THE LATER ELIZABETHANS[22]
Shakespeare's great tragedies did not create a new epoch in the development
of the drama. In themes and general treatment they made no marked departure
from the past. Their translation of story and circumstance into the
conflicts and processes of character was beyond the reach of imitation,
and, indeed, not likely to gain full recognition from contemporaries. They
were rather the consummation of the old than the heralds of a new era,
though their influence on succeeding dramatists was wide and permeating,
especially as time and publication brought a growing appreciation of their
greatness as literature. Meanwhile, the old types of tragedy continued
their sway, sometimes little touched by Shakespeare's influence. English
history plays were rare; Roman history plays frequent; Senecan closet
dramas continued; the Marlowean and Kydian traditions received further
development. The revenge play, in particular, continued to be one of the
most conspicuous types. Further, a most important innovating force appeared
just at the close of Shakespeare's tragic period in the heroic romances of
Beaumont and Fletcher, which gained an immediate popularity and created new
practices in both tragedy and tragicomedy.
The times were changing. The improved social status of the theatre, the
support of the court, the vogue of private theatres like Blackfriars, the
increasing interest in the stage on the part of the lettered and
fashionable classes, supplied more intelligent and critical audiences; but
the increasing Puritanism separated the drama more and more from sympathy
with the main public. The drama became less national, more critical, and
less moral. The corrupt society of the reign of James I supplied little of
that imaginative idealism which had found expression at the time of the
Armada. It offered the serious drama either objects for satire and cynicism
or sophisticated and courtly ideals of conduct. In consequence, a more
conscious art found itself less competent than in the early drama to depict
greatness of mind, and resorted to the tracing of abnormal passion, the
casuistical inquiry into moral problems, the exposure of evil, or to
romance without moral intention.
Yet dramatic enterprise continued unabated. The theatre continued to
attract poetic ambition. Scholars, men of letters, gentlemen of rank turned
to the popular stage. There was as yet no suspicion of decadence. Rather
the past seemed to offer, through a recognition of its merits and a pruning
of its faults, encouragement for a greater achievement in the future. In
spite of critical realization of the absurdities of the early drama, and
of the necessity for a better regulated art, the integrity of the national
tradition was recognized and maintained. In 1612, in a preface to his
"White Devil," Webster, after explaining that he had departed from the
classical standards "willingly, and not ignorantly," proceeds to extol his
contemporaries and masters:--
"Detraction is the sworne friend to ignorance: for mine
owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of
other mens worthy labours; especially of that full and
haightened stile of Maister Chapman, the labor'd and
understanding workes of Maister Johnson, the no lesse
worthy composures of the both worthily excellent
Maister Beamont & Maister Fletcher, and lastly (without
wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious
industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker, & M. Heywood;
wishing that what I write may be read by their light;
protesting that, in the strength of mine owne
judgement, I know them so worthy, that though I rest
silent in my owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare
(without flattery) fix that of Martiall:
--non morunt haec monumenta mori."
After a time the greatness of the past masters proved rather an impediment
than a stimulus. But in 1612 their work seemed to offer encouragement for
even greater achievement in the immediate future.
For the historian this period offers less difficulties than the preceding
ones. After 1610 comparatively few plays of importance are non-extant, and
few of the extant plays are anonymous. The bulk of the important plays was
produced by a few dramatists, who dominated the theatres and whose careers
determined the drama's development. After examining the revenge plays
which about 1612 gave a further extension to that species, and the heroic
romances of the Beaumont-Fletcher collaboration, which were produced within
a few years before that date, we may trace the succeeding developments of
tragedy mainly in the work of Fletcher, Massinger, Middleton, Ford, and
Shirley.
The main line of the development of the revenge tragedy is represented by
Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," the anonymous "Second Maiden's Tragedy,"
and Webster's "White Devil" and "Duchess of Malfi." The four plays may be
said to constitute a new species whose differences from the old type seem
clearly unconnected with Shakespeare's "Hamlet" but directly traceable to
Marston's plays, especially his "Malcontent."
Revenge is no longer the main motive but is a subsidiary element in
complicated stories of revolting lust and depravity. Tragedy has become the
representation of vice and sin, with a proneness for their foulest
entanglements. In one play a brother plays the part of pandar to his
sister; in another a father to his daughter; and in a third a mother to her
daughter. Nor is revenge, even in its subordinate position, the simple
blood-for-blood requital that it is in Kyd. It may be for various causes
beside murder; it is born of malice rather than duty; it may share in the
moral turpitude of the rest of the action. The ghost no longer directs the
course of revenge, and may disappear entirely. In "The Revenger's Tragedy"
the skull of the betrothed, as the skeleton in "Hoffman," takes the place
of the apparition; and in other plays the duties of the ghost are
minimized or farmed out among various supernatural agents, two female
ghosts appearing. Hesitation on the part of the avenger does not appear.
Indeed, his entire character has changed. He may be a villain, as in
"Hoffman," or the villain's accomplice, or one of Marston's "malcontents,"
or a combination of these parts. The other leading elements in the Kydian
type are preserved. Insanity of various forms, real and pretended, is
prominent. Intrigue of a complicated kind abounds, but is often dependent,
after the fashion of current comedy, largely on improbable disguises.
Deaths are as frequent as ever and more horrible. Much of the old stage
effect reappears, as in the masques, funerals, ghosts, and exhibition of
dead bodies, but there is a great increase in the number and ingenuity of
melodramatic sensations. Each play is a chamber of horrors. In one, a wife
dies from kissing the poisoned portrait of her husband; in another, the
lustful king sucks poison from the jaw of a skull; and in a third, from the
painted lips of a corpse. Comets blaze, there are many portents, the time
is ever midnight, the scene the graveyard, the air smells of corruption,
skulls and corpses are the _dramatis personae_. Every means seems to be
employed to make theatrically effective the horrors of death and decay. And
once, at least, these means are used with tremendous power in the riot of
madness, torture, and corruption that preludes the death of the Duchess of
Malfi.
All or nearly all of the active characters are black with sin. The
extraordinary exploitation of villany in Elizabethan tragedy here reaches
its culmination. The arch-villain as ruthlessly devoted to crime as
Hoffman, the accomplice assiduous in revolting baseness, the villain
touched by remorse, the malcontent reviling human life,--all these
appear--sometimes all combined in one person--and play their parts along
with unshrinking prostitutes and lustful monarchs. The study of villany,
however, has gained intensity and plausibility over the earlier plays. If
none of the villains take to themselves much individuality, most of them
have moments of dramatic impressiveness, and they are intended to be
realistic. They are drawn with an accumulation of detail, a fondness for
probing into depravity, with a sense of the dramatic value of devilry, and
with a bitterness and cynicism that often seem sincere and searching. It is
this cynicism which gives character to the reflective elements of these
plays. The Kydian soliloquy on fate has given way to the prevailing
satirical and bitter tone that finds its favorite themes in the sensuality
of women and the hypocrisy and greed of courts, and its favorite means of
expression in the connotation of the obscene and bestial.
The qualities attributed to these four plays recall "Hoffman" and "The
Atheist's Tragedy," and still more Marston's plays, and the satirical
comedy of the preceding decade as well as the tragedy. Though the four
plays are thus classed together, their differences are marked. "The Second
Maiden's Tragedy" manifests more than the others the influence of Beaumont
and Fletcher. Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," far superior to his earlier
"Atheist's Tragedy," surpasses Marston and reveals brilliant dramatic
talent. Full of thrills and unspeakable juxtapositions, it is governed by a
sheer delight in horror and unrelieved by any moral standard. Webster, on
the contrary, made his horrors impressive in both poetry and moral.
