouring
circumstances. They were emanations of strong but short conceptions,
poured forth in haste and heat; they blotted their lines as rarely as we
are told did Shakespeare; they revelled in their first conceptions,
often forgotten in their rapid progress; the true inspiration was lodged
in their breasts, the hidden volcano has often burst through its
darkness, and flamed through a whole scene, for often have they written
as Shakespeare wrote. We may look in them for entire scenes, felicitous
lines, and many an insulated passage, studies for a poet; anthologies
have been drawn from these elder dramatists.[16] We may perceive how
this sudden generation of poets, some of whose names are not familiar
to us, have moulded our language with the images of their fancy, and
strengthened it by the stability of their thoughts.