THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.
1564-1616.
The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's
_Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing of
Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little less
than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there
were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature.
Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of
eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the
establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of
Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above
given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be
called the Elizabethan. In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the
queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited
much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their
forerunners; and "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" have been, by
courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a
certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a
largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which
stamp them all alike with the queen's seal.
Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of
the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of
the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a
rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in
the literature of her time. But in Elizabethan poetry the maiden queen
is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen
of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and even
Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in _Henry
VIII._, and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory
introduced into _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
That very time I saw--but thou could'st not--
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal thronëd by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy free--
an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth's hand.
The praises of the queen, which sound through all the poetry of her
time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not
merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never
before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and
bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the
gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's
feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the
crown. The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and
to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of
Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict
against popery and Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman. In spite
of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character,
and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her
government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will,
and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a _man_," and she
had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts,
passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic
flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities,
the nobles, and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with
plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the
day. "When the queen paraded through a country town," says Warton, the
historian of English poetry, "almost every pageant was a pantheon. When
she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the
hall she was saluted by the _penates_. In the afternoon, when she
condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons
and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs,
who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in
the figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by
Diana, who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of
unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of
Acteon." The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any
notice were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of
Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of
these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, _The
Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth_, and Walter Scott has
made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of _Kenilworth_.
Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy
of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to
see the spectacle; may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a huge
dolphin in the castle lake, speaking the copy of verses in which he
offered his trident to the empress of the sea; and may have
heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song.
But in considering the literature of Elizabeth's reign it will be
convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's
career to its close (1599) we have, for the sake of unity of treatment,
anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding.
In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English
prose. This was John Lyly's _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_. It was in
form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to
see the world and get an education; but it is in substance nothing but a
series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc., written in
language which, from the title of the book, has received the name of
_Euphuism_. This new English became very fashionable among the ladies,
and "that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism," says a
writer of 1632, "was as little regarded as she which now there speaks
not French."
Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the _Monastery_, but
the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shaft on is made to talk is not at
all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration,
and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from
a kind of fabulous natural history. "Descend into thine own conscience
and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and
stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust; be merry, but with modesty;
be sober, but not too sullen; be valiant, but not too venturous." "I see
now that, as the fish _Scolopidus_ in the flood _Araxes_ at the waxing
of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black
as the burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our
familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most
faithless." Besides the fish _Scolopidus_, the favorite animals of
Lyly's menagerie are such as the chameleon, "which though he have most
guts draweth least breath;" the bird _Piralis_, "which sitting upon
white cloth is white, upon green, green;" and the serpent _Porphirius_,
"which, though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none
but himself."
Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air
of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On every
page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but
many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the
hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and
polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in
rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and
introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in
Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, _Euphues
and his England,_ and six editions of the whole work were printed before
1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's _School of Abuse_, a
tract directed against the stage and published about four months later
than the first part of _Euphues_, the language is directly Euphuistic.
The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587, his _Menaphon;
Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues_, and his _Euphues's Censure to
Philautus_. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published, in 1590,
_Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy_, from which Shakspere took the plot
of _As You Like It_. Shakspere and Ben Jonson both quote from _Euphues_
in their plays, and Shakspere was really writing Euphuism when he wrote
such a sentence as "'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis 'tis true."
[Illustration: Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Milton.]
That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty
aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar,
poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and
then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had
been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went
to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alençon, and
was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572.
Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands,
had gone as embassador to the emperor's court, and every-where won
golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of
Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the _Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia_, which remained in manuscript till 1590. This was a
pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian _Arcadia_ of
Sanazzaro, and the _Diana Enamorada_ of Montemayor, a Portuguese author.
It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney
finished only two books and a portion of the third. It describes the
adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who were wrecked on
the coast of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full of the stock
episodes of romance: disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles,
jousts and single combats. Although the insurrection of the Helots
against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not the
real Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of
pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the fairy land of Spenser.
Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that
he
did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use,
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes.
Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as "Italianated" as
Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose.
