THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AND PLAYWRIGHTS.
The rejoicing age of Elizabeth was fond of "variety entertainments".
The Court Masques, such as those of Lyly, and George Peele's
"Arraignment of Paris," abounded in songs, music, and dancing, and
were expensively furnished. The Universities had their own amateur
authors and performers. The "children" of St. Paul's and other schools
acted so naturally that, as we read in "Hamlet," they became serious
rivals of the professional actors.[1] "An aery of children, little
eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically
clapped for it, these are now the fashion". Polonius indicates the
many sorts of plays, "tragedy, comedy, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical,
historical-pastoral, scene individual, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot
be too heavy or Plautus too light." From authors of the heavy Senecan
school came blank verse: "the light people" continued, when Shakespeare
wrote "Love's Labour's Lost," to employ rhymes in many measures; till
Peele, and above all Marlowe, introduced a more free and varied and
accomplished blank verse. The general taste turned from many imitations
of the ponderous Seneca to plays of more freedom, but even moralities
and interludes of the old sort continued to be played in the age of the
Shakespearean drama.
There were countless troops of players, vagabonds in the eyes of
the law--those who held no licence from a noble (as "the Earl of
Leicester's men," "the Admiral's men," and many others), "hardly
scaped whipping". In "Ratsei's Ghoaste" a company of strollers, Bottoms
and Snugs, stage-stricken, are licensed by a highwayman. They acted
where they could, mere "barnstormers," mainly in the yards of inns,
under the galleries.
The City was puritanic, or, at all events, was adverse to the nuisance
caused by crowds of roisterers and hangers-on of the theatre, and by
1577 James Burbage built his theatre beyond the municipal bounds,
in Shoreditch. The Curtain and the Fortune were in the same region.
Southwark, south of the river, a noisy quarter, gave hospitality to the
Rose, and, in 1599, to the Globe, built by Burbage's son, the famous
Richard, Shakespeare's friend.
The Diary of Philip Henslowe, who financed players and authors, among
his other enterprises, contains the jottings of this avaricious and
uneducated patron. There were many small "private theatres," which had
a scrambling existence.
The pit was unseated, and open to the rain and sun, the galleries above
were less uncomfortable. The noble and wealthy sat in galleries round
the pit, or on the stage, which was covered over or partly covered from
the air. The arras, or tapestry hangings, concealed the prompter--and
Polonius in "Hamlet". Scenes in bedrooms were at the back, and
when such a scene closed, the hangings fell over it. There was no
scene-shifting, as with us, pasteboard rocks and trees were easily
moved about. A painted frame with a name over it in large letters,
stood for town-gate, and for the town.[2]
There were no women actors, boys took women's parts till the
Restoration.
Such clowns, dancers, singers, and practical jokers as Tarleton and
Kemp, and such actors as held shares in their theatres, made good
livelihoods. The authors, who sold them dramas for a sum down, and had
no more profit from them in any way, were paid sums ranging from £6 to
£20: according to modern rate of purchasing power from £50 to £160.
The play then became the property of the speculator, like Henslowe, or
manager, or company of authors, which had paid for it. Robert Greene,
the celebrated literary man of whom we have to speak presently, was
accused of selling a copy of a play to one company, and then, when that
company went "on tour" through provincial towns, of selling another
copy to another company. "He was very capable of having it happen to
him." When any speculator or company had once bought a play, they could
hand it over to any author with orders to alter it as he pleased. This
was annoying to the first author or authors, for sometimes two men,
sometimes three, sometimes five or six would combine to make a play.
The consequence is that modern critics spend much time and ink in
trying to discover which author wrote each part of a comedy or tragedy,
and how much of the original work of the first author, or authors, was
kept in a play which, perhaps, Shakespeare himself took up and re-wrote.
We have no space for such discussions, which seldom lead to any certain
conclusions, but we must remember that the actors much objected to the
printing of any plays which they owned, for, once printed, it was not
easy to prevent other companies from acting them. But publishers sent
shorthand reporters to take down the words during the performance,
and wild work they often made of it. These printed plays, small cheap
square volumes or "quartoes," may be very correct or very incorrect
copies of the author's words; some of Shakespeare's quartos are good
texts, some are execrable.
The playwrights were usually young men who had been at one of the
Universities, and had picked up all that they could learn of the
newest French and Italian literature, ideas, and manners. They were
very scornful of play writers who, like Kyd, Shakespeare, and even
Ben Jonson, far more learned than any of them, had not been at Oxford
or Cambridge. The pamphlets of the University men tell us much of the
little we know about their rivals, often their betters, who had not
studied at Oxford or Cambridge.
John Lyly.
From the University wits whose plays preluded to Shakespeare, John
Lyly (?1554-1606) of Magdalen, Oxford, stands a little apart. He
wrote dramas to be acted before the maiden Queen by the boy singers
of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's. Unlike some of his brethren,
he remembered the reverence due to boys and virgins, and his pieces
are remarkable for delicacy of tone, while the refined and romantic
sentiment, the pure and hopeless passion of his "Endymion," for
example, and the style of the prose in his dialogue, are all in the
manner of his "Euphues". When he aimed at broad mirth, he was not broad
enough or facetious enough to be amusing. His characters usually, as
in "Endymion" and "The Woman in the Moon," are the gods, goddesses,
heroes, and heroines of classical mythology, but their manners are
those of the Court of Elizabeth, though more refined.
Allegory on events of the day is suspected of lurking in the plays:
Cynthia, for example, has always some complimentary reference to
Elizabeth. "Mother Bombie" is not a successful essay in low comedy:
"Campaspe," a love story of the Court of Alexander the Great (where
Plato finds himself, somehow), is quite a pretty approach, as is
"Galatea," towards the romantic comedy; but in Shakespeare's early
"Love's Labour's Lost" we see that, at the first attempt, he far
surpassed his predecessor. Puns, alliteration, and anecdotes of
unnatural history are nearly as prevalent in the plays as in the
"Euphues" of Lyly. Several of his songs are pretty; some of his scenes
of love-making when the lady, though coy, is willing to be won, are
graceful, and the prose of the dialogue, conceits apart, is lucid and
in good taste. His blank verse in "The Woman in the Moon," is not
specially characteristic.
Peele.
George Peele would have a far better claim than Kyd to the title of
"sporting" if there were even a little truth in the tract about him
called "Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman"; while to
the title of "gentleman" he would have no moral pretensions. The jests
are rough and far from honest practical jokes, but the author had some
knowledge of Peele's position as a director of pageants and masques.
There is no smoke without fire, and the contemporary stories of the
"Bohemian" life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University
wits connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely be
baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire: he was
born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates Hall, now Dr.
Johnson's college of Pembroke in Oxford, took his Bachelor's degree
about 1577, his Master's in 1579.
His "Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 1589),
he probably wrote at Oxford. It is a pocket epic, and summary of
the Trojan war--based partly on the "Iliad," partly on the later
Ionian legends, as of Palamedes, and the love of Achilles for
Polyxena, daughter of Priam. By 1581 Peele was in London. In 1584 his
"Arraignment of Paris" was published; it was acted in that year before
Elizabeth by the "children" of the Chapel Royal. It is strange sport
for ladies, and Mrs. Quickly might have said, "You do ill to teach the
child such words". The piece in which Paris is arraigned for giving the
apple to Venus, is a pastoral written in a variety of rhymed metres,
with some speeches in creditable blank verse: there is a pretty song,
Fair, and fair, and twice as fair,
And fair as any may be.
At the close Diana presents the famous apple, with the assent of Venus,
Juno, and Pallas, to Queen Elizabeth. Peele also arranged pageants for
the Lord Mayor, and wrote (1593) a "Chronicle History of Edward I,"
a play based on an absurd ballad about the profligacy and fabulous
cruelty of Eleanor, the worthy Queen of "Longshanks". Friar David ap
Tuck provides a comic part, in prose. John Baliol, King of Scotland,
brags and submits in blank verse: the best of the blank verse is
assigned to the wicked Eleanor: the lines are not usually "stopped" in
the stiff old style.
In 1593 Peele also wrote his "Honour of the Garter," a poetic vision
of "lovely knights" of old days. The Prologue contains a lament for
Marlowe,
the Muses' darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below.
"The Old Wives' Tale" is thought to have suggested a poem very unlike
it, Milton's "Comus". The date of Peele's "David and Bathsheba," "a
remain of the fashion of Scripture plays," is uncertain (published in
1599). This is the best of Peele's extant work, and the blank verse is
not unworthy of Marlowe. David says of the dead Absalom--
touch no hair of him,
Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds
Delight to play, and love to make it curl,
Wherein the nightingales would build their nests,
And make sweet bowers in every golden tress,
To sing their lover every night to sleep.
With Peele and Marlowe we are coming close to the perfection of the
verse of Shakespeare. Peele died in 1597(?); two years earlier he was
poor and in sickness. Probably some of his plays are lost; the "Battle
of Alcazar" is but doubtfully assigned to him. Peele cannot have taught
Shakespeare much: though he greatly improved blank verse, he only
proves that spectators were not intolerant of real poetry in plays.
Greene.
Robert Greene was a Norwich man (born about 1560), the son of parents
of substance; at St. John's College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1578.
Norwich was a puritan town, but the indulgence of Greene's mother, as
he tells us, enabled him to make the Italian tour, probably between
1578 and 1580,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
said the proverb, and Greene, a man greatly given to fits of
repentance, describes his dissipations much as St. Augustine describes
his own. At all events he learned Italian and could borrow from novels
in that language. He lived among "wags as loose as myself," both in
Italy and London. Neither the effects of a rousing sermon nor an early
marriage (1585, 1586) to a wife with whom he soon parted company could
withdraw Greene from the bottle and his wild comrades. He was the
conventional "gentleman of the press," living by a very rapid pen,
"yarking up a pamphlet" with unprecedented speed, says Nash, and his
wares, we learn, were well paid. He had also many noble patrons, at
least he dedicated his "love pamphlets," romances in the manner of
Lyly, to many ladies. They are pure in tone, and his favourite female
character is a chaste and long-suffering Patient Grizel, like Enid in
the Welsh "Mabinogion," and Enid in the "Idylls of the King". Between
1583 and 1589 he wrote at least eight of those love stories and
pamphlets, including "Euphues, his Censure to Philautus," and, as five
were dedicated to ladies of rank, they were probably of the sort which
women enjoyed. Later he was either remorseful, or affected remorse, for
his way of living, and turned his experience of the town to use, in
tracts on "Cosenage" and "Cony-catching," exposures of the devices of
courtesans, usurers, and other harpies.
