OTHER DRAMATISTS.
Beaumont and Fletcher.
John Fletcher was born at Rye in December, 1579; being the son of that
Dean of Peterborough who troubled the last moments of Mary, Queen of
Scots, and later was bishop, successively, of Bristol, Worcester, and
London. Very early, aged about 12, the son entered Benet College,
Cambridge, but before he was 17 the death of his father, in poverty,
caused him to leave the University. We hear no more of him, on sound
authority, till he began to write plays with Francis Beaumont, born in
1584, the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, a judge.
In 1597 Beaumont entered Pembroke College, Oxford, then known as
Broadgates Hall; three years later he entered the Inner Temple. In
1605 Beaumont wrote some prefatory verses to Jonson's play "The Fox
(Volpone)" as also did Fletcher. "Philaster" (1610?) is believed to
have been the first play composed in their prolific partnership, but it
was also attributed to Beaumont alone. Beaumont died in March, 1616,
the death-year of Shakespeare; Fletcher in 1625.
One need not be a Charles Lamb to discover that "after all, Beaumont
and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Sidneys and Shakespeares".
But perhaps only a reader who is himself a poet can discover, with Mr.
Swinburne's certainty, in Beaumont "the gifts of tragic pathos and
passion, of tender power and broad strong humour"; in Fletcher "a more
fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness
of action, a more various readiness and fullness of bright original
speech".
Others cannot pretend to assign to each author, or to their various
allies, their own contributions to each of the fifty-two dramas, which
Mr. Swinburne suspected Coleridge of "never having really read".
Whether Coleridge did or did not carefully peruse the fourteen stout
volumes of Weber's edition, it is certain that very few people are more
industrious. A French critic, M. Jusserand, affirms that a friendly
hand could make a pleasing selection of scenes, displaying tragical
vigour, eloquence, poetry, wit, and that the selection would give "the
falsest idea of their work," for "the lugubrious and the ribald were
their chief domain".
At all events other qualities than ribaldry will win their readers at
present, and it is unnecessary to direct readers to a play in which
a woman "makes the very satyrs blush at her sight." Coleridge thought
it would be interesting to settle a question of statistics, "how many
of these plays are founded on rapes, how many on incestuous passions,
and how many on mere lunacies". Mr. Swinburne provided the statistics,
_Plays_ 52, _Rapes_ 2, _Incestuous Passions_ 0, _Lunacies_ 2.
In the throng of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher (of which a folio
edition was published in 1647; an uncertain amount of the writing was
ascribed to Massinger), it must suffice to speak of but a few. The
bald analysis of any of these Jacobean dramas cannot do justice to
its merits. The plots of the greatest dramas, those of the Athenian
stage and of Shakespeare, rest, now on history, now on inventions
of prehistoric antiquity, myths and legends. The story of Lear has
elements as impossible, and as primitive, as the stories of Œdipus
or of Thyestes. The events are monstrous--"people don't do these
things,"--but they afford to the dramatist great situations, and they
were already familiar in tradition.
The events in "The Maid's Tragedy," on the other hand, could not have
occurred, and have no traditional source. There have been callous and
profligate kings, but Charles II, who declared that "in my reign all
tragedies must end happily," and for whom Waller later made "The Maid's
Tragedy" end happily, did not seduce innocent girls, hand them over as
brides to courtiers who were already betrothed to other ladies, and
retain his victims as his mistresses.
The king in "The Maid's Tragedy" does these things, and is a moral
monster. Amintor being in love with Aspatia, and she with him, the king
forces him--for loyalty and passive obedience are his guiding stars--to
reject Aspatia, and wed Evadne, whom nobody suspects of being the royal
mistress. At Courts, however, these graces are not hid.
The bridal eve is not much enlivened by a masque of Neptune and Æolus,
and is saddened by the wails and prophecies of the forlorn Aspatia.
Other bridesmaids talk ribaldry enough, but the bridegroom, whose heart
is with Aspatia, feels
A grief shoot suddenly through all my veins;
Mine eyes rain: this is strange at such a time.
The bride receives him coldly. A man has wronged her, will he slay that
man? She names the king: "To cover shame I took _thee_" she says.
The situation,--with the horror-stricken loyalty of Amintor; his
heart already a chaos of remorse, regret, and desire; the implacable
resolution of Evadne; "the murderess-Magdalen, whose penitence is of
one crimson colour with her sin--" is undeniably tragically great.
Ribaldries as of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida" greet the happy
pair in the morning. The secret reaches Melanthius, brother of Evadne
and the king's bravest captain. Evadne binds the sleeping king in
his bed, wakens him, taunts him, and stabs him for her husband, her
brother, and herself. Aspatia disguises herself as her own avenging
brother, challenges Amintor who has deserted her, strikes him, kicks
him; at last he draws, and she falls by the hand of the man she loves.
Evadne enters, red-handed from regicide,
Am I not fair?
Looks not Evadne beauteous with these rites?
The seeming dead speaks,--
I am Aspatia yet--
and takes farewell. Amintor stabs himself, but not before Evadne has
set him the example. Had Ophelia fallen by the sword of Hamlet the
tragedy would not have been "deeper".