Dependent at every step on the work of predecessors, he succeeded as did no
other poet except Shakespeare in transforming the revenge play into a work
of art and truth. Chapman was, perhaps, his chief model, but the processes
of his transforming art, though not its results, bear resemblances to
Shakespeare's. He was possessed by an interest in the effects of crime upon
character, and had the power to realize these momentarily with amazing
truth. Hence his great portraits of Vittoria, the Cardinal, and the
Duchess, and the ingeniously and vividly though not very consistently drawn
figure of Bosola. As Shakespeare in "Macbeth" and "Lear," fascinated by the
wickedness of the world, reveled in images of blackness, corruption, and
despair, so Webster, more laboriously and inquisitively, was ever seeking
fantastic expression for the old truth that all is vanity. In his
masterpiece, "The Duchess of Malfi," and in a lesser degree in "The White
Devil," his recognition of moral values again recalls Shakespeare. We are
moved by the pitifulness of the suffering as well as by the horror of the
evil. There is no confusion of good and bad; and if the prevailing view of
life is cynical, it is not unrelieved by respect for fortitude and
conscience. The tragedy of revenge reached a new altitude in this play,
which, though poorly constructed, tells a story of criminal and horrible
revenge with a vivid delineation of character, a pervading moral sense, and
with flashes of speech that attain both poetic and dramatic sublimity.[23]
The collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher was finished by the time that
Webster published his acknowledgment of their mastership. Gentlemen by
birth and breeding, they began writing for the stage apparently as pupils
of Jonson, entered into collaboration by 1607, and in the next five years,
by the time that Beaumont was twenty-seven and Fletcher thirty-three,
produced some ten plays that gained them a popularity surpassing that of
Shakespeare's later years, and extending well through the Restoration. So
far as tragedy is concerned, the main result of their collaboration was the
formation of a new species of heroic romances, some tragedies and some
tragicomedies. Six plays serve to define the type, though other plays of
the collaboration have resemblances to it and, after Beaumont's retirement,
the type was continued in the work of Fletcher and others. These six plays,
"Four Plays in One," "Thierry and Theodoret," "Cupid's Revenge,"
"Philaster," "A King and No King," and "The Maid's Tragedy," probably owe
more to Beaumont than to Fletcher. "The Maid's Tragedy" and the two
tragicomedies, "Philaster" and "A King and No King," are the masterpieces,
but the six plays resemble one another so closely that one analysis will
answer for all.
Beaumont and Fletcher did not, like most of their predecessors, turn to
English or Roman history for their plots, and they preserved but few traces
of the Marlowean tragedy with its central protagonist and dominating
passion, or of the revenge type in any of its amplifications. Their plots,
largely of their own invention, are highly ingenious and complicated. They
deal with heroic actions in imaginary foreign realms. The conquests,
usurpations, and passions that ruin kingdoms are their themes, but there
are no battles or armies, and the action is usually confined to the rooms
of the palace or a neighboring forest. Usually contrasting a story of gross
sensual passion with one of idyllic love, they introduce a great variety of
incidents, and aim at a constant but varied excitement. Love of one sort or
another, honor also of many kinds, and friendship, which is somewhat more
steadfast, are ever in conflict. We are given seats in an anteroom of the
palace, and at once the flow of events engrosses us,--conspiracies,
imprisonments, insurrections, wars, adultery, seduction, murder, the talk
of courtiers, gossip of women, banquets of the monarch, and the laments of
the love-lorn. Or, after a tumultuous hour, we may retire to the adjoining
forest, where the lovers wander to forget their misfortunes, and by its
fountains weave their laments into lyrical garlands. A few hours, and
kingdoms have trembled in the balance; the heroine has been proved guilty
and innocent again; and the lover has been ecstatic, frantic, jealous,
cowardly, implacable, and forgiving, and finally wins or dies with his
honor secure.
The tragedies differ from those preceding in structure as well as in
material. Their main purpose is theatrical effectiveness; their means of
securing it the constant use of surprise. Beaumont and Fletcher did not
follow their narrative sources closely; they invented their own stories or
used old ones as the frame for their favorite situations and characters.
The tragic, idyllic, and sensational matter is skillfully constructed into
a number of theatrically telling situations which lead by a series of
suspenses and surprises to very effective climaxes or catastrophes. All
signs of the epic methods of construction found in the early drama have
disappeared, and the interest in the action is maintained at fever heat. In
"The Maid's Tragedy," the climax of the play comes at the end of the fourth
act with the murder of the king by his mistress, Evadne, the wife of
Amintor. But in the fifth act the main action absorbs the sub-plot and
continues its course of thrills and surprises until the very end. In "A
King and No King," the love of Arbaces for his supposed sister furnishes
many entanglements, and it is not until the end of Act V that we know that
the princess is not his sister, and the tragedy of incest is resolved into
romance. There is no inevitableness in the action of these plays. Usually,
until the last moment there is a chance for either a happy or an unhappy
ending, and in every case the _denouement_ or catastrophe is elaborately
planned and complicated.
From the nature of their material and treatment there is little difference
between the tragedies and tragicomedies. Tragicomedy as a species had up to
this time hardly been recognized in the English drama, although there are
sporadic instances of the use of the term and although romantic comedy
usually offered tragic elements. Fletcher's definition (borrowed from
Guarini) in the preface to "The Faithful Shepherdess," may be taken as
sufficiently distinguishing the form from other species,--"A tragicomedy is
not so called in respect to mirth and killing, but in respect it wants
deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it,
which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of
familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so
that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a
comedy." The example of Beaumont and Fletcher, moreover, gave popularity
and importance to this class of plays. Borrowing motives familiar in
romantic narrative and the preceding drama, they yet created a departure
from preceding romantic comedy, both in the constant emphasis which they
place upon the contrast between the tragic and idyllic elements of their
plots and in the especial attention they pay to surprising and complicated
_denouements_. They aim not merely at a mixture of the sentimental and
tragic but at involving every one in a tangle of disastrous complications,
resolved only by a series of final surprises. Although only two of the six
romances are tragicomedies, the imitators of Beaumont and Fletcher most
frequently adopted the form, realizing apparently the theatrical value of
keeping the spectators thrilled and excited until the end and then
relieving their sympathetic suspense by a happy solution.
The _dramatis personae_ of the six plays belong to the impossible and
romantic situations rather than to life, and are usually of certain
types,--the sentimental or violent hero; his faithful friend, a blunt
outspoken soldier; the sentimental heroine, often a love-lorn maiden
disguised as a page in order that she may serve the hero; an evil woman
defiant in her crimes; and the poltroon, usually a comic personage. With
the addition of a king, some gentlemen and ladies of the court, and a few
persons from the lower ranks, the cast is complete. The various persons
introduce one another in long descriptions; and, after the introductory
speech, the character remains fixed, except as the shifting situations
demand some unexpected revolution. There is no shading or subtlety in the
characterization, little discrimination or individuality in the different
representatives of the favorite types, who, however, are by no means
wanting in originality. They do not reveal the depths or complexities of
human nature, but they exhibit fresh and ingenious variations of the old
types, audacious humor and abundant spirit, and the power of their
creators to rise to a situation and to express dramatic emotion. Thus,
their type of evil woman acquires tremendous force in the scenes where
Evadne plays her part; and their heroines suffer, serve, weep, love,
forgive, and die, in lines that somehow preserve the grace of simplicity,
though they wear all the jewels of allusion and imagery that the authors
possess. Moreover, their men and women talk like real persons. Dryden
declared that they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen
much better than Shakespeare, a distinction that in some respects is clear
to-day. The men of preceding tragedies had spoken a language elevated and
removed from ordinary discourse, but in Beaumont and Fletcher the romantic
scenes and impossible changes of character are made plausible by an absence
of archaism and a directness and lucidity of speech.
