THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE
BY
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMVIII
TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES LAMB
When stark oblivion froze above their names
Whose glory shone round Shakespeare's, bright as now,
One eye beheld their light shine full as fame's,
One hand unveiled it: this did none but thou.
Love, stronger than forgetfulness and sleep,
Rose, and bade memory rise, and England hear:
And all the harvest left so long to reap
Shone ripe and rich in every sheaf and ear.
A child it was who first by grace of thine
Communed with gods who share with thee their shrine:
Elder than thou wast ever now I am,
Now that I lay before thee in thanksgiving
Praise of dead men divine and everliving
Whose praise is thine as thine is theirs, Charles Lamb.
CONTENTS
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
JOHN WEBSTER
THOMAS DEKKER
JOHN MARSTON
THOMAS MIDDLETON
WILLIAM ROWLEY
THOMAS HEYWOOD
GEORGE CHAPMAN
CYRIL TOURNEUR
INDEX
THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
The first great English poet was the father of English tragedy and the
creator of English blank verse. Chaucer and Spenser were great writers
and great men: they shared between them every gift which goes to the
making of a poet except the one which alone can make a poet, in the
proper sense of the word, great. Neither pathos nor humor nor fancy nor
invention will suffice for that: no poet is great as a poet whom no one
could ever pretend to recognize as sublime. Sublimity is the test of
imagination as distinguished from invention or from fancy: and the first
English poet whose powers can be called sublime was Christopher Marlowe.
The majestic and exquisite excellence of various lines and passages in
Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be
allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which
blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts.
With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness in
"Tamburlaine the Great"; and for two grave reasons it must always be
remembered with distinction and mentioned with honor. It is the first
poem ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere
rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest
passages--perhaps, indeed, the noblest in the literature of the
world--ever written by one of the greatest masters of poetry in loving
praise of the glorious delights and sublime submission to the
everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive
qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of
music and the proper tone of color for the finest touches of poetic
execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease
upon every consummate resource of luxurious learning and leisurely
refinement, has ever excelled the best and most representative work of a
man who had literally no models before him, and probably or evidently
was often, if not always, compelled to write against time for his
living.
The just and generous judgment passed by Goethe on the "Faustus" of his
English predecessor in tragic treatment of the same subject is somewhat
more than sufficient to counterbalance the slighting or the sneering
references to that magnificent poem which might have been expected from
the ignorance of Byron or the incompetence of Hallam. And the particular
note of merit observed, the special point of the praise conferred, by
the great German poet should be no less sufficient to dispose of the
vulgar misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pretenders to
criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a
finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution
as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or
scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in
them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by
Shakespeare. What most impressed the author of "Faust" in the work of
Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the author of "Manfred" is
proof enough to consign his best work to the second or third class at
most. "How greatly it is all planned!" the first requisite of all great
work, and one of which the highest genius possible to a greatly gifted
barbarian could by no possibility understand the nature or conceive the
existence. That Goethe "had thought of translating it" is perhaps hardly
less precious a tribute to its greatness than the fact that it has been
actually and admirably translated by the matchless translator of
Shakespeare--the son of Victor Hugo, whose labor of love may thus be
said to have made another point in common, and forged as it were another
link of union, between Shakespeare and the young master of Shakespeare's
youth. Of all great poems in dramatic form it is perhaps the most
remarkable for absolute singleness of aim and simplicity of
construction; yet is it wholly free from all possible imputation of
monotony or aridity. "Tamburlaine" is monotonous in the general roll and
flow of its stately and sonorous verse through a noisy wilderness of
perpetual bluster and slaughter; but the unity of tone and purpose in
"Doctor Faustus" is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of
incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labor
as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts,
thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular prose _History of Dr.
Faustus_, and therefore should be set down as little to the discredit as
to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language
can stand beside this tragic poem--it has hardly the structure of a
play--for the qualities of terror and splendor, for intensity of purpose
and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense
perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and
radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of
words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of
simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression of the agonies endured
by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the highest
note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the
sheer straightforwardness of speech in which his agonizing horror finds
vent ever more and more terrible from the first to the last equally
beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue which has no
parallel in all the range of tragedy.
It is now a commonplace of criticism to observe and regret the decline
of power and interest after the opening acts of "The Jew of Malta." This
decline is undeniable, though even the latter part of the play is not
wanting in rough energy and a coarse kind of interest; but the first two
acts would be sufficient foundation for the durable fame of a dramatic
poet. In the blank verse of Milton alone, who perhaps was hardly less
indebted than Shakespeare was before him to Marlowe as the first English
master of word-music in its grander forms, has the glory or the melody
of passages in the opening soliloquy of Barabas been possibly surpassed.