"Philaster," again, is a romantic comedy, that deserves its second
title "Love lies a'bleeding". Philaster is kept out of his royalty by
the king, who is wedding his daughter, Arethusa, beloved by Philaster,
to Pharamond, prince of Spain, a random debauchee. His intrigue with
the audacious wanton Megra, a Court lady, and the besetting of him
by the armed burgesses, devoted to Philaster, yield the grim comic
material. Philaster gives his page, Bellario (really the disguised
Euphrasia, who loves him), to Arethusa. She is accused of an intrigue
with the page, who is the soul of loyalty to her and to Philaster. He,
in jealousy, rejects both his lady and his page: they meet in a forest:
he dismisses Bellario, and bids Arethusa stab him, or he will stab her.
We are two
Earth cannot bear at once.
He does stab her, and is attacked by a country fellow, who wounds him;
he then flies from some of the Court who are approaching. Finding
Bellario asleep in a glade, Philaster wounds her; so that the pursuers,
who
Have no mark to know me but my blood,
may suppose Bellario to be the assailant of Arethusa! "Oh, my heart,
what a varlet's this, to offer manslaughter upon the harmless
gentlewoman," we may cry, with the grocers wife in "The Knight of the
Burning Pestle". We "could hurl things at him," at Philaster: whose
jealousy does not palliate his cruelty and treachery.
Through many complications the plot winds its way; Bellario, who is
about to be tortured, proves to be a woman; both she and Arethusa
survive; Philaster, of whom nobody thinks the worse, marries Arethusa;
Pharamond is mobbed; all ends happily except for that most pathetic of
patient Grizels, Bellario, who remains contented in the happiness of
the others. The purity and sweetness of Arethusa, the loyalty of the
loving Bellario, and her beautiful speeches, cannot enable this play to
escape the blame of being unnatural and repulsive.
The naked analysis of the plays of this age, is, of course, no fair
criterion of their merit. A bare exposure of the plot of "Cymbeline"
would deter a man from reading it. The authors are protected by the
magic of their poetry, which conveys them off in a golden cloud as
Aphrodite saved Æneas. A bare analysis of "A King and No King" (1611),
with the alternate valour and nobility, brag, and unintelligible
clemencies and ferocities of Arbaces, King of Iberia, who has defeated
and captured Tigranes, King of Armenia, would move the most austere
to mirth. But there is a method in the apparent madness of Arbaces;
and Bessus, the braggart poltroon, is an officer worthy to fight under
the same standard as Parolles and Bobadil, while virtue and happiness
are kept for Arbaces and Panthea, Tigranes and the faithful Spaconia,
through the sudden revelation of Gobrias, the Lord Protector, that
Arbaces is a warming-pan pretender, and neither son of Queen Arane (who
unceasingly tries to have him stabbed or poisoned), nor the brother of
Panthea.
The last tragedies are "The False One," and "Valentinian". Concerning
"Thierry and Theodoret" it is not pleasant to speak out, and it
is not honest to be silent. "Derived," we are told, "from the
French chronicles of the reign of Clotaire the Second," the play is
rancid with the humours of the lowest London haunts; marked by wild
anachronisms--the Merovingian troops carry muskets,--and crammed with
impossible crimes. For a contrast we have the eloquence of Thierry
(poisoned by a handkerchief that robs him of sleep, after he has been
drugged to deprive him of offspring), and the spotless virtues of his
wife Ordella, whom Thierry has been on the point of sacrificing to the
gods. The blank verse almost uniformly moves with a loose superfluous
foot; as
The most remarkable thing in which kings differ,
From private men,
and so on, is a specimen. There is a pearl to be found on this
dust-heap, the stainless Ordella, "the most perfect idea of the female
heroic character," says Lamb; but she is found after we have passed
through a malodorous labyrinth of "unnatural and violent situations".
Plays like this, or even like "The Spanish Comedy," which opens
pleasantly and humorously, and in the cure and his sexton suggests the
influence of Cervantes, but closes in a mist of evil passions, give
some show of reason to the opinion of our French critic. "A friendly
hand selecting with care" might give all of Beaumont and Fletcher's
that can please readers not specially devoted to the study of the
Drama. Even in the beautiful scenes of "The Faithful Shepherdess," in
poetry worthy of Spenser's pastoral vein, the author, quite needlessly,
introduces a shepherdess who resembles the Brunhault of "Thierry and
Theodoret" as Brunhault may have been in girlhood.
"The Knight of the Burning Pestle," on the other hand, with the
grocer-critic who insists on a play in which a grocer shall "do
admirable things"; with the humours of the grocer's wife, and the
Quixotic adventures of Ralph, the apprentice, is lively, and, says the
Prologue, "has endeavoured, to be far from unseemly words to make your
ears glow". Yet, in the jail delivery of the Barber, the authors go out
of their way to find ugly ribaldries. Famous among the comedies are
"The Scornful Lady," "The Humorous Lieutenant," "The Wild-goose Chase,"
and "The Little French Doctor". The lyrics and songs are especially
beautiful, even in the Elizabethan wealth of song.
A peculiarity of Fletcher's blank verse is his fondness for redundant
syllables at the close, and indeed anywhere in the line. This manner
was gaining on Shakespeare in his latest plays, and, in authors after
Fletcher, led to the decay, almost to the death, of blank verse.
Yet Fletcher's lines, as before Marlowe and Shakespeare, were often
"end-stopped": the sense closed with the close of each line; this
is not the manner of Shakespeare, or of Beaumont. In his later days
Fletcher went for his plots to Spanish tales and romances.
Chapman.
The date of the birth (near Hitchin) of George Chapman, conjecturally
placed in 1559, is unknown. He was at Oxford in 1574. The exactness
of his scholarship must not be estimated by his translation of Homer;
translations, whether in prose or verse, did not then aim at precision.
