THE one contribution of the Elizabethan stage to the literature of the
world is the plays of Shakespeare. It seems unaccountable to us to-day
that the almost infinite superiority of his work to that of all his
contemporaries was not recognized in his own lifetime. There is frequent
mention in the literature of his time, of “the excellent dramatic
writer, Master Wm. Shakespeare” and usually in the way of praise, but in
the same category with other excellent dramatic writers, like Jonson,
Chapman, Webster, and Beaumont, and with no apparent suspicion that he
is in a quite different class from these, and forms indeed a class by
himself—is _sui generis_. In explanation of this blindness it should be
said, first that time is required to give the proper perspective to
literary values, and secondly that there is an absence of critical
documents from the Elizabethan period. There were no reviews or book
notices or literary biographies. A man in high place who was
incidentally an author, a great philosopher and statesman like Bacon, a
diplomatist and scholar like Sir Henry Wotton, a bishop or a learned
divine, like Sanderson, Donne or Herbert, might be thought worthy to
have his life recorded. But a mere man of letters—still more a mere
playwriter—was not entitled to a biography. Nowadays every writer of
fair pretensions has his literary portrait in the magazines. His work is
criticized, assayed, analyzed; and as soon as he is dead, his life and
letters appear in two volumes. We do not know what Shakespeare’s
contemporaries thought of him, except for a few complimentary verses,
and a few brief notices scattered through the miscellaneous books and
pamphlets of the time; and these in no wise characterize or distinguish
him, or set him apart from the crowd of fellow playwrights, from among
whom he has since so thoroughly emerged. Aside from the almost universal
verdict of posterity that Shakespeare is one of the greatest, if not
actually the greatest literary genius of all time, there are two
testimonies to his continued vitality. One of these is the fact that his
plays have never ceased to be played. At least twenty of his plays still
belong to the acted drama. Several of the others, less popular, are
revived from time to time. We do not often have a chance in England or
America to see “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Measure for Measure,” or
“Richard II”—all pieces of the highest intellectual interest—to see
them behind the footlights. But all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays
are given annually in Germany. Indeed, the Germans claim to have
appropriated Shakespeare and to have made him their own.
Now the only seventeenth century play outside of Shakespeare which still
keeps the stage is Massinger’s comedy, “A New Way to Pay Old Debts.”
This has frequently been given in America, with artists like Edwin Booth
and E. L. Davenport in the leading rôle, Sir Giles Overreach. A number
of the plays of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood,
Middleton, and perhaps other Elizabethan dramatists continued to be
played down to the middle of the eighteenth century, and a few of them
as late as 1788. Fletcher’s comedy, “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,” was
acted in 1829; and Dekker’s “Old Fortunatus”[8] enjoyed a run of twelve
performances in 1819. But these were sporadic revivals. Professor Gayley
concludes that of the two hundred and fifty comedies, exclusive of
Shakespeare’s, produced between 1600 and 1625, “only twenty-six survived
upon the stage in the middle of the eighteenth century: in 1825, five;
and after 1850, but one,—‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts,’—while at the
present-day no fewer than sixteen out of Shakespeare’s seventeen
comedies are fixtures upon the stage.” Now and then a favorite
Elizabethan play like Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist,” or Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s
Holiday,” or Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” is
presented by amateurs before a college audience or a dramatic club, or
some other semi-private bunch of spectators. Middleton’s “Spanish Gipsy”
was thus presented in 1898 before the Elizabethan Stage Society and was
rather roughly handled by the newspaper critics. But these are literary
curiosities and mean something very different from the retention of a
play on the repertoire of the professional public theatres. It is a case
of revival, not of survival.
But even if Shakespeare’s plays should cease to be shown,—a thing by no
means impossible, since theatrical conditions change,—they would never
cease to be read. Already he has a hundred readers for one spectator.