The figure of the hero before it degenerates into caricature is as
finely touched as the poetic execution is excellent; and the rude and
rapid sketches of the minor characters show at least some vigor and
vivacity of touch.
In "Edward II." the interest rises and the execution improves as visibly
and as greatly with the course of the advancing story as they decline in
"The Jew of Malta." The scene of the king's deposition at Kenilworth is
almost as much finer in tragic effect and poetic quality as it is
shorter and less elaborate than the corresponding scene in Shakespeare's
"King Richard II." The terror of the death scene undoubtedly rises into
horror; but this horror is with skilful simplicity of treatment
preserved from passing into disgust. In pure poetry, in sublime and
splendid imagination, this tragedy is excelled by "Doctor Faustus"; in
dramatic power and positive impression of natural effect it is as
certainly the masterpiece of Marlowe. It was almost inevitable, in the
hands of any poet but Shakespeare, that none of the characters
represented should be capable of securing or even exciting any finer
sympathy or more serious interest than attends on the mere evolution of
successive events or the mere display of emotions (except always in the
great scene of the deposition) rather animal than spiritual in their
expression of rage or tenderness or suffering. The exact balance of
mutual effect, the final note of scenic harmony between ideal
conception and realistic execution, is not yet struck with perfect
accuracy of touch and security of hand; but on this point also Marlowe
has here come nearer by many degrees to Shakespeare than any of his
other predecessors have ever come near to Marlowe.
Of "The Massacre at Paris" it is impossible to judge fairly from the
garbled fragment of its genuine text, which is all that has come down
to us. To Mr. Collier, among numberless other obligations, we owe the
discovery of a striking passage excised in the piratical edition which
gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play; and which, it
must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is
obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is
overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time, has a typical
quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That
anti-papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged
chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from the death of Queen
Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to
conjecture what it would be fruitless to affirm, that it gave a hint in
the next century to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and really
admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued ninety-seven years after
the death of Marlowe.
The tragedy of "Dido, Queen of Carthage," was probably completed for the
stage after that irreparable and incalculable loss to English letters by
Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure,
and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities
of a personal and social satirist; a man gifted also with some fair
faculty of elegiac and even lyric verse, but in nowise qualified to put
on the buskin left behind him by the "famous gracer of tragedians," as
Marlowe had already been designated by their common friend Greene from
among the worthiest of his fellows. In this somewhat thin-spun and
evidently hasty play a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's
narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been
expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially
inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of
dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble
and incomposite piece of work is, however, uninspired by the
unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too obsequious
in their subservience.
It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon
cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best
in the serious scenes of "King Henry VI." is mainly the work of Marlowe.
That he is, at any rate, the principal author of the second and third
plays passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first
and imperfectly printed as "The Contention between the two Famous Houses
of York and Lancaster," can hardly be now a matter of debate among
competent judges. The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is
to determine, if indeed we should not rather say to conjecture, the
authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do
a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in
the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even
remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these
scenes as they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare,
there are tones and touches which recall rather the clownish horseplay
and homely ribaldry of his predecessors than anything in the lighter
interludes of his very earliest plays. We find the same sort of thing
which we find in their writings, only better done than they usually do
it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little worse done than
usual. And even in the final text of the tragic or metrical scenes the
highest note struck is always, with one magnificent and unquestionable
exception, rather in the key of Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare
while yet in great measure his disciple.
It is another commonplace of criticism to affirm that Marlowe had not a
touch of comic genius, not a gleam of wit in him or a twinkle of humor:
but it is an indisputable fact that he had. In "The Massacre at Paris,"
the soliloquy of the soldier lying in wait for the minion of Henri III.
has the same very rough but very real humor as a passage in the
"Contention" which was cancelled by the reviser. The same hand is
unmistakable in both these broad and boyish outbreaks of unseemly but
undeniable fun: and if we might wish it rather less indecorous, we must
admit that the tradition which denies all sense of humor and all
instinct of wit to the first great poet of England is no less unworthy
of serious notice or elaborate refutation than the charges and calumnies
of an informer who was duly hanged the year after Marlowe's death. For
if the same note of humor is struck in an undoubted play of Marlowe's
and in a play of disputed authorship, it is evident that the rest of the
scene in the latter play must also be Marlowe's. And in that
unquestionable case the superb and savage humor of the terribly comic
scenes which represent with such rough magnificence of realism the riot
of Jack Cade and his ruffians through the ravaged streets of London must
be recognizable as no other man's than his. It is a pity we have not
before us for comparison the comic scenes or burlesque interludes of
"Tamburlaine" which the printer or publisher, as he had the impudence to
avow in his prefatory note, purposely omitted and left out.