In the main, what reality the characters retain in our memories is due to
the power of the verse to reflect clearly the emotions of the moment. There
is a notable absence of the merely sonorous, the turgid declamation, the
mouthing of strange words, and an absence of over-crowding thought or
fancy. Beaumont and Fletcher had no desire to make their style sententious,
weighty, and philosophical. They knew what they wanted to say, and they
said it clearly and rapidly. They had room for ornament and rhetorical
device, but none for eccentricity or obscurity. Another remark of Dryden's,
that they perfected the English language, deserves consideration as the
view of a century later, and can be appreciated even now. The
characteristics of their style, so far as it can be considered as a common
property, seem due to an effort to make dialogue correspond as nearly as
possible to natural speech. This is particularly true of Fletcher, who is
the more revolutionary of the two and the more persistent in his
mannerisms. His structure is loose and conversational, and his blank verse
overruns the borders of the rigid pentameter and approaches the
irregularity of prose. Numerous added syllables and a large percentage of
feminine endings further mark his departures from past models, and,
combined with his end-stopped lines, give his verse a peculiar monotony.
Both writers rise now and then to an intensely imaginative phrase or a
beautifully wrought description. The verse of neither is suggestive of the
intricacies of human feeling or the splendor of human intellect, but the
verse of both, of Fletcher preeminently, reveals a fertility of imagination
and an extraordinary mobility of words.
These merits of style gave Beaumont and Fletcher their seventeenth century
reputation and have continued to attract readers in the generations since.
Ethical objections to their plays drove them from the stage in spite of
their theatrical effectiveness. They wrote with little ethical intention.
Unlike some of their contemporaries, they did not seek to discover the
abodes of sin and to chastise the monster, nor did they study human nature
in the light of moral law. They dealt with themes that would please their
audience and would offer a sufficient range of emotions for the exhibition
of their poetic powers. Without imaginations that touched spiritual heights
or penetrated to the real significance of moral conflict, they entered
unhesitatingly upon the task of holding up a mirror to a society loose in
manners and unprincipled in morals. They were not so much guilty of
intentional immorality as impotent to produce moral effect. If their
imaginations kept too frequent company with the gross and the unhealthy,
they also sought at times the sweeter and nobler aspects of life. What won
for their ethics high laudation from their contemporaries was their
rhetorical and dramatic exaltation of ideals of magnanimity and dreams of
idyllic love and devoted friendship.
Their masterpieces, despite their limitations, must be given high rank in
the English drama. Outside of Shakespeare it would be difficult to find in
our language another tragedy that as an artistic achievement can be counted
the superior of "The Maid's Tragedy." But the main contribution of their
collaboration took the form of a type, limited in themes and
characterization, brilliant often both in dramatic discovery and in
execution, but tending toward artificiality and convention. Their most
important innovations, the products of serious artistic effort as well as
of cleverness and ingenuity, mark the acquirement by the drama of new
habits of doubtful value. Their sacrifice of character to situation, their
devotion to theatrical effectiveness, their lack of moral purpose, their
dalliance with the artificial and abnormal aspects of passion, and their
disregard for the limits of blank verse, all these characteristics
furnished examples eagerly followed by the dramatists of the next
generation, examples that did not promote in tragedy a true or
comprehensive or noble reflection of life.
Immediately after Beaumont's retirement Fletcher probably collaborated with
Shakespeare on "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," and possibly on a
lost play, "Cardenio." The partnership resulted in no distinct departures
from the methods of either dramatist, but it seems to have been full of
incentive for the younger man, whose poetic gift nowhere displays itself
more splendidly. From this time on he wrote constantly for the theatre,
composing three or four plays a year, collaborating on many of these with
Massinger, and maintaining his position as the most popular dramatist of
the time until his death in 1625.
Perhaps if Beaumont had lived, the two might have advanced to maturer and
worthier achievement, but Fletcher's work alone rather displays the
superficialities and artificialities of the collaboration. His amazing
cleverness appears in every scene, but he evidently wrote more and more for
immediate success, and relied more and more on his readinesss of wit and
invention to take the place of earnest and serious purpose. The long series
of plays in which he had at least a considerable share, range in kind from
comedies of manners to tragedies of blood and revenge, but practically all
may be described as romantic drama, having, that is, strange improbable
events, foreign and remote scenes, variety and surprise in action, and love
as the central motive. His sense of dramatic value in theme or incident was
constantly alert, and in Spanish stories, especially the "Novellas
Exemplares" of Cervantes, he found mazes of complicated action which
exactly suited his fancy, and which he managed with adroit dramaturgy. The
Spanish influence is more noticeable in the comedies than in the more
serious plays; but, whatever the theme or the source, Fletcher added bustle
and excitement. The distinctions between tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and
romantic comedy often become barely discernible. The material and treatment
are similar. Tragic situations occur in comedies as well as tragedies, and
in either case, though finely conceived and admirably expressed, are yet
always directed by the desire for surprise and thrills. The tragicomedies
conform most closely to the conventionalities and repetitions of the heroic
romances, though they exhibit abundant originality of invention. Through
their example, romantic and melodramatic tragicomedy became perhaps the
most popular and characteristic dramatic species of the reign of Charles I,
and a direct progenitor of the heroic plays of the Restoration.
In his tragedies Fletcher's prostitution to theatrical effectiveness admits
a recognition of the literary tradition. At least, the two which are the
result of his unaided efforts are composed with more care and with more
evidence of artistic responsibility than his other dramas. In
"Valentinian"[24] he turned from his usual sources and themes to those long
approved in pure tragedy, and found in Roman history a story of revenge and
lust. Though treating the material with great freedom, he unfortunately
followed his source in continuing the action beyond the murder of
Valentinian through the counter revenge on Maximus. The first two acts,
that tell of the attempted seduction of Lucina and her final ruin, are
among the best sustained tragic developments in Fletcher, and, in
comparison with many similar scenes in contemporary drama, testify to his
remarkable poetic gifts. But the later scheming and the overthrow of her
husband involve a conversion of character and a descent into absurd
improbability. In "Bonduca," Fletcher's invention moved unhampered.
Historical sources are used merely as hints and incentives. The stories of
Bonduca and Caratach are combined; and the interest in their tragic fates
diversified by the stories of Bonduca's daughters and their Roman lovers,
by the episode of the noble Poenius, by the pathos of the child Hengo, and
also by some gross and brutal comedy. All these interests are skillfully
interwoven and focused upon the great central scene of the battle. There is
stirring presentation of camp life, and throughout the action moves with
abounding spirit. The play is not tragedy at all if one judges it strictly
by Aristotle's precepts or by Shakespeare's example, or even in comparison
with the emotional tension of "The Maid's Tragedy." But it is an admirable
example of the blending of the romantic, historical, heroic, pathetic,
comic, and tragic, full of human nature as well as incident, conspicuous
for poetic expression as well as theatrical ingenuity, one of the
masterpieces of the romantic drama.
The tragedies in which Fletcher collaborated with Massinger or others offer
few amendments of his usual dramatic habits. "The Queen of Corinth," "The
False One," "The Double Marriage," and the spectacular "Prophetess" are all
melodramas in which Massinger's moral earnestness and rhetorical
seriousness contrast with Fletcher's vivacity, and in which clever
stage-craft, noble poetry, and slipshod and hasty workmanship are
indiscriminately manifest. "The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt"
carries on the practice of treating contemporary foreign history, already
exemplified by Marlowe and Chapman. Hurriedly written within a few months
of Barnavelt's death, it can lay no claim to be a thorough or impartial
study of historical events, but it affords a remarkable illustration of the
readiness with which both authors could summon their talents to an
occasion. Given a theme that had a current theatrical interest, and
Massinger's declamation and Fletcher's pathos came nimbly to the task, and
almost at their very best.