His "Repentance," and his "Groatsworth of Wit" (1592), with the
notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last efforts. The
"Groatsworth of Wit" describes the jealousies between the playwrights
and the actors, who, then as always, gained most of the popularity,
and then gained most of the money yielded by the stage. It is almost
impossible for unbiased readers to avoid detecting in Greene's
"Johannes Factotum," "the only Shake-scene in the country," an allusion
to Shakespeare. Whether he partook too freely of pickled herrings and
Rhine wine, as gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness,
and died in debt to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592.
Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even according to
Nash he was a "ruffler". "Penning of plays," Greene says, was his
"continual exercise," but at what date he began it is uncertain. He
appears to have been stung by some comment in a play by two other
authors on the unfashionable character of his own dramas, "for that I
could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins"; that
is, apparently, he did not try to write the sonorous blank verse of
Marlowe; or tried and failed to produce in Nash's words "the swelling
bombast of a bragging blank verse".
If "Alphonsus, King of Arragon" be his first play, as it gives
Tamburlaine on a small scale it may have been suggested by Marlowe's
drama: however Alphonsus, after Napoleonic victories, marries his own
true love, the daughter of the Sultan and Greene's play, like the
tragedies preferred by Charles II, "ends happily". The blank verse is
inferior to that of the Ninevite play in which Lodge took part, "A
Looking Glass for London and England".
"Orlando Furioso" is a strange medley; there is prose, blank verse,
and even a speech in Latin: the materials are drawn, of course, from
Ariosto; the Paladins deal enormously in classical allusions.
In "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," the Prince of Wales, afterwards
Edward I, falls in love with a gamekeeper's daughter, and describes her
charms in blank verse, and in a very pretty pastoral manner. By the
old trick of novels and of the stage he sends Lacie, a courtier, to
woo for him (as in "Much Ado about Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and "Two
Gentlemen of Verona"), and the usual consequences follow.
The Friars Bacon and Bungay are shown at their pranks, with a devil,
and Lacie, "in country apparel," flirts with the keeper's daughter in
talk of Apollo's courtship of Semele (mother of Dionysus by Zeus). The
king beholds their courtship by dint of crystal-gazing; while they are
also on the stage.
The plot becomes extremely complicated, and poor Margaret, the keeper's
daughter, has to play the patient Grizel to Lacie. She is cruelly
treated, but marries Lacie in the end, while Edward pairs off with
Eleanor. The servant of Friar Bacon, Miles, and a devil provide some
comic matter. The blank verse is now much more accomplished, and
imitates the cadences of Marlowe.
The play of "James IV" is so absurdly unhistorical (it transfers
the plot of an Italian novel by Cinthio to the Court of Holyrood),
that it can hardly be read with patience, but Greene's sweet,
patient, long-enduring heroine, Dorothea, appears again, in the part
historically filled by a very different person, Margaret Tudor, whose
passion for being alternately married (finally to "Lord Muffin") and
divorced, was rebuked by her brother, Henry VIII, himself no model of
constancy. Greene introduced and Shakespeare continued the practice
of taking plots for romantic comedies, (such as "As You Like It")
from Italian novels; and, like Shakespeare, he is the poet of good
women, "the Homer of women," as his friend Nash said with hyperbole of
compliment.
Lodge.
The Memoirs of Thomas Lodge, had he left them to us, would be of more
interest than are his writings. He "had an oar in every paper-boat,"
says the Cambridge satirist in the play, "The Return from Parnassus,"
but he had oars in other boats that were not of paper. Born about 1558,
he was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, an eminent grocer. He was
educated at Trinity College, Oxford, being by one academic generation
junior to Lyly. Going to the Inns of Court, London, he answered
Gosson's attack on poetry, "The School of Abuse," in an abusive style
very unlike that of Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy". He and
Barnaby Rich (the supposed author of a most vivacious translation of
two books of Herodotus), were friends, and wrote commendatory verses,
each for the other's work (1581).
If in his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), Lodge is speaking from
his personal experience, he already knew "the ignoble melancholy of
pecuniary embarrassment," thanks to the expensive acquaintance of "Mrs.
Minx," and long bills due to his tailor. He warns the young against the
temptations of the town, at tedious length and with overabundance of
classical allusions. In an unreadable romance (1584) (Lyly's "Euphues"
being the model), "Forbonius and Prisceria," he inserts many not
unreadable verses.
"Glaucus and Scilla" is a work of the same _genre_ as Shakespeare's
"Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas of six lines.
"Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences"
says Lodge, and his tale is too prolix, verbose, and full of "delayes".
There are harmonious cadences, and pretty descriptions, but Lodge's
poetic vein is best in his brief lyrics. He found time, on sea or land,
to write "Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy". This contains the tale
which Shakespeare made immortal by transfiguring it in "As You Like
It". The vagrant and affected prolixity of this kind of story had a
popularity that endured for a century, and surprises us as much as our
popular novels will doubtless astonish future generations. Such as the
style was, Lodge had mastered it, and redeemed it by the intercalated
verses. "Rosalynde" had vogue, and Lodge, who had set forth on a
freebooting expedition with young Thomas Cavendish, wrote probably
the only novel, "A Margarite of America" (1596), ever composed in the
frosty Straits of Magellan. His next novel was "Euphues's Shadow," the
euphuism of the shadow is equal to that of the substance. His play, "A
Looking Glass for London and England," written in collaboration with
Greene, was acted in 1592. We are introduced to Rasni, King of Nineveh,
with three Kings of Cilicia, Crete, and Paphlagonia, returning from the
overthrow of Jeroboam, King of Jerusalem..
Greene and Lodge are magnificently disdainful of local colour. The
Cilician King, in very sonorous blank verse, proclaims the Assyrian
monarch to be more beautiful than Hyacinthus and Endymion, personages
of Greek mythology. Oseas the prophet, brought in by an angel, listens
to an angelic harangue of some thirty lines, and tersely replies: "The
will of the Lord be done!" To him enter "Clown and a crew of Ruffians,"
and we have several pages of humours in prose; mainly the talk is of
ale and horses. After a prolonged and chaotic performance, Nineveh
repents under the preaching of Jonah, and these amiable moralists,
Greene and Lodge, bid London go and do likewise. That the blank verse
is not bad, and that the satire of Rasni's flatterers _may_ be a hit
at the adulators of Elizabeth, is the best that can be said for this
Scriptural drama. After all it is not so tedious as Lodge's play from
Roman history, "The Wounds of Civil War".
It is needless to speak of such mere hackwork as his books on William
Longbeard and Robert the Devil, but his "Fig for Momus," satires in
rhyming heroic couplets, accredit him, contrary to the boast of Joseph
Hall, as the first English satirist.
Not popular in literature, Lodge (1600) turned physician, taking his
M.D. degree at Avignon. Now he really flourished, and was in good
practice, till his death in 1625. His reputation rests on his lyrics;
for the advance of the drama he did nothing.
Nash.
With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, or Nashe,
made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the history of
Elizabethan literature. The son of "William Nash, minister" (not
improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk
in November, 1567. The Christian names of his brothers and sisters,
Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are of the Biblical sort favoured by
"the Brethren".
Nash made no claim to the title "gentleman" then used in the heraldic
sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar" (at Oxford "servitor") or Lady
Margaret's Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, and was in
residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 he was in London, a literary
hack, employed, for example, to write an "Introduction" to Greene's
"Menaphon". He addresses the students of both Universities in his
irrepressibly rattling way, and it is hardly possible to doubt that
in a long passage he rails at the unfortunate Kyd in his capacities
as playwright and translator from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed
contemporary literature and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings
of Gabriel Harvey.
With him Nash later had a war of pamphlets, the best known is "Have
with You to Saffron Walden," containing a full answer to the eldest
son of the Halter-maker (1596). The pamphlets are only of interest
for their personal hints: the feud arose from a slighting allusion by
Greene to Harvey's parentage ("Quip for an Upstart Courtier"). Nash
took up the cudgels (as his weapons of wit may be called) for Greene;
Harvey pursued Greene's memory beyond the tomb, and Government at last
put an end to the publication of the pamphlets.
Nash and Marlowe worked together at the play of "Dido," mainly based on
the "Æneid" of Virgil, with an opening scene in un-Virgilian bad taste,
and highly unedifying to the players, "the Children of her Majesty's
Chapel The play is in blank verse, usually better than Nash's own in
his "Summer's Last Will and Testament". Much of this is in Nash's hasty
prose; a blank verse tirade in praise of dogs is amusing:--
To come to speech, they have it questionless,
Although we understand them not so well,
They bark as good old Saxon as may be.
In 1597, Nash was imprisoned for a play "The Isle of Dogs".
It is impossible to enumerate his tracts, of which his turbulent
prose satire, "Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil," is
the most spirited. His "Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack
Wilton" (1594) is a crude anticipation of "Gil Blas," and the novel
of unscrupulous wandering adventurers, and contains the feigned
story of the loves of Surrey and his Geraldine, which was taken to
be historical. Nash lived a scrambling life, a bookseller's hack,
destitute of patrons, and died about 1601. For the advance of the
drama, despite his play-writing, Nash did nothing.
Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe is happily on the right side of the line which
separates poets who may be read from poets who must be written about.
He was born on 6 February, 1564, being the son of an eminent shoemaker
at Canterbury. He was educated at the King's School of that city,
where he held a little scholarship of a pound, quarterly, and went to
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with one of the scholarships founded
there for Canterbury boys by Archbishop Parker (1581). In 1584 he took
his Bachelor's degree, being a contemporary of Nash and Greene, and
three years later put on his Master's gown. His translations of Ovid's
"Amores" may have been executed at Cambridge; he did not publish them.
His first public work was the first part of the play of "Tamburlaine,"
acted in 1587 or 1588. The drama, in both parts, is destitute of
construction; the hero, Tamburlaine, "the scourge of God," merely
overruns a vast extent of country, subduing kings, massacring maidens,
and glutting his unbounded rage for universal conquest. His only human
weakness is his passion for "divine Zenocratê," his wife, and he might
be called a martyr to "megalomania," trampling on divine names no less
than on the backs of Emperors. The scene in which he enters in his
chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizond and Soria, bit in mouth, and
cries:--
Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!
was matter of constant jest and parody, a proof of the popularity of
the drama.
In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays,
Marlowe was "a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with the
thought of what man may achieve. "Nature," he makes Tamburlaine say,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all...
but after this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine sinks
to finding felicity in "an earthly crown".
The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, places
in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines on the
aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful:--
If all the pens that poets ever held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
This is the vision of beauty which haunts and evades Marlowe, as the
shadow of the mother of Odysseus in Hades fades away from his embrace.
Sometimes it appears to him
like women or unmarried maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.
Again, in "Dr. Faustus," a new Tamburlaine who seeks the impossible in
magic, not by arms, and sells his soul to the Adversary, the vision
arises in the form of Helen of Troy, that ancient symbol of the World's
Desire.
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium...