In 1594 he published "The Shadow of Night," containing verses which
have been used to support the theory that he was the poet concerning
whose favour Shakespeare expresses uneasiness in his Sonnets. He
wrote a conclusion to Marlowe's "Hero and Leander"; attempted the
luscious (which did not suit his genius), in Ovid's "Banquet of
Sense"; celebrated Henry, Prince of Wales, in "The Tears of Peace," is
mentioned as a dramatist by Meres in 1598, and in that year published
his version of "Seven Books of the 'Iliad'" (not the first seven),
while he finished his "Iliad" in 1611, his "Odyssey," some years later.
Thanks mainly to the perfect sonnet of Keats, Chapman's Homer is the
work by which his memory is kept green except among special students
of the Elizabethan drama. To have made Homer "common coin" was a great
benefit to the English public, that had known only the mediaeval
romances based on Ionian (700 B.C.), Athenian, and Roman
perversions of the poet. The "Iliad" he did into "fourteeners," a
jigging old measure,--[1] "a splendid swinging metre," says Saintsbury,
"better able than any other English metre to cope with the body as well
as the rhythm of the English hexameter". Tastes differ! Here are four
lines ("Iliad" XV, 596-600). The poet speaks of Zeus,
For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about
To make him cast the fleet such fire as never should go out;
Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
"The last line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour
at his best," says a critic, and this may be the best of Chapman. But
it does not express the meaning of Homer, who says nothing about the
"foulness" of the prayer of Thetis, and whose Zeus does not desire to
satiate his eyes with "the splendour of the burning ships," but to see
_one_ ship set on fire; as, on that signal, he intends to cause the
instant rout of the Trojans. It will be observed that Chapman here
compresses four Greek hexameters into four English "fourteeners";
and that the movement of his verse is as rapid as the nature of the
"fourteener" permits. He is, however, rugged and obscure and overloads
the simplicity of Homer with Elizabethan conceits of his own invention.
The "Odyssey" he rendered into heroic couplets with a free movement,
and, had he been more sparing of his own conceits, the version would be
more satisfactory. Unhappily no English measure represents the Homeric
hexameter.
In 1604-5, Chapman with Marston was imprisoned for a very faint piece
of satire on the Scots, in "Eastward Ho"; and Ben Jonson, who had been
no partner to the passage, as a collaborator in tie play magnanimously
insisted on sharing the punishment.
Chapman's comedy, "All Fools" opens with an imitation of a play of
Terence (followed by Molière in "L'École des Pères"). We have the
sensible and indulgent, and the severe and deceived father. But the
plot becomes painfully involved, and jokes on cuckolds are no longer
so delightful as they were for two centuries to English taste. His
other comedies are not below the level of his contemporaries, excluding
Shakespeare and Jonson.
Among Chapman's plays on contemporary French history, the two on Bussy
d'Amboise vary much from "Byron's' (Biron's) Conspiracy," and "The
Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron". "Bussy d'Ambois" has all the faults
of fustian, obscurity, bloodshed, torture exercised on the stage, and
great palpable ghosts. A friar is the go-between of _le brave Bussy_
and Madame de Monsoreau, Chapman's "Tamyra, Countess of Mountsurry". He
appears and disappears through a trap door, and when he dies "_Umbra_
Friar" (the ghost of the holy man), "keeps on the business still".
Mountsurry (Monsoreau) too, disguised as the friar, is very busy. A
magician summons Behemoth, a monstrous fiend with whom Joan of Arc was
accused of being too familiar. Tamyra is stabbed frequently on the
stage, to make her write a letter inviting Bussy to a fatal tryst;
and next, being tortured, she complies and writes in her own blood.
Bussy is overpowered by numbers and slain. Charles Lamb admired a
long description of a duel between six minions of Henry III, three on
each side. The Nuntius (the messenger), a looker-on, tells how Bussy
charged his foe exactly as, in his youth, the Nuntius had seen a
unicorn charge an Armenian jeweller, and
Nailed him with his rich antler to a tree.
In "The Revenge of Bussy" his ghost enters and dances with the ghosts
of the Duc de Guise, the Cardinal, and Châtillon. The lookers-on are
surprised, believing the Guises to be alive and well, when Aumale
enters with the news that both have just teen assassinated! The
"Revenge" contains some very noble passages of reflection, in which
Chapman always shines, and some reminiscences of Homer. The ghosts,
though "affable familiar sprites," might be excused by the example of
Seneca's tragedies. Dryden found in "Bussy d'Ambois" "a hideous mingle
of false poetry and true nonsense," but not all of the poetry is false.
There are, indeed, in Chapman's blank verse, passages of exquisite
beauty and charm: praise which cannot be denied to passages in the
works of all his contemporaries in dramatic writing.
John Marston.
John Marston was of an old Shropshire family: he is supposed to have
been born in 1575 and educated at Coventry school. He was a member of
Brasenose College, Oxford. His father intended him to be a barrister,
but observes in his will that "man proposeth but God disposeth".
He wrote satires first, and then plays, later took orders, in 1616
received the living of Christchurch in Hampshire, and died in London
in 1634. His plays had been collected and published in 1633. Marston's
earliest publications, under the assumed name of Kinsayder, 1598, were
"The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certain Satires," and, in
the same year, "The Scourge of Villainy". As to "Pygmalion,"
My wanton Muse lasciviously doth sing,
he says: the verses are in the stanza of "Venus and Adonis". With a
cheerful anachronism, Pygmalion, having made his ivory statue of a
woman, invokes the shade of Ovid--who lived much after his time. At his
prayer the statue lives, and Marston ceases to sing lasciviously.