The most striking illustration, however, both of Fletcher's genius and its
prostitution to theatrical effectiveness is to be found in "The Bloody
Brother; or Rollo, Duke of Normandy." Here in collaboration with Massinger
and possibly Jonson and Middleton, he returned to one of the stock themes
of tragedy, the story of family feud and a bloody tyrant. In comparison,
however, with any preceding dramas of this class, whether in early
imitations of Seneca or later treatments of lust and revenge, the play
shows the alteration that had come over dramatic ideals and methods. Its
purpose is neither to follow literary tradition nor to expose the evil of
tyranny, but to make some startling theatrical effects out of the familiar
material. Fletcher accomplishes this purpose with his usual recklessness of
talent. When the height of tragic passion is required he rises to it, or
very nearly, in the scene where Edith pleads with the tyrant to spare her
father's life, a scene which Dyce pronounced the most real in its
passionate earnestness of anything in Beaumont and Fletcher's writings. But
the most astounding display of his power comes where there is no genuine
passion but only make-believe. It is the final scene of the play.
Edith, whose father has been killed by the bloody and
lustful Rollo, is planning to murder him. She has
pretended to yield to his solicitations, and has
arranged a secret meeting with him at her house. Enter
Edith, splendidly dressed--a banquet prepared. She
kneels and prays to her father's soul that she may
forget all pity and kill the tyrant--
"His heaven forgot, and all his lusts upon him."
Then, as her boy sings the lovely song, perhaps
Shakespeare's,
"Take, oh take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn--"
Enter Rollo. By one of Fletcher's sudden conversions,
he has changed to a subtle hypocrite and appears
humble, repentant, begging for pity and love,
"in whiteness of my wash'd repentance,
In my heart's tears and love of truth to Edith,
In my fair life hereafter."
Edith, surprised and unnerved, gradually forgets her
purpose, and as she informs the audience in several
asides, is yielding; when--Enter Hamond and the guard.
Hamond, a brave blunt soldier, is seeking revenge on
Rollo because the tyrant has killed his brother and
outraged him by commanding him to murder the noble
Audrey. Hamond announces that he has come to kill
Rollo, who seizes Edith and interposes her as a
defense. She, aroused now to Rollo's real nature, draws
her dagger, but he snatches it from her. In the
struggle that follows Rollo and Hamond are both killed.
All this occupies only one hundred and fifty lines of verse and must be
accounted a most skillful bit of playmaking, a scene such as only Fletcher
among the Elizabethans could contrive. But there is neither truth to life
nor dramatic logic; on the contrary, there are two improbable conversions
of character. It is not tragedy, it is hardly serious drama, it is
theatrical claptrap; yet Fletcher's poetry is as fine, and, for all that
one can see, as sincere as in the scene of genuine passion. Such dramatic
impossibilities as this Fletcher faced with eager recklessness, and gayly
spurred his Pegasus for the leap.
"The Bloody Brother" further illustrates the union of the material and
methods of the Beaumont-Fletcher romances with the conventions of the
tragedy of revenge and lust. That union, manifest also in Fletcher's
"Valentinian," is henceforth characteristic of the tragedy of the age. The
dramatists belonged to a late period of an artistic development and had
many examples both native and foreign to draw upon. They were men of talent
or even genius whose creations were independent and original but rarely
without large indebtedness to their predecessors. While Shakespeare and
Jonson were often borrowed from, the majority of the tragedies clung to the
examples of Webster and Tourneur or mingled revenge and horrors with the
romantic plots and novel technic of Beaumont and Fletcher. A marked
similarity consequently exists in the plays of men of different
temperaments and purposes. Lustful tyrants and their intriguing favorites,
love crossed by honor and often allied with revenge, illicit and abnormal
passion, romantic princes and princesses, an action confined to the rooms
of a palace, situations involving seduction or temptation, stage-effects
whether by horrors or by masques and pageants, and a style more equable,
less fantastic than in the early drama,--these are the ingredients which
characterize tragedy for the quarter century after Shakespeare's death.
Middleton's tragedies and tragicomedies came late in his career, following
a period of realistic comedies, in which his observant and satirical
imagination found free play. Though affected by Beaumont and Fletcher's
romanticism, he preserved most of the traits of the tragedy of revenge in
its late development, including such penetrating analysis of character
swayed by evil as we have found in Marston and Webster. In some of his
romantic dramas, as the tragicomedy "The Witch," there is little of this
serious purpose. The various revenge motives--of the duchess on the duke
who has compelled her to drink from the skull of her murdered father, of
the lover upon the husband who has married his betrothed, and of the
jealous husband upon his wife--are all treated with melodramatic
insincerity though with an ingenious accompaniment of spectacular and
supernatural interference on the part of the witches. Attempted murder
results in wounds that easily heal; the deadly potion proves harmless; the
duke discovered dead comes to life. In the single tragedy written by
Middleton alone, "Women Beware Women," the revenge species appears
unadulterated. Isabella's illicit relation with her uncle, the use of a
masque to bring about the final slaughter, the scenes of seduction, and the
abominable wickedness of all the persons, are elements that recall the
Tourneurian group. The fluency and eloquence of Middleton's style and his
admirable delineation of character by rapid dialogue are best shown in the
early scenes; after the old mother, so beautifully and truly drawn, has
disappeared from the action, the rest is unrelieved murder and lust.
The two famous plays that were the results of Middleton's collaboration
with Rowley have somewhat different characteristics. Rowley, a playwright
used to rude and fantastic comedy, and the author of "All's Lost by Lust,"
a clumsy tragedy of revenge, wrote most of the comic scenes and had some
share in the serious plots. In "The Fair Quarrel," the hesitation of
Captain Ager to defend the honor of his mother unless convinced of her
purity; and in "The Changeling," the entanglement of Beatrice with the
loathed follower whom she has persuaded to murder her accepted suitor,
offer situations novel and ingenious. In both plays, the opportunity for
mere melodrama with sudden conversions of character is refused, and the
series of startling situations made the basis for a study of human motive.
It is this which gives "The Fair Quarrel," in spite of its absurdities,
superiority over most of the tragicomedies of the time. In "The
Changeling," one may easily imagine what havoc Fletcher would have made of
the characterization in order to over-emphasize situations, sensational
enough in themselves; but Middleton and Rowley followed the best tradition
of Webster. The rash and pampered Beatrice retains our sympathies even in
her degradation, and remains convincingly alive, whether in her incipient
love for De Flores or her final cry for forgiveness. De Flores,
clear-headed and well-motived, is the most powerful and individual of the
post-Shakespearean villains. The comic relief supplied by the mad scenes
spoils the tragic unity of the play. But, except in Shakespeare and
Webster, the old combination of murder, revenge, sinful love, villany,
madness, and ghosts had never been made so consistently the result of human
motive and so effective in its appeal to our sympathies.
Massinger's dramatic career, ranking in productiveness with Shakespeare's
or Fletcher's, extended from the time of Shakespeare's withdrawal from the
theatre to within a few years of the Civil War. For ten years he was mainly
occupied in collaborating with Fletcher for the king's men; and of the
nineteen plays usually classed as his own, none were acted before 1622. His
work, therefore, falls roughly into two periods, the first when he was the
assistant of Fletcher, the second when he had succeeded Fletcher as the
main reliance of the leading London company.
Of his work with Fletcher the tragedies have already been considered. In
most of the plays of the collaboration, Fletcher's share is the more
important, especially in the treatment of the dramatic crises. In plays, as
"The Queen of Corinth" and "The Laws of Candy," where Fletcher's hand is
least apparent, there is an excess of melodramatic ingenuity without the
Fletcherian vivacity, Massinger's temperament reveals itself, however, from
the first in the gravity of his style and the seriousness of his morality.
