THE DRAMA
(1)
Biologists tell us that the hybrid--the product of a variety of
ancestral stocks--is more fertile than an organism with a direct and
unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too fanciful as the
starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, which owed its strength
and vitality, more than to anything else, to the variety of the
discordant and contradictory elements of which it was made up. The drama
was the form into which were moulded the thoughts and desires of the
best spirits of the time. It was the flower of the age. To appreciate
its many-sided significances and achievements it is necessary to
disentangle carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the
classics, in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air
of enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time.
As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious thing.
Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval Church. Early in
the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners began the habit, at
Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of playing some part of the story
of Christ's life suitable to the festival of the day. These plays were
liturgical, and originally, no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element.
But gradually the inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the
upper hand; from ceremonies they developed into performances; they
passed from the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street. A
waggon, the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in
England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This momentous
change in the history of the miracle play, which made it in all but its
occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place about the end of
the twelfth century. The rise of the town guilds gave the plays a new
character; the friendly rivalry of leagued craftsmen elaborated their
production; and at length elaborate cycles were founded which were
performed at Whitsuntide, beginning at sunrise and lasting all through
the day right on to dusk. Each town had its own cycle, and of these the
cycles of York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry still remain. So too,
does an eye-witness's account of a Chester performance where the plays
took place yearly on three days, beginning with Whit Monday. "The
manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a
high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In
the lower they apparelled themselves and in the higher room they played,
being all open on the top that all beholders might hear and see them.
They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was
played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor and so to
every street. So every street had a pageant playing upon it at one time,
till all the pageants for the day appointed were played." The
"companies" were the town guilds and the several "pageants" different
scenes in Old or New Testament story. As far as was possible each
company took for its pageant some Bible story fitting to its trade; in
York the goldsmiths played the three Kings of the East bringing precious
gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and the shipwrights the building of
Noah's ark. The tone of these plays was not reverent; reverence after
all implies near at hand its opposite in unbelief. But they were
realistic and they contained within them the seeds of later drama in the
aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city
manners taken straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at
Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and
realistic comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright.
"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal.
With nails that are both noble and new
Thus shall I fix it to the keel,
Take here a rivet and there a screw,
With there bow there now, work I well,
This work, I warrant, both good and true."
Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and his
fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a doublet and
in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. Squeamishness
about historical accuracy is of a later date, and when it came we gained
in correctness less than we lost in art.
The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of Elizabethan drama,
but it must not be supposed they were over and done with before the
great age began. The description of the Chester performances, part of
which has been quoted, was written in 1594. Shakespeare must, one would
think, have seen the Coventry cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as
every one of the time must have been, with the performances;
"Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the
development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its
accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes
of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think
of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and
inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the
strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle
plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned
upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded
performance took place in London when King James entertained Gondomar,
the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that as a "command"
performance, reviving as command performances commonly do, something
dead for a generation--in this case, purely out of compliment to the
faith and inclination of a distinguished guest.
Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, though
contemporary in their popularity, came what we called "moralities" or
"moral interludes"--pieces designed to enforce a religious or ethical
lesson and perhaps to get back into drama something of the edification
which realism had ousted from the miracles. They dealt in allegorical
and figurative personages, expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and
squared rather with the careful self-concern of the newly established
Protestantism than with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more
characteristic of the time. _Everyman_, the oftenest revived and best
known of them, if not the best, is very typical of the class. They had
their influences, less profound than that of the miracles, on the full
drama. It is said the "Vice"--unregeneracy commonly degenerated into
comic relief--is the ancestor of the fool in Shakespeare, but more
likely both are successive creations of a dynasty of actors who
practised the unchanging and immemorial art of the clown. The general
structure of _Everyman_ and some of its fellows, heightened and made
more dramatic, gave us Marlowe's _Faustus_. There perhaps the influence
ends.
The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step nearer the
full growth of drama. Companies of strolling players formed themselves
and passed from town to town, seeking like the industrious amateurs of
the guilds, civic patronage, and performing in town-halls, market-place
booths, or inn yards, whichever served them best. The structure of the
Elizabethan inn yard (you may see some survivals still, and there are
the pictures in _Pickwick_) was very favourable for their purpose. The
galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the more
privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard stood the
crowd or sat, if they had stools with them. The stage was a platform set
on this floor space with its back against one side of the yard, where
perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a dressing room. So suitable was
this "fit-up" as actors call it, that when theatres came to be built in
London they were built on the inn-yard pattern. All the playhouses of
the Bankside from the "Curtain" to the "Globe" were square or circular
places with galleries rising above one another three parts round, a
floor space of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting
out on to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery
behind it.