Of the Satires we may say in the words addressed by Mr. Toots to the
Chicken, "the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure". The first
attacks one Ruscus, for writing, like Mr. Toots, letters to himself.
Parasites and boasting soldadoes are also satirized. A quarrel with
Hall who styled himself "the first English satirist," arose; the
authors of "The Return from Parnassus" (1601) spoke of Marston with
coarse but effective contempt. In 1599 this "new poet" sold a play to
Henslowe. His "Antonio and Mellida," "Sophonisba," "What You Will,"
and "The Malcontent" (a misanthrope, as in Molière and Wycherley),
do not receive much praise even from the greatest enthusiasts for
the old drama. In the dedication to "The Malcontent" Marston made up
his quarrel with Ben Jonson, whom he had assailed in "Satiromastix"
in reply to Ben's "Poetaster" (1601), not before Ben, according to
his own account, had beaten him. In 1605 Marston joined Chapman and
Ben in composing "Eastward Ho". The remarks on the Scots, for which
the authors were imprisoned, are merely such as Dr. Johnson used to
make for the purpose of teasing Boswell. The play, on the whole, is
a very good-humoured study of life in London--rather in Hogarth's
manner,--with the honest goldsmith, his industrious and his idle
apprentice; his ambitious daughter, who would marry a knight with a
castle in the air; his quiet daughter, betrothed to the industrious
apprentice; the usual number of jokes connected with "horns," and
local colour that was useful to Scott in "The Fortunes of Nigel".
Probably Marston did little in this favourite comedy; he wearied of
play-writing, and was contemptuous of his own works, and careless of
his own fame.
Dekker.
Thomas Dekker, as genial as Marston is crabbed, was a playwright and
bookseller's hack, concerning whose life little is known except that he
was one of Henslowe's "hands" in 1597; was redeemed by Henslowe from
prison in the Poultry in 1598; and was still producing pamphlets in
1637. A Londoner by birth, he knew some Dutch, and as his Bryan in "The
Honest Whore" proves, a little Gaelic. His most popular work in prose
was "The Gull's Hornbook," which is full of the details of life in the
taverns; the thieves; the _bona robas_, usurers, fops, gamblers, all
the world which is best known to the modern reader in "The Fortunes of
Nigel".
The social historian finds matter gloomy enough as a rule, in "The
Wonderful Year" of the accession of James I; and "The Seven Deadly
Sins of London" shows a helpless horror of the crowded poverty of the
town. Mr. Swinburne found in one of Dekker's tracts a genius akin to
Goldsmith's, Thackeray's, Sterne's, Molière's, Dickens's, and not
unlike Shakespeare's; with Goldsmith he is often compared; he has given
men medicines to make them love him.
Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, and his contributions are
discerned by the bewildering light of internal evidence. Of his own
pieces, "The Shoe Maker's Holiday" (1600) is a broadly cheerful comedy;
the jolly son of St. Hugh, Simon Eyre, becomes Lord Mayor, and, in the
upper plot, the hero, Lacy, is very readily pardoned after deserting
his regiment in France to woo another Mayor's daughter in the disguise
of a shoemaker.
"The Honest Whore," in two parts, shows Bellafront as a Magdalen
redeemed by a sudden love which does not find its earthly close; she
marries a scamp to whom, in the Second Part, she plays the Patient
Grizel, backed by her father disguised as an old serving-man. There is
abundance of the inevitable ribaldry.
In a play devoted to "Patient Grissil," that ideal of the dramatists,
occurs the lovely lyric "Art thou poor, Yet hast thou golden slumbers";
in "Old Fortunatus" (in the story of the Magical Purse) is "Fortune's
kind, cry holiday": other pretty songs occur in "The Sun's Darling"
(Ford and Dekker).
"Satiromastix," as we have seen, secures for Dekker the praise of
audacity, for no craven would have attacked Ben Jonson. There are fine
_tirades_ of imaginative blank verse in "Fortunatus". Dekker admired
a thoroughly good woman, whether converted or needing no conversion,
as most of his fraternity and as Fielding did. But Fortune, if she
sometimes "cried holiday" to Dekker, was never "kind". He is best
remembered for his songs and for the words
the best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
When Lamb tells us that Dekker "had poetry enough for anything": when
Mr. Swinburne declares that Dekker "was endowed in the highest degree
with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial
humour, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement, and
an exquisite simplicity of expression," we wish to search for his
privately reprinted works in prose, and the solitary edition of his
plays.
But on the other hand we are told that his "Satiromastix" is not too
severely called "a preposterous medley": that his "besetting vice"
is "reckless and sluttish incoherence"; that one play can be best
explained as the work of an intoxicated man in a debtor's prison; that
"there are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as
the most shiftless and shameless of slovens and of sluts." Dekker wrote
several pamphlets, which, in a sort, resemble some minor work of Daniel
de Foe.
Middleton.
Though Ben Jonson said in his haste that Middleton was "a base fellow,"
he was of a gentle house. The date of his birth is unknown (1570?),
as early as 1597 he was writing for the Press; by 1602 he was working
at plays in which five or six other men collaborated. Probably they
settled on a plot, or rather on two plots, upper and under, and each
author wrote an act: a little ready money came in, but the dramas must
have been "in the veniable part of things lost". Middleton frequently
worked with Dekker, also with Rowley. They are usually thought to
have mainly contributed the noisy and incoherent underplots, but
Dekker's admirers credit _him_ with the _dénouement_ of "The Old Law"
(Middleton, Massinger, Dekker).