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
In this absolute perfection of the magic of verse, we see the true
conquest of Marlowe: as in the agonies of the last hour of Faustus,
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo's Laurel Bough.
The last act is full of pity and of terror.
The dagger-thrust that slew Marlowe in a Deptford tavern, at the end of
May, 1593, robbed English poetry of a genius whose future performance
cannot be measured, nor can the form which it might have taken be
guessed. The comic prose scenes in "Faustus" are very stupid and may
perhaps be by another hand, but nothing in Marlowe indicates the gift
of humour.
In "The Jew of Malta" Barabas, on a scale less disproportionate than
Tamburlaine, represents immeasurable desire of wealth, not of royalty.
In the earlier scenes the speeches of Barabas, with the recurrence
of romantic and sonorous names, in a way remind us of Milton. The
Jew, ill-treated as he is, is not allowed to be sympathetic, and
the monstrosity of his crimes reminds the modern reader of Aytoun's
"Firmilian": with a touch of the story of the Hunchback in the "Arabian
Nights". Though Barabas has a beloved daughter, rapidly converted
to Christianity, though his ducats and his daughter are all that he
loves, he lags very far behind Shylock. The play was well calculated
for popularity, but, save Barabas, it contains no character of marked
merit.
"Edward II" has been much praised in modern times, and even preferred
to the "Richard II" of Shakespeare. Neither King was a good subject
for tragedy, though both endured the extremes of misfortune. But in
Richard there were noble elements, debased by a long struggle with
some of his uncles, and undermined by a period of absolute power. In
Edward II we know nothing estimable, save a moment of princely valour
when he was all but taken at Bannockburn. His doting devotion to Piers
Gaveston, who is well sketched by Marlowe, his intolerable insults
to his Queen, place him quite beyond sympathy, till his awful last
hours and appalling end. The instantaneous change of the Queen from a
loving, forgiving, and intolerably wronged woman to a monster of cruel
hypocrisy cannot be called artistic; and though the play, compared with
Marlowe's other dramas, is "regular," and opens the path to what we
may call the legitimate drama, without the monstrosities of "The Jew
of Malta," it does not contain such surprising excellencies as occur
in "Tamburlaine" and "Faustus". The noblest passage, the speech of the
fallen King to Leicester, could scarcely come from the Edward of the
earlier acts. The "Massacre of Paris" (the Bartholomew massacre of
1572) is of no importance among Marlowe's works.
If we could agree with his too fond biographer that Marlowe wrote the
passages of "Henry VI," in which Jeanne d'Arc is worthy of herself, and
that Shakespeare contributed the scandalous scenes of her debasement,
we might regard Marlowe as a wonder of clear-sighted appreciation.
But nothing in their works confirms this conjecture. What share, if
any, Marlowe had in "Henry VI" and "Titus Andronicus," and precisely
what Shakespeare did for both of these dramas is unknown. Marlowe's
beautiful lyric, "Come live with me and be my Love," is for ever
fragrant, and his "Hero and Leander" (stiffly finished by Chapman,
it is said at Marlowe's own dying request) is at least the equal of,
and may even be preferred by many readers to, the first fruits of
Shakespeare's invention, "Venus and Adonis".
Shakespeare's "dead shepherd" did not die unlamented by his brother
poets: he had patrons in Raleigh and Sir Thomas Walsingham, and it is
not necessary to criticize here certain horrible libels on his life and
conversation.[3]
Kyd.
The irony of chance, by a freak of Ben Jonson's, has attached to the
most ill-fated of authors the name of "Sporting Kyd". Born about 1558
the son of a scrivener in the City, Kyd was educated at Merchant
Taylors' School. He was not a member of either University. It is by a
piece of luck, for his biographers, that he was satirized by Nash as
one who stole from a French translation of Seneca's tragedies; and so
produced a play, "Pompey the Great, his fair Cornelia's Tragedie," one
who "will afford you whole Hamlets," and who took up the business of
translating from the Italian. By pursuing these and other sarcastic
hints of Nash's, Kyd has been identified as the author of the most
truly popular of early Elizabethan plays "The Spanish Tragedy"; of
what the Germans call the "Ur-Hamlet," the oldest English Hamlet play;
and the translator of "The Householder's Philosophic," in prose; while
he is thought guiltless of the first part of "Jeronimo," a prelude,
meant to be humorous, to his "Spanish Tragedy". To that work, again,
additions were made, and Ben Jonson was paid for making them, though
they are thought not to resemble his manner, and he frequently girds
in his own later dramas at the popular "Spanish Tragedy". It is a long
tissue of horrors and revenges in blank verse, old Hieronymo slowly
pursuing the slayers of his son, Horatio, and contains, like "Hamlet,"
a play within a play, in which the actors in a fencing scene slay
each other in earnest, to glut Hieronymo's revenge. As in "Hamlet"
there is a ghost, but ghosts were common in the dramas of Seneca and
his English imitators. Hieronymo, when apprehended, bites his tongue
out, and stabs himself and a Duke who happens to be convenient in his
neighbourhood.
If Kyd were really the author of the first play of "Hamlet," based on
a Danish story which English actors who played in Germany in 1587 may
have brought home, the fact would be interesting. If we only possessed
a copy of this first "Hamlet," we should know how much, if anything at
all, Shakespeare retained from the original play. Kyd is credited with
being the first to show the change and development of characters under
the sway of the events of the drama, though this can scarcely be proved
save by a long comparison of all the characters in the plays of other
writers. Grotesque as are his horrors, when we compare those of "Titus
Andronicus" and of successors of Shakespeare who ought to have known
better, we wonder at his moderation.
Kyd's end was lamentable. He was arrested, and tortured, in May, 1593,
on suspicion of having written a placard threatening a massacre of
undesirable aliens in London, who interfered with home industries.
In his papers was found part of a perfectly serious though heterodox
discourse on a theological topic, apparently intended to be submitted
to a Bishop. He cleared himself of the placard, and, in a letter to
Puckering, the Lord Keeper, said that he had the theological piece from
Marlowe, that it was among his papers by accident, and that Marlowe,
then just dead, was an evil man, and no friend of his.
Kyd now lost the patronage of a peer, unnamed, and by December in the
following year he was dead; his family renounced the administration
of what possessions he may have left behind him. He has of late been
the subject of minute English and German research, like every one who
had, or may have had, the faintest connexion with Shakespeare. The
indecision of Hieronymo (Act III. scene 12) in revenging himself on
Balthasar for slaying Horatio, Hieronymo's son, and hanging him up in
Hieronymo's summer-house, has other motives than the indecision of
Hamlet. But this indecision, and the play within the play, and Kyd's
supposed authorship of the "Ur-Hamlet," which lies behind the First
Quarto of "Hamlet," make Kyd interesting to critical specialists.
These predecessors of Shakespeare need to be mentioned, though perhaps
only Marlowe's dramas are now commonly read by lovers of poetry. Though
these men wandered in the wilderness, so to speak, they pointed out the
way to Shakespeare, and made the world familiar with rude forecasts of
the forms of the romantic comedy, the historical play, and the tragedy.
Several wrote blank verse well, occasionally; Marlowe brought blank
verse, not precisely dramatic, but rather reflective, to the highest
beauty. Almost all the early dramatists also graced their plays with
charming songs.
All of these early dramatists had that sweet and birdlike English note
of song, "woodnotes wild," which (to an English ear) is rare in all but
the early poetry of France. We have observed this note in the lyrics of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Time did not stifle the music,
it is prolonged in the fashionable love-romances and in the early
dramas. Thus even Nash, the least poetical of his associates, has his
Adieu, farewell earth's bliss
This world uncertain is,
which, with its refrain,
Lord, have mercy on us,
recalls Dunbar's lament
_Timor Mortis conturbat me._
Dust hath closed Helen's eye,
Worms feed on Hector brave.
Where are the lovely knights and the ladies of old time?
Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure,
written in a time of pestilence, is another lament of Nash's, and
Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year.
Peele has
His golden locks hath time to silver turned,
and the beautiful song of Bethsabe at the bath,
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air.
Greene has his
Ah, what is love, it is a pretty thing,
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king,
which is in the spirit of Burns's best songs of rural love; and his
courtly love song with the French refrain,
_N'oserez vous, mon bel ami!_
and his Lullaby
Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee.
This has the charm of the folk-songs,
Old and plain,
And dallying with the innocence of love.
It may also be said that, at the opposite pole, Greene's snatches of
English hexameters are the best of their kind then written.
If nothing else Of Lyly's existed his
Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses--Cupid payed,
would keep his memory green.
Lodge has been blamed as a common plagiary because he translated so
many of his lyrics, not always or often with due acknowledgment, from
Des Portes and Ronsard. But in some cases he improved the land which
he conquered, and his "Love in my bosom like a bee," "Down a down!"
"Thus Phyllis sung," and "Pluck the fruit and taste the pleasures," are
genuine additions to English song, and prelude to Shakespeare's, and
the music of the coming generation.
All of the treasures of his predecessors are not equivalent or nearly
equivalent to the small change of Shakespeare's genius. But the best
things in his predecessors' work indicate that, in a favourite phrase
of Aristotle, "Nature was wishing to make" a Shakespeare. Yet was the
birth of his genius none the less a miracle. He did much more than
combine all that was good in all the others. He added that which is
universal and eternal.
Shakespeare.
Concerning the life of William Shakspere (as he signed it), or
Shakespeare (as his name was usually spelled), only a few essential
facts are known from records of his own time, mainly documents
concerning the legal affairs of himself, his family, and the
theatrical company with which he was connected. Unlike many of the
contemporary playwrights he was not a member of either University, and
so college records about him are necessarily absent: and there is no
contemporary roll of names of pupils at the school of his native place,
Stratford-on-Avon.
Again, he was not a pamphleteer or journalist, like Nash, Greene, and
others, and so he left no account of his friendships and enmities; no
prose books about his opinions on art and literature, like Ben Jonson;
he wrote no satirical plays, as Ben did, full of angry, contemptuous,
and envious attacks on his rivals, and on the actors. As he was no
learned scholar, the Universities never dreamed of making him, like
Ben Jonson, a Master of Arts. People who wrote criticisms of poetry in
prose or verse always spoke highly of him: one, John Davies, remarks
that, in the opinion of some, had he not been an actor, he would have
been fit company for Kings. But anecdotes of him were not sought for
till all who had known him had long been dead. His own dramas contain
a few topical allusions, and his sonnets appear to be more or less
autobiographical, though to what degree, as in the case of Sidney's
sonnets, is matter of dispute. He took almost no part in any public
services, and in these circumstances little is known of his life,
despite the painful researches of many learned students, and the
wildest modern conjectures.
Concerning even the paternal grandfather of the poet, presumed to have
been Richard Shakespeare, a farmer at Snitterfield, within four miles
of Stratford-on-Avon, we have little more than probable presumptions.