The author of _A Study of Shakespeare_ was therefore wrong, and utterly
wrong, when in a book issued some quarter of a century ago he followed
the lead of Mr. Dyce in assuming that because the author of "Doctor
Faustus" and "The Jew of Malta" "was as certainly"--and certainly it is
difficult to deny that whether as a mere transcriber or as an original
dealer in pleasantry he sometimes was--"one of the least and worst among
jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets," he could
not have had a hand in the admirable comic scenes of "The Taming of the
Shrew." For it is now, I should hope, unnecessary to insist that the
able and conscientious editor to whom his fame and his readers owe so
great a debt was over-hasty in assuming and asserting that he was a poet
"to whom, we have reason to believe, nature had denied even a moderate
talent for the humorous." The serious or would-be poetical scenes of the
play are as unmistakably the work of an imitator as are most of the
better passages in "Titus Andronicus" and "King Edward III." Greene or
Peele may be responsible for the bad poetry, but there is no reason to
suppose that the great poet whose mannerisms he imitated with so stupid
a servility was incapable of the good fun.
Had every copy of Marlowe's boyish version or perversion of Ovid's
_Elegies_ deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially
condemned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an
occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have
deplored its destruction, if its demerits--hardly relieved, as his first
competent editor has happily remarked, by the occasional incidence of a
fine and felicitous couplet--could in that case have been imagined. His
translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the
original and falls short of it; often inferior to the Latin in point and
weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a clearer note
of poetry and lifted into a higher mood of verse. Its terseness, vigor,
and purity of style would in any case have been praiseworthy, but are
nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how
close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips
into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal
representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really
startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark
than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the
technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into account.
One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in
the whole range of descriptive and fanciful poetry would have secured a
place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his
plays had perished with himself. His "Passionate Shepherd" remains ever
since unrivalled in its way--a way of pure fancy and radiant melody
without break or lapse. The untitled fragment, on the other hand, has
been very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imitated, but only by
the greatest lyric poet of England--by Shelley alone. Marlowe's poem of
"Hero and Leander," closing with the sunrise which closes the night of
the lovers' union, stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of
any possible competitor between the death of Spenser and the dawn of
Milton. In clear mastery of narrative and presentation, in melodious
ease and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre-eminent than in the
adorable beauty and impeccable perfection of separate lines or
passages.
The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English
poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to
overestimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest
among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any
great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an
influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the
right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's
before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more
exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most
daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him
there was neither genuine blank verse nor genuine tragedy in our
language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made
straight, for Shakespeare.
JOHN WEBSTER
There were many poets in the age of Shakespeare who make us think, as we
read them, that the characters in their plays could not have spoken more
beautifully, more powerfully, more effectively, under the circumstances
imagined for the occasion of their utterance: there are only two who
make us feel that the words assigned to the creatures of their genius
are the very words they must have said, the only words they could have
said, the actual words they assuredly did say. Mere literary power, mere
poetic beauty, mere charm of passionate or pathetic fancy, we find in
varying degrees dispersed among them all alike; but the crowning gift of
imagination, the power to make us realize that thus and not otherwise it
was, that thus and not otherwise it must have been, was given--except by
exceptional fits and starts--to none of the poets of their time but only
to Shakespeare and to Webster.
Webster, it may be said, was but as it were a limb of Shakespeare: but
that limb, it might be replied, was the right arm. "The kingly-crownèd
head, the vigilant eye," whose empire of thought and whose reach of
vision no other man's faculty has ever been found competent to match,
are Shakespeare's alone forever: but the force of hand, the fire of
heart, the fervor of pity, the sympathy of passion, not poetic or
theatric merely, but actual and immediate, are qualities in which the
lesser poet is not less certainly or less unmistakably pre-eminent than
the greater. And there is no third to be set beside them: not even if we
turn from their contemporaries to Shelley himself. All that Beatrice
says in _The Cenci_ is beautiful and conceivable and admirable: but
unless we except her exquisite last words--and even they are more
beautiful than inevitable--we shall hardly find what we find in "King
Lear" and "The White Devil," "Othello" and "The Duchess of Malfy"--the
tone of convincing reality; the note, as a critic of our own day might
call it, of certitude.