Mr. Bullen finds this passage the drollest of things droll. There can
be no doubt that it must have evoked hearty laughter on the stage.
Easily are Hoard and Lucre gulled in "A Trick to Catch the Old One,"
namely the uncle of the young profligate Witgood. Granting that these
ancient chuffs were incredibly credulous, the play is a bustling
comedy, with abundance of tricks and turns. The Mayor of Queenburgh
in the play so styled was contemporary with Hengist and Horsa; is
full of very serious matter, merrily set down. We must not approach
in a spirit of historical pedantry a drama in which the Earls of
Devonshire and Staffordshire, the sons of Constantine (namely Aurelius
Ambrosius, Constantius, and Uther Pendragon), with Vortiger and Horsus,
Hengist, the tanner Mayor of Quinborough, Aminada, and a number of
button-makers and professional murderers, also two monks, play their
parts. The incoherencies, the button-makers, the chaste Constantius, an
unwilling monarch, his murder by the minions of Vortiger, their murder
(in Macbeth's manner) by Vortiger, are the drollest of unconscious
drolleries. This monstrous medley of dull disconnected humours,
unspeakable villainies, and speeches in excellent blank verse, with
the sufferings of the angelic Castiza, contains, as usual, a pearl of
wronged and innocent womanhood.
Middleton is thought by some to walk more closely in Shakespeare's
footsteps than even Webster, and his acknowledged masterpiece is "The
Changeling," so called from the underplot (by Rowley), in which two
sane men smuggle themselves as maniac and idiot into a private lunatic
asylum. The cheerful interludes of lunacy set off the tragedy.
Beatrice Joanna, betrothed to Alonzo de Piracquo, loves Alsemero at
first sight, and for Piracquo's murderer suborns de Flores, a man whom
she loathes, and whose face seems charged with disaster. De Flores has
a violent physical passion for Beatrice, endures her insults, haunts
her, and accepts her murderous command. After slaying her betrothed,
and cutting off his finger that wears the ring of betrothal, he has
that scene with Beatrice in which he rejects all her offers, even her
whole fortune, and, by threatening to divulge her crime, compels her to
be his mistress. This scene is justly celebrated; it does indeed move
terror, and pity for the pitiless. But the adventures of Beatrice's
bridal night with Alsemero; the absurd affair of the glasses marked M
and C; the burning by de Flores of the girl who here plays the part of
Brangwain in the romance of Tristram and Iseult; all these things prove
Middleton's inability to keep on the level of his own high conception.
After some powerful passages and the reappearance of the bleeding
finger with the ring, de Flores murders Beatrice, and dies rejoicing in
his success. Tragedy, as Shakespeare and Aristotle understood it, was
not concerned with resolute ruffians and girls with violent passions,
but with Cordelia and Hamlet, Othello and Desdemona, noble souls; with
fate-driven and fallen Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; or Coriolanus ruined
by the excess of his own qualities.
Middleton's comedy of "The Roaring Girl," a contemporary virago with
pipe and sword, idealized as the champion of her sex; his prodigal old
Sir Bounteous in "A Mad World," and his "Chaste Maid in Cheapside"
were long popular; while the humours of the duel, and the sterling
excellence of Captain Ager in "A Fair Quarrel," are contrasted with the
horseplay of Middleton's constant partner, Rowley. In 1620, Middleton
was appointed Chronologer to the City, and did the work for which he
was paid. He continued to write for the stage, and his "Spanish Gipsy,"
an intermezzo of a very serious plot with the humours of gentlefolks
playing gipsies; his "The Witch," with curious resemblances to the
Witches in "Macbeth," and the highly successful "topical" play, "A
Game of Chess," with the intrigues in the affairs of the Spanish
match for Charles, Prince of Wales, are among the most notable of
his many dramas. The Spanish ambassador, in August, 1624, caused the
political "Game of Chess" to be withdrawn, for "his Majesty," James I,
"remembers well there was a commandment and restraint given against the
representing of any modern Christian kings in those stage plays". James
might well remember it! In 1604 Shakespeare's company had brought him
on the stage, playing his part in the mysterious affair of 1600, the
Gowrie Conspiracy. The play was stopped on the third night.
Middleton also wrote many City masques. He died on 4 July, 1627.
Heywood.
Thomas Heywood was born in Lincolnshire, was a Cambridge man, and by
1596-1598 was an actor and a writer for the stage and the Press. He
says that it is no custom of his to print his plays, being faithful
to the actors (who lost their rights in a play, when printed). He
confesses to having "had a hand or at least a main finger" in two
hundred and twenty plays.
The strong point in Heywood is his study of domestic manners in
Englishmen at home, and as adventurers abroad, as in "The English
Traveller," and "The Fair Maid of the West". Here Clem, the son of a
baker who, "when corn grew to be at a high rate, never doughed after,"
frankly says of four sea captains, "I believe they be little better
than pirates".
Heywood's most celebrated play, "A Woman Killed with Kindness," reads
as much like a modern novel as a Jacobean drama. There is no ribaldry,
no horrors, only a duel between two sets of men over a disputed hawking
match. The hero, Frankford, shelters and entertains a broken gentleman
who flees from the field, and the man, though thoroughly conscious
of his own villainy, seduces Frankford's wife, who is beautiful and
hitherto a pearl of virtue. She yields at a word: Frankford discovers
and spares them, the lady makes a pathetic end, and, dying of remorse
(of which her lover has his full share), she is "killed with kindness".