His "Sidneian showers of sweet discourse" sowed every page of the
_Arcadia_ with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his
contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer age finds
insipid. This splendid vice of the Elizabethan writers appears in
Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. If he
describes a field full of roses, he makes "the roses add such a ruddy
show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty." If he
describes ladies bathing in the stream, he makes the water break into
twenty bubbles, as "not content to have the picture of their face in
large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set forth a
miniature of them." And even a passage which should be tragic, such as
the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with conceits like
these: "For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued weeping got a
little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a little
trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death; in her cheeks the
whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of
them; her neck, a neck of alabaster, displaying the wound which with
most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties; so as here was a
river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white," etc.
The _Arcadia_, like _Euphues_, was a lady's book. It was the favorite
court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its
sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady for
whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been
dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.
Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learn'd and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.
Sidney's _Defense of Poesy_ composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595,
was written in manlier English than the _Arcadia_, and is one of the
very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time.
He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, _Astrophel and
Stella_, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich
(with whom he was not in love), according to the conventional usage of
the amourists.
Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at
Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent sent to help
the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his giving his
cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, "Thy necessity is yet
greater than mine." Sidney was England's darling, and there was hardly a
poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain "the meed of some
melodious tear." Spenser's _Ruins of Time_ were among the number of
these funeral songs; but the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden,
concerning whom little is known.
Another typical Englishman of Elizabeth's reign was Walter Raleigh, who
was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the
restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical
enterprise that marked, the times. He fought against the queen's enemies
by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Netherlands and in
Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot army against the League in
France. Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great nursery of English
seamen. He was half-brother to the famous navigator, Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard Grenville. He
sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure
fleet, and in 1591 he published a report of the fight, near the Azores,
between Grenville's ship, the _Revenge_, and fifteen great ships of
Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon, "memorable even beyond credit, and
to the height of some heroical fable." Raleigh was active in raising a
fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588. He was present in 1596 at the
brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex "singed the Spanish king's
beard," in the harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed to Guiana,
in search of the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish
town of San José, in the West Indies; and on his return he published
his _Discovery of the Empire of Guiana_. In 1597 he captured the town of
Fayal, in the Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia,
and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe.
America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors,
nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, "the
Devonshire Skipper," had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, after his
voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily
stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the
exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and
Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published
by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, _The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and
Discoveries made by the English Nation_, worked powerfully on the
imaginations of the poets. We see the influence of this literature of
travel in the _Tempest_, written undoubtedly after Shakspere had been
reading the narrative of Sir George Somers's shipwreck on the Bermudas
or "Isles of Devils."
Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth's successor, James I. He was
sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason. The sentence
hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and he was
beheaded. Meanwhile, during his twelve years' imprisonment in the Tower,
he had written his _magnum opus_, the _History of the World_. This is
not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of learned
dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. A chapter
with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in a
universal history nowadays: "Of their opinion which make Paradise as
high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle
regions of the air." The preface and conclusion are noble examples of
Elizabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to
Death. "O eloquent, just and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou
hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the
world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised;
thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride,
cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two
narrow words, _hic jacet_."
Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet. Spenser calls
him "the summer's nightingale," and George Puttenham, in his _Art of
English Poesy_ (1589), finds his "vein most lofty, insolent, and
passionate." Puttenham used _insolent_ in its old sense, _uncommon_; but
this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its
modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, _The Lie_, are a
challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of
life--the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. The same grave and caustic
melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, _The
Pilgrimage_. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few
poetical remains are asserted in the manuscripts or by tradition to have
been "made by Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he was beheaded." Of
one such poem the assertion is probably true--namely, the lines "found
in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster."
Even such is Time, that takes in trust,
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust!