There are poets--in our own age, as in all past ages--from whose best
work it might be difficult to choose at a glance some verse sufficient
to establish their claim--great as their claim may be--to be remembered
forever; and who yet may be worthy of remembrance among all but the
highest. Webster is not one of these: though his fame assuredly does not
depend upon the merit of a casual passage here or there, it would be
easy to select from any one of his representative plays such examples of
the highest, the purest, the most perfect power, as can be found only in
the works of the greatest among poets. There is not, as far as my
studies have ever extended, a third English poet to whom these words
might rationally be attributed by the conjecture of a competent reader:
We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die, by dying.
There is a depth of severe sense in them, a height of heroic scorn, or a
dignity of quiet cynicism, which can scarcely be paralleled in the
bitterest or the fiercest effusions of John Marston or Cyril Tourneur or
Jonathan Swift. Nay, were they not put into the mouth of a criminal
cynic, they would not seem unworthy of Epictetus. There is nothing so
grand in the part of Edmund; the one figure in Shakespeare whose aim in
life, whose centre of character, is one with the view or the instinct of
Webster's two typical villains. Some touches in the part of Flamineo
suggest, if not a conscious imitation, an unconscious reminiscence of
that prototype: but the essential and radical originality of Webster's
genius is shown in the difference of accent with which the same savage
and sarcastic philosophy of self-interest finds expression through the
snarl and sneer of his ambitious cynic. Monsters as they may seem of
unnatural egotism and unallayed ferocity, the one who dies penitent,
though his repentance be as sudden if not as suspicious as any ever
wrought by miraculous conversion, dies as thoroughly in character as the
one who takes leave of life in a passion of scorn and defiant irony
which hardly passes off at last into a mood of mocking and triumphant
resignation. There is a cross of heroism in almost all Webster's
characters which preserves the worst of them from such hatefulness as
disgusts us in certain of Fletcher's or of Ford's: they have in them
some salt of manhood, some savor of venturesome and humorous resolution,
which reminds us of the heroic age in which the genius that begot them
was born and reared--the age of Richard Grenville and Francis Drake,
Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.
The earliest play of Webster's now surviving--if a work so piteously
mutilated and defaced can properly be said to survive--is a curious
example of the combined freedom and realism with which recent or even
contemporary history was habitually treated on the stage during the
last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The noblest poem known to
me of this peculiar kind is the play of "Sir Thomas More," first printed
by Mr. Dyce in 1844 for the Shakespeare Society: the worst must almost
certainly be that "Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell" which the
infallible verdict of German intuition has discovered to be "not only
unquestionably Shakespeare's, but worthy to be classed among his best
and maturest works." About midway between these two I should be inclined
to rank "The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt," a mangled and deformed
abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane
Grey. In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration
of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took
decidedly the greater part. The shambling and slipshod metre, which
seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of
simple and exquisite melody--the lazy vivacity and impulsive
inconsequence of style--the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with
interludes of absolute and headlong collapse--are qualities by which a
very novice in the study of dramatic form may recognize the reckless and
unmistakable presence of Dekker. The curt and grim precision of
Webster's tone, his terse and pungent force of compressed rhetoric,
will be found equally difficult to trace in any of these three plays.
"Northward Ho!" a clever, coarse, and vigorous study of the realistic
sort, has not a note of poetry in it, but is more coherent, more
sensibly conceived and more ably constructed, than the rambling history
of Wyatt or the hybrid amalgam of prosaic and romantic elements in the
compound comedy of "Westward Ho!" All that is of any great value in this
amorphous and incongruous product of inventive impatience and impetuous
idleness can be as distinctly traced to the hand of Dekker as the
crowning glories of "The Two Noble Kinsmen" can be traced to the hand of
Shakespeare. Any poet, even of his time, might have been proud of these
verses, but the accent of them is unmistakable as that of Dekker.
Go, let music
Charm with her excellent voice an awful silence
Through all this building, that her sphery soul
May, on the wings of air, in thousand forms
Invisibly fly, yet be enjoyed.
This delicate fluency and distilled refinement of expression ought
properly, one would say, to have belonged to a poet of such careful and
self-respectful genius as Tennyson's: whereas in the very next speech of
the same speaker we stumble over such a phrase as that which closes the
following sentence:
We feed, wear rich attires, and strive to cleave
The stars with marble towers, fight battles, spend
Our blood to buy us names, _and, in iron hold,
Will we eat roots, to imprison fugitive gold_.