From Fletcher he acquired his stage-craft and his attachment to the
romantic drama of thrills and surprises, but his art was meanwhile
developing a responsibility and purposes all its own.
Of the plays written without the aid of Fletcher, two, "A New Way to Pay
Old Debts" and "The City Madam," are domestic comedies of manners. The
others are romantic dramas which can be classified only with some
difficulty as comedies, tragicomedies, and tragedies. A number of the
tragicomedies are to be distinguished from the tragedies only by the happy
endings and the absence of bloodshed. Nor are these always decisive. Of
the tragedies, "Believe as You List" and "The Virgin Martyr" result in
victory as well as death, and in the tragicomedy, "The Maid of Honor,"
suitors worthy and unworthy are rejected and the vindicated heroine enters
a nunnery. The tragedies in the main deal with more serious and important
actions and rely less on intrigue than the tragicomedies; but it may be
said of Massinger, with even more truth than of Fletcher, that he dealt
with romantic stories abounding in tragic possibilities, usually resulting
in happy endings, but occasionally taking a loftier tone and a fatal
conclusion.
The plays as a whole reveal a remarkable variety of stories and a treatment
of sources fully as free and ingenious as Fletcher's and often contriving a
political as well as a moral lesson. Honor and religion play conspicuous
parts as in contemporary Spanish drama, to which Massinger apparently owed
a considerable debt; although in only one instance, "The Renegade," has
direct indebtedness to a Spanish play been traced. The earlier drama is
also freely drawn upon. At this date it was in fact almost impossible to
compose a play without traversing motives and incidents that were familiar
on the stage; and Massinger borrowed from many, from Shakespeare as freely
as from Fletcher, and from minor dramatists as well. The story of the
usurper Sebastian, told in "The Battle of Alcazar," is retold in "Believe
as You List"; and the poisoning by kissing the painted corpse, related in
"The Second Maiden's Tragedy," reappears in his "Duke of Milan." In spite
of their variety and ingenuity, his plays are very like others of the
period. There are the same court and courtiers, general, favorite, rival
lovers, rival mistresses, and the same trials of chastity or intrigues of
lust and malice.
Yet the independence of Massinger's invention and the truth of his
conceptions of human motive are by no means small. In "The Bashful Lover"
there is a presentation of idealizing and self-sacrificing love, far
surpassing the courtly compliments of Fletcher and rivaling the magnanimity
of Browning's conceptions. In such themes, just removed from the exaltation
and the horror thought necessary for tragedy, yet serious and exalted above
the average of comedy, Massinger is at his best. An outline of his "Maid of
Honor" may serve to illustrate both the independence of his imaginative
conceptions and the careful integration of his structure.
Act i opens at the court of Roberto, King of Sicily,
who, after much eloquent solicitation, permits his
natural brother Bertoldo to lead an expedition against
Gonzaga, a knight of Malta, who is relieving Sienna,
captured by Ferdinand, Duke of Urbin, in his effort to
win the duchess by force. Camiola, the maid of honor,
after some buffoonery on the part of Sylli, a
Malvolio-like wooer, has a parting interview with
Bertoldo and confesses that his vow as a knight of
Malta is the only bar to her acceptance of his offers
of marriage. In act ii, after some further buffoonery
by Sylli, who serves throughout as a comic contrast to
Camiola's other suitors, Fulgentio, the King's minion,
solicits Camiola, but is tartly repulsed, and threatens
to slander her. The scene changes to Sienna, the camp
of Gonzaga, and then to the citadel held by Ferdinand.
Bertoldo and his followers are defeated and made
prisoners, Gonzaga tearing the cross from Bertoldo's
breast. In act iii all the prisoners are released by
ransom, except Bertoldo, who thereupon bewails the
falseness of his brother the King. The scene changing
to Sicily, Adorni, a faithful follower of Camiola's
father, soliloquizes on his love for her and his
intention to take vengeance on Fulgentio. Later he
appears wounded before Camiola and presents the
minion's recantation, but is blamed by her for his
presumption in assuming a task proper only for her
lover. Upon the arrival of news of Bertoldo's plight,
Camiola, who is as energetic as loyal, decides to
sacrifice her fortune to pay her lover's ransom, and
summons Adorni to act as her agent in freeing Bertoldo.
Adorni dutifully undertakes the mission that promises
to ruin his hopes. In act iv the Duchess Aurelia
arrives at Sienna and Ferdinand surrenders. Bertoldo in
prison reads Seneca, soliloquizes on suicide, falls on
the ground, and threatens to rend the bowels of the
earth, quite in Kydian fashion. Adorni enters, and
Bertoldo, upon hearing of Camiola's sacrifice, blesses
her name and promises marriage. It is now Adorni's turn
to soliloquize on suicide. Bertoldo is brought before
Aurelia, who, suddenly enamored, offers him herself and
duchy. After some resistance he yields. Adorni now
begins to hope. In Sicily Camiola has convinced the
King of Fulgentio's worthlessness. In act v Camiola
receives from Adorni the news of Bertoldo's fickleness,
but she still scorns Adorni and resolves to seek
redress from the King. Accordingly, at the marriage of
Bertoldo and Aurelia, she breaks in, states her case
with eloquence and temper, and appeals to the King.
Aurelia suddenly feels all her love quenched, and
Bertoldo pleads for pity. All await the fulfillment of
Camiola's promise that she will declare whom she will
marry, and are astonished when Father Paula announces
that she has decided to become the bride of the church.
Before taking the veil, she obtains Fulgentio's pardon,
gives one half of her wealth to the faithful Adorni,
and commands Bertoldo to resume the cross of Malta.
In his six tragedies there is less of romantic love and more of the blacker
passions. "The Unnatural Combat," "The Duke of Milan," "The Fatal Dowry"
(in collaboration with Field), and "The Roman Actor" deal with lust and
revenge in the quantity and quality long prescribed. In the last named,
however, Massinger broke away from the conventional treatment and made his
protagonist neither the cruel tyrant nor the lustful queen, but a dignified
and noble representative of the actor's profession, and took the
opportunity of effectively expanding the old device of a play within a
play. The other two tragedies present still more originality of conception
and treatment: "Believe As You List," dealing with the fortune of a
rightful claimant to the crown, and "The Virgin Martyr," perhaps a revision
of an early play by Dekker, returning to the old material of the Miracles,
the story of a martyrdom that converts the persecutors. In each of these
tragedies, as in "The Maid of Honor," a number of stories are organized
into a single action, introduced by admirable exposition, and usually
carried through with direct and logical progress. In the treatment of
catastrophe, always heightened, prolonged, and sometimes full of surprise
after Fletcher's fashion, Massinger is less competent. Massinger could not
keep to the inevitable development of character as did Shakespeare, nor
could he sacrifice character to situation as light-heartedly as did
Fletcher. In consequence he falls between two stools; and his fifth act is
usually clumsy and unconvincing.
Massinger's art was not only less reckless than Fletcher's; it was linked
to a serious moral view of human affairs. He always worked under a sense of
responsibility both as a dramatic artist and as a preacher of political and
personal morality. Neither the heedlessness of Fletcher nor the perversion
of Ford is discoverable in his plays. Bad and good are clearly
differentiated, despite the improbabilities of the romantic vicissitudes;
and poetic justice is administered with decision. Following his venturesome
and nimble master, he pursues his pathway gravely, judicially, somewhat
heavily. His careful art and sincere morality lack the leaven of dramatic
genius. The orator and the rhetorician are always elbowing the dramatist
off the scene. His style, never splendid, never excessively figurative, is
always contained and clear. At its best in sustained declamation, it often
descends to a tone approaching prose and rarely rises to the more stirring
or impelling emotions. His abundant inventiveness also fails him in the
great crises of passion. Again and again when the heroine is at bay, or the
hero within the jaws of ruin, Massinger resorts to oratory. As in "The Maid
of Honor," eloquence is the _deus ex machina_ which solves the difficulties
of the plot. In consequence, the characterization, though involving subtle
and penetrating conceptions of human nature, and often logical and
consistent, rarely results in living beings. An exception must be made of
some of his men, whose virility and dignity are akin to his own temper and
can be made real through his favorite rhetorical means. The women, with
few exceptions, of whom Camiola is chief, are, for reverse reasons, bad
failures. Chastity cannot be revealed by an oratorical appeal, and the evil
women only grow impossible when they add rhetoric to lust.