And one proof of this eternity of fame is the extent to which his
language has taken possession of the English tongue. In Bartlett’s
“Dictionary of Quotations” there are over one hundred and twenty pages
of citations from Shakespeare, including hundreds of expressions which
are in daily use and are as familiar as household words. These include
not merely maxims and sentences universally current, such as “Brevity is
the soul of wit,” “The course of true love never did run smooth,” “One
touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” but detached phrases: “wise
saws and modern instances,” “a woman’s reason,” “the sere, the yellow
leaf,” “damnable iteration,” “sighing like a furnace,” “the funeral
baked meats,” “the primrose path of dalliance,” “a bright, particular
star,” “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily,” “the bubble
reputation,” “Richard’s himself again,” “Such stuff as dreams are made
on.” There is only one other book—the English Bible—which has so
wrought itself into the very tissue of our speech. This is not true of
the work of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists. I cannot, at the moment,
recall any words of theirs that have this stamp of universal currency
except Christopher Marlowe’s “Love me little, so you love me long.”
Coleridge prophesied that the works of the other Elizabethan playwrights
would in time be reduced to notes on Shakespeare: i.e., they would be
used simply to illustrate or explain difficult passages in Shakespeare’s
text. This is an extreme statement and I cannot believe it true. For the
dramas of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Webster,
Middleton, and many others will never lack readers, though they will
find them not among general readers, but among scholars, men of letters,
and those persons, not so very few in number, who have a strong appetite
for plays of all kinds. Moreover, vast as is the distance between
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, historically he was one of them. The
stage was his occasion, his opportunity. Without the Elizabethan theatre
there would have been no Shakespeare. Let us seek to get some idea,
then, of what this Elizabethan drama was, which formed the Shakespearean
background and environment. Of course, in the short space at my
disposal, I cannot take up individual authors, still less individual
plays. I shall have to give a very general outline of the matter as a
whole.
What is loosely called the Elizabethan drama, consists of the plays
written, performed, or printed in England between the accession of the
queen in 1558 and the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament at
the breaking out of the civil war in 1642. But if we are looking for
work of literary and artistic value, we need hardly go back of 1576, the
date of the building of the first London playhouse. This was soon
followed by others and by the formation of permanent stock companies.
Heretofore there had been bands of strolling players, under the
patronage of various noblemen, exhibiting sometimes at court, sometimes
in innyards, bear-baiting houses, and cockpits, and even in churches.
Plays of an academic character both in Latin and English had also been
performed at the universities and the inns of court. But now the drama
had obtained a local habitation and a certain professional independence.
Actors and playwriters could make a living—some of them, indeed, like
Burbage, Alleyn, and Shakespeare made a very substantial living, or even
became rich and endowed colleges (Dulwich College, e.g.). One Henslow,
an owner and manager, had at one time three theatres going and a long
list of dramatic authors on his payroll; was, in short, a kind of
Elizabethan theatrical syndicate, and from Henslow’s diary we learn most
of what we know about the business side of the old drama. In those days
London was a walled town of not more than 125,000 inhabitants. As five
theatre companies, and sometimes seven, counting the children of Paul’s
and of the Queen’s Chapel, were all playing at the same time, a public
of that size was fairly well served. You have doubtless read
descriptions, or seen pictures, of these old playhouses, The Theatre,
The Curtain, The Rose, The Swan, The Fortune, The Globe, The Belle
Savage, The Red Bull, The Black Friars. They varied somewhat in details
of structure and arrangement, and some points about them are still
uncertain, but their general features are well ascertained. They were
built commonly outside the walls, at Shoreditch or on the Bankside
across the Thames, in order to be outside the jurisdiction of the mayor
and council, who were mostly Puritan and were continually trying to stop
the show business. They were of wood, octagonal on the outside, circular
on the inside, with two or three tiers of galleries, partitioned off in
boxes. The stage and the galleries were roofed, but the pit, or yard,
was unroofed and unpaved; the ordinary, twopenny spectators
unaccommodated with seats but _standing_ on the bare ground and being
liable to a wetting if it rained. The most curious feature of the old
playhouse to a modern reader is the stage. This was not, as in our
theatres, a recessed or picture frame stage, but a platform stage, which
projected boldly out into the auditorium. The “groundlings” or yard
spectators, surrounded it on three sides, and it was about on a level
with their shoulders. The building specifications for The Swan playhouse
called for an auditorium fifty-five feet across, the stage to be
twenty-seven feet in depth, so that it reached halfway across the pit,
and was entirely open on three sides. At the rear of the stage was a
traverse, or draw curtain, with an alcove, or small inner stage behind
it, and a balcony overhead. There was little or no scenery, but
properties of various kinds were in use, chairs, beds, tables, etc. When
it is added to this that shilling spectators were allowed to sit upon
the stage, where for an extra sixpence they were accommodated with