Which he who can parse, let him scan, and he who can scan, let him
construe. It is alike incredible and certain that the writer of such
exquisite and blameless verse as that in which the finer scenes of "Old
Fortunatus" and "The Honest Whore" are so smoothly and simply and
naturally written should have been capable of writing whole plays in
this headlong and halting fashion, as helpless and graceless as the
action of a spavined horse or a cripple who should attempt to run.
It is difficult to say what part of these plays should be assigned to
Webster. Their rough realistic humor, with its tone of somewhat
coarse-grained good-nature, strikes the habitual note of Dekker's comic
style: there is nothing of the fierce and scornful intensity, the ardor
of passionate and compressed contempt, which distinguishes the savagely
humorous satire of Webster and of Marston, and makes it hopeless to
determine by intrinsic evidence how little or how much was added by
Webster in the second edition to the original text of Marston's
_Malcontent_: unless--which appears to me not unreasonable--we assume
that the printer of that edition lied or blundered after the manner of
his contemporary kind in attributing on the title-page--as apparently he
meant to attribute--any share in the additional scenes or speeches to
the original author of the play. In any case, the passages thus added to
that grimmest and most sombre of tragicomedies are in such exact keeping
with the previous text that the keenest scent of the veriest blood-hound
among critics could not detect a shade of difference in the savor.
The text of either comedy is generally very fair--as free from
corruption as could reasonably be expected. The text of "Sir Thomas
Wyatt" is corrupt as well as mutilated. Even in Mr. Dyce's second
edition I have noted, not without astonishment, the following flagrant
errors left still to glare on us from the distorted and disfigured page.
In the sixth scene a single speech of Arundel's contains two of the most
palpably preposterous:
The obligation wherein we all stood bound
* * * * *
Cannot be concealed without great reproach
To us and to our issue.
We should of course read "cancelled" for "concealed": the sense of the
context and the exigence of the verse cry alike aloud for the
correction. In the sixteenth line from this we come upon an equally
obvious error:
Advice in this I hold it better far,
To keep the course we run, than, seeking change,
Hazard our lives, our honors, and the realm.
It seems hardly credible to those who are aware how much they owe to the
excellent scholarship and editorial faculty of Mr. Dyce, that he should
have allowed such a misprint as "heirs" for "honors" to stand in this
last unlucky line. Again, in the next scene, when the popular leader
Captain Brett attempts to reassure the country folk who are startled at
the sight of his insurgent array, he is made to utter (in reply to the
exclamation, "What's here? soldiers!") the perfectly fatuous phrase,
"Fear not good speech." Of course--once more--we should read, "Fear not,
good people"; a correction which rectifies the metre as well as the
sense.
The play attributed to Webster and Rowley by a publisher of the next
generation has been carefully and delicately analyzed by a critic of our
own time, who naturally finds it easy to distinguish the finer from the
homelier part of the compound weft, and to assign what is rough and
crude to the inferior, what is interesting and graceful to the superior
poet. The authority of the rogue Kirkman may be likened to the outline
or profile of Mr. Mantalini's early loves: it is either no authority at
all, or at best it is a "demd" authority. The same swindler who assigned
to Webster and Rowley the authorship of "A Cure for a Cuckold" assigned
to Shakespeare and Rowley the authorship of an infinitely inferior
play--a play of which German sagacity has discovered that "none of
Rowley's other works are equal to this." Assuredly they are not--in
utter stolidity of platitude and absolute impotence of drivel. Rowley
was a vigorous artist in comedy and an original master of tragedy: he
may have written the lighter or broader parts of the play which rather
unluckily took its name from these, and Webster may have written the
more serious or sentimental parts: but there is not the slightest shadow
of a reason to suppose it. An obviously apocryphal abortion of the same
date, attributed to the same poets by the same knave, has long since
been struck off the roll of Webster's works.