The passing of the greatness of the Elizabethan drama is manifest in
Massinger as in his contemporaries. He retains, to be sure, most of the
external characteristics of his predecessors; he writes constantly in the
light of their achievements; he would restrain Fletcher's theatricality by
a more cautious and responsible art. Like Shakespeare he maintains a moral
standard despite the exigencies of a romantic plot. But the old fervor as
well as the old extravagance of diction have gone; and a careful dramaturgy
now finds itself incompetent to meet the requirements of great tragic
crises. His tragedies recapitulate what has been done before, without
important advance or departure, and without attaining one unforgettable
phrase or one moment that electrifies the reader with an undeniable
conviction of its dramatic truth.
In Ford the results of servile imitation and original genius were curiously
combined. The first dramatist to feel the overshadowing effect of
Shakespeare's tragedies, he borrowed freely from "Lear," "Othello," and
"Romeo and Juliet," and he was hardly less indebted to Beaumont and
Fletcher and the school of Webster. As a playwright he was, in fact,
usually imitative and often unskillful. As a poet his consciousness of the
greatness of earlier dramatists now chilled him to bald copying and now
incited him to a unique development of some of the old tragic motives. With
Dekker and Rowley he collaborated on "The Witch of Edmonton," a tragicomedy
dealing with a contemporary crime and linking itself with the domestic
tragedies. "Perkin Warbeck," a revival of the chronicle history, is without
battles or pageants, and is less concerned with the scenic presentation of
history than with the delineation of the character of the claimant. His
other tragedies, "Love's Sacrifice," "The Broken Heart," and "'Tis Pity
She's a Whore," are at once both more in accord with prevailing modes in
the drama and more characteristic of Ford's imaginative temperament. In
spite of their worthless comic scenes, their conventional material, and
their melodramatic situations, they present tragic passion with an
intensity and truth possible only to dramatic genius.
Love is the theme, and an excess of sentiment and passion in conflict with
friendship, right, or natural law, is the particular province that Ford
makes his own. A favorite in love with the wife of his lord, a brother in
love with a sister, are the situations over which his genius casts an
oppressive melancholy that lasts until the final heart-breaks. The monarch,
his favorite, a buffoon or two, and lords and ladies, love-sick or
passion-inflamed, play with the casuistry of love and mingle dances and
revels with bloodshed and horror. Villany and revenge appear but are not
very essential. The seeds of fatal passions have been already sown when the
play begins; it is the stifling hothouse in which they luxuriate. The end
is inevitable, though it may be long held in suspense and attained through
some surprise in the final act.
"The Broken Heart" is the most healthy of his plays. Orgilus, whose life
has been blighted because Penthea has married Bassanio through the
intervention of her brother, the great General Ithocles, pursues his
revenge upon Ithocles in spite of much delay and apparent reconciliation.
Finally he stabs Ithocles to death just as Ithocles is to be married to the
princess Calantha, and just as Penthea dies of madness and starvation. The
familiar round of revenge, madness, and torture here reappears, but it is
told in a story full of romantic sentiment and human passion, and not
without sunshine as well as shadow. It is the final scenes, however, which
every reader remembers. Calantha is dancing when the tidings of the deaths
of her father and her lover are brought to her, and she dances on, hiding
her grief and playing her part nobly, until, duty accomplished, her heart
is free to yield to its bursting sorrow.
It is in scenes like these, showing passion restrained or overborne for the
moment, or the strain and suspense preceding the crash, that Ford is at his
best. The marvelous parting scene between brother and sister in "'Tis Pity"
is perfection itself. His imagination dissolves the horrible story into the
very language of the breaking heart. His verse, lacking both the old
rhetorical artificiality and the vivacity and adaptability of Fletcher's,
possesses a restraint and moderation of language and a complex and
beautiful melody all its own. At times it is the thinnest of translucent
veils "through which passion is burning as the radiant lines of morning."
One may find in him somewhat of the perverse inquisitiveness of Donne. A
wayward and solitary searcher in the realms of poetry, he voyaged only to
regions unexplored or forbidding. But, as we have seen, his imagination,
wayward though it was, took direction from his contemporaries, and he was
representative of much in current tragedy. Though Ford's ethical attitude
is perhaps more non-committal than that of any of his contemporaries, yet
his casuistical interest in moral problems, and the emphasis which he
places on such problems at the expense of his stories, are traits common in
the drama of the time, and especially in the collaborative work of
Middleton and Rowley. His absorption with questions of sex, his searching
for new sensation, his attempt to bestow on moral perversion the
enticements of poetry correspond with what is most decadent in Fletcher and
Shirley. Like his fine-spoken and well-mannered courtiers and impulsive
ladies, Ford imagined in an atmosphere of unhealthy emotion. His plays are
immoral because their passion is so often morbid and their sentiment
mawkish. His power to reveal character and passion, which rank him with the
greatest of the Elizabethans, was discovered in his searching the by-paths
of the abnormal and pathological. Pathos for him was a flower plucked from
a poisonous exotic.
Beginning about 1625 and extending to the Civil War, Shirley's dramatic
career overlapped and continued Massinger's as Massinger's did Fletcher's.
After leaving the university he took orders, but shortly became converted
to Catholicism, and then, after a volume of poems, turned to the public
theatres for employment. The last of the brilliant series of poets who made
the London stage the home of poesy and contributed to the great period of
the English drama, at the closing of the theatres he was the dean of his
profession. His thirty odd plays, while naturally continuing the methods
and types of Massinger and of Fletcher, his avowed master, and while
reminiscent of much in earlier writers, especially Webster and Shakespeare,
also reflect about all the characteristics manifest in the drama during the
reign of Charles I.
Shirley's remarkable talents challenge comparison with his predecessors. He
had a share of Massinger's seriousness of purpose and painstaking art, and
of Fletcher's freshness of fancy and sprightliness of style. In invention
he is hardly less ingenious than either, and in careful construction and
theatrical craftsmanship he approaches Massinger's undoubted mastership.
His verse seems modeled on Fletcher's, but it often has a spontaneity of
movement and a richness of decoration that recall Elizabethan style in its
early flights. Little of early aphorism, however, or of the later obscurity
and confusion remains; these are replaced, sometimes indeed by a hackneyed
declamation, but often by natural and fluent dialogue.
Yet, in spite of his talents, Shirley's own position and his contribution
to the drama are difficult of definition, because he is so constantly
reminiscent of his predecessors and so constantly approaching, though never
quite equaling, their preeminent models. His plays, like Massinger's, seem
to the reader of to-day repetitions of one another. Each coalesces in the
mind with other comedies of manners, or other tragedies of blood, or with
the tragicomedies of Massinger and Fletcher. Whatever the species, love is
the theme, lust is pursuing, chastity is tried by intrigue and by
declamation; but the real interest is in the plot, the tricks, disguises,
subterfuges, villains, and surprises that end--as the case may be--in the
discomfiture of the fools, or the marriage of the lovers, or the downfall
of a dynasty.