stools, and could send the pages for pipes and tobacco, and that from
this vantage ground they could jeer at the actors, and exchange jokes
and sometimes missiles, like nuts or apples, with the common people in
the pit, why, it becomes almost incomprehensible to the modern mind how
the players managed to carry on the action at all; and fairly marvellous
how under such rude conditions, the noble blank verse declamations and
delicate graces of romantic poetry with which the old dramas abound
could have got past. A modern audience will hardly stand poetry, or
anything, in fact, but brisk action and rapid dialogue. Cut out the
soliloquies, cut out the reflections and the descriptions. Elizabethan
plays are stuffed with full-length descriptions of scenes and places:
Dover Cliff; the apothecary’s shop where Romeo bought the poison; the
brook in which Ophelia drowned herself; the forest spring where
Philaster found Bellario weeping and playing with wild flowers. In this
way they make up for the want of stage scenery. It would seem as if the
seventeenth century audiences were more naïve than twentieth century
ones, more willing to lend their imaginations to the artist, more eager
for strong sensation and more impressible by beauty of language, and
less easily disturbed by the incongruous and the absurd in the external
machinery of the theatre, which would be fatal to illusion in modern
audiences with our quick sense of the ridiculous. You know, for example,
that there were no actresses on the Elizabethan stage, but the female
parts were taken by boys. This is one practical reason for those
numerous plots in the old drama where the heroine disguises herself as a
young man. I need mention only Viola, Portia, Rosalind, Imogen, and
Julia in Shakespeare. And the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher
and many others are full of similar situations. Now if you have seen
college dramatics, where the same practice obtains, you have doubtless
noticed an inclination in the spectators to laugh at the deep bass
voices, the masculine strides, and the muscular arms of the ladies in
the play. But trifles like these did not apparently trouble our simple
forefathers.
In the eighty-four years from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to the
closing of the theatres we know the names of 200 writers who contributed
to the stage, and there were beside many anonymous pieces. All told,
there were produced over 1500 plays; and if we count masques and
pageants, and court and university plays, and other quasi-dramatic
species the number does not fall much short of 2000. Less than half of
these are now extant. It is not probable that any important play of
Shakespeare’s is lost, although no collection of his plays was made
until 1623, seven years after his death. Meanwhile about half of them
had come out singly in small quartos, surreptitiously issued and very
incorrectly printed. We probably have all, or nearly all, of Beaumont
and Fletcher’s fifty-three plays. And Ben Jonson collected his own works
carefully and saw them through the press. But Thomas Heywood wrote,
either alone or in collaboration, upwards of 220, and of these only
twenty-four remain. Dekker is credited with seventy-six and Rowley with
fifty-five, comparatively few of which are now known to exist. One
reason why such a large proportion of the Elizabethan plays is missing,
is that the theatre companies which owned the stage copies were
unwilling to have them printed and thereby made accessible to readers
and liable to be pirated by other companies. Manuscript plays were a
valuable asset, and were likely to remain in manuscript until they were
destroyed or disappeared. There are still many unpublished plays of that
period. Thus the manuscript of one of Heywood’s missing plays was
discovered and printed as late as 1885. A curious feature of the old
drama was the practice of collaboration. A capital instance of this was
the long partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher. But often three, or
sometimes four dramatists collaborated in a single piece. It is
difficult, often impossible, to assign the different parts of the play
to the respective authors and much critical ingenuity has been spent
upon the problem, often with very inconclusive results. To increase the
difficulty of assigning a certain authorship, many old plays were worked
over into new versions. It is surmised that Shakespeare himself
collaborated with Fletcher in “Henry VIII,” as well as in “The Two Noble
Kinsmen,” a tragi-comedy which is not included in the Shakespeare folio;
that in “Henry VI” he simply revamped old chronicle-history plays; that
“Hamlet” was founded on a lost original by Kyd; that “Titus Andronicus”
and possibly “Richard III” owe a great deal to Marlowe; and that the
underplot of “The Taming of the Shrew” and a number of scenes in “Timon
of Athens” were composed, not by Shakespeare but by some unknown
collaborator. In short we are to look upon the Elizabethan theatre as a
great factory and school of dramatic art, producing at its most active
period, the last ten years of the queen’s reign, say, from 1593–1603,
some forty or fifty new plays every year: masters and scholars working
together in partnership, not very careful to claim their own, not very
scrupulous about helping themselves to other people’s literary property:
something like the mediaeval guilds who built the cathedrals; or the
schools of Italian painters in the fifteenth century, where it is not
always possible to determine whether a particular piece of work is by
the master painter or by one of the pupils in his workshop. Instances of
collaboration are not unknown in modern drama. Robert Louis Stevenson
and W. E. Henley wrote several plays in partnership. Charles Reade in
his comedy, “Masks and Faces,” called in the aid of Tom Taylor, who was
an actor and practical maker of plays. But these are exceptions. Modern
dramatic authorship is individual: Elizabethan was largely corporate.