Richard's son John, father of the poet, in 1551 set up in business
at Stratford-on-Avon, then a town of some 1500 inhabitants. He was a
dealer in agricultural commodities; Aubrey, the antiquary, a century
later, heard that he was a butcher. But the trade of a butcher in a
tiny town is not lucrative, yet by 1556 he could buy two tenements,
one in Henley Street, next door to the so-called "Birthplace". He held
a succession of municipal offices, and was one of two chamberlains of
town accounts. In 1557 (?) he married Mary Arden, a daughter of a far
away branch of a good family; she inherited fifty acres of land and
a house at Wilmcote, and other property. After the birth of children
who died young, came William, baptized on 26 April, 1564. His father,
still prospering, was chief magistrate in 1568: that year came licensed
play-actors to Stratford--"The Queen's," and "The Earl of Worcester's".
But after 1572 the affairs of the father turned gradually to the worse;
he mortgaged the property near Wilmcote in 1578; he fell into debt, and
in 1586 ceased to be an alderman. His family had increased while his
fortunes declined.
As there was a free Grammar School at Stratford, it is natural to
suppose that William was educated there from his seventh or eighth to
his thirteenth year. If so, he would learn Latin grammar, and read more
or less in the popular classics, including, "old Mantuan"--not Virgil,
but a writer of the Italian Renaissance. Supposing Shakespeare to have
left school at thirteen, he was at the age of Bacon when he went up
to Cambridge. Books have been written about the learning or want of
learning of Shakespeare. In all probability he could make out most
of the meaning of a Roman writer of comedies, like Plautus, or of a
philosopher like Seneca. But his use of English translations, whenever
he could get them, does not look as if he read Latin with ease: he
could ask a friend or pay a poor scholar to help him when he had no
translations; and to Ben Jonson his Latin seemed "small," because
Ben had so much scholarship, and was so proud of it. All general
information Shakespeare acquired as easily as he drew breath. Of
schoolmasters, judging from allusions in the plays, he entertained the
same opinion as Sir Walter Scott. The classics are most in view in his
early plays, in some of which he worked over an earlier manuscript by
a more scholarly hand. Moreover classical allusions, mythological and
historical, lay loose on the surface of all contemporary literature;
and abounded in the conversation of the wits.[4] No man ever cared less
for historical accuracy and correct "local colour" than Shakespeare: he
piled up anachronisms, making Aristotle live before the Trojan war.
When not yet 19 years of age, at the close of 1582, Shakespeare married
Anne Hathaway, who had the same dowry, in money (£6. 13s. 4d.) as
his mother. She was seven or eight years older than he: their first
child was born at the end of May, 1583, and the circumstances did not
promise domestic happiness. Twins, Hamnet (who died young) and Judith,
were born in 1585, and whether Shakespeare did, or did not get into
trouble for poaching on the lands of Lucy of Charlecote (against whom
his heraldic ridicule, in "Merry Wives," Act I, Scene I, indicates
a grudge), it was time for him to seek his fortune. Perhaps he made
ventures near home (Aubrey, who knew an old actor that had traditions,
says he was a schoolmaster), but by 1587 he was probably "hanging loose
on the town" in London. Here he had a fellow townsman, Field, who later
printed his "Venus," and his "Lucrece". The story that Shakespeare held
the horses of playgoers outside the doors of a theatre comes late into
literary anecdote.
By 1594 (perhaps by 1592) Shakespeare was a member of the Company of
Actors known successively as "Leicester's," "Derby's" (died 1592)
"Hunsdon's" (Carey) and, at the accession of James VI and I (1603)
"The King's". With him were the great Richard Burbage, John Heminge,
Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips. By this Company all his plays
were first acted. By 1592 they used the Rose Theatre, and others, and
in 1599 the Globe. There is no proof that Shakespeare ever played in
Scotland (he could not pronounce Dunsinane, and accentuated the final
syllable) or abroad.
From the moment of his departure from Stratford nothing is certainly
known of Shakespeare, till the dying Greene apparently alludes to
him in "A groat's worth of wit, bought with a million of Repentance"
(1592). Adjuring his comrades (Nash, Peele, and Marlowe?), to forswear
sack and the stage, Greene seems to remind them of a hardship in their
professional position: the rewriting of plays, once sold, by other
hands. A new hand might alter it for the owners, the hand might be that
of an actor, one of the "puppets," says Greene, "that speak from our
mouths.... There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that
with his 'Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide' supposes he is as
well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being
an absolute 'Johannes factotum'" (jack-of-all-work) "is, in his own
conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.... It is a pity men of
such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes."
If, as has been suggested (there is no certainty), a piece called
"Henry VI" (part I), played by Shakespeare's company in March, 1592,
was an older drama "bombasted" by Shakespeare, and if his conduct
was one cause of Greene's wrath, we can only regret that Shakespeare
set his hand to a work that rejoiced English patriots. The author or
authors represent Jeanne d'Arc in two totally different characters,
now as a patriot, equally brave, self-sacrificing, and eloquent; now
as a loose woman who denies her father, and asserts her pregnancy by
one or other of several lovers. History is strangely treated, and the
materials must have been taken from Anglo-Burgundian scandals, and from
a curious French prose chronicle romance, obviously done into prose out
of verse, the "Chronique de Lorraine". This appears to have been the
source of the scenes in which Jeanne fights at Rouen, many years after
her martyrdom in 1431.
Shakespeare may have "written in" the scenes where Jeanne acts and
speaks like herself; the others (let us hope so!) may be by a baser
hand. The second and third parts of "Henry VI," were later much
altered, probably by Shakespeare; the scenes with Jack Cade are
entirely in his manner.
As we have not the original manuscripts, we are often unable to
distinguish, in Shakespeare's earlier works, between what is his own
and what belongs to a play by an earlier hand, or by a collaborator.
The tendency of criticism is to attribute the best passages to
Shakespeare and to guess at the authors of what is not so good.
The dates especially of the early plays are far from certain. But we
can hardly be mistaken in thinking "Love's Labour's Lost" a very early
example of the poet's play-writing. He has not mastered blank verse:
the sense usually ends with the end of each line; much of the play
is written in rhymed verse of various metres: prose is comparatively
little used. Some of the personages, as Biron and Longueville, are of
the contemporary Court of Henry of Navarre, a most unlikely person to
contemplate seclusion from female society! The play, of which the plot
seems to be Shakespeare's own,[5] is full of promise of good things
to come. Biron will blossom into Benedick, Costard and Jaquenetta
into Touchstone and Audrey; the ladies are predecessors of the poet's
many ladies, as Beatrice and Rosalind, who are merry when in love. We
have the stock figure of the pedant schoolmaster in Holofernes, of
the fantastic talker in Armado, and the songs, "On a day, Alack the
day," and "When daisies pied and violets blue," prelude to all the
enchantments of Shakespeare's lyrics. The play was revised and worked
over in 1598 (?).
"Titus Andronicus" (certainly extant in 1594) is the play which Burns
and his brothers, in boyhood, declined to listen to; it is as full of
horrors as an Assyrian bas-relief of the torturing of prisoners of war.
Tortures were familiar, in practice, to the subjects of Elizabeth,
and the horrors are not worse than those of ancient Athenian and
other Greek legendary histories. But neither these things nor the
over-abundance of pedantic classical allusions are in Shakespeare's
mature taste. Much of the play has been guessed at as the work of
"Sporting Kyd," and a fairly old tradition (published in 1678) says
that Shakespeare only touched it up. Long ago Hallam remarked that
criticism might come to be as dubious as to Shakespeare's precise
share in the plays, as, after Wolf (1795) she has been uncertain about
Homer's part in his epics. It is clear and certain that plays, when
Shakespeare came to the town, were often altered and added to by others
than the original authors. Though "Titus Andronicus" was, in 1598,
assigned to Shakespeare by Francis Meres, and was included in the first
collected edition, the Folio, in 1623, he may, perhaps, have been the
last and, as the most popular, the titular _bearbeiter_, or worker-over
of the drama.
"Richard III" could scarcely be made to feed more full of horrors on
the stage than that prince actually did, as reported by Holinshed,
and the play, if inflated, is less so than Marlowe's "Tamburlaine".
Marlowe's "Edward II," again, had its influence on "Richard II," a
perilous play to be concerned with, from the scene of deposing the
king, under the irritable Elizabeth. Acted by order of the Essex
conspirators, in 1601, it brought Shakespeare's company under the
momentary displeasure of the Queen.
The third Richard has all the elements of popularity. He is as hideous
as the second Richard was effeminately beautiful, as resolute as his
predecessor was weak. It is well that a dramatist should make himself
plainly understood, but Shakespeare seems to play with his own art when
the splendid rhetoric of Richard III reveals (he soliloquizes more than
Hamlet) the cause why he is "determined to prove a villain"--his spite
against the world for his own deformity,--and why he is determined to
be a hypocrite,
With odd old ends stolen forth of Holy Writ.
The scene of the wooing of the Lady Anne, and the dream of Clarence,
are among the most familiar passages in English poetry, and the second
is rich in the magic of Shakespeare's blank verse. The wavering
character of Richard II, ever in extremes of confident arrogance and
of sudden dread, like that of Agamemnon, would not have seemed to
Aristotle fit for a hero of tragedy. But in memorable passages of
poetry, single lines that, once read, can never be forgotten, the play
is rich, and such lines are the mark and sign manual of Shakespeare's
genius. "The real Shakespeare cannot help showing himself here and
there; and then we are in the presence of something new--of a kind of
English poetry that no one has hit upon before...."[6]
It is in "Romeo and Juliet," and the "Midsummer Night's Dream," both
relatively early pieces, even more than in the chronicle plays, that
this ever-present magic of genius, the unequalled command of beautiful
fresh phrases, the hurrying rush of exquisite ideas, first shines out
most conspicuously: the youth of passion in the Romeo, and the soul of
romance, are accompanied by the gay wit of glorious Mercutio and the
lax humours of the Nurse and the servants. Shakespeare was compelled
to kill Mercutio by Tybalt's sword, otherwise a character so congenial
to him would have run away with the play, and turned the tragedy into
comedy. Shakespeare, says Ben Jonson, "had an excellent phantasy"
(fancy), "brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with
such facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."
Mercutio could only be stopped by a sword thrust! The "Midsummer
Night's Dream" is the enchanted consummation of the world-wide fairy
belief, relieved against the rustic comedy of Bottom and Snug.
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona," like "Love's Labour's Lost," is a bud
full of promise. Launce is as delightfully humorous as Silvia is gay
and charming, and Julia is the first of the ladies in page's guise and
deep in love; but "Romeo and Juliet," and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
are already nonpareils, full-blown roses that time cannot wither.