The entertainment given by these companies of players (who usually got
the patronage and took the title of some lord) was various. They played
moralities and interludes, they played formless chronicle history plays
like the _Troublesome Reign of King John_, on which Shakespeare worked
for his _King John_; but above and before all they were each a company
of specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance for
which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of our
music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the theatre it
bears its affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of the Globe or
the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you must go. The
quality of the audience is a point of agreement. The Globe was
frequented by young "bloods" and by the more disreputable portions of
the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that day) "coney
catchers" and the like; commonly the only women present were women of
the town. The similarity extends from the auditorium to the stage. The
Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in exhibitions of strength
or skill from his actors; the broad sword combat in _Macbeth_, and the
wrestling in _As You Like It_, were real trials of skill. The bear in
the _Winter's Tale_ was no doubt a real bear got from a bear pit, near
by in the Bankside. The comic actors especially were the very
grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and Cowley, the
chief of them, were as much popular favourites and esteemed as separate
from the plays they played in as is Harry Lauder. Their songs and tunes
were printed and sold in hundreds as broadsheets, just as pirated
music-hall songs are sold to-day. This is to be noted because it
explains a great deal in the subsequent evolution of the drama. It
explains the delight in having everything represented actually on the
stage, all murders, battles, duels. It explains the magnificent largesse
given by Shakespeare to the professional fool. Work had to be found for
him, and Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his
triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in _Macbeth_ and the
Fool in _Lear_. Others met the problem in an attitude of frank despair.
Not all great tragic writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of
comedy, and Marlowe in _Dr. Faustus_ took the course of leaving the low
comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor demanded, to
an inferior collaborator.
Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and public
theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, produced the
Elizabethan drama which we know. The public theatres were not the only
places at which plays were produced. At the University, at the Inns of
Court (which then more than now, were besides centres of study rather
exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important
part of almost every festival. At these places were produced academic
compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we
find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus
or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were incomparably
the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always thought of
literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a
poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his rhetoric appealed to men
for whom words and great passages of verse were an intoxication that
only a few to-day can understand or sympathize with; his
bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink
from horrors. Tragedies early began to be written on the strictly
Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca's, with some ulterior
intention. Sackville's _Gorboduc_, the first tragedy in English,
produced at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing
Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession. To be
put to such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical
tragedy of the learned societies and the court. None of the pieces
composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and indeed
they could not have been a success on it. The Elizabethan audience, as
we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action
took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the
popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its
conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of
introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description
or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action;
contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama.
Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a
dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention. None
of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed
their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their hands
and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The stories of their
plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and writ in choice
Italian," and very often their methods of preparation were very like
his.
Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the time
affected and finished the drama we have already seen. It is time now to
turn to the dramatists themselves.
(2)
Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who fused the
academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of
literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, gave us
Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here. Greene and Peele, the
former by his comedies, the latter by his historical plays, and Kyd by
his tragedies, have their places in the text-books, but they belong to a
secondary order of dramatic talent. Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest.
It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole
movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering
instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and
made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him.
Historical relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other
English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of his
time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power and life
inspires all his pages. The teaching of Machiavelli, misunderstood for
their own purposes by would-be imitators, furnished the reign of
Elizabeth with the only political ideals it possessed. The simple
brutalism of the creed, with means justified by ends and the unbridled
self-regarding pursuit of power, attracted men for whom the Spanish
monarchy and the struggle to overthrow it were the main factors and
politics. Marlowe took it and turned it to his own uses. There is in his
writings a lust of power, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness," a
glow of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energy which
is in the spirit of the time. In _Tamburlaine_ it is the power of
conquest, stirred by and reflecting, as we have seen, the great deeds of
his day. In _Dr. Faustus_ it is the pride of will and eagerness of
curiosity. Faustus is devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his
knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art and to extend his power
with his knowledge. His is the spirit of Renaissance scholarship
heightened to a passionate excess. The play gleams with the pride of
learning and a knowledge which learning brings, and with the nemesis
that comes after it. "Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble
not at my speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I
have been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never
seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle in
which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in at the
quiet close.
"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired,
For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools;
We'll give his mangled limbs due burial;
And all the students, clothed in mourning black
Shall wait upon his heavy funeral."
Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in
every play. In the _Jew of Malta_ it is the hero Barabbas. In _Edward
II_. it is Piers Gaveston. In _Edward II_. indeed, two elements are
mixed--the element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the
purely tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in
which it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of
abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, "furnished
hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his _Richard II_; and the
death scene of Marlowe's King moves pity and terror beyond any scene,
ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives
the hint of what Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom
in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career.
Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went further than
his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with atheism, to have
denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might have had trouble with
the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one
way of outlet, but if literary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and
seventeenth century atheism was a very crude business. The _Atheist's
Tragedy_ of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us)
gives some measure of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to
the heroine,
"No? Then invoke
Your great supposed Protector. I will do't."
to which she:
"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then
I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain."
Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the
obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of language when the
thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation. He was a
butt of the parodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured
him "on this side idolatry," did his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol
is fed and stuffed with relic and rags of Marlowesque affectation--
"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia,
Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day."
is a quotation taken straight from _Tamburlaine_.
(3)
A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the limits of a
general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We must take up the
story of the drama with the reign of James and with the contemporaries
of his later period, though of course, a treatment which is conditioned
by the order of development is not strictly chronological, and some of
the plays we shall have to refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth
century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his
heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The
influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose _Spanish Tragedy_
with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the
popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists,
mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day
turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that
caught as an echo from better men than themselves. One of the worst of
these--he is also one of the most typical--was John Marston, a purveyor
of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose
tragedy _Antonio and Mellida_ was published in the same year as
Shakespeare's _Hamlet_. Both plays owed their style and plot to the same
tradition--the tradition created by Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_--in which
ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman
waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be
more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his
age than a comparison of the two. The style of _Antonio and Mellida_ is
the style of _The Murder of Gonzago_. There is no subtlety nor
introspection, the pale cast of thought falls with no shadow over its
scenes. And it is typical of a score of plays of the kind we have and
beyond doubt of hundreds that have perished. Shakespeare stands alone.
Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had its
root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, there was
a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely constructed strings
of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had its roots in a joyous and
fantastic study of the common people. These plays are happy and
high-spirited and, compared with the ordinary run of the tragedies, of
better workmanship. They deal in the familiar situations of low
comedy--the clown, the thrifty citizen and his frivolous wife, the
gallant, the bawd, the good apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously
and tersely and with a careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the
reading. The best writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker--and
the best play to read as a sample of it _Eastward Ho!_ in which Marston
put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined with Jonson
and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the non-Shakespearean
comedy of the time.
For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far cry in
spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was under
Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her successor. Quickly
though insensibly the temper of the nation suffered eclipse. The high
hopes and the ardency of the reign of Elizabeth saddened into a profound
pessimism and gloom in that of James. This apparition of unsought
melancholy has been widely noted and generally assumed to be
inexplicable. In broad outline its causes are clear enough, "To travel
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." The Elizabethans were, if
ever any were, hopeful travellers. The winds blew them to the four
quarters of the world; they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities.
They beat off the great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain.
They pushed discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth.
Under James all these things were over. Peace was made with Spain:
national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a
Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter Raleigh, a
romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was beheaded out of hand
by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred
devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive. The Court which had
been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a
knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a
king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and
none of their virtues. Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the
visiting moon. The bright day was done and they were for the dark. The
uprising of Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife
darkened the temper of the time.
The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, which
because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly reflects
soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. The onslaughts
of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable enemies of the
theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a difference between
the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the dark animosity of _The
Atheists' Tragedy_ with its Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any
villainy proposed to him! "I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to
a courtier who played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted,
"conceited" love passage in the vein of _Much Ado_, "I speak, sir, as
the fashion now: is, in earnest." The quick-witted, light-hearted age
was gone. It is natural that tragedy reflected this melancholy in its
deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no light to relieve it, men supped
full of horrors--there was no slackening of the tension, no concession
to overwrought nerves, no resting-place for the overwrought soul. It is
in the dramatist John Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful
exponent.
The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic figures
that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in Webster into a
duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on two tragedies, _The White
Devil_ and _The Duchess of Malf_. Both are stories of lust and crime,
full of hate and hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of
bitter and ironical comment on men and women. In them chance plays the
part of fate. "Blind accident and blundering mishap--'such a mistake,'
says one of the criminals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the
steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds." His
characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, cynical
informers, sad and loving women, and they are all themselves in every
phrase that they utter. But they are studied in earnestness and
sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare's successors
in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator. He has single
lines worthy to set beside those in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. His dirge
in the _Duchess of Malfi_, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside
the ditty in _The Tempest_, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned
father. "As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth,
earthy." He has earned his place among the greatest of our dramatists by
his two plays, the theme of which matched his sombre genius and the
sombreness of the season in which it flowered.
But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the
voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end.