And the mention of Tom Taylor reminds me that Elizabethan drama was, in
an important degree, the creation of the actor-playwright. Peele,
Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, Munday, and Rowley certainly, Marlowe,
Kyd, Greene, and many others probably, were actors as well as authors.
Beaumont’s father was a judge, and Fletcher’s father was the Bishop of
London, but they lodged near the playhouses, and consorted with
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid or the Devil Tavern or the
Triple Tun or the other old Elizabethan ordinaries which were the
meeting places of the wits. In fact, it is evident that the university
wits; the Bohemians and hack writers in Henslow’s pay; gentlemen and men
with professions, who wrote on the side, such as Thomas Lodge who was a
physician; in short, the whole body of Elizabethan dramatists kept
themselves in close touch with the actual stage. The Elizabethan drama
was a popular, yes, a national institution. All classes of people
frequented the rude wooden playhouses, some of which are reckoned to
have held 3000 spectators. The theatre was to the public of that day
what the daily newspaper, the ten-cent pictorial magazine, the popular
novel, the moving picture show, the concert, and the public lecture all
combined are to us. And I might almost add the club, the party caucus,
and the political speech. For though there were social convivial
gatherings like Ben Jonson’s Apollo Club, which met at the Devil Tavern,
the playhouse was a place of daily resort. And there were political
plays. Middleton’s “A Game at Chess,” e.g., which attracted enormous
crowds and had the then unexampled run of nine successive performances,
was a satirical attack on the foreign policy of the government; in which
the pieces of the game were thinly disguised representatives of
well-known public personages, after the manner of Aristophanes. The
Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who figured as the Black Knight,
remonstrated with the privy council, the further performance of the play
was forbidden, and the author and several of the company were sent to
prison. Similarly the comedy of “Eastward Ho!” written by Jonson,
Chapman, Marston, and Dekker, which made fun of James I’s Scotch
knights, gave great offense to the king, and was stopped and all hands
imprisoned. The Earl of Essex had the tragedy of “Richard II,” perhaps
Shakespeare’s,—or perhaps another play on the same subject,—rehearsed
before his fellow conspirators just before the outbreak of his
rebellion, and the players found themselves arrested for treason.