The drama had become conventionalized. The dramatists were no longer
searching for new themes and characters in a wide range of stories; they
were inventing their plots but were restricted in their materials. The
ingredients of early plays served Shirley's purpose, and by a few new
devices or changes in motive he gave his fashionable ladies, his lustful
monarchs, scheming favorites, and exiled heroes new names and adventures,
and so produced a play. The cleverness of the plot occupies your attention,
or occasionally a beautiful passage or a fine conception of character
arrests the mind, but at the close you are at a loss to separate the play
from a dozen similar ones.
In Shirley, as in Massinger, the most representative plays, and certainly
those most satisfactory to our taste, are the tragicomedies. Bloodshed and
horror and grossness of language and situation may all be absent, and the
story of love and intrigue, even if it does not exalt the mind or purify
the passions, may be altogether delightful. In "The Royal Master," one of
the best, the role of the lustful monarch is assumed for a single scene,
only to cure a really charming heroine of her infatuation for royalty; and
the intriguing favorite is foiled, the banished noble vindicated, and two
love matches completed with gracefulness of language and dexterity of plot.
Unfortunately Shirley's land of romance is rarely so wholesome as here or
the inhabitants so agreeable.
His tragedies mainly conform to the hackneyed models, no matter what the
sources may be or how large his own invention may seem. The earliest, "The
Maid's Revenge," relating a Spanish story of the rivalry in love of two
sisters that ends in a fatal duel between brother and lover, is wholly in
the tone of romantic melodrama. "The Politician," a more ambitious effort,
combines the villain play with the Beaumont-Fletcher romance. Gotharius,
the politician, is the villain; Marpisa, the evil woman, is his mistress
and about to be married to the king; Albina, the loyal and long-suffering
heroine, is the villain's wife; Turgesius is the prince and hero; and
Olaus, a blunt soldier, is his faithful friend. There is an insurrection,
as so often in Fletcher; and after a long intrigue the villain and the evil
woman perish, and the prince marries the heroine. In "Love's Cruelty," a
more original conception is worked out with telling realism and a good deal
of dramatic truth. Clariana becomes infatuated with her husband's friend
Hippolito; and, even after the guilty lovers have been permitted to go
unpunished by the husband, her passion continues until her jealousy at her
lover's approaching marriage to Eubella drives her to his murder. Rarely
elsewhere in the Elizabethan drama is the story of illicit love told with
less of glamour and more veracity. These merits are perhaps counterbalanced
by the extreme realism of the language and the stage action.
In this play the deceived husband dies of grief, but Eubella, who had
earlier resisted the lustful duke, is solaced after the death of her
betrothed by a promise of marriage from the duke himself. Both "The
Politician" and "The Duke's Mistress," a tragedy along hackneyed lines, end
with reward for the virtuous and punishment only for the vicious. Such
application of poetic justice had been earlier expounded by Ben Jonson in
defense of the punishments inflicted in his comedy, "Volpone." The
applications of the doctrine in Shirley and Massinger were, however,
probably due not so much to theoretical criticism as to the popular
preference for the restriction of the catastrophe to the bad, a preference
recorded by Aristotle and evidently shared by a generation in which
romantic tragicomedy was the most popular dramatic form.
Shirley's tragic masterpieces, however, offered no alleviation of horror
and bloodshed. "The Traitor" and "The Cardinal" are plays of revenge, lust,
intrigue, and villany, in which all the accretions of this kind of tragedy
from Kyd and Marlowe down to Webster and Massinger seem to be represented.
The villains are as black as Barabas and as crafty as those of Webster;
plots are as intricately entangled with counterplots as in Tourneur; and
surprises follow as rapidly as in Fletcher. The corpse kissed by the
repentant duke is again presented; there is attempted rape and assumed
madness; in each play a bridegroom is murdered as he takes his place in the
wedding procession; and in each revenge strews the final scene with the
dead. But the old motives still had power to convey poetic inspiration, and
the examples of all his predecessors summoned Shirley to his best efforts.
Perhaps in no other plays does he so constantly recall their work;
certainly in no others do the poetic quality of his language, the vigorous
delineation of character, and the dramatic depiction of passion so worthily
maintain what were even for men of his day the great traditions of English
tragedy.
Tragedies by minor writers during the years from 1620 to 1642 offer little
that is distinctive. Occasionally, as in the anonymous "Nero" of 1624, we
have a play spontaneous in phrase and lifelike in characterization, worthy
of the best days of the drama; but in the main the plays only repeat what
is to be found in Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. In spite of the vogue of
tragicomedy, tragedy was by no means neglected, nearly fifty tragedies
being preserved from the twenty years, in addition to those by the authors
mentioned. These include several by Suckling, Glapthorne's pastoral
tragedy, "Argalus and Parthenia," and his worthless "Wallenstein," May's
plays on classical history, and others by Killigrew, Davenant, Carlell,
Heming, Davenport, and less known men.
The large majority conform to the later type of revenge play as exemplified
in Massinger and Shirley. Sometimes the romantic love element supersedes
the intrigue and horrors, but oftener the horrors have full sway. A double
plot, usually with an elaborate surprise in the fifth act, revolves about
lust and revenge with some attention to untarnished honor and unconquered
chastity. The lustful duke and his intriguing favorite, or the tyrannical
usurper and the rightful prince alternate at the centre of the stage along
with the evil woman, perhaps a Lady Potiphar, and a distressed maiden,
likely to be disguised as a boy. Madness is frequently represented, eyes
are plucked out, brains dashed upon the stage, and many of the old horrors
reproduced, but ghosts rarely appear. The action consists largely of
adultery, seduction, and rape; and these are represented with a horrid
detail that rivals Marston. When chastity is preserved it is often by a
device similar to that used in "Measure for Measure," although occasionally
there is an exchange of men instead of women. Tragedy is for the most part
confined to stories of crime. The monstrous politicians and libertines
differ from their sixteenth century predecessors chiefly in the greater
ingenuity and complexity of their intrigue, their subordination of ambition
or other motives to those of love or lust, and in the prosaic flatness of
their blank verse.
Often there are manifest borrowings, and occasionally a dramatist evidently
strove to include everything that had ever been known on the tragic stage.
"The Rebellion," by Thomas Rawlins, presents Machiavel, a villain, whose
soliloquies might be burlesques on Barabas and Richard III, two mad scenes,
a nurse from "Romeo and Juliet," a Moor, who is another villain, attempted
rape, and frequent bursts of poetry:--
"The lazy moon has scarcely trimm'd herself
To entertain the sun; she still retains
The slimy tincture of the banish'd night."
On the other hand, the usual type of tragedy, with reminiscences of
Shakespeare and Fletcher, sometimes shows a genuine poetic gift, as notably
in Lord Falkland's "The Marriage Night." The most marked trait, however, of
these minor tragedies is their eagerness to out-Herod Herod and to make
good their weakness in dramatic truth by means of stage horrors or rant.
"The Valiant Scot," a tragedy dealing with the career of Wallace,
represents the cutting out of the tongue of one English ambassador and the
putting out of the eyes of another. In "Mirza" the protagonist kills his
seven-year-old daughter,--"Takes Fatima by the neck, breaks it, and swings
her about." The taste for atrocities seems to have been most highly
developed at Oxford, where the students acted Goffe's outrageous plays and
a Samuel Harding published "Sicily and Naples," a medley introducing
revenge for a father, a maiden disguised as a boy, a villain-favorite, the
Mariana device, and combining rape, murder, madness, and incest in a
fashion not equaled since "Titus Andronicus."