The "Comedy of Errors," based on Plautus, with the farcical errors
of indistinguishable identities in the masters, reduplicated in the
servants, would add by its broad farce to Shakespeare's popularity,
though not to his fame. But in "The Merchant of Venice" the blending
of moral tragedy in the sombre character of the outraged Jew, Shylock,
combined with the delightful and tender romance of the lovers, proved
the multifarious versatility of the poet, his power in the delineation
of the most various moods and passions, and also the unequalled magic
of his verse.
On such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.
Here Virgil is equalled or surpassed in the province where Virgil was
greatest; in the use of words that by some inexplicable art suggest
more than they seem to say, filling the mind with vague and potent
emotion, and a longing not to be appeased, as does the beauty of
twilight and moonlight.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
In this passage, whether he knew it or not--and _we_ know not how he
knew things,--Shakespeare soars to the heights of Plato's dreams, in
the "Phædrus" and the "Symposium". Did he go beyond the appreciation of
"the groundlings" in such passages? Did they find mirth in the passion
of the Jew, and fail to fathom Shakespeare's deep sympathy with the
oppressed? Probably he gave them more and other things than he seemed
to give; to them Shylock's may have appeared as a comic part, but
indeed we cannot judge that strange Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare
knew what they wanted, horrors, ghosts, revenges, manslayings. He
gave them these things in "Lear" and "Hamlet," but gave with them the
deepest and subtlest thoughts, the most magical poetry, treasures of
wit, and all this they could enjoy, as they could follow every point,
pass, and parry in the wit-combats.
It seems probable that Shakespeare's fame as a poet rested, for a
while, rather on his verses, "Venus and Adonis" (published 1593) and
"Lucrece" (1594), than on all the treasures of his plays. The two
poems, the only works of Shakespeare's which he himself saw through
the press, are dedicated, in brief terms, to Henry Wriothesley, Earl
of Southampton, then a lad of twenty, fond of pleasure, art, and
letters. The dedications are not fulsome, when we consider the manner
of addressing patrons in that age. The second address, of some ten
lines, says "the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end....
What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in
all I have, devoted yours." It seems that Southampton had behaved with
generosity to the poet, and it looks as if the poet's "love" were more
than the trick-phrase of a person obliged.
The poems themselves, "Venus and Adonis" in a six line stanza,
"Lucrece" in a seven line stanza, are remarkable for fluent mastery
of verse and rhyme, for lusciousness of description of physical
beauties, and for the compassionate passage on the poor hunted hare,
and the vigorous description of a horse. Shakespeare manifestly loved
a good horse, and probably felt compunctions about riding to harriers.
But as to the poetry; it certainly is not superior to the luscious
descriptions in Spenser; the verse is by no means superior to, nor, to
some tastes, equal to Spenser's; and, if we lost Marlowe's "Hero and
Leander," the misfortune would be as great as if we lost "Venus" and
"Lucrece". The two compositions show us Shakespeare exercising himself
on a fashionable class of themes, and with an overflow of fashionable
conceits; _sufflaminandus erat_, says Ben Jonson; "the drag needed to
be put on". Had we nothing else of Shakespeare's, we could make no
guess at his greatness.
Indeed his contemporaries could hardly do so, till his plays were
pirated and printed, because all their innumerable merits could not
be fully appreciated till the plays were meditatively and frequently
perused. By 1598, Francis Meres, comparing English with ancient poets,
names Shakespeare and others with Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles and
Aristophanes, also Ausonius and Claudian. But he places Warner in the
same good company (in "Palladis Tamia," or "Wit's Treasury," 1598).
The plays named by Meres are "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Comedy of
Errors," "Love's Labours Lost," "Love's Labour's Won" (?), "Midsummer
Night's Dream," "Merchant of Venice," both "Richards," "Henry IV," "King
John," "Titus Andronicus," and "Romeo and Juliet". "The soul of Ovid
lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his 'Venus
and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets, among his private
friends." (Not published till 1609.)
Gullio, in the Cambridge comedy, "The Return from Parnassus" (about
1599-1602) is a farcical ignorant braggart who says "let this
duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sweet Mr.
Shakespeare," for his "Venus and Adonis". He also quotes "Romeo and
Juliet," and the University wits manifestly despised Shakespeare, as no
scholar and not a University man. They bade Ben Jonson go back to his
brick-making; _he_ was not a University man!
Meanwhile Shakespeare, with his share in the company and what he
received for his written plays, and from patrons, was thriving, while
his father struggled with debt and difficulties. None the less,
probably aided pecuniarily and advised by Shakespeare, he applied
to the College of Arms for a grant of armorial bearings (1596). A
memorandum exists in which John Shakespeare is said to have "lands
and tenements of good wealth and substance". The grant was not made
till 1599, and the heralds appear to have been very good-natured in
permitting these Shakespeares to write themselves gentlemen. The
financial basis, however, was supplied when, in 1597, Shakespeare
bought New Place, a large house in the town of Stratford, and two
gardens. Sir Sidney Lee reckons his income, allowing for the altered
values of money, at £1040 in our currency.
In short, like Scott, Shakespeare lived to found a family of
gentility, though Scott naturally inherited the gentility and heraldic
quarterings, which Shakespeare did not. He prospered continually; he
held, later, shares in the Globe theatre, and there is abundant proof
that in money, acres, and goods he throve to an extent that denotes
careful living. He appears as a strict exactor of debts: in nothing
was he careless and indifferent except as regarded the immortal works,
which, after his death, his 'stage friends, Heming and Condell,
published as best they might (1623, the first folio).
Shakespeare seems, in fact, to have had even more than Scott's
indifference to his literary fame, unless we suppose him to have been
firmly persuaded that his works, once given to the stage, must secure
their own immortality. Even so, he might have employed the leisure of
his last years in preparing a correct text for the press.
Yet who knows that Shakespeare did _not_ dream of doing what was
unprecedented, of revising and collecting his plays for publication?
Playwrights seldom printed their dramas, for reasons already given.
But, in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson published
his "works" (he was laughed at for calling them "works") in a tall
and stately folio. It may have been in Shakespeare's mind to do the
same thing: but "to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow"! He may have
contemplated the difficult task, he may even have made fair copies
of some of his manuscripts of his many unprinted plays,--the papers
which his friends, the actors, say had "scarce a blot". But his older
manuscripts may have been tattered and worn, and altered for better or
worse. To collect and revise all was a serious labour for a retired,
perhaps a weary man. He was but 52 when he died; he may, we repeat,
have dreamed of a task which he put off from day to day: there is no
mystery in delays so natural when the custom of play writers was not to
publish.
The Sonnets.
It is difficult or impossible to date Shakespeare's Sonnets. As we know
from Meres, "sugared sonnets" of his were circulating in manuscript
in 1598: the book of Sonnets was (piratically?) published in 1609
with a dark dedication to "Mr. W. H.," by the pirate, or procurer of
piracy, Thorpe, "To the only begetter of these sonnets Mr. W. H. all
happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth
the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T.T.". T.T. did not wish
to be understood. The two most popular theories are that Mr. W. H. is
William Herbert, in 1601 Earl of Pembroke; before his accession to the
Earldom, he was known by "courtesy title" as Lord Herbert. To him then,
about 1598-1601, the Sonnets to a man are addressed.
The second theory lays stress on Shakespeare's known devotion to the
Earl of Southampton; certainly his patron, and assured of his love in
the dedications of "Venus" and "Lucrece," in 1593, 1594. The Sonnets
are therefore dated about 1594, whereas, by the Pembroke theory, they
are dated about 1598-1601.
It is not possible, in this place, to criticize the two theories.
The matter is of no importance in itself, but some partisans of the
Pembroke theory represent Shakespeare as embittered almost to madness
by the affair, constantly alluded to in the Sonnets, of a double
betrayal by his mistress, the Dark Lady, and by his adored friend
the Earl of Pembroke. Henceforth we are to suppose, he revealed his
passions in his tragedies, and was a fevered creature, dreaming of
"bloody vengeance".
There is not a shadow of proof for the hypothesis that the Dark Lady
of the Sonnets was a Maid of Honour, Mary Fitton, whose portraits
demonstrate that she was of a fair complexion, with grey eyes and brown
hair. We have not the slightest reason to believe that, in 1597-1601,
when he was building up an estate, Shakespeare was mad with love of
Mary, and jealousy of her lovers who, after 1601, are unknown, till,
in 1606, she committed a fault, in the country. Of the two Earls,
Southampton, rather more probably than Pembroke, was, if either of them
was, the beloved friend of the Sonnets.[7]
The Sonnets are not in the Italian or Petrarchian form of recurring
rhymes, but are in three verses of four lines, with a rhyming couplet
to conclude. In many respects they resemble the sonnets fashionable
at the time, with praise of a patron whom the poet loves and who is
the inspiration of the poet. The accustomed conceits of Petrarch
and his French followers, des Portes, Ronsard, and many others, are
transfigured by the poet's genius. It was usual to applaud the beauty
of the patron, and to exaggerate the love of the poet.
This was matter of common form, but the sonnets of Shakespeare reflect
the actual passion of love, or of friendship "passing the love of
women," yet always respectful. People wrote thus to Elizabeth in her
old age, but Shakespeare conveys an impression of sincerity, whether
because he felt what he expresses, or whether his genius makes real and
glowing that which was, with other writers, mere matter of compliment.
He may be "unlocking his heart," in either case, for he must have
known, for some one, the passion which, on the second theory, he
dramatically employs to glorify his young inspirer. Yet again, he could
imitate and express "all thoughts, all passions": his "sweetest nature"
can scarcely have known the emotions of Shylock!
However we may try to distinguish between what is conventional and what
is _felt_ in the Sonnets, they apparently refer to real persons and
real situations. Sonnets I-XVII urge marriage on the beautiful young
patron and friend: his beauties and virtues must live in his children
as well as in verse. Sonnets XXXIII-XXXVI hint at some measure of
estrangement, some wrong done to the poet by the friend.
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.
Sonnets XL-XLIII suggest that the friend has drawn away the poet's
mistress.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty.
Such are
The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.
The suffering poet appears to bear no malice, it must be admitted.
Thenceforward there are regrets for the absence of the friend,
beautiful reflections, promises of immortality in verse, till (LXVII)
the poet hears that the friend keeps bad company, and though (LXX) this
may be an envious slander, the poet has his doubts. In LXVIII-XCIII the
poet feels that the patron is preferring other minstrels, and one of
these he applauds for
the proud full sail of his great verse.
This singer is inspired by
that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.[8]
Here are personal allusions to some facts, or jests, which we cannot
hope to discover: the rival poet has been guessed at as Barnabe Barnes
("Parthenope and Parthenophil," 1593), who certainly wrote a sonnet
on the inspiration of Southampton's eyes. Others think that George
Chapman, the translator of Homer, is the rival whom Shakespeare writes
of admiringly. In XCV-XCVI the poet recurs to the stories which "spot
the beauty of thy budding name". In CIV he has loved his friend for three
years,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned.