The pathos and the details of manners are entirely in the style of many
modern novels, and the underplot, also serious, if improbable, has the
favourite stainless heroine, Susan; a girl of great nobility.
There is a most amusing list of the practising "Mediums" of the day,
in "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon". They have their specialities, one
"doth pretty well for a thing that is lost." Mother Sturton deals in
prevision--"is for fore-speaking"; another "practised the book and
key" (an automatism, the key is tied into the book, the fingers hold
it up under the handle of the key, and the book turns in answer to
questions). "All do well," says the witch, "according to their talent.
For myself, let the world speak There are some good speeches and good
blank verse in "The Iron Age," one of four dramas on the "Four Ages of
Hesiod's Mythology". In "The Rape of Lucrece" is an extraordinary set
of popular songs, some coarse enough, one in Dutch, and among them the
beautiful lyric,
Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day,
which, more than his twenty-four surviving dramas, keeps Heywood's
memory green and fragrant. He wrote miscellaneous pamphlets and books
with enormous industry.
There is something sympathetic in his very carelessness,--what Lamb
precisely meant when he called Heywood "a prose Shakespeare" is
disputed. Possibly he meant that Heywood has sweetness of nature,
humour, and knowledge of character, without much poetry.
Webster.
Concerning the life and adventures of John Webster next to nothing is
known. In 1602 the account books of Henslowe, the financier of the
stage, mention two lost plays as being, the first by Dekker, Drayton,
Middleton, Munday, and Webster; and the second by Webster, Chettle, T.
Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and Dekker. Dramas by so many hands cannot
be masterpieces. Webster was a great and busy collaborator; in the
bustling "citizen comedies," "Northward Ho" and "Westward Ho" he worked
with Dekker. He is best known by Lamb's extracts from his "White Devil"
and "Duchess of Malfi".
"The White Devil" (printed in 1612) is a chronicle play of the career
of Vittoria Corombona, but Webster has altered the facts as he pleased.
The more tragic humours of the betrayed husband (our liberal fathers
gave him a shorter name) are exemplified in her lord Camillo, who, in
the interests of her lover, the Duke of Brachiano, is murdered in a
manner intended to disguise the crime: the device is about as subtle
as the blowing up of Darnley with gunpowder. The Duchess, another
patient Grizel, except so far as Vittoria is concerned, men slay by
poisoning the portrait of her faithless husband, which she kisses, and
thus imbibes the infection. Cornelia, the mother of Vittoria and of
her leading murderer Flamineo, is a pathetic figure, and it is she who
sings the beautiful lyric.
Call for the robin red breast and the wren.
Lamb says of Cornelia, "she speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue
has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror
skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it
can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then
step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, this only a
Webster can do." But if this is _all_ that a Webster can do, and if
to do this he needs an accumulation of unnatural horrors--fratricide,
the murderer of a brother contemplating the madness which his deed
has wrought in his mother; if the slain brother has just been kicking
his strumpet sister; then we may ask whether an art that flourishes
in these odious and extravagant conditions produces "one of the
imperishable and ineradicable landmarks of literature".
The serene and audacious impudence of Vittoria, when accused of her
first husband's, Camillo's, murder; and the Ophelia-like laments
and the song of Cornelia; with the all-but imperturbable wickedness
of Flamineo, yield the extracts which Charles Lamb made current
coin. Webster, in fact, returned, with abundant genius, but without
discretion, to the class of Revenge-plays opened by Kyd in "The Spanish
Tragedie".
The behaviour of the Duchess of Malfi, in the play of that name
(printed 1623), introduced as she is by a noble panegyric, does not
prepare us for her sudden wooing of her steward, Antonio. Her brothers,
like the brothers of Keats's Isabella, determine to punish her: their
instrument, Bosolo, is a character not wholly lost, who deliberately
sells himself to guilt; and the scene in which eight madmen are let
loose to dance round the Duchess--they do not shake her resolution,--is
much admired. She is strangled, the children are strangled on all
sides, the servant Cariola is strangled, though "she bites and
scratches". The Fifth Act is a scene of the Kilkenny cats; almost
everybody, including Bosolo, is stabbed, and Ford, in commendatory
verses, applauds Webster, as at least the equal of the Athenian
tragedians.
Webster's genius was confessedly "subdued to that it worked in". In
the preface to "The White Devil" he complains that the public will not
endure a tragedy which observes the critical laws; "the sententious
Chorus," and "the passionate and weighty Nuntius," the messenger who,
in Greek tragedy, reports the horrors done off the stage. Deprived of
the messenger, obliged to work his massacres on the scene, Webster was
unsparing in horrors. His "Devil's Lawsuit" is a complicated web of
squalid intrigue; the blank verse is utterly degenerate; and "Appius
and Virginia" is not remarkable for originality in the representation
of that famous Roman story.
Webster's idea of a ghost was rather unconventional; Brachiano's
phantasm in "The White Devil" wore no common sheet, but "leather
cassock and breeches, and boots; with a cowl, in his hand a pot of lily
flowers, with a skull in't". Dekker advises his Gull at the play to
laugh aloud in the crisis of the tragedy, and probably there were some
hardy or hysterical spectators who thus received the too, too solid
spirit of Brachiano. The Tragedy of Revenge inspired Cyril Tourneur's
"Revenger's Tragedy," and horror has her home in this play and his
"Atheist's Tragedy". What in them deserves reading may be found in
Lamb's extracts.