The strictly _literary_ prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small
proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature
were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented--outside of the
_Arcadia_ and _Euphues_ already mentioned--chiefly by tales translated
or imitated from Italian _novelle_. George Turberville's _Tragical
Tales_ (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter's
_Palace of Pleasure_ (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio's
_Decameron_ and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly of
interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge's
_Rosalind_ and Robert Greene's _Pandosto_, the sources respectively of
Shakspere's _As You Like It_ and _Winter's Tale_, are short pastoral
romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical
pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against "Martin Marprelate,"
an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops,
are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic
whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion
has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were Nash's _Piers
Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_, Lyly's _Pap with a Hatchet_, and
Greene's _Groat's Worth of Wit_. Of books which were not so much
literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the
_Chronicle of England_, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was
Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced
Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in
his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely
Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from
the French version of Jacques Amyot.
Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most
important was Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the first four
books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of
law, and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of
the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had
yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous,
stately, and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an
English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers,
such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the _Ecclesiastical Polity_
been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would
doubtless have been written in Latin.
The life of Francis Bacon, "the father of inductive philosophy," as he
has been called--better, the founder of inductive logic--belongs to
English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to
the history of English philosophy. But his volume of _Essays_ was a
contribution to general literature. In their completed form they belong
to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and
contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of
pregnant maxims--the text for an essay--than that developed treatment of
a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were, said
their author, "as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appetite
than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays, so called, in
the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the thing is
ancient." The word he took from the French _essais_ of Montaigne, the
first two books of which had been published in 1592. Bacon testified
that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they "came
home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate title explains their
character: _Counsels Civil and Moral_, that is, pieces of advice
touching the conduct of life, "of a nature whereof men shall find much
in experience, little in books." The essays contain the quintessence of
Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of men. The
truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they
cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many
of them the currency of proverbs. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice."
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." "There
is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the
proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination,
and his noble English rises now and then, as in his essay _On Death_,
into eloquence--the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar
off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that
_lumen siccum_ which he loved to commend, "not drenched or bloodied by
the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was
a dry wine.
A popular class of books in the 17th century were "characters" or "witty
descriptions of the properties of sundry persons," such as the Good
Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some modern
_Heads of the People_, where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches the
Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more modern instance of
the kind is George Eliot's _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, which
derives its title from the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, whose
character-sketches were the original models of this kind of literature.
The most popular character-book in Europe in the 17th century was La
Bruyère's _Caractères_. But this was not published till 1688. In England
the fashion had been set in 1614, by the _Characters_ of Sir Thomas
Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed. One
of Overbury's sketches--the _Fair and Happy Milkmaid_--is justly
celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness. "Her breath is
her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made
hay-cock. She makes her hand hard with labor, and her heart soft with
pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel,
she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She bestows her year's
wages at next fair, and, in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in
the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and
surgery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold
sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none;
yet to say truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied with old
songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones. Thus lives she, and
all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers
stuck upon her winding-sheet."
England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and
rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said
Bishop Joseph Hall, which were "sung to the wheel and sung unto the
pail." Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into
the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of them through his plays,
and wrote others like them himself:
Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song.
That old and antique song we heard last night.
Methinks it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.
The knitters and the spinners in the sun
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones
Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth[20]
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age.
[Footnote 20: Simple truth.]
Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with
sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in
miscellanies, such as the _Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon_, and
Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of
whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known
writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly,
Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. Series of
love sonnets, like Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Sidney's _Astrophel and
Stella_, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond,
Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or
imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as
William Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_ and _Shepherd's Pipe_
(1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, _The Passionate
Shepherd to his Love_, which Shakspere quoted in the _Merry Wives of
Windsor_, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love
stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and Juliet_ (the source of
Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero and Leander_, and
Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of Lucrece_, the first of
these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though
handled in any thing but a classical manner. Wordsworth said finely of
Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died
of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are
by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at
every turn, though it be with golden sand. It is significant of his
dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of
narration, and that, in the _Rape of Lucrece_ especially, the poet
lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening
on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have
done.
In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the
same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in
some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who
wrote the last four "sestiads"),[21] the path is utterly lost, "with
woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown." One is reminded that modern
poetry, if it has lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one
compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's _Hero and Leander_ with
Byron's ringing lines:
The wind is high on Helle's wave,
As on that night of stormy water,
When love, who sent, forgot to save
The young, the beautiful, the brave,
The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter.
[Footnote 21: From Sestos on the Hellespont, where Hero dwelt.]
Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best
remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from
1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a
great Elizabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but not
his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond
his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was written, as has
been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of
Chapman's time. Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer_, is well known. In his translation of the _Odyssey_, Chapman
employed the ten-syllabled heroic line chosen by most of the standard
translators; but for the _Iliad_ he used the long "fourteener."
Certainly all later versions--Pope's and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and
Bryant's--seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman's English,
which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble
metrist. In Chapman it is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many
passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer's
hexameters.
From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
Like rich Antumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire
Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face
Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase.
The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea,
found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow's
_Survey of London_, and Harrison's _Description of England_ (prefixed to
Holinshed's _Chronicle_), but in long historical and descriptive poems,
like William Warner's _Albion's England_, 1586; Samuel Daniel's _History
of the Civil Wars_, 1595-1602; Michael Drayton's _Barons' Wars,_ 1596,
_England's Heroical Epistles_, 1598, and _Polyolbion,_ 1613. The very
plan of these works was fatal to their success. It is not easy to digest
history and geography into poetry. Drayton was the most considerable
poet of the three, but his _Polyolbion_ was nothing more than a
"gazeteer in rime," a topographical survey of England and Wales, with
tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty
books and nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of
Marlowe, that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the
first poets had;" and there are brave things in Drayton, but they are
only occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His
_Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of
Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and is
interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the popular
fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a good
honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative piece, his
_Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland,_ a sermon apparently on the text
of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of philosophy,
Suave, mari magno, turbantibus æquora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.
But the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in
the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that
some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without
having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes
when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of
immortal thought and passion. Such was in England the fortune of the
stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that
were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays
that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible,
and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history
and additions to the church service on feasts and saints' days.
Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them,
and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air. In some English
cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed almost
to the close of the 16th century. And in the celebrated Passion Play at
Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle play that has
survived to our own day. These were followed by the moral plays, in
which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty Juventus, Riches,
Folly, and Good Demeanaunce were the persons of the drama. The comic
character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and he was retained
in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract vice, who
became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The "formal Vice,
Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for his business to belabor
the roaring Devil with his wooden sword:
...with his dagger of lath
In his rage and his wrath
Cries 'Aha!' to the Devil,
'Pare your nails, Goodman Evil!'
He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch,
of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his
back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes.
Masques and interludes--the latter a species of short farce--were
popular at the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was often entertained at
the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with
translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto. Original comedies and
tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence and Seneca, and
chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings. There was a
master of the revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays to be
performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children of the
Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral. These early
plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and
throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakspere's;
but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary value.
There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy
noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players,
who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until stationary
theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and
established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of
literature. In 1576 the first London play-houses, known as the Theater
and the Curtain, were erected in the suburb of Shoreditch, outside the
city walls. Later the Rose, the Hope, the Globe, and the Swan were built
on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers resorting to them
were accustomed to "take boat." These locations were chosen in order to
get outside the jurisdiction of the mayor and corporation, who were
Puritans, and determined in their opposition to the stage. For the same
reason the Blackfriars, belonging to the company that owned the
Globe--the company in which Shakspere was a stockholder--was built,
about 1596, within the "liberties" of the dissolved monastery of the
Blackfriars.
These early theaters were of the rudest construction. The six-penny
spectators, or "groundlings," stood in the yard or pit, which had
neither floor nor roof. The shilling spectators sat on the stage, where
they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence they
chaffed the actors or the "opposed rascality" in the yard. There was no
scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys. Plays were acted in
the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or "Rome," or
whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude appliances
must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight battlements of
Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The dramatists had to
throw themselves upon the imagination of their public, and it says much
for the imaginative temper of the public of that day, that it responded
to the appeal. It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals
of space and time, and "with aid of some few foot and half-foot words,
fight over York and Lancaster's long jars." Pedantry undertook, even at
the very beginnings of the Elizabethan drama, to shackle it with the
so-called rules of Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place, to
make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from
tragedy. But the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer
sympathies of the audience, and they decided for feedom and action,
rather than restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of
Shakspere and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in
London in full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred
and fifty thousand inhabitants.
Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the
Englishmen of that time than it has ever been before or since. It was
his club, his novel, his newspaper, all in one. No great drama has ever
flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the
Elizabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors, and familiar
with stage effect. Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and Fletcher,
who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not dependent on their
pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived in a theatrical
atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be put on.
It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and
playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of
their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough
from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence,
some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome property in
his native Stratford. Accordingly, shortly after 1580, a number of men
of real talent began to write for the stage as a career. These were
young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly,
Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors
and playwrights. Most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in
wretchedness. Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses;
Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and
pickled herring, and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl.
The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays between 1584 and 1601. They were
written for court entertainments, mostly in prose and on mythological
subjects. They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk and
vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them. All the
characters talk Ephuism. The best of these was _Alexander and Campaspe_,
the plot of which is briefly as follows. Alexander has fallen in love
with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the artist Apelles to
paint her portrait. During the sittings Apelles becomes enamored of his
subject and declares his passion, which is returned. Alexander discovers
their secret, but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the
lovers' hands. The situation is a good one, and capable of strong
treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But Lyly slips smoothly over
the crisis of the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives us
clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of
question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings.
For example:
"_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world?"
"_Camp_. He that made me last in the world."
"_Apel_. That was God."
"_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc.
Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and
sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's
indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit
combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_,
greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.
The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere's forerunners,
or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly
called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he
died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have
written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's
Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of
tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent
plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left
little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. _Tamburlaine_
was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with
passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's
phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his
_Discoveries_, the "scenical strutting and furious vociferation" of
Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere put a quotation from _Tamburlaine_ into
the mouth of his ranting Pistol. Marlowe's _Edward II_. was the most
regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays. It was the best
historical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and not undeserving of
the comparison which it has provoked with the latter's _Richard II._ But
the most interesting of Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the
_Tragical History of Doctor Faustus_. The subject is the same as in
Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as
greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to
Goethe's. His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a
mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to
the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power. The tragic
irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus
makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and
feats of legerdermain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The
love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is
entirely wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of
Goethe's Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is
materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in
witchcraft. The greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the last
scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician
awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully
drawn.
O, _lente, lente currite, noctis equi_!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike....
O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!
Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the
comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery.
George Peele's masterpiece, _David and Bethsabe_, was also, in many
respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than
dramatic, consisting not in the characterization--which is feeble--but
in the Eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one noble chorus--
O proud revolt of a presumptuous man,
which reminds one of passages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and
occasionally Peele rises to such high Æschylean audacities as this:
At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.
Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and
careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the
mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and
want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage. He has,
notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness and grace
than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_,
there is a fresh breath, as of the green English country, in such
passages as the description of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and
the picture of the dairy in the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield.
In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art
proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared not
only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable
advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection,
hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the
equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are
certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more developed state of
the art. But the work of this early school settled the shape which the
English drama was to take. It fixed the practice and traditions of the
national theater. It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole
of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in
the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action. It
decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue,
bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions,
hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle,
murder, and sudden death. It established blank verse, with occasional
riming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech, as the
language of the tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the language
of the low comedy and "business" parts. And it introduced songs, a
feature of which Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like
all great poets, invented no new form of literature, but touched old
forms to finer purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even
the old chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the
old jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.
Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the
world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious
persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of
reason--that the plays which pass under his name were really written by
Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making
serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote
Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is
startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or
perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that
his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and
fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the Homeric
poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost
prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of
his death the first English colony in America was already nine years
old. The important known facts of his life can be told almost in a
sentence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he was
eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor, play
writer, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars and
the Globe theaters. He seemingly prospered, and retired about 1609 to
Stratford, where he lived in the house that he had bought some years
before, and where he died in 1616. His _Venus and Adonis_ was printed in
1593, his _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and his _Sonnets_ in 1609. So far
as is known, only eighteen of the thirty-seven plays generally
attributed to Shakspere were printed during his life-time. These were
printed singly, in quarto shape, and were little more than stage books,
or librettos. The first collected edition of his works was the so-called
"First Folio" of 1623, published by his fellow-actors, Heming and
Condell. No contemporary of Shakspere thought it worth while to write a
life of the stage-player. There is a number of references to him in the
literature of the time; some generous, as in Ben Jonson's well-known
verses; others singularly unappreciative, like Webster's mention of "the
right happy and copious industry of Master Shakspere." But all these
together do not begin to amount to the sum of what was said about
Spenser, or Sidney, or Raleigh, or Ben Jonson. There is, indeed, nothing
to show that his contemporaries understood what a man they had among
them in the person of "Our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare." The
age, for the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to
review writing and literary biography. Nor is there enough of
self-revelation in Shakspere's plays to aid the reader in forming a
notion of the man. He lost his identity completely in the characters of
his plays, as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do. His sonnets
have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence as to his
character and life, but the speculations founded upon them have been
more ingenious than convincing.
Shakspere probably began by touching up old plays. _Henry VI_. and the
bloody tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_, if Shakspere's at all, are
doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage. The _Taming
of the Shrew_ seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere and some
other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in
parts of _Henry VIII., Pericles_, and _Timon of Athens_. Such
partnerships were common among the Elizabethan dramatists, the most
illustrious example being the long association of Beaumont and Fletcher.
The plays in the First Folio were divided into histories, comedies, and
tragedies, and it will be convenient to notice them briefly in that
order.
It was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try
his fortune. Elizabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to
Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. The following
year saw the destruction of the colossal Armada, which Spain had sent to
revenge Mary's death; and hard upon these events followed the gallant
exploits of Grenville, Essex, and Raleigh.
That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of the times, and the
sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now
born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a passage in his
plays.
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea!
His English histories are ten in number. Of these _King John_ and _Henry
VIII._ are isolated plays. The others form a consecutive series, in the
following order: _Richard II._ the two parts of _Henry IV., Henry V.,_
the three parts of _Henry VI.,_ and _Richard III._ This series may be
divided into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group of four plays. In
the first the subject is the rise of the house of Lancaster. But the
power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation. In the second group,
accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars of the Roses, reaching
their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York, and the
tyranny of Gloucester. The happy conclusion is finally reached in the
last play of the series, when this new usurper is overthrown in turn,
and Henry VII., the first Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne and
restores the Lancastrian inheritance, purified, by bloody atonement,
from the stain of Richard II.'s murder. These eight plays are, as it
were, the eight acts of one great drama; and, if such a thing were
possible, they should be represented on successive nights, like the
parts of a Greek trilogy. In order of composition the second group came
first. _Henry VI_. is strikingly inferior to the others. _Richard III_.
is a good acting play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series
of great tragedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, in a
literary sense, it is unequal to _Richard II.,_ or the two parts of
_Henry IV_. The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical
tragedy, and it contains his master-creation in the region of low
comedy, the immortal Falstaff.
The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is
well seen in comparing his _King John_ with the two plays on that
subject which were already on the stage. These, like all the other old
"Chronicle histories," such as _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ and the _Famous
Victories of Henry V._, follow a merely chronological, or biographical,
order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without any unity of
effect, or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe.
Shakspere's order was logical. He compressed and selected, disregarding
the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the higher truth of fiction;
bringing together a crime and its punishment as cause and effect, even
though they had no such relation in the chronicle, and were separated,
perhaps, by many years.
Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's Lost_
was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together a
number of _humors_, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts,
and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his
comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of play,
unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story turned on
a single "humor," Katharine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's
_Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The _Taming of the
Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays;
a _bourgeois_ domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It belongs
to the school of French comedy, like Molière's _Malade Imaginaire_, not
to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.
The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It
was a play purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability
being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so
alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications
follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play.
Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll.