Yet he goes on in the old strain of love and praise, though
What's new to speak, what new to register?
In CX-CXI he perhaps laments his own profession as a player; perhaps
he refers to changes in his affections. Taking the whole of this and
the preceding sonnet together, the second seems the more natural
interpretation. In Sonnet CXI, Fortune is blamed
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.
The name of actor was, indeed, branded as no better than that of
vagabond, while the play-writers constantly called the players "apes,"
and "mimics". Here Shakespeare does seem to speak of his profession:--
I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view.
With CXXVII begin Sonnets addressed to a woman, a dark lady, but (CXXX)
not very beautiful.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
This may be a mere criticism of the absurd hyperboles of admiration
by contemporary sonneteers. In CXXXIII the poet seems to upbraid the
lady for taking his friend from him, and through three sonnets this
plaint is poured out with obscure puns on "will" and "Will," his name,
and--some think--his friend's name. The poet is (CXLIV) placed between
"two spirits that suggest me still", One good, is a man; one evil, a
woman.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil.
In addressing the woman, the poet is much more outspoken than when
addressing the man on
The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.
The poet, like Catullus with Lesbia, loves against his reason and his
knowledge of the woman's true nature (CXLVII),
Past cure am I, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
If all this be in earnest, we have a tragedy of the heart, whether
in 1594, or in 1598-1601, or in neither. Again and again, in his
plays, Shakespeare mocks at sonnets and sonneteers; and though _his_,
in parts, are personal, the depth of their significance, and the
persistence of his emotions, must be left to the literary instinct of
the reader. We cannot reconstruct Shakespeare's self out of his works,
lyrical or dramatic. Had the sonnets been recognized as reflecting a
scandalous episode in society, it could scarcely have followed that
"no sequence of such poems was received more coldly". Those of Sidney,
Daniel, Drayton, and Constable, were often reprinted. Shakespeare's had
not even a second edition till 1640.[9]
It is unfortunate that literary history can scarcely pass by, leaving
these strange guesses about a strange matter unnoticed. The sonnets in
themselves are a book of golden verse, shining with gems of beautiful
phrases,
The stretched metre of an antique song.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.
When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
This beautiful poem (CVII) most manifestly refers to Shakespeare's
forebodings about "my true love," who was "supposed as forfeit to
a confined doom" (Southampton, in 1601, was sentenced to captivity
for life). But "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured," that
is Elizabeth, Cynthia, is dead, "Luna's extinct," as contemporary
versifiers said. "In this most balmy time," Peace "proclaims olives
of endless age," that is the accession of James VI and I put an end
to fears of wars of a disputed succession. On 10 April, 1603, James
released Southampton.[10] The Sonnets, like "the floor of heaven," are
"thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,".never to be dimmed by mists
of conjecture, or nonsense about Shakespeare as a sensual sycophantic
snob, mad with jealousy and foiled desire.
Later Plays.
Returning to the plays, we find, between 1597 and 1601, Shakespeare
in his second period, with "Henry IV," "The Merry Wives of Windsor,"
"Henry V," "Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night,"
and "Julius Cæsar". Such was the astonishing harvest of five years.
Probably "Henry IV" is the play which we would retain, could we keep
but one, so delightful is Falstaff, the fat knight, the embodiment of
the richest humour. He "has given us medicines to make us love him,"
and even the delightful characters of Hotspur, the Mercutio of the
history, and of Lady Percy, take a far lower place. We would banish
all, and keep honest Jack. Many cannot bear to see Falstaff have much
the worse of the jest, as in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," said to have
been composed in a fortnight, at the desire of Elizabeth, who wished
to see that impossibility, Falstaff in love. The characters of Shallow,
Slender, Sir Hugh, even the transient Anne Page, and all the broad
humours of life in an English country town, do not console us for the
defeat of the hero.
It is in "Henry V" that Shakespeare not only emphasizes his love of
England, nobly expressed by John of Gaunt in "Richard II," but makes it
the mainspring of the drama. The yeomen soldiers in the play frankly
tell the disguised king that they doubt the justice of his cause--and
well they may, for no man ever had a worse, and Shakespeare must have
known it,--but "our country, right or wrong," must be the motto of the
playwright, and he puts into Henry's mouth the speeches that still stir
the blood like the sound of a trumpet. Much has been written on Henry's
hardness to Falstaff, whose heart he broke,--but Henry at least acts
in accordance with his actual character, a brave, able, ruthless, and
hard man, always convinced of his own righteousness. Pistol's braggart
humour is as good as ever, and that learned man of the sword, Fluellen,
is a forerunner of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty.
"Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night"
(1599-1600) are the three central stars in the crown of Shakespeare's
comic Muse. More humorous than "Henry IV" they cannot be, but in them
is no admixture of history, and the women in the three are ladies,
whereas in "Henry IV" Lady Percy is the chief contrast with Falstaff's
Mrs. Quickly, and her crew. Shakespeare cannot, we may suppose, have
lived in the intimate society of the ladies of Elizabeth's Court; he
must have divined and created Beatrice ("a star danced, and under
that was she born") and Hero, sweetly bearing the accusations of her
intolerable lover, Claudio:--
I have marked
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand shames
In angel whiteness beat away these blushes,
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.
The mirth and high spirit of Beatrice, the humours of Benedick, endear
the comedy to every reader, yet the end is "huddled up," like the ends
of many of the plays; Claudio is lightly taken back into favour, with
Shakespeare's almost limitless tolerance. He can scarcely ever bring
himself to punish one of his rogues, such as Lucio and Parolles, and is
as clement to the less deserving Claudio.
The mirth of "Twelfth Night" might border on the farcical, if Sir Toby,
Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the light people, were
not so delightfully human and living, like their butt, Malvolio; and
did not Viola and Olivia lend their exquisite grace. Meanwhile, in "As
You Like It," we fleet our time carelessly as they did in the golden
world, under the greenwood tree, in the enchanted company of Rosalind,
Touchstone, the greatest of Shakespeare's clowns, and the melancholy
and humorous Jaques, the contemplator.
Returning to historical drama, and using North's translation of
Plutarch as his material, fusing North's prose into blank verse, he
now produced "Julius Cæsar," in which the chief personages are Brutus,
Marcus Antonius, and the Roman populace. Brutus appears as the virtuous
and irresolute man, slave to a pedantic conscience which pushes him on
to the slaying of great Cæsar. All readers note Shakespeare's way of
placing a man of nature more or less noble, but irresolute, in a crisis
which demands decision. Hamlet, Brutus, and Macbeth are the great
examples. It does not follow that Shakespeare himself was irresolute,
and that, when he thought of a man who is obliged to take a constant
part, he felt that, had he been that man, he would have wavered. He
simply, chose to illustrate that tragedy of a soul. Where would be the
interest in a play of Hamlet had the prince gone straight to his mark
and slain the king "at sight"? There would have been no play! How could
we endure a Brutus who, in his relations with Cæsar, mobbed and stabbed
the greatest of mortals, in a forthright business manner, with no
hesitations? If there were not enough of nobility in Macbeth to unman
him, he would be a vulgar usurper. When he chose, Shakespeare could
design men as true to their single aim as Richard III and Iago. Tragedy
requires in the chief sufferer, as the Greeks saw, greatness with a
fatal blemish; this idea runs through their poetry from Achilles to the
Aias and Œdipus of Sophocles. The purpose of Brutus, a deed, to reverse
his own words, "to make whole men sick," when in contemplation, would
not let him eat, nor talk, nor sleep; but, once resolved, his heart is
steeled, nor does the ghost of Cæsar fright him, as the spectres of his
fancy appal Macbeth.
The other great character is the fickle Roman crowd, played on by the
rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare was not hostile to the people, but the
mob he knew, and drew it relentlessly again and again.
"Hamlet" (1602) is believed to have been based on a lost drama of 1589,
perhaps by Kyd; the original source is the "History of the Danes" by
Saxo Grammaticus, and there was a French version by Belleforest. Of
Shakespeare's play there are three versions, a hopelessly imperfect
text in a pirated quarto of 1603; abetter, "enlarged to almost as much
again" (1604); and the Folio edition of 1623. None of these is good, as
a text; and the inconsistencies of the play may in part be due to an
admixture of the old piece, and to tamperings with the manuscript.
Of "Hamlet" it is vain to speak briefly, and more than enough of
speaking at large has been done by a myriad of commentators. The young
prince, full of good qualities, is bound with knots which a real Dane
of the Saga time would have cut with the short sword. But Hamlet has
"the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming" of life, and death,
and love, and contrary duties. Thus he, like Œdipus in the Greek
tragedy, becomes as fatal to all around him as if he bore the Evil
Eye; and while, like David at Ziklag, he is playing the madman, actual
madness hangs over him like the sword of Damocles. Thus Shakespeare
has left to the world a marvel of subtle and penetrative thought, of
tenderness, of humour; to the critics a wrangle over psychological
problems.
The same unparalleled powers, the same universality, the same gloomy
vision of life, and, in "King Lear," another study of true and of
feigned madness, inspire "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello," the last the
most piteous of all. For in Othello it is not the error of a wavering
hero, or the ambition of a man tempted, like Macbeth, by portents and
prophecies, but the sheer inborn devilry of a creature in human form,
Iago, that "breaks, and brings down death" on the most innocent of
victims, Desdemona. "The pity of it" is too awful: the sense of _wyrd_,
of masterful destiny, is too cruel.
Yet, if Shakespeare were to write tragedies, and to write them on
the traditional materials which are the bases of these plays, it was
inevitable that, as he wrote, he should have regarded life as he does,
and human fortunes as the spoil of wayward and cruel fate. Æschylus
could not make pretty melancholy pieces out of the materials of the
"Agamemnon" and "Eumenides". He, to be sure, tried to justify the
ways of the gods to men, and Shakespeare makes no such effort. His
characters, in the immortal words of Nicias to his doomed Athenian
army, "have done what men may, and endure what men must". "The rest is
silence."
Of Troilus and Cressida (1603), printed 1609, we can only say that
Shakespeare when he wrote it "was for one hour less noble than
himself". The piece makes mockery--save for Odysseus,--of the heroes of
Homer, and of Cressida, whom Chaucer treats with such fine chivalry.
Thersites is merely loathsome, Aias a fool, Achilles a treacherous
procurer of the death of Hector. Shakespeare made an impossible
blend of Homer (of whom he clearly knew a little),[11] of Ovid, and
of the mediaeval forms of the Tale of Troy. The elements are wholly
incompatible, and the mood of the poet, whether he wrote the play early
or late, was unenviable.