Massinger.
Philip Massinger (born 1583) was the son of a gentleman patronized by
the noble house of Pembroke. The poet was educated at St. Alban Hall,
Oxford, but left without taking a degree (1606). He had fallen into
debt, and commenced play-writing in 1614; his earliest known piece, in
which Dekker took part, "The Virgin Martyr," was acted in 1622. The
period represented is that of the persecution under Diocletian, and the
piece is old-fashioned enough; introducing the angelic companion of
St. Dorothea, and the devil who attends the persecutor, Theophilus, a
very late convert. Torture is introduced on the stage, and Theophilus
slays his daughters, whom he had tortured out of Christianity back into
the Olympian faith, and whom Dorothea reconverts by arguments with
which they must already have long been familiar. There is a tendency
to credit Dekker both with the most gracious passages of verse in
the piece and with the stupid but energetic ribaldries of Hircius and
Spungius.
"The Unnatural Combat" (duel between a son and a father who rivals
Cenci in Shelley's tragedy), "The Duke of Milan," with a most unnatural
plot, "The Roman Actor," "The Fatal Dowry," are among Massinger's
tragedies; some twelve of his plays were burned in manuscript by Betty
Baker, or Barnes, the cook of Warburton, the herald. If they contained
such scenes as that of "the ghost of young Malefort," slain by his
father, "naked from the waist, full of wounds, leading in the Shadow of
a lady, her face leprous," our regret for them may not be overwhelming.
We have plays enough in which a man is poisoned by the venomed paint on
a canvas or on a dead lady's face; plays enough in which victims (as in
"The Roman Actor") are cruelly tortured on the stage.
That Massinger has noble passages and great _tirades_ is undeniable,
and he is one of the four or five successors of Shakespeare who are
said by their admirers to follow most closely in his footsteps. The
play which keeps Massinger's memory green in common recollection is
his "A New Way to pay Old Debts". The great part is that of Sir Giles
Overreach, a financial ruffian, suggested probably by a real character
equally nefarious, Sir Giles Mompesson. A victim of Overreach's in his
own nephew, Wellborn, and the play shows how Wellborn, with the aid
of a rich and virtuous widow, Lady Allworth, cozens Overreach into
advancing money; how his creature, Marrall, chouses him; and how his
daughter, Margaret, marries young Allworth, and not the peer for whom
the usurer designed her. Described as "both lion and fox," Overreach,
always ready to fight, is more successful in the furious than in the
furtive part of his nature. He bullies man and defies God in seeking
satisfaction of his two chief desires, to ruin and humiliate his social
superiors and to plunder the widow and the orphan or any other victim
whose loss may be his gain.
But like the Mammon-worshippers in "A Trick to Catch the Old One,"
Overreach himself is credulous enough, an easy victim of the
conspirators against his pride and pocket. Massinger's indelicacy
"has not always the apology of wit," indeed he is not remarkable
for humour, any more than most of his contemporaries, who sought and
doubtless got a laugh by stereotyped and witless ribaldries.
The character part of Greedy, a parasite of Overreach's, remarkable for
his appetite,--a shield of brawn and a barrel of Colchester oysters
"were to him a dish of tea" before breakfast,--must have been diverting
on the stage; and when Marrall turns against his master, we are
reminded of similar surprises by Mr. Micawber and Newman Noggs, though
_they_ were not accomplices in the iniquities which they exposed.
Massinger's plays are often interwoven with the work of other hands,
and deal, in a more or less veiled way, with the political situations
of his time. He lived in poverty, as his petitions to the Herbert
family prove; and he died in 1640. He was dissatisfied with his
fortunes and with public indifference; poverty had forced him into
poetry, and hunger had made him hasty in his work; the too common
calamity of poor authors.
Ford.
John Ford was a native of Ilsington in Devonshire, baptized on 17
April, 1586. He was of good family, entered the Inns of Court, and is
said to have practised in his profession. A contemporary rhymer speaks
of him "deep in a dump," "with folded arms and melancholy hat". He
worked at plays with Dekker, and in "The Witch of Edmonton" (1622?).
Four of his comedies were burned or otherwise put out of being by
Betty Barnes, or Baker, the celebrated cook of Warburton, Somerset
herald, who made away with at least fifty manuscripts of old plays: his
earliest known comedy (1613) was among Betty's victims. His earliest
independent surviving piece, "The Lover's Melancholy," was played in
1628. The more serious part has a rather improbable plot turning on
the disguise of a girl as a man, but there are many beautiful romantic
passages in the loves of Palador, Prince of Cyprus, and Eroclea. A
masque of Bedlamites within the play indicates the strange contemporary
taste for the terrors and humours of maniacs.
In 1633 the famous plays "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," and "The Broken
Heart," were printed. The former has a plot of incestuous loves, ending
in a pretty general massacre. Given the inspiration of the unnatural,
Ford could do great things. In the Prologue to "The Broken Heart" (the
scene is Sparta, of all unlikely places) Ford reprobates the staple of
low contemporary comedy, "jests fit for a brothel court's applause,"
"apish laughter," "lame jeers at place or persons"; perhaps Ford was
not unaffected by Prynne's famous attack on the stage, "Histriomastix"
(1632).