The fun lies in the situation. This was a comedy of the Latin school,
and resembled the _Mennaechmi_ of Plautus. Shakspere never returned to
this type of play, though there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer
Night's Dream_. In the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally hit upon
that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or
created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his
predecessors. In this play, as in the _Merchant of Venice, Midsummer
Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night,
Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure_, and the
_Tempest_, the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main
intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary
intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by
no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest
motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of
romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and
gayety, as in _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_. In others, like
_Measure for Measure_, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the
happy close. Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end,
and a play like _Winter's Tale_, in which the painful situation is
prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed,
were called, on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies."
The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was
cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely,
and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touchstone and
Audrey, in _As You Like It_; sometimes closely, as in the case of
Dogberry and Verges, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, where the blundering
of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action.
The _Merry Wives of Windsor_ is an exception to this plan of
construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-class
English life, and, is written almost throughout in prose. It is his only
pure comedy, except the _Taming of the Shrew_.
Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned
it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus
_Cymbeline_ is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as
_Winter's Tale_--to which its plot bears a resemblance--and is only
technically a tragedy because it contains a violent death. In some of
the tragedies, as in _Macbeth_ and _Julius Cæsar_, the comedy element is
reduced to a minimum. But in others, as _Romeo and Juliet_, and
_Hamlet_, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast. Akin
to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the
moralities. The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in _As You Like It_, and
Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_, are a sort of parody of the
function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with
scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of
insight into the depths of man's nature.
The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless _Titus Andronicus_ be his,
was, doubtless, _Romeo and Juliet_, which is full of the passion and
poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large proportion of
riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work. He
dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew
freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet. _Romeo
and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that
the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama.
It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic conclusions from within,
through character, rather than through external chances. This is true of
all the great tragedies of his middle life, _Hamlet, Othello, Lear,
Macbeth_, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the
character and actions of the hero. This is so, in a special sense, in
_Hamlet_, the subtlest of all Shakspere's plays, and, if not his
masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled
the greatest minds. It is observable that in Shakspere's comedies there
is no one central figure, but that, in passing into tragedy, he
intensified and concentrated the attention upon a single character. This
difference is seen even in the naming of the plays; the tragedies always
take their titles from their heroes, the comedies never.
Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned were the
three Roman plays, _Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus,_ and _Anthony and
Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the plot
of none of his plays, but took material that he found at hand. In these
Roman tragedies he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, even in so doing,
gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when
he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist. It is
most instructive to compare _Julius Cæsar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline_
and _Sejanus_. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In
_Catiline_ he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first
oration against Catiline. _Sejanus_ is a mosaic of passages from Tacitus
and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play.
Having grasped the conceptions of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and
Mark Anthony, as Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their
consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original,
and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is
reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's
own. _Timon of Athens_ is the least agreeable and most monotonous of
Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and _Troilus and Cressida_, said
Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old
Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern
standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them. Ajax becomes a
stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a
vain and sulky chief of faction. In losing their ideal remoteness the
heroes of the _Iliad_ lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer
experiences an unpleasant disenchantment.
It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude
though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling
his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in England
with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist. It is true
that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and
at all points perfect. But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere
did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage,
with the finer requirements of his art. Strained interpretations have
been put upon this or that item in Shakspere's plays; and yet it is
generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in
a given case than that "the audience liked puns," or, "the audience
liked ghosts." Compare, for example, his delicate management of the
supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in _Faustus_. Shakspere's age
believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always
something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery. The ghost
in _Hamlet_ is merely an embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is
invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The
witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into
a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the
fairies in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ are the personified caprices of the
lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes and
dislikes they control, save in the instance where Bottom is "translated"
(that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible world. So in the
_Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth,
ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's necessities.
Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at more
points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the sweetest
poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his plays. He
made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the
history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a
world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, though at
first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of classical
taste, have at length learned to know him. An ever-growing mass of
Shakespearian literature, in the way of comment and interpretation,
critical, textual, historical, or illustrative, testifies to the
durability and growth of his fame. Above all, his plays still keep, and
probably always will keep, the stage. It is common to speak of
Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists as if they stood, in
some sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost measureless
distance between him and all his contemporaries. The rest shared with
him in the mighty influences of the age. Their plays are touched here
and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint
heirs. But, as a whole, they are obsolete. They live in books, but not
in the hearts and on the tongues, of men.