"Unpleasantness" is also the not undeserved charge against "Measure
for Measure"; but Cinthio's Italian tale, on which it is founded, was
"a sordid record of lust and cruelty". Shakespeare, altering the plot,
redeemed it by the figure of Isabella, and by the sad Mariana in her
"moated grange".
It cannot be denied that when Shakespeare added "Timon of Athens,"
the tragedy of a misanthrope, to "Troilus," and then produced the
extremely unpleasant scenes in "Pericles" (which is not in the Folio
of 1623, the first edition of his collected plays) he was selecting
topics that encourage the belief in his own bitterness of spirit, while
in "Antony and Cleopatra" the magnificent study of "the serpent of old
Nile," and of the ruin she wrought, he continues his vein of thought on
the accidents that bring courage and greatness to the dust.
In "Coriolanus" he contrasts the fickleness of the mob with an heroic
soul ruined by its relentless exaggeration of its own merits and
overweening greatness; the tragedy of Napoleon is a modern instance.
Dating the play in 1608-1609, critics derive the character of the
mother of Coriolanus from Shakespeare's thoughts of his own mother, who
died in 1608. Of her character, of course, we know absolutely nothing.
The "tranquillity" of "Cymbeline" so rich in poetry, and so recklessly
constructed; of the "Winter's Tale," where the poetry is yet more
divine, and the plot is as heaven pleases; and of "The Tempest" (1613),
where much of the "local colour" is derived from the adventures of
English sea-men in the Bermudas (1609-1610), is explained by the
resignation of increasing years.
We cannot reason thus with much confidence. Shakespeare could only have
produced "The Tempest" in the plenitude of his genius, but he might
have created it as it stands at any date after 1596, when he happened
to take up the materials.
"Henry VIII" was being played in 1613 when the Globe Theatre was
burned. That parts are by Shakespeare, parts by Fletcher, is a theory
resting on the elusive internal evidence of style and quality.
From 1611 till his death in 1616, Shakespeare is thought to have lived
mainly at home, at Stratford, where his daughters married men in their
own situation of life. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616. By 1623 his
monument in Stratford Church had been erected.
Ben Jonson wrote, "I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this
side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and
free nature."
Shakespeare, in accordance with Greek and Roman wisdom, had chosen
the _fallentis semita vitæ_; in his private course he was studiously
obscure. His all-embracing and unparalleled genius was exhibited only
in his art, and in his profession by which he lived and prospered. He
had carried blank verse from the point at which Marlowe left it to a
never equalled pitch of various perfection; while his lyrics are worthy
of "all the angels singing out of heaven". His creations of character
are in number, variety, and excellence, unrivalled; he touched with the
surest hand every chord in the human heart; he explored every height
and depth, and despite the inevitable stains left by his age, and the
haste necessitated by his profession, his work attains the high-water
mark of human genius.
Jonson.
Ben Jonson (born 1572-73) is believed to have been descended from the
Annandale border clan of the Johnstones. His father, after suffering
troubles under Mary Tudor, became a Protestant preacher. Ben was a
posthumous child, his mothers second husband was a bricklayer or
builder. The boy was educated at Westminster school, under Camden, the
antiquarian and historian, to whom he more than once expressed his
gratitude. His name as an undergraduate is not found in the records
of either Oxford or Cambridge. Jonson did not long practise his
stepfather's useful art: he served through a campaign in Flanders,
and told Drummond of Hawthornden that he slew, in single combat, a
champion of the enemy. He had more than a literary acquaintance with
the fencing terms which his Captain Bobadil uses with so much gusto.
Returning to England he fell among actors and playwrights, is mentioned
as a tragedian by Meres ("Palladis Tamia") in 1598, was challenged by
an actor, Gabriel Spencer, whom he slew in fair fight; was imprisoned;
turned Catholic, not for long; and, on his release, married. By 1596
he had worked with very minor playwrights at forgotten plays, and
had tinkered at "The Spanish Tragedy ". He now wrote "Every Man in
His Humour," an early form of the play, which he revised; removing
the scene from Florence to London, for its repetition in 1598, when
Shakespeare's company were the players. In the Prologue he ridiculed,
as Sidney had done, the reckless early dramas, in which the hero lives
a long life on the stage, while "three rusty swords" furnish forth a
stage army, and squibs and stage thunder delight the audience. He aims
at good-humoured comedy of everyday life, laughs at "such errors as
you'll all confess," and in Master Stephen draws a shadowy Shallow,
a predecessor of Bob Acres, while that stock-figure, the poltroon
bragging copper-Captain Bobadil, survives in loving memory as an
excellent study in a familiar "character-part," the "Miles Gloriosus,"
of the Roman comedian.
The personages are citizens of the day, the anxious father; the
downright squire; a "Town Gull," or dupe, Master Matthew, to match the
country gull, the melancholy and gentlemanlike Master Stephen; while
Kitely illustrates the humours of jealousy. The characters are types,
each with his "humour," or ruling passion of foible, and the standing
butt is Hieronymo in Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy". As the author parodies
forgotten plays, and makes use of forgotten catch-words, it may
justly be said that "much of his humour still remains in obscurity".
In Shakespearean humour, with its sweet tolerance, enduring quality,
and sympathy and gentle melancholy, Ben is totally deficient. His
"humours" are idiosyncrasies or "fads" or "ruling passions" carried
into ludicrous extremes.
The success of "Every Man in His Humour" prompted "Every Man out of
His Humour," acted in 1599, by Shakespeare's company, and printed,
"Containing more than hath been publicly spoken or acted," in 1600.
Jonson was as eager to print his plays as Shakespeare was indifferent.
The comedy was much too long, and had been "cut" severely by the
players. It has a kind of chorus of spectators and critics, and is
an exhibition of "humours" (the word was then a piece of popular
slang), or types. Sogliardo is an amusing _bourgeois gentilhomme_,
who, like Shakespeare, "lacks" what he calls a "cullisen" (scutcheon)
and will stick at no expense to purchase one. The romantic and
euphuistic humours of Puntarvolo and his lady are excellent fooling;
Macilente, the bitterly envious, suggests, in a more tragic style,
his contemporary, Scott's Sir Mungo Malagrowther (in "The Fortunes
of Nigel"); the coxcomb, Fastidious Brisk, is an agreeable rattle,
especially in his account of his duel and his dresses, boots, hat, and
jewellery; and the compliment by Macilente to the Queen is charmingly
courtly, coming from that blustering mountain of a man, the author. But
the play was not a success. For this, or for any other reason (perhaps
because they cut down his plays into manageable size), Ben quarrelled
with the actors, Shakespeare's company, and began to write satirical
plays on the players, and on the poets who were more successful than
himself, or who had theories that were not his about how plays should
be written, about "art," in his favourite phrase. In different moods
he spoke differently about Shakespeare's "art," now saying that he
had none; now that without art and labour Shakespeare could not have
produced his "true-filed" phrases.
"Cynthia's Revels" (1600) was acted by "the children of the Royal
Chapel," and printed in 1601. (New scenes were added in the Folio
edition of 1616). A lively prologue is acted by the boys, who quarrel
for the privilege of speaking it. One of them mimics a coxcomb
spectator, with three sorts of tobacco to smoke on the stage. Among the
humours of the Court, Crites is taken to represent the author himself,
"this Crites is sour". The exquisite song (_ex forti dulcedo_) "Queen
and huntress, chaste and fair," outlives the humours, and the satire,
which was personal, for the gentlemen of the press and stage, then, as
now, liked personal controversy, "it is such easy writing".
The "Poetaster"(1601) runs amuck against actors. "They forget that they
are in the statute" (against vagabonds) "the rascals; they are blazoned
there... they and their pedigrees; they need no other heralds, I wis."
This was an anachronism, at the Court of Augustus, the scene of the
play, but appropriate to Shakespeare's new scutcheon. The loves of
Ovid and Julia, Virgil reading the "Æneid" to Augustus, are mixed with
contemporary satire to which Dekker replied in "Satiro-Mastix, or the
untrussing of the Humorous Poet" (acted by Shakespeare's company, 1602).
Marston (Crispinus) was also assailed, and war raged on the lower
slopes of the Muses' hill. Since the beginnings of the theatre,
play-writers have parodied and mocked each others' works, as
Aristophanes caricatured Euripides, as ancient Pistol parodied
Marlowe's "jades of Asia," and Molière made mirth of the tragedies
played by the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. But Ben, though a
huge, noisy, and truculent adversary, was placable, and he and Marston
became friends. Much ingenuity has been spent in detecting hits at
Shakespeare in Ben's plays and epigrams; very probably some of his
cutting allusions are aimed at his successful rival, but it needs two
to make a quarrel.
When James VI of Scotland came to the English throne, and lived no
longer on the allowance of £3000 a year from Elizabeth, he spent very
largely on elaborate masques, courtly entertainments, not unlike the
ballets in which Louis XIV later danced his parts. The hosts of Greek
mythology were let loose on the stage, all the sea-nymphs, daughters
of Oceanus, for example, floating in a shell of mother-of-pearl, among
Tritons better schooled in their parts than honest Mike Lambourn in
"Kenilworth". The dresses scenery, and decorations, "the bodily parts,
were of Master Inigo Jones his design and act" (see "The Masque of
Blackness," 1605). The Queen and the Court ladies acted, or at least
appeared as sea-nymphs, and Ben produced the words, which were deeply
learned, and the exquisite songs. Unrefined as he was, he became
intimate with hospitable and generous lords and ladies. Their gifts and
his payment from the Royal coffers in pensions were of more profit to
him than his plays, for which he said that he received only £200. It is
hardly necessary to add that he had bitter quarrels with Inigo Jones.
Jonson's Roman tragedy, "Sejanus" (1603) on the fortunes and fall
of that favourite of the Emperor Tiberius, is deeply learned. The
author, in the printed version, gave references in footnotes, to his
authorities, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, and many others, as if he
had been writing a severe work of history. Nothing can be less like
Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, with his free handling of North's
translation of Plutarch, with his wild mobs, and murder done openly.
Ben was classical and accurate; his Romans speak a stately blank verse:
his Tiberius, slow, formal, hypocritical, and deceitful above all
things, is the Tiberius of Tacitus; his all-daring Sejanus is a less
candid Richard III; and though Ben admitted that the ancient Chorus,
with its chants, was impossible on the English stage, he was, in other
respects, conscientiously classical. The whole heavy air of Rome, the
terror, the duplicity, the political influence of women, their passion,
the servility and the discontent, live in the somewhat ponderous blank
verse, of which Ben first wrote the matter in prose, an uninspired
method.
The "Catiline and His Conspiracy," acted 1611, "did not please the
populace," nor the Court much, as Ben admits in a quotation from
Horace: in these "jig-given times" he asked Pembroke's patronage for "a
legitimate poem". In fact Jonson with all his amazing energy, vigour,
and appreciation of character--that of Cicero is excellent--was too
pedantic, and the orations of his Cicero were too long for the stage.
