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 Elisabethan. In strictness the Elisabethan
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
Elisabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the
Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness {77} 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 Elisabethan 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 marked--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 throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart
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 Elisabeth's hand.
The praises of the queen, which sound through {78} 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 Elisabeth. 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 Elisabeth 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 and 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 {79} 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, speak 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,
Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at the sound."
{80} But in considering the literature of Elisabeth'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 Shafton 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; {81} 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
{82} of Abuse_, a tract directed against the stage and published about
four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is
distinctly 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."
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, statesman, 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 Alencon, 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 {83} remained in
MS. 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
a third. It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and
Pyrocles, who are 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 Faery 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 {84}
age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elisabethan 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 a 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 the 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 indeed 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 {85}
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 at all 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.
{86} Another typical Englishman of Elisabeth'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 Revenue,
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
Jose, 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 {87} 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 {88} 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
region of the air." The preface and conclusion are noble examples of
Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to
Death. "O eloquent, just: and mighty Death! Whom none could advise,
thou has 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 MSS. or by tradition to have been
"made by Sir Walter {89} 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 as 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 Elisabethan 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 {90} 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_, compiled by Ralph Holinshed in
1577. 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, {91} 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 {92} 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 Bruyere's _Caracteres_. But {93} this was not
published till 1588. 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 {94} 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
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age."
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 _Shephera's Pipe_
(1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} _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"), the path is utterly lost, "with
woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown."
One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has {96} 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."
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 Elisabethan 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. 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. His verse was not the heroic
line of ten syllables, chosen by most of the standard translators, but
the long fourteen-syllabled measure, 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.
{97}
"From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
Like rich Autumnus' 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."
Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_, is
well-known. Fairfax's version of Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_ (1600)
is one of the best metrical translations in the language.
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 _Baron's 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 {98} 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 aequora ventis," etc.
But the Elisabethan 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 {99} 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 {100} short farce--were
popular at the Court of Henry VIII. Elisabeth 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
quality.
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 play-house was built in London. This
was the _Black Friars_, which was located within the liberties of the
dissolved monastery of the Black Friars, in order to be outside of the
jurisdiction of the Mayor and Corporation, who were Puritan, and
determined in their opposition to the stage. For the same reason the
{101} _Theater_ and the _Curtain_ were built in the same year, outside
the city walls in Shoreditch. Later the _Rose_, the _Globe_, and the
_Swan_, were erected on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers
resorting to them were accustomed to "take boat."
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
Elisabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle,
or classical unities of time and place, {102} 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 freedom 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
Englishman 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
Elisabethan 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
{103} 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 from 1584 to 1601. They were
written for court entertainments, in prose and mostly 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 Euphuism. 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 {104} 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 a 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 {105}
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 legerdemain;
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 {106} 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 currile, 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," etc.
which reminds one of passages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and
occasionally Peele rises to such high Aeschylean 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 {107} 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_, and his _Pinner of Wakefield_, 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, {108} 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 {109} 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,
playwriter, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars
and the Globe Theaters. He seemingly prospered in his calling 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, the _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 are
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 {110} 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 Elisabethan 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. Elisabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to
Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. {111} 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 III._, 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 {112} 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 {113} 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," Katherine'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 Moliere'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 _Menaechmi_ of
Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of {114} 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_, _Winters 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 {115} 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 _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, 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 {116} 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 Caesar_, _Coriolanus_, and _Antony and
Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the
plot of none of his plays, but took {117} 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
Caesar_ 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
conception 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.
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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 {119} 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 Shaksperian 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 Shakspere and the other Elisabethan 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 {120} most
remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakspere was Ben
Jonson, whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the other's
gracious impersonality. Jonson was nine years younger than Shakspere.
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 times 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." [1]
The inscription on his tomb, in Westminster Abbey, is simply
"O rare Ben Jonson!"
Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the _vetus comaedia_ 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 {121} 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 persona_ 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 "spongy humors of the time," that is, the fashionable
affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London
life. His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic
humorists, to play them off upon each other, involve them in all manner
of comical misadventures, and render 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
foot-notes, 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 {122} 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 single humor or eccentricity,
as in some of Moliere's lighter comedies, like _Le Malade Imaginaire_,
or _Le Medecin malgre 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
{123} _Love's Triumph_, _Hymn to Diana_, _The Noble Mind_, and the
adaptation from _Philostratus_,
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,"
and many others entitle their author to rank among the first 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, though not equal to Fletcher's _Faithful
Shepherdess_, 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. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature.
2. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.
3. The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. Edited by J. Hannah.
4. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. (First and Second Books.)
5. Bacon's Essays. Edited by W. Aldis Wright
{124}
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 or Gifford's
Edition.)
[1] Francis Beaumont. _Letter to Ben Jonson_.
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