"The Broken Heart" is free from the customary ribaldries; it is a
tragedy of fate, the characters are noble. Ithocles is noble, despite
the original wrong which he has committed in separating Orgilus and
Penthea, and wedding Penthea to "the grey dissimulation" of the jealous
Bassanes. Orgilus, who murders Ithocles, is noble in his death, the
death of Seneca without the bath. Penthea is noble, and the wanderings
of her mind at the end of her slow suicide, are beautiful in their
sad fantasy; finally the dancing of Calantha, while one after another
come messengers with the tidings that break her heart, is noble, and
probably her endurance is the reason for the placing of the scene in
Sparta. As in Greek tragedy, all are doomed by Fate; the Oracle of
Delphi has spoken truth, with the wonted obscurity which only Time can
unriddle. It is true that the interest shifts, in the last scenes, from
Penthea to Calantha, whom we have scarcely looked on previously. But
Ford aimed high, and came near to hitting his mark. He ought never to
have, attempted his crazy low comedy scenes.
Ford's "Perkin Warbeck" is by far the most readable historical play of
the old stage, after Marlowe's "Edward II," and Shakespeare's Chronicle
plays. Perkin's character is resolute and princely, as is that of his
Gordon bride, "The White Rose". "If he lost his life he died a king" in
royal bearing. As King Henry says
The custom, sure, of being called a king
Has fastened in his thought that he is such.
Ford, in his Tragedies, is not to be reckoned among Mr. Swinburne's
"splendid slovens". His blank verse never degenerates into
skimble-skamble slackness, but, compared with most of his
contemporaries, he does not shine as a lyric poet. He retired to the
country after the overthrow of the stage and the beginning of the civil
war.
Shirley.
James Shirley, of an honourable family, was born in London, in 1596. He
entered the Merchant Taylors' School, and, in 1612, went to St. John's,
Oxford, where Laud was then master. Laud, who believed in "the beauty
of holiness," is said to have prevented Shirley, as a blemished man,
with a large mole on his face, from taking holy orders. He migrated
to Cambridge, to St. Catherine's Hall, published a poem in 1616, did
take orders, received a living; left it on becoming a Catholic, turned
schoolmaster at St. Albans, and then went to town as a playwright.
His "Love's Tricks" was licensed in 1624-1625,--"a silly play," writes
Mr. Pepys in 1667. Shirley was prolific; his "Witty Fair One" (acted
1628) is thought one of his best comedies. These dramas have a touch of
the modern; we hear of "balls," a new name then for dancing parties. In
"The Lady of Pleasure" (1635) Lady Bornwell's contempt for the country
life and for country gentlemen, and her determination to spend her
husband's fortune on the gaieties of the Court, are amusing, and we
expect her to be a Lady Teazle. But, despite her husband's stratagem
of beating her at her own game, and the humours of the nephew whom she
has brought from Oxford, the piece can hardly be read with enthusiastic
delight. It is deemed Shirley's masterpiece in comedy, and preludes to
the comic drama of the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688. Dryden
expresses extreme contempt for both Hey wood and Shirley; it is to be
feared that his own plays are now no more popular than theirs.
After residing at Dublin under the great Earl of Strafford, and
producing plays at the Viceregal Court, and after insulting in an
ironic dedication of "The Bird in a Cage," the Puritan Prynne, who had
been most cruelly punished for allusions in his work against the stage
("Histriomastix"), Shirley returned to London. His "The Cardinal" is
imitated from Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," and with "The Traitor" is
reckoned (though Shirley preferred "The Cardinal"), "the best of his
flock" in tragedy. Pepys (1662) writes "there is no great matter in
it," but Pepys's dramatic criticisms are no great matter. In 1642 came
the shutting up of the theatres, and Shirley, after seeing the wars
under his patron, the Duke of Newcastle, returned to his old profession
as a schoolmaster.
He wrote a preface (1647) to some hitherto unprinted plays of Beaumont
and Fletcher, commending their stage as a school of moral discipline,
"In this silence of the stage thou hast a liberty to read these
inimitable plays". In 1659 Shirley published his "Contention of Ajax
and Ulysses," containing the noble lines which embalm his memory:--
The glories of our blood and state.
Are shadows, not substantial things.
His
Bid me no more good night, because
'Tis dark, must I away?
is also a pretty piece, like his "Song" (attributed wrongly to Carew).
Shirley's works were often acted at the beginning of the Restoration,
but he refused to write more dramas. The shock of the great fire of
1666 is said to have caused the deaths, on the same day, of himself and
of his wife. The blank verse of Shirley is seldom distinguished. His
numerous works suffer somewhat because they come at the end of a long
period in which talent like his, with defects of taste often greater
than his, have satiated and wearied all but the special student and
enthusiastic devotee of the drama. The minor stars in the galaxy of
playwrights almost defy enumeration.
Space does not permit estimates of the last dramatists of "the first
temple," Randolph, Suckling--whose dramatic verse is as chaotically bad
as several of his lyrics are exquisite; Davenant, who tried to keep
alive a semblance of the drama at the end of Cromwell's protectorate;
Brome, Cartwright, Mayne, and others. The blank verse in which the
elder poets had so often excelled was left to the care of Milton; the
blank verse of the stage became formless, and, during the Restoration,
rhymed heroic couplets usurped its place.
[1] As I write, an accidental "fourteener" meets the eyes in the
heading of a magazine article--"Discovery of the Missing Link by
Georgiana Knight". This metre does not seem the best in which to render
Homer.