The most remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare was
Ben Jonson, whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the other's
gracious impersonality. Jonson was nine years younger than Shakespeare.
He was educated at Westminster School, served as a soldier in the low
countries, became an actor in Henslowe's company, and was twice
imprisoned--once for killing a fellow-actor in a duel, and once for his
part in the comedy of _Eastward Hoe_, which gave offense to King James.
He lived down to the time of Charles I (1635), and became the
acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit
combats at the Mermaid, the Devil, and other famous London taverns.
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.[22]
The inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is simply
O rare Ben Jonson!
[Footnote 22: Francis Beaumont. _Letter to Ben Jonson_.]
Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the _vetus comædia_ of Aristophanes,
which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely
different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and not romantic,
and were pure comedies, admitting no admixture of tragic motives. There
is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his
dramatic creations. They were comedies not of character, in the high
sense of the word, but of manners or humors. His design was to lash the
follies and vices of the day, and his _dramatis personæ_ consisted for
the most part of gulls, impostors, fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts,
and "Pauls men." In his first play, _Every Man in his Humor_ (acted in
1598), in _Every Man Out of his Humor, Bartholomew Fair_, and, indeed,
in all of his comedies, his subject was the fashionable affectations,
the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London life. His
procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic humorists,
and "squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls," by playing them off
upon each other, involving them in all manner of comical misadventures,
and rendering them utterly ridiculous and contemptible. There was thus a
perishable element in his art, for manners change; and, however
effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been
before an audience of Jonson's day, it is as hard for a modern reader to
detect his points as it will be for a reader two hundred years hence to
understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the
present day as _Patience_, or the _Colonel_. Nevertheless, a patient
reader, with the help of copious footnotes, can gradually put together
for himself an image of that world of obsolete humors in which Jonson's
comedy dwells, and can admire the dramatist's solid good sense, his
great learning, his skill in construction, and the astonishing fertility
of his invention. His characters are not revealed from within, like
Shakspere's, but built up painfully from outside by a succession of
minute, laborious particulars. The difference will be plainly manifest
if such a character as Slender, in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, be
compared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson's
plays; with Master Stephen, for example, in _Every Man in his Humor_;
or, if Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same
comedy, perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature.
_Cynthia's Revels_ was a satire on the courtiers and the _Poetaster_ on
Jonson's literary enemies. The _Alchemist_ was an exposure of quackery,
and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted with
learning. _Volpone_ is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a
harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it depicts
is too revolting for comedy. The _Silent Woman_ is, perhaps, the easiest
of all Jonson's plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate.
There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is extremely ludicrous,
and the emphasis is laid upon a single humor or eccentricity, as in some
of Molière's lighter comedies, like _Le Malade Imaginaire_, or _Le
Médecin malgré lui_.
In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in
lyric poetry. His songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakspere's,
but they have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his _Love's Triumph,
Hymn to Diana_, the adaptation from Philostratus,
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
and many others entitle their author to rank among the first of English
lyrists. Some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous
verse, the _Forest_ and _Underwoods_; others in the numerous masques
which he composed. These were a species of entertainment, very popular
at the court of James I., combining dialogue with music, intricate
dances, and costly scenery. Jonson left an unfinished pastoral drama,
the _Sad Shepherd_, which contains passages of great beauty; one,
especially, descriptive of the shepherdess
Earine,
Who had her very being and her name
With the first buds and breathings of the spring,
Born with the primrose and the violet
And earliest roses blown.
1. A History of Elizabethan Literature. George Saintsbury.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1877.
2. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1877.
3. The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. Edited
by J. Hannah. London: Bell & Daldy, 1870.
4. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. London: Sampson
Low, Son & Marston, 1867.
5. Bacon's Essays. Edited by W. Aldis Wright. Macmillan
& Co. (Golden Treasury Series.)
6. The Cambridge Shakspere. (Clark & Wright.)
7. Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.
8. Ben Jonson's Volpone and Silent Woman. Cunningham's
Edition. London: J.C. Hotten, (3 vols.)