The few occasional poems of this great poet are worth study by those who
are capable of feeling interest in the comparison of slighter with
sublimer things, and the detection in minor works of the same style,
here revealed by fitful hints in casual phrases, as that which animates
and distinguishes even a work so insufficient and incompetent as
Webster's "tragecomoedy" of "The Devil's Law-case." The noble and
impressive extracts from this most incoherent and chaotic of all plays
which must be familiar to all students of Charles Lamb are but patches
of imperial purple sewn on with the roughest of needles to a garment of
the raggedest and coarsest kind of literary serge. Hardly any praise can
be too high for their dignity and beauty, their lofty loyalty and
simplicity of chivalrous manhood or their deep sincerity of cynic
meditation and self-contemptuous mournfulness: and the reader who turns
from these magnificent samples to the complete play must expect to find
yet another and a yet unknown masterpiece of English tragedy. He will
find a crowning example of the famous theorem, that "the plot is of no
use except to bring in the fine things." The plot is in this instance
absurd to a degree so far beyond the most preposterous conception of
confused and distracting extravagance that the reader's attention may at
times be withdrawn from the all but unqualified ugliness of its ethical
tone or tendency. Two of Webster's favorite types, the meditative
murderer or philosophic ruffian, and the impulsive impostor who is
liable to collapse into the likeness of a passionate penitent, will
remind the reader how much better they appear in tragedies which are
carried through to their natural tragic end. But here, where the story
is admirably opened and the characters as skilfully introduced, the
strong interest thus excited at starting is scattered or broken or
trifled away before the action is half-way through: and at its close the
awkward violence or irregularity of moral and scenical effect comes to a
crowning crisis in the general and mutual condonation of unnatural
perjury and attempted murder with which the victims and the criminals
agree to hush up all grudges, shake hands all round, and live happy ever
after. There is at least one point of somewhat repulsive resemblance
between the story of this play and that of Fletcher's "Fair Maid of the
Inn": but Fletcher's play, with none of the tragic touches or interludes
of superb and sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of Webster's,
is better laid out and constructed, more amusing if not more
interesting, and more intelligent if not more imaginative.
A far more creditable and workman-like piece of work, though glorified
by no flashes of such sudden and singular beauty, is the tragedy of
"Appius and Virginia." The almost infinite superiority of Webster to
Fletcher as a poet of pure tragedy and a painter of masculine character
is in this play as obvious as the inferiority in construction and
conduct of romantic story displayed in his attempt at a tragicomedy.
From the evidence of style I should judge this play to have been written
at an earlier date than "The Devil's Law-case": it is, I repeat, far
better composed; better, perhaps, than any other play of the author's:
but it has none of his more distinctive qualities; intensity of idea,
concentration of utterance, pungency of expression and ardor of pathos.
It is written with noble and equable power of hand, with force and
purity and fluency of apt and simple eloquence: there is nothing in it
unworthy of the writer: but it is the only one of his unassisted works
in which we do not find that especial note of tragic style, concise and
pointed and tipped as it were with fire, which usually makes it
impossible for the dullest reader to mistake the peculiar presence, the
original tone or accent, of John Webster. If the epithet unique had not
such a tang of German affectation in it, it would be perhaps the aptest
of all adjectives to denote the genius or define the manner of this
great poet. But in this tragedy, though whatever is said is well said
and whatever is done well done, we miss that sense of positive and
inevitable conviction, that instant and profound perception or
impression as of immediate and indisputable truth, which is burnt in
upon us as we read the more Websterian scenes of Webster's writing. We
feel, in short, that thus it may have been; not, as I observed at the
opening of these notes, that thus it must have been. The poem does him
no discredit; nay, it does him additional honor, as an evidence of
powers more various and many-sided than we should otherwise have known
or supposed in him. Indeed, the figure of Virginius is one of the finest
types of soldierly and fatherly heroism ever presented on the stage:
there is equal force of dramatic effect, equal fervor of eloquent
passion, in the scene of his pleading before the senate on behalf of the
claims of his suffering and struggling fellow-soldiers, and in the scene
of his return to the camp after the immolation of his daughter. The mere
theatric effect of this latter scene is at once so triumphant and so
dignified, so noble in its presentation and so passionate in its
restraint, that we feel the high justice and sound reason of the
instinct which inspired the poet to prolong the action of his play so
far beyond the sacrifice of his heroine. A comparison of Webster's
Virginius with any of Fletcher's wordy warriors will suffice to show
how much nearer to Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as a
tragic or a serious dramatist. Coleridge, not always just to Fletcher,
was not unjust in his remark "what strange self-trumpeters and tongue
bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are"; and again
almost immediately--"all B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or
cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the 'claret' they
have shed." There is nothing of this in Virginius; Shakespeare himself
has not represented with a more lofty fidelity, in the person of
Coriolanus or of Brutus, "the high Roman fashion" of austere and heroic
self-respect. In the other leading or dominant figure of this tragedy
there is certainly discernible a genuine and thoughtful originality or
freshness of conception; but perhaps there is also recognizable a
certain inconsistency of touch. It was well thought of to mingle some
alloy of goodness with the wickedness of Appius Claudius, to represent
the treacherous and lecherous decemvir as neither kindless nor
remorseless, but capable of penitence and courage in his last hour. But
Shakespeare, I cannot but think, would have prepared us with more care
and more dexterity for the revelation of some such redeeming quality in
a character which in the act immediately preceding Webster has
represented as utterly heartless and shameless, brutal in its hypocrisy
and impudent in its brutality.