The odes of the Chorus were not apt to increase the pleasure of the
audience.
Ben's recognized comic masterpieces were "The Fox (Volpone)" first
acted at the Universities, then at the Globe, 1605; "The Silent Woman"
(1609), "The Alchemist" (1610), and "Bartholomew Fair" (1614). Both in
"The Fox" and "The Alchemist," there is something that reminds us of
Marlowe. The Fox, Volpone, a Venetian magnifico, a childless man, for
years pretends to be dying, surrounded by his little court of obscene
depravities, and aided by his parasite, Mosca, gulls men who, each in
his degree, is an incarnation of cruel greed.
Volpone is a voluptuary in his devilish delight in human corruption.
The aged Corbaccio he tempts to disinherit his son; the madly jealous
Corbino he tempts to prostitute his wife, from the avaricious Volt ore
and from all of them he wrings rich presents. It is a masque of the
Deadly Sins, and behind them stands Murder, hesitating between poison,
the dagger, and the smothering pillow, for all the fortune-hunters
would slay their tormentor if they dared.
The scene with the English Lady Would-be, an affected literary lady,
who tires Volpone to death with literary chatter, is more than the rest
in the true spirit of comedy. Celia, the suffering wife of Corbino, and
Bonario, the young son of the evil dotard, Corbaccio, alone represent
the soul of good in things evil. The plot is ingeniously entangled
and untied, and justice can scarcely add to the torments which the
characters owe to their own insatiate greed.
In "The Alchemist," three scoundrels, occupying by connivance of a
servant an empty house, and captained by Subtle, an alchemist, play
on the greed and lust of many "coneys". These each, in Jonson's way,
represent a "humour". Sir Epicure Mammon, the City Knight, is all for
unlimited lust, secured by the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's
Stone. He is as eager as Faustus for the unlimited, and as learned
in his gloating discourses as Jonson himself, who, in Subtle,
displays all his knowledge of the jargon of alchemy. Dol Common,
the decoy, the Fairy Queen, has an extensive and peculiar knowledge
of Billingsgate; Abel Drugger, the tobacconist, hopes to prosper in
his trade by magical spells; the gamester, Pertinax Surly, strong in
his own marked cards and loaded dice, has a salutary scepticism; and
the two puritans, Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome, are ready for
anything which will supply finance for their godly crew of Anarchists
at Amsterdam. Ben well understood these extreme fanatics, "a sect of
dangerous consequence that will have no king, but a presbytery," said
Queen Elizabeth. They were soon to put an end to "merry England,"
and, when we look at the quality of much of the mirth in the later
Jacobean plays, we are not enamoured of either party in the conflict.
The play, with its constant bustle was and long remained popular. So
did "Bartholomew Fair," a colossal exhibition of a London festival,
with all the humours of the joyous populace, interrupted by Rabbi Busy,
the fanatic, who has eaten more roast pig than any one, and rushes
about denouncing all the other "Dagons" and "idols," like a bloated
English Tartuffe, _le pauvre homme._ The stocks do not daunt him, his
tongue remains as free as Mause Headrigg's. In an introduction to this
enormous burlesque Jonson throws scoffs at "The Tempest" of Shakespeare.
"The Silent Woman" is truly a roaring farce on a singular subject,
Morose, a gentleman as impatient of noise, and as certain that all
silence except his own was golden, as the Sage of Chelsea. How he
is saddled with a wife who, from being "mim as a mouse" becomes the
most vociferous of Roaring Boys, and, indeed to the confusion of
some boastful gallants, _is_ a boy pranked up for the practical jokes
whereby Morose's nephew extracts Morose's money, may be read, with much
other mirthful noisy matter, by the curious.
"The Devil is an Ass" (1616) is a satire on conjurers, crystal-gazers,
projectors, or, as we say, "promoters" of bubble enterprises, and their
gulls and "coneys".
A walking tour to Scotland (1618-1619), where Jonson was entertained
by Drummond of Hawthornden, had for its fruit Drummond's brief
notes of his conversation and literary opinions. He did not care
much for Drummond's Petrarchian sonnets, "cross-rhymes"; and, as to
Shakespeare (whom Drummond himself does not seem to have appreciated),
merely said that "he wanted art," and that, in his geography, he was
wrong when he gave Bohemia a sea-coast. Happily Ben left splendid
tributes other-where (in verses attached to the first collected
edition of Shakespeare's plays, "The Folio" (1623), and in prose),
to Shakespeare's genius and character. Drummond's estimate of Ben as
a braggart about himself, and a contemner of others, as jealous and
vindictive, is only true in part. No man had more or more admiring
friends; at taverns he reigned, among the great wits "Sealed of the
Tribe of Ben," like an earlier Dryden.
His last plays "The New Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a
Tub," were badly received: in an Ode he
left the loathèd stage
And the more loathsome age;
he lost his place of Masque-maker in 1632, but was still befriended
by Charles I. He died on 6 August, 1637, before the troubles of the
Covenant came to a head.
His great collection of books and his treatise on the "Poetics" of
Aristotle and the "Art of Poetry" of Horace had already been destroyed
by a fire. Many of his beautiful lyrics exhibit that grace, delicacy,
and, in the best sense, _poetry_ which are not conspicuous in his
plays. "His throne is not with the Olympians but with the Titans,"
and Tennyson could not endure the gloom which he found in Jonson's
comedies.
Scott, on the other hand, seems to have known them almost by heart,
and constantly quotes them, and, indeed, the whole host of minor
Elizabethan playwrights. The learning of Jonson, in Greek no less than
in Latin, is a marvel,
Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,
in his prodigious activity of production. His immortal lyrics attest
the delicacy and grace which seldom inspire his plays, and, indeed, are
most noted in the lover; "a scholar and a gentleman," of his incoherent
play "The New Inn" (1629). Ben's drama is the work of a "made" writer,
the fruit of reflection on what the stage ought to be, and of ponderous
industry and diligent observation. We feel that the plays, despite
their richness and vigour, their masculine energy, are somewhat
prolix, rather pedantic, and they do not hold the stage, like those of
Shakespeare, at whom Ben scratched so often, without moving the master
to reply in kind.
Jonson's Prose.
It is not easy to sympathize with the sweet enthusiasts who place
Ben Jonson's "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter,"
above Bacon's Essays. These sayings, maxims, and very brief essays
were mainly written when Ben was old, and not yet wise enough to be
contented. He appears as a contemner of times present, when the poet
is no longer taken at his own estimate, which, in Jonson's case, was
rather high. Many of the "Discoveries" had, not infrequently or of
recent date, been discovered before. Thus of Fortune, "That which
happens to any man, may to every man. But it is in his reason what he
accounts it, and will make it." This has been put more briefly and
better: "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so". Nothing
can be more trite than this of waste of time, but the expression
is admirable, "What a deal of cold business doth a man" (and do
most women) "mis-spend the better part of life in! In scattering
compliments, _tendering visits_, gathering and venting news, following
feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner." But
Jonson was not profuse in venting compliments, and, with his enormous
reading, can hardly have spent much time in paying calls. The sentences
on the decay of taste are passed by elderly men of letters in all
ages on "railing and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more
greedily read..." "Expectation of the vulgar is more drawn with newness
than goodness," yet a poet is nothing if he has not something new in
manner if not in matter.
Jonson says that his memory was once excellent, till he was past 40.
Certainly it had ceased to be trustworthy: he attributes to Homer
what Homer never said, and to Orpheus what Homer did say. Ben finds
the new poems in his old age so bad that a man "never would light his
tobacco with them". We all remember his sentences on Shakespeare: and
"how there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned".
He had three ways of viewing Shakespeare: one when he had well drunk,
and was magnificent, as Howell tells us, about himself and his Muse.
Thus he said to Hawthornden that Shakespeare "wanted art," and did not
know that Bohemia lacks a sea-coast. The second way is that of his
"Discoveries". The third and excellent way is in his poem, in which he
speaks of Shakespeare as the mind of the great world does,
He was not for an age but for all time,
was greater than
the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome,
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
To the oratory of Bacon he gives the same praise in the same noble
measure. "I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only
proper to himself..." Against Machiavel's "a Prince should exercise his
cruelty by his ministers and not by himself," Jonson nobly replies,
"But I say he puts off man, and goes into a beast, that is cruel,"
though indeed beasts are not wittingly cruel, and the man that is cruel
goes into a devil. Jonson is always manly: his thoughts are ponderous
and just rather than remarkable for novelty; they do not cling, like
Bacon's, to the memory of the race, nor shine in so many facets with
such imperishable colours.
[1] They also ran every chance of becoming desperately wicked dogs,
according to Charles Kingsley in his essay, "Plays and Puritans".
[2] See an interesting discussion in Mr. Darrell Figgis's "Shakespeare"
(1911), Chap. III.
[3] Marlowe was summoned before the Privy Council, and "entered his
appearance" on 20 May, 1593. The Council had heard of a "school of
Atheists," and Marlowe appears to have been named among them. There
is no hint of atheism in the fragmentary paper which Kyd said that
he had from Marlowe, who was at liberty in the end of May, but was
killed at Deptford, and buried on 1 June. On Whitsun Eve, 2 June, a
horrible libel against Marlowe was brought to the Privy Council. The
circumstances are mysterious. _Cf._ Mr. Boas, "Works of Thomas Kyd,"
1901, and Mr. Ingram, "Christopher Marlowe and His Associates," 1904.
[4] The curious, almost verbal coincidences, between passages in
Shakespeare and passages in the Athenian tragedians are probably due to
parity of genius, not to imitation. On the other side see Mr. Churton
Collins's "Studies in Shakespeare," p. 72, _et sqq._
[5] Shakespeare's other plays are based either on actual chronicles
and histories; or on legends, as in "King Lear" and "Cymbeline"; or on
tales, mainly Italian, founded as a rule on old traditional stories,
and sometimes done by others into English novels. Earlier plays, of
similar origin, are also employed. Such, too, were the usual sources of
Molière, and almost all Greek tragedy rests on Achæan or Ionian myths,
current in older epic poems.
[6] Saintsbury.
[7] Mr. Tyler, in his edition of the Sonnets (1890), Dr. Brandes, in
his "William Shakespeare," and Mr. Harris, in "The Man Shakespeare,"
support the Pembroke theory. Sir Sidney Lee's "Life of William
Shakespeare" contains the arguments in favour of Southampton.
[8] Ben Jonson was something of a visionary.
[9] Jusserand, "Literary History of the English People," Vol. III, p.
233.
[10] Lee, pp. 147-150.
[11] Shakespeare could read parts of Homer in Chapman's translation
of Books I, II, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, published in 1598. But certain
touches indicate his acquaintance with Book XXII, 320, 321, 391-393.
The drama begins with the situation in Book VII.