They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a term often
used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that
an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to
its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which
keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is decadent when the
sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of
colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper
implications. Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of
O'Shaughnessy's
"We are the music-makers,
We are the dreamers of dreams,"
decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an obvious
rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses across the
moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in its word
texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader. The drama of Beaumont and
Fletcher is decadent in two ways. In the first place those variations
and licences with which Shakespeare in his later plays diversified the
blank verse handed on to him by Marlowe, they use without any restraint
or measure. "Weak" endings and "double" endings, _i.e._ lines which end
either on a conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or
lines in which there is a syllable too many--abound in their plays. They
destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic instrument by
letting this element of variety outrun the sparing and skilful use which
alone could justify it. But they were decadent in other and deeper ways
than that. Sentiment in their plays usurps the place of character.
Eloquent and moving speeches and fine figures are no longer subservient
to the presentation of character in action, but are set down for their
own sake, "What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave
soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge. When they die
they die to the music of their own virtue. When dreadful deeds are done
they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness which
throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare or Webster
but in tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is the authors'
forte and they play upon it amazingly. The sterner tones of their
predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent of pathos and woe.
This delight not in action or in emotion arising from action but in
passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity
in grain. Shakespeare may be free and even coarse. Beaumont and Fletcher
cultivate indecency. They made their subject not their master but their
plaything, or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their own
powers of figure and rhetoric.
Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be said
than they carried one step further the faults of their masters. Emotion
and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn sentiment. Tragedy takes on
the air of a masquerade. With them romantic drama died a natural death
and the Puritans' closing of the theatre only gave it a _coup de grace_.
In England it has had no second birth.
(4)
Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another author whose
lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close connection with the age
which followed, justifies his separate treatment. Ben Jonson shows a
marked contrast to Shakespeare in his character, his accomplishments,
and his attitude to letters, while his career was more varied than
Shakespeare's own. The first "classic" in English writing, he was a
"romantic" in action. In his adventurous youth he was by turns scholar,
soldier, bricklayer, actor. He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low
Countries; on his return to England fought a duel and killed his man,
only escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he
was Poet Laureate. Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and it
forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his work. But
it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his learning and
knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor Swinburne--perhaps not even
Milton--was a better scholar. He is one of the earliest of English
writers to hold and express different theories about literature. He
consciously appointed himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature
with a definite creed.
But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed to the
romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly classical. He
never consented to be bound by the "Unities"--that conception of
dramatic construction evolved out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated
in the Renaissance till, in its strictest form, it laid down that the
whole scene of a play should be in one place, its whole action deal with
one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be
no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently
an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's
temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited
because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was
essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was
uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never
veiled his scorn of those--Shakespeare among them--whom he conceived to
do so; but he knew and valued his own work, as his famous last word to
an audience who might be unsympathetic stands to witness,
"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you may."
Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two contemporary
comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one _As You Like It_,
the other _What You Will_. Of the two attitudes towards the public, and
they might stand as typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can
claim complete sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their
favours is not a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it
is apt to succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its
opposite.
Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he set it
against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly of
Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to _Every Man Out
of His Humour_--one of his earlier plays. "I travail with another
objection, Signor, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere
I can be delivered of it," says Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies
Cordatus. Mitis:--"That the argument of his comedy might have been of
some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that
countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the
lady's waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near
and familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I
would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define _Quin sit
comoedia_? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's
definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who
would have a comedy to be _invitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis,
imago veritatis_; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous and
accommodated to the correction of manners." That was what he meant his
comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular comedy of the day,
_Twelfth Night_ and _Much Ado_. Shakespeare might play with dukes and
countesses, serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come
down more near and ally himself familiarly with the times. So comedy was
to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and its
sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and elaboration,
respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and built up of
characters each the embodiment of some "humour" or eccentricity, and
each when his eccentricity is displaying itself at its fullest,
outwitted and exposed. This conception of "humours," based on a
physiology which was already obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism
of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of
contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and
tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of
contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the
models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and
follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and
elaborateness of the plots which he constructed for their exposure. At
the first glance his people are contemporary types, at the second they
betray themselves for what they are really--cock-shies set up by the new
comedy of Greece that every "classical" satirist in Rome or France or
England has had his shot at since. One wonders whether Ben Jonson, for
all his satirical intention, had as much observation--as much of an eye
for contemporary types--as Shakespeare's rustics and roysterers prove
him to have had. It follows that all but one or two of his plays, when
they are put on the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of
remoteness and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare
or Molière. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which is the
Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to
many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. Jealous husbands,
foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a
cunning slave--they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy
used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the
stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse.
Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention. Had he
kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting on to it
types he had learned from books, he might have made himself an English
Molière--without Molière's breadth and clarity--but with a corresponding
vigour and strength which would have kept his work sweet. And he might
have founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper
into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration
comedy ever succeeded in doing. As it is, his importance is mostly
historical. One must credit him with being the first of the English
classics--of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope. Perhaps
that is enough in his praise.