The English drama was self-originated and self-developed, like the
Spanish, but unlike the classical stages of Italy and France. Coming
down from the old scriptural and allegorical plays, the miracles and
moralities of the Middle Ages, it began to lay its hands on subject
matter of all sorts: Italian and Spanish romances and pastorals, the
chronicles of England, contemporary French history, ancient history and
mythology, Bible stories and legends of saints and martyrs, popular
ballad and folklore, everyday English life and the dockets of the
criminal courts. It treated all this miscellaneous stuff with perfect
freedom, striking out its own methods. Admitting influences from many
quarters, it naturally owed something to the classic drama, the Latin
tragedies of Seneca, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence, but it did
not allow itself to be shackled by classical rules and models, like the
rule of the three unities; or the precedent which forbade the mixture of
tragedy and comedy in the same play; or the other precedents which
allowed only three speakers on the stage at once and kept all violent
action off the scene, to be reported by a messenger, rather than pass
before the eyes of spectators. The Elizabethans favored strong action,
masses of people, spectacular elements: mobs, battles, single combats,
trial scenes, deaths, processions. The English instinct was for quantity
of life, the Greek and the French for neatness of construction. The
ghost which stalks in Elizabethan tragedy: in “Hamlet,” “Richard III,”
Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” and Marston’s “Antonio and Mellida” comes
straight from Seneca. But except for a few direct imitations of Latin
plays like “Gorboduc” and “The Misfortunes of Arthur”—mostly academic
performances—Elizabethan tragedy was not at all Senecan in
construction. Let us take a few forms of drama, which, though not
strictly peculiar to our sixteenth century theatre, were most
representative of it, and were the forms in which native genius
expressed itself most characteristically. I will select the
tragi-comedy, the chronicle-history, and the romantic melodrama or
tragedy of blood. In 1579 Sir Philip Sidney, who was a classical
scholar, complained that English plays were neither right tragedies nor
right comedies, but mongrel tragi-comedies which mingled kings and
clowns, funerals and hornpipes. Nearly a century and a half later,
Addison, also a classical scholar, wrote: “The tragi-comedy, which is
the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous
inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thoughts. An author might as
well think of weaving the adventures of Aeneas and Hudibras into one
poem as of writing such a motley piece of mirth and sorrow.” Sidney’s
and Addison’s principles would have condemned about half the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As to the chronicle-history play,
Ben Jonson, who was a classicist writing in a romantic age, had his
fling at those who with “some few foot and half-foot words fight over
York and Lancaster’s long jars.” I do not know that any other nation
possesses anything quite like this series of English kings by
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bale, Peele, Ford, and many others, which taken
together cover nearly four centuries of English history. You know that
the Duke of Marlboro said that all he knew of English history he had
learned from Shakespeare’s plays; and these big, patriotic military
dramas must have given a sort of historical education to the audiences
of their time. The material, to be sure, was much of it epic rather than
properly dramatic, and in the hands of inferior artists it remained
lumpy and shockingly crude. To obtain comic relief, the playwrights
sandwiched in between the serious parts, scenes of horseplay,
buffoonery, and farce, which had little to do with the history. But in
the hands of a great artist, all this was reduced to harmony. Henry IV,
Part I, is not only a great literary work, but a first-class acting
play. The tragedy is very high tragedy and the Falstaff scenes very
broad comedy, but they are blended so skilfully that each heightens the
effect of the other without disturbing the unity of impression. As to
the romantic melodrama or tragedy of blood, the Elizabethans had a
strong appetite for sensation, and many of their most powerful plays
were of this description: Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine,” Shakespeare’s “Lear,”
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy,” Middleton’s “Changeling,”
Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi,” and scores of others, which employ what
has been called solution by massacre, and whose stage in the fifth act
is as bloody as a shambles. Even in the best of these, great art is
required to reconcile the nerves of the modern reader to the numerous
killings. In the extreme examples of the type, like “Titus Andronicus”
(doubtfully Shakespeare’s), Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta,” or the old
“Spanish Tragedy,” or Cyril Tourneur’s “Revenger’s Tragedy,” the theme
is steeped so deeply in horrors and monstrosities, that it passes over
into farce. For the great defect of Elizabethan drama is excess,
extravagance. In very few plays outside of Shakespeare do we find that
naturalness, that restraint, decorum and moderation which is a part of
the highest and finest art. Too many of the plots and situations are
fantastically improbable: too many of the passions and characters
strained and exaggerated, though life and vigor are seldom wanting. This
is seen in their comedies as well as in their tragedies. Thus, Ben
Jonson, an admirable comic artist, ranking next, I think, after
Shakespeare, a very learned man and exhaustless in observation and
invention; very careful, too, in construction and endeavoring a reform
of comedy along truly classical lines—Ben Jonson, I say, chose for his
province the comedy of humors; i.e., the exhibition of all varieties of
oddity, eccentricity, whim, affectation. Read his “Every Man in His
Humour” or his “Bartholomew Fair” and you will find a satirical picture
of all the queer fashions and follies of his contemporary London. His
characters are sharply distinguished but they are _too_ queer, too
overloaded with traits, so that we seem to be in an asylum for cranks
and monomaniacs, rather than in the broad, natural, open daylight of
Shakespeare’s creations. So the tyrants and villains of Elizabethan
melodrama are too often incredible creatures beyond the limits of
humanity.
It is perhaps due to their habit of mixing tragedy and comedy that the
Elizabethan dramatists made so much use of the double plot; for the main
plot was often tragical and the underplot comical or farcical.