If the works already discussed were their author's only claims to
remembrance and honor, they might not suffice to place him on a higher
level among our tragic poets than that occupied by Marston and Dekker
and Middleton on the one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley on
the other. "Antonio and Mellida," "Old Fortunatus," or "The
Changeling"--"The Maid's Tragedy," "The Duke of Milan," or "The
Traitor"--would suffice to counterweigh (if not, in some cases, to
outbalance) the merit of the best among these: the fitful and futile
inspiration of "The Devil's Law-case," and the stately but subdued
inspiration of "Appius and Virginia." That his place was with no
subordinate poet--that his station is at Shakespeare's right hand--the
evidence supplied by his two great tragedies is disputable by no one who
has an inkling of the qualities which confer a right to be named in the
same day with the greatest writer of all time.
Aeschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness. "But in any
wise, I say unto thee, revere thou the altar of righteousness": this is
the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its crowning prospect is
the reconciliation or atonement of the principle of retribution with the
principle of redemption, of the powers of the mystery of darkness with
the coeternal forces of the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration
and of light. The doctrine of Shakespeare, where it is not vaguer, is
darker in its implication of injustice, in its acceptance of accident,
than the impression of the doctrine of Aeschylus. Fate, irreversible and
inscrutable, is the only force of which we feel the impact, of which we
trace the sign, in the upshot of "Othello" or "King Lear." The last step
into the darkness remained to be taken by "the most tragic" of all
English poets. With Shakespeare--and assuredly not with
Aeschylus--righteousness itself seems subject and subordinate to the
masterdom of fate: but fate itself, in the tragic world of Webster,
seems merely the servant or the synonyme of chance. The two chief agents
in his two great tragedies pass away--the phrase was, perhaps,
unconsciously repeated--"in a mist": perplexed, indomitable, defiant of
hope and fear; bitter and sceptical and bloody in penitence or
impenitence alike. And the mist which encompasses the departing spirits
of these moody and mocking men of blood seems equally to involve the
lives of their chastisers and their victims. Blind accident and
blundering mishap--"such a mistake," says one of the criminals, "as I
have often seen in a play"--are the steersmen of their fortunes and the
doomsmen of their deeds. The effect of this method or the result of this
view, whether adopted for dramatic objects or ingrained in the writer's
temperament, is equally fit for pure tragedy and unfit for any form of
drama not purely tragic in evolution and event. In "The Devil's
Law-case" it is offensive, because the upshot is incongruous and
insufficient: in "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" it is
admirable, because the results are adequate and coherent. But in all
these three plays alike, and in these three plays only, the peculiar
tone of Webster's genius, the peculiar force of his imagination, is
distinct and absolute in its fulness of effect. The author of "Appius
and Virginia" would have earned an honorable and enduring place in the
history of English letters as a worthy member--one among many--of a
great school in poetry, a deserving representative of a great epoch in
literature: but the author of these three plays has a solitary station,
an indisputable distinction of his own. The greatest poets of all time
are not more mutually independent than this one--a lesser poet only than
those greatest--is essentially independent of them all.
The first quality which all readers recognize, and which may strike a
superficial reader as the exclusive or excessive note of his genius and
his work, is of course his command of terror. Except in Aeschylus, in
Dante, and in Shakespeare, I at least know not where to seek for
passages which in sheer force of tragic and noble horror--to the vulgar
shock of ignoble or brutal horror he never condescends to submit his
reader or subdue his inspiration--may be set against the subtlest, the
deepest, the sublimest passages of Webster. Other gifts he had as great
in themselves, as precious and as necessary to the poet: but on this
side he is incomparable and unique. Neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had
so fine, so accurate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of
demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the
horrible and the loathsome--Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac from Eugène
Sue and Émile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men
with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men
imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again
and again his passionate and daring genius attains the utmost limit and
rounds the final goal of tragedy; never once does it break the bounds of
pure poetic instinct. If ever for a moment it may seem to graze that
goal too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, the very next
moment finds it clear of any such risk and remote from any such
temptation as sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost of its
forerunners in the field. And yet this is the field in which its paces
are most superbly shown. No name among all the names of great poets will
recur so soon as Webster's to the reader who knows what it signifies, as
he reads or repeats the verses in which a greater than this great
poet--a greater than all since Shakespeare--has expressed the latent
mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry or beauty, and
distinguishes it inexplicably and inevitably from all that is but a
little lower than the highest.