Absurd plays of this sort were common enough from the days of "Cambyses,"
and cannot be fairly taken as evidences of the drama's decadence. Nor do
the main differences that are apparent between tragedy after 1620 and that
of the early or of the Shakespearean period point to decadence as
unmistakably as critics are wont to assume. There is a waning of poetic
power; blank verse descends to prose, and its flowers have a jaded air; but
there is poetic imagination in Glapthorne as well as in Shirley, noble
rhetoric in Massinger, and sheer poetry in Ford. The ethical tone has in
general suffered deterioration. The moral insight of Shakespeare or even of
Webster is not maintained; courtly and sophisticated ideals ring false; the
language becomes gross; the vulgarities of the early plays are replaced by
mawkish sentimentality or lewd suggestiveness. There seems to be increasing
difficulty in presenting persons normally good. The reiteration of scenes
of rape and seduction bespeak an unhealthy moral atmosphere. Yet tragedy,
though at tunes perverse or forgetful, still clings to its moral standards.
It still endeavors to expose and chastise sin and to incite to virtue.
Decadence is more manifest in the restriction and conventionalizing of the
material of tragedy. The love for the impossible, the craving for
stupendous emotions and supernormal passions had given place to theatrical
court intrigues. The daring attempts of Marlowe and Shakespeare to depict
the great round of the emotions had given way to a continual harping on
illicit love. Dramatists were no longer striving to give beautiful
expression to the terrible, heroic, or pitiable in story, but seeking to
construct acting plays out of stock situations and stock characters. There
was a lack of fresh impulse. French romance and Spanish drama seem to have
encouraged no marked innovations, and French classicism was only just
making itself heard at the closing of the theatres. A man of original
genius like Ford staggered under the recognition of the greatness of
earlier achievement and turned to the abnormalities and excesses of passion
for his themes. Shirley, more typical of the period, devoted talents of a
high order to repeating familiar models.
Yet there was progress as well as stagnation. Dramatists had shaken off the
medieval adherence to sources and learned to invent, though their invention
unhappily followed current theatrical fashions rather than fresh creative
impulses. The art of making plays had advanced, not as Shakespeare had
pointed the way, by making construction dependent upon character, but as
Beaumont and Fletcher had fashioned, by making character subordinate to a
varied and rapid action. There is more complication, more coherence in
plot, more ingenuity in situation, and a far greater use of surprise than
in the early plays, but no great gain in consistent motivation. Yet many of
the early absurdities have disappeared; and in discovering what is to be
acted and what not, in the quick excitement of the spectator's interest,
and in the careful integration of the various lines of action, the
dramaturgy is, in comparison with the period before Shakespeare, noticeably
modern.
The differences which distinguish the different periods do not conceal the
essential unity of the entire development from 1562 to 1642. The changes
that take place in the prevailing types are of degree and not of kind.
Nearly all the tragedies might be called tragedies of blood, for nearly all
deal with crime and bloodshed. A narrower division like that of the tragedy
of revenge keeps its integrity from Kyd onward, the hesitation motive
finding transformation in "Hamlet," the union of revenge, intrigue, and
madness finding a different development in Webster and others, and
remaining until the end the most prevalent type of tragedy. A majority of
Elizabethan plays are romantic rather than classical or realistic, though
the romance is of many kinds and drawn from many widely different sources,
as Boccaccio, D'Urfe, or Lope de Vega. For a time it is mainly confined to
romantic comedy, but it soon enters into tragedy and tragicomedy. In
tragedy it plays a fitful part, but in tragicomedy it conquers the
theatres. The course of tragedy from its inception in an amalgamation of
medieval and classical elements, through its establishment by Marlowe, its
development of types and methods, the transformation of these by
Shakespeare into a dramatic form that changed and enlarged the meaning of
tragedy for the centuries since then, the further development of types and
methods under the innovations of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the splendid
contribution that tragedy still received from Webster, Middleton, Ford, and
Massinger,--all this was comprised within a single century; all that was
most significant, within a single lifetime.
Tragedy throughout this development remained popular. Less than the ballad
but more than any other form of literature prior to the pamphlet, novel,
and newspaper, the drama was the result of popular taste, thought, and
desire. Tragedy early shook off the bonds of classical tradition, and it
never ceased to aim first at pleasing the audiences. Shakespeare as well as
Dekker or Shirley was their servant. Even in the later days when increasing
Puritanism alienated a large portion of the public from the theatres,
literary standards failed to overthrow the sovereignty of the people,
though, as the dramatists paid allegiance to a restricted and less
representative audience, the drama waned. Without a guiding criticism,
without any reliance on authority or tradition, appealing first to the
public theatre and only secondly to court or culture or posterity, tragedy
at its best was not distinguished by impeccability of literary art. It
lacked simplicity of theme and precision of treatment; it was fantastic in
design and language. It lacked refinement; it was vulgar in diction and
scene; it was revolting in its horrors and bloodshed. It lacked reserve and
definiteness of literary purpose; it was sensational, incongruous, or naive
in its address to the intelligence. But from the same conditions that gave
rise to its faults and excesses came its excellences. A delight in verbal
felicity, a welcome for diverse excitement, and a craving for story on the
part of the public made possible the wealth of incident and character, the
varied emotional appeal, and the fervid poetry of Elizabethan tragedy. It
was free to avail itself of every resource of poet or playwright in order
to present human passion of all kinds, human individuals of many varieties.
Its virtues as well as its faults are summed up in Shakespeare. After his
death it developed in dramatic dexterity rather than in the
comprehensiveness of its mirror of life. Yet, without Shakespeare, the
fabrics of its vision comprise
"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself."
Even without him, the legacy of Elizabethan tragedy is an unfaded pageant
of the greatness and the pain, the passion and the poetry of our little
life.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward, Fleay, Schelling, and the bibliographies in the Shakespeare
_Jahrbuch_ continue to be the best guides. Dyce's admirable edition of
Beaumont and Fletcher (11 vols., 1843-46) has long been the standard, but
two new complete editions of their works are now in progress, one under the
general editorship of A. H. Bullen (London, 1904-), the other edited by A.
Glover and A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905-). The discussion in this chapter
is in part based on my _Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare_
(1901) and my edition of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_ in the
_Belles-Lettres Series_ (Boston, 1906). I must refer to the latter for a
full bibliography of both texts and critical works. Miss Hatcher's _John
Fletcher_ (Chicago, 1905) should be added. Webster has been well edited by
Dyce and Hazlitt; and his two principal tragedies by M. W. Sampson in the
_Belles-Lettres Series_, with full bibliography. E. E. Stoll's monograph,
_John Webster_, referred to in chapter v, has been drawn upon in the
discussion in this chapter. Tourneur has been edited by J. Churton Collins
(1878); Middleton by A. H. Bullen; Massinger very poorly by Gifford (2d
ed., 1815); Ford by Gifford (1827, revised by Dyce, 1869); and Shirley by
Dyce (1833). Editions of selections from all these dramatists will also be
found in the _Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists_, with introductions of
varying value. Bibliographical references to all dramatists of this period
will be found in Ward and Schelling, and in general more comprehensive
discussion of their plays than are to be found elsewhere. Of especial value
in the study of sources are E. Koeppel's two volumes, _Quellen Studien zu
den Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marston's und Beaumont und Fletcher's_ (1895)
and _Quellen Studien zu den Dramen George Chapman's, Philip Massinger's und
John Ford's_ (1897).
Among the critical appreciations of the dramatists of this and the
preceding chapters are: Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_,
Hazlitt's _Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_, Jeffrey's _Essay
on Ford_, Lowell's _Old English Dramatists_, G. C. Macaulay's _Francis
Beaumont_ (1883), Swinburne's _Ben Jonson_ (1889), and his essays on other
dramatists.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Elizabethan has been used to designate the whole period of the drama
from 1559 to 1642.
[23] For a somewhat different view of the play, emphasizing its crudity as
a drama, see Mr. William Archer's "Webster, Lamb, and Swinburne," _New
Review_, January, 1893.
[24] See Coleridge, _Notes on Beaumont and Fletcher_, for a characteristic
and valuable criticism of the play.