Shakespeare, who at all points was superior to his fellows, knew how to
knit his duplicate plots together and make them interdependent. But in
pieces like Middleton’s “Changeling” or “The Mayor of Queensboro,” the
main plot and the subplot have nothing to do with each other and simply
run along in alternate scenes, side by side. This is true of countless
plays of the time and is ridiculed by Sheridan in his burlesque play
“The Critic.” Let it also be remembered that an Elizabethan tragedy was
always a poem—always in verse. Prose was reserved for comedy, or for
the comedy scenes in a tragedy. The only prose tragedy that has come
down to us from those times is the singular little realistic piece
entitled “The Yorkshire Tragedy,” the story of a murder. A very constant
feature of the old drama was the professional fool, jester, or kept
clown, with his motley coat, truncheon, and cap and bells. In most plays
he was simply a stock fun maker, though Shakespeare made a profound and
subtle use of him in “As You Like It” and in “Lear.” The last court
jester or king’s fool was Archie Armstrong, fool of Charles I. After the
Restoration he was considered as old-fashioned and disappeared from the
stage along with puns and other obsolete forms of wit. Opera and
pantomime were not introduced into England until late in the seventeenth
century: but the Elizabethans had certain forms of quasi-dramatic
entertainment such as the court masque, the pageant, and the pastoral,
which have since gone out. They were responsible for some fine poetry
like Fletcher’s “Faithful Shepherdess,” Jonson’s fragment “The Sad
Shepherd” and Milton’s “Comus.” Of late years the pageant has been
locally revived in England, at Oxford, at Coventry, and elsewhere.
Now since it has ceased to be performed, what is the value of the old
drama, as literature, as a body of reading plays? Of the 200 known
writers for the theatre, ten at least were men of creative genius,
Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Webster, Middleton,
Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger. At least a dozen more were men of
high and remarkable talents, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marston, Ford,
Heywood, Shirley, Tourneur, Kyd, Day, Rowley, Brome. Scarcely one of
them but has contributed single scenes of great excellence, or invented
one or two original and interesting characters, or written passages of
noble blank verse and lovely lyrics. Even the poorest of them were
inheritors or partakers of a great poetic tradition, a gift of style, so
that, in plays very defective, as a whole, we are constantly coming upon
lines of startling beauty like Middleton’s
Ha! what art thou that taks’t away the light
Betwixt that star and me?
or Marston’s
Night, like a masque, has entered heaven’s high hall,
With thousand torches ushering the way.
or Beaumont’s
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
But when all has been said, and in spite of enthusiasts like Lamb and
Hazlitt and Swinburne, I fear it must be acknowledged that, outside of
Shakespeare, our old dramatists produced no plays of the absolutely
first rank; no tragedies so perfect as those of Sophocles and Euripides;
no comedies equal to Molière’s. Nay, I would go further, and affirm that
not only has the Elizabethan drama—excluding Shakespeare—nothing to
set against the first part of Goethe’s “Faust,” but that its best plays
are inferior, as a whole, to the best of Aristophanes, of Calderon, of
Racine, of Schiller, even perhaps of Victor Hugo, Sheridan and
Beaumarchais. It is as Coleridge said: great beauties, counterbalanced
by great faults. Ben Jonson is heavy-handed and laborious; Beaumont and
Fletcher graceful, fluent and artistic, but superficial and often false
in characterization; Webster, intense and powerful in passion, but
morbid and unnatural; Middleton, frightfully uneven; Marlowe and Chapman
high epic poets but with no flexibility and no real turn for drama.
Yet unsatisfactory as it is, when judged by any single play, the work of
the Elizabethans, when viewed as a whole, makes an astonishing
impression of fertility, of force, of range, variety, and richness, both
in invention and in expression.
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[8] “Every Man in his Humor” lasted well down into the nineteenth
century on the stage. And here are a few haphazard dates of late
performances of Elizabethan plays: “The Pilgrim,” 1812; “Philaster,”
1817; “The Chances,” 1820; “The Wild Goose Chase,” 1820; “The City
Madam,” 1822; “The Humorous Lieutenant,” 1817; “The Spanish Curate,”
1840.
PRINTED BY E. L. HILDRETH & COMPANY,
BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, U. S. A.