Les aigles sur les bords du Gange et du Caÿstre
Sont effrayants;
Rien de grand qui ne soit confusément sinistre;
Les noirs paeans,
Les psaumes, la chanson monstrueuse du mage
Ezéchiel,
Font devant notre oeil fixe errer la vague image
D'un affreux ciel.
L'empyrée est l'abîme, on y plonge, on y reste
Avec terreur.
Car planer, c'est trembler; si l'azur est céleste,
C'est par l'horreur.
L'épouvante est au fond des choses les plus belles;
Les bleus vallons
Font parfois reculer d'effroi les fauves ailes
Des aquilons.
And even in comedy as in tragedy, in prosaic even as in prophetic
inspiration, in imitative as in imaginative works of genius, the
sovereign of modern poets has detected the same touch of terror wherever
the deepest note possible has been struck, the fullest sense possible of
genuine and peculiar power conveyed to the student of lyric or dramatic,
epic or elegiac masters.
De là tant de beautés difformes dans leurs oeuvres;
Le vers charmant
Est par la torsion subite des couleuvres
Pris brusquement;
A de certains moments toutes les jeunes flores
Dans la foret
Out peur, et sur le front des blanches métaphores
L'ombre apparait;
C'est qu'Horace ou Virgile out vu soudain le spectre
Noir se dresser;
C'est que là-bas, derrière Amaryllis, Électre
Vient de passer.
Nor was it the Electra of Sophocles, the calm and impassive accomplice
of an untroubled and unhesitating matricide, who showed herself ever in
passing to the intent and serious vision of Webster. By those candid
and sensible judges to whom the praise of Marlowe seems to imply a
reflection on the fame of Shakespeare, I may be accused--and by such
critics I am content to be accused--of a fatuous design to set Webster
beside Sophocles, or Sophocles--for aught I know--beneath Webster, if
I venture to indicate the superiority in truth of natural passion--and,
I must add, of moral instinct--which distinguishes the modern from
the ancient. It is not, it never will be, and it never can have been
natural for noble and civilized creatures to accept with spontaneous
complacency, to discharge with unforced equanimity, such offices or such
duties as weigh so lightly on the spirit of the Sophoclean Orestes that
the slaughter of a mother seems to be a less serious undertaking for his
unreluctant hand than the subsequent execution of her paramour. The
immeasurable superiority of Aeschylus to his successors in this quality
of instinctive righteousness--if a word long vulgarized by theology may
yet be used in its just and natural sense--is shared no less by Webster
than by Shakespeare. The grave and deep truth of natural impulse is
never ignored by these poets when dealing either with innocent or with
criminal passion: but it surely is now and then ignored by the artistic
quietism of Sophocles--as surely as it is outraged and degraded by the
vulgar theatricalities of Euripides. Thomas Campbell was amused and
scandalized by the fact that Webster (as he is pleased to express it)
modestly compares himself to the playwright last mentioned; being
apparently of opinion that "Hippolytus" and "Medea" may be reckoned
equal or superior, as works of tragic art or examples of ethical
elevation, to "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy"; and being no
less apparently ignorant, and incapable of understanding, that as there
is no poet morally nobler than Webster so is there no poet ignobler in
the moral sense than Euripides: while as a dramatic artist--an artist in
character, action, and emotion--the degenerate tragedian of Athens,
compared to the second tragic dramatist of England, is as a mutilated
monkey to a well-made man. No better test of critical faculty could be
required by the most exacting scrutiny of probation than is afforded by
the critic's professed or professional estimate of those great poets
whose names are not consecrated--or desecrated--by the conventional
applause, the factitious adoration, of a tribunal whose judgments are
dictated by obsequious superstition and unanimous incompetence. When
certain critics inform a listening world that they do not admire
Marlowe and Webster--they admire Shakespeare and Milton, we know at once
that it is not the genius of Shakespeare--it is the reputation of
Shakespeare that they admire. It is not the man that they bow down to:
it is the bust that they crouch down before. They would worship Shirley
as soon as Shakespeare--Glover as soon as Milton--Byron as soon as
Shelley--Ponsard as soon as Hugo--Longfellow as soon as Tennyson--if the
tablet were as showily emblazoned, the inscription as pretentiously
engraved.