Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one
fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single
dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "He was a
savage," said Voltaire, "who had imagination. He has written many happy
lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada." Had this
been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or
Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there
was something in it. Again, Voltaire's boast that he had been the first to
show the French "some pearls which I had found" in the "enormous dunghill"
of Shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have
been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or
Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James
except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the
certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically
five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from
Shakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no
_Hamlets_ or _Lears_ among them. There are no _Midsummer Night's Dreams_.
There is not even a _Winter's Tale_.
If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in
general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare
his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire's
vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as
a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by
the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably
looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of
the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among
virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have
been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the
Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long
succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from
the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be
disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can
read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never
could have read them with his own.
One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down
Lamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr.
Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the
world--that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other
men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the
Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb
had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of
phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne
had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did
not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was
carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a
beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to
Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his
attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a
spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly
virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to
entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal
Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been
clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but
retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays
like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle.
Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for
saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of
his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life.
His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most
argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the
Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His
style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for
intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the
impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is
being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more
insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far
more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs
Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious
excess when he says of Brome:
Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in
their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as
Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris.
Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not going many
miles too far when he calls _The Antipodes_ "one of the most fanciful and
delightful farces in the world." It is a piece of poetic low comedy that
will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it
expecting to be bored.
It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average
reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed
in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale.
Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry
rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be
said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their
period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming
landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble
circumstances.
They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few
of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another
up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are
individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by
Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious
possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets
by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest
of them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and
Dekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never
existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry.
Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliant
heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of
Jonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the
excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy
which survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purely
dramatic work he ever wrote.
One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human
nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too
little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even so
good a play as _The Duchess of Malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive on
the part of the duchess's persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman's _Bussy
d'Ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines.
Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of
motive--the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in
part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of _King Lear_
as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the
other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _Othello_ breaks
free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of
the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was
Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists
again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was
natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on
pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader,
accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish
that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither
fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals,
but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the
base of Shakespeare's colossal statue.
Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of
Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have
added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a
character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_,
however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than
the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even
Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_,
described one of the chapters as "unreadable." The book as a whole is not
that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog
rather than